GOT: The Great — Chapter 275 - The Battle of the Bastards
The dragon flew for an entire afternoon. The color of the ground below shifted gradually from varied shades of brown into grey-white — first dead grass, then a thin skin of snow.
The further north they flew, the thicker that snow became.
By evening there was no green left anywhere. Only white plains stretching in every direction, broken up by black treetops and thin ribbons of river.
The sky darkened. The wind had eased since midday, but the air was colder.
Drogo brought the dragon down into a forest. The trees here were taller and denser than anything he'd seen in the south, their branches lacing together overhead into a white canopy that swallowed most of what little light still remained.
The snow on the ground was deep. When Drogon landed, his claws sank nearly a foot into it, and where they touched, the snow melted instantly into wet black mud that steamed in the cold air.
Drogo swung down from the dragon's back. His boot tops disappeared into the snow the moment he landed. The cold pushed through the leather and into his ankles.
The three dragons settled and folded their wings. White vapor rose off their bodies. Snow fell on them and melted from their heat, beading into droplets that ran down along the grooves of the steel armor and dripped from the lower edges of the belly plates, punching tiny holes into the snow below.
Those holes refroze into shells of ice within seconds.
Drogo walked a few paces, packed down a small patch of ground, then crouched and peeled off his gloves, already soaked through with cold — and pressed his bare palms flat against the snow.
He rarely got the chance to touch snow. While the light still held, he set about building a snowman with unhurried interest.
He scooped the nearby snow into a mound, compressed it, gathered more, packed it down again, his fingers going red with cold. Then he snapped off two short branches and pushed them into either side of a snowball he'd already rounded out, found a small angular stone, and pressed it into the front for a nose.
The blizzard arrived in the middle of the night.
The wind came pressing down through the treetops like a length of cloth being ripped apart all at once, and then those rips became a single unbroken hum that went on and on.
Snow pellets struck the tree trunks in a fine, continuous clatter.
Drogo leaned against the inside of Drogon's wing joint, pulled his cloak tight, and tugged his hood further down.
The dragons were far calmer in the blizzard than he'd expected.
No roaring. No movement.
Drogon only curved his thick neck into a loop and tucked his head into the gap between his wing and his chest, his whole body steaming. Rhaegal did the same. Only Viserion shifted in the wind, swinging his tail from one side of his body to the other and sweeping a wide swathe of snow aside.
When the sky began to pale, the wind dropped. The snow thinned.
Drogon lifted his head from the drift. The moisture on his neck condensed in the cold dawn air into a fine pale mist, rising in slow wisps from between the gaps in his scales.
Drogo reached out and patted the Valyrian Steel Armor at his neck. The plates were warm. That warmth seeped through the metal and out into the morning air like the last heat coming off a coal that had just gone dark.
He climbed back up.
When all three dragons lifted off, the wind from their wings swept long furrows through the snow below.
He flew north for another half day, and then he saw the battlefield.
At first it was just a scatter of dark shapes in his field of vision, like ink dropped onto paper and spreading. As he closed the distance, the shapes grew and resolved into bodies lying across the snow.
Grey giants stretched out on the white ground, black arrow shafts jutting from their shoulders and chests.
Beside them lay several mammoths, spears driven through their sides, the blood around the wounds already frozen into dark-red crusts across their grey-white hides.
Further on, scattered not far from the giants, were the wildlings — some in leather armor, some wrapped only in rough cloth, many of them already half-buried, only the outlines of their limbs and shoulders still showing above the snow.
Drogo brought the dragon lower and let the updraft carry them into a glide.
He saw the Bolton banners twisting in the wind, the flayed man sigil swaying at the edge of a stretch of snow soaked through with blood, while cavalry formations swept in from both flanks and drove the mammoth-riding giants before them.
He flew on a little further.
Below, a large group of men were completely surrounded. Bolton forces were closing from all four directions, shields arranged in a curving wall across the snow, spears pushing out through the gaps, steadily compressing the semicircle of encirclement.
Drogo reached into the mesh sack and pulled out a wildfire jar the size of a drinking cup. He turned the mouth downward over the densest section of the shield wall and let go.
The jar dropped and shattered.
Green flames burst from the point of impact and spread laterally across the snow. The shields caught the instant they touched the fire.
When the three dragons broke through beneath the cloud layer, the Bolton soldiers started cheering.
They thought it was reinforcements. Come to help sweep the wildlings away.
Only Ramsay Bolton didn't smile.
He stood beneath the flayed man banner and watched the three dragons descend, their wings casting shadows across the entire battlefield, and his brow stayed locked.
When Drogo's first round of wildfire came down and the green flames tore a gap through the Bolton line, men rolled in the fire. Others fell back. One man even shouted up at the sky: "Aim better! You're burning us!"
Drogo ignored all of it. He pushed the dragon lower still.
Wildfire jars were unpredictable in the air, a gust could carry them off by several yards. He had to get close enough to guarantee every jar landed exactly where it needed to.
The airstream roared past his ears. At his lowest pass, he could look down and read the engravings on soldiers' armor. Could hear clearly what they were shouting.
"He's not here to help me," Ramsay Bolton said, watching the burning battlefield. "He's here to help Jon Snow. That bastard."
"How?" His lieutenant's voice had shot up, panic and fury spilling over. "We already bent the knee to him."
"I saw Sansa Stark at Dragonstone. She's carrying the Horse King's child."
He said nothing more after that.
The wind stirred the flayed man cloak at his shoulder. He looked up at the dragons one last time, turned, and gave the order.
"Fall back."
He wheeled his horse. Barely a dozen strides out, he yanked the reins hard.
Ramsay looked in the direction his horse was facing. On the southern snowslope, a line of lake-blue was pressing down along the contours of the terrain, banners twisting in the wind, each one bearing a white eagle.
The Knights of the Vale.
They had ridden day and night and hit the edge of the battlefield at precisely this moment, cutting in from behind the Bolton forces and sealing off every line of retreat.
Ramsay Bolton's army was caught between the wildlings, the dragons, and the Knights of the Vale.
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