Second Battle of Tumbleton

The Second Battle of Tumbleton was a surprise attack by Addam Velaryon and an army of Riverlanders against the royalist host outside Tumbleton. It broke the camp’s strength, killed Prince Daeron, and ended the lives of two dragons serving the king, but the attackers could not take the town. Addam, who had come to prove that he was no turncloak, died beside Seasmoke; the battle’s victory was therefore both real and incomplete.

Background and opposing forces

Two days before the attack, the Caltrops planned to kill Hugh Hammer and Ulf White. Prince Daeron had approved the plot, which was intended to remove the two dragonriders who had betrayed Rhaenyra’s cause. The strike was set for the very night Tumbleton was attacked, but the royalist camp was caught by an army arriving before the conspirators could act. The battle thus overturned one intended killing with a sudden assault that left the plotters themselves exposed to the confusion and danger of combat.

Addam’s attack grew out of his effort to restore his standing after the Two Betrayers’ treason had stained him by association. Rather than accept suspicion, he set out to demonstrate his loyalty through action. The account distinguishes a later singers’ tale, in which he sought counsel from the Green Men on the Isle of Faces, from what can be established: Addam flew quickly from place to place, gathering lords who remained loyal to the queen. The Riverlands had already suffered many battles and skirmishes, and its keeps and villages had paid heavily in blood. Yet the destruction at Tumbleton gave Addam a powerful cause for assembling the region’s forces. By the time he advanced, nearly four thousand men were with him.

His army included Benjicot Blackwood, Lord of Raventree, and Sabitha Frey, Lady of the Twins, accompanied by her father and brothers of House Vypren. Other Riverland lords had gathered new levies despite their earlier losses; Hugo Vance brought three hundred men as well as Myrish sellswords. House Tully entered the war after Addam’s appearance at Riverrun persuaded Ser Elmo Tully to call his banners for the queen, against the wishes of his bedridden grandfather, Lord Grover. The royalist force around Tumbleton was larger, but numbers did not protect it from an attack delivered at night against an army that had grown careless.

The night assault

The royalist host had been encamped outside Tumbleton for too long. Drunkenness was widespread, disease had taken hold, and the death of Lord Ormund Hightower had left the army without a settled commander. The lords who might have replaced him disputed authority among themselves, absorbed in rivalries rather than the approaching enemy. Addam’s forces came from the north and west while the camps were burning. The assault caught the royalists unprepared: some men were still leaving their tents, others were trying to saddle their horses or put on their armor. The attackers turned the camp’s disorder into a rout before its defenders could form a coherent response.

Seasmoke was central to the attack. Addam descended on Tumbleton on his dragon, bringing fire to the camps and to the town. A hundred tents soon burned, including the elaborate pavilions of Hobert Hightower, Unwin Peake, and Prince Daeron. The flames also reached parts of Tumbleton that had escaped destruction in the earlier fighting. The dragon’s attacks magnified the shock of the night assault, while the royalist troops struggled to understand where the enemy was and who was in command.

The whereabouts of the opposing dragonriders compounded the confusion. Daeron was asleep in his pavilion; Ulf White was inside Tumbleton, asleep after drinking at the Bawdy Badger; and Hugh Hammer was also within the walls. Their dragons were kept outside the town, in the fields beyond the encampments. Ulf could not be roused and, in the account that became notorious, slept through the battle beneath a table. Hugh responded more quickly, calling for his equipment and a horse so he could reach Vermithor, but Seasmoke had already set the stables alight. Bold Jon Roxton encountered him in the yard and killed him with Orphan-Maker. Hugh’s men arrived in time to see their lord fall; Roxton killed several of them before he too was killed.

Prince Daeron’s death is not settled by a single account. One version says he emerged from his burning pavilion and was killed by the Myrish sellsword Black Trombo with a spiked morningstar; that was the story Trombo himself spread. Another retains the same general sequence but names an unknown man-at-arms as the killer and gives him a sword instead. In the version favored by Grand Maester Munkun’s True Telling, and by the account presented here, Daeron never escaped the pavilion: it collapsed in the fire and killed him. His death was certain, but the precise manner remained disputed.

The dragons’ fight

As the assault developed into a wider battle, the dragons roused around the field. Silverwing and Vermithor had been resting near each other south of Tumbleton, while Tessarion was in Prince Daeron’s camp. A crossbow bolt was loosed at Silverwing, and mounted men attacked Vermithor while the bronze dragon was still on the ground. The assault on Vermithor cost the attackers their lives. Tessarion rose from the western camp, and Addam turned Seasmoke to meet her.

The young Tessarion and Seasmoke repeatedly approached and veered away, circling and exchanging bursts of flame without closing the fight. Their aerial contest drew hundreds of watchers to the roofs of Tumbleton. That struggle changed when the much older Vermithor took to the sky, wounded and without a rider. Unable to distinguish friend from foe, he attacked those around him. Seasmoke then struck Vermithor and drove the larger dragon down into the mud. The two became locked together, while soldiers and boys ran from their struggle or were caught beneath it.

Tessarion joined the fight, but the reason cannot be known. The account leaves open whether she acted from bloodlust or came to aid one of the other dragons; it also asks whether a riderless dragon can recognize allies and enemies. What is recorded is the outcome. Vermithor killed Seasmoke, then collapsed and died when his damaged wings could not lift him. Tessarion survived longer, but could not regain the sky. As the day waned, Benjicot Blackwood summoned a longbowman known as Billy Burley, who killed the grounded dragon with three arrows. Silverwing, the only other dragon present, survived. She had circled above the battlefield as the fighting began, then descended after dark and remained among the dead dragons.

Outcome and aftermath

By dusk, the fighting had ended. The Riverlanders lost fewer than a hundred men and killed more than a thousand from Oldtown and the Reach. Their attack destroyed or captured most of the royalists’ wagons, fodder, and provisions, took three-quarters of their warhorses, killed their prince, and brought down two of the king’s dragons. But the attackers did not capture Tumbleton. Its walls remained intact, and when the royalists withdrew inside and shut the gates, Addam’s army lacked the siege equipment and dragons needed to force an entry. At moonrise, the Riverlanders left the field and withdrew into the hills.

Among the dead was Addam, found beside Seasmoke by Benjicot Blackwood. Benjicot carried Addam’s body away. Addam’s bones rested at Raventree Hall for eight years; in 138 AC, his brother Alyn had them returned to Driftmark and buried in Hull, the town where Addam had been born. His tomb bears a single word, LOYAL, supported by carvings of a seahorse and a mouse. The inscription gives the battle’s personal meaning a lasting form: Addam’s death did not secure the town, but his intended proof of allegiance survived him.

The battle also shaped Tumbleton’s physical aftermath. Sharis Footly, ruling for her infant son, set about restoring the town: she cleared the burned remains of shops and houses, rebuilt the walls, buried the dead, and planted wheat, barley, and turnips in fields where the camps had stood. She had the heads of Seasmoke and Vermithor cleaned, mounted, and displayed in the town square, where visitors paid to see them. The dragons’ remains made the victory and its cost part of the town’s landscape, while the rebuilding marked a return to ordinary cultivation amid the ruin left by war.