The Vale Campaign of 136 AC was a military intervention to restore Joffrey Arryn as the Vale’s liege, and its success came at a steep cost. Alyn Velaryon and Bloody Ben Blackwood eventually secured the rivals’ submission, but the campaign’s two routes into the Vale exposed their forces to urban fighting, deep snow, attacks on their baggage train, and the unexpected presence of Sheepstealer and Nettles. The outcome strengthened Joffrey Arryn’s position while leaving one of the invading forces too depleted to serve as a useful ally in the fighting that followed.

Purpose and Command

The campaign formed part of the struggle to settle the Vale’s leadership. Alyn Velaryon carried an army toward the region, but Lord Rowan announced that its commander would be Moredo Rogare, Lady Larra’s brother. Moredo was regarded as a formidable fighter: tall and stern, with white-blond hair and blue eyes, he carried a Valyrian steel longsword named Truth. Yet his appointment was unpopular. Unlike his brothers Roggerio Rogare and Lotho Rogare, Moredo had little command of the Common Tongue. Critics questioned whether a Lyseni should lead Westerosi knights, and Lord Rowan’s opponents used the appointment to renew allegations that he had aligned himself with Alyn Velaryon and the Rogares.

The operation advanced along two separate approaches. Alyn Velaryon swept aside the Gilded Falcon’s sellsails and captured the harbor at Gulltown. At the other end of the Vale, Ser Robert Rowan led a force along the high road through the mountains. The split gave the campaign reach across the region, but each column faced different difficulties: Alyn’s troops had to take and secure a defended port, while Robert’s men had to cross exposed, snowbound passes with a vulnerable supply train.

Gulltown and the High Road

Capturing Gulltown’s harbor did not mean that the city had been easily won. The attackers lost hundreds of men storming the port’s walls, and three times as many more in the house-to-house fighting that followed. Moredo Rogare’s limitations as a speaker became a direct operational problem when his translator was killed in the street fighting. His own troops could not understand his commands, and he could not understand their reports; confusion followed. The campaign’s appointment controversy thus had consequences beyond court politics, disrupting communication during the assault itself.

The high road proved no easier. Deep snow in the upper passes slowed Ser Robert Rowan’s advance to a crawl, while mountain clansmen repeatedly attacked the baggage train. They were descendants of First Men driven into the mountains by the Andals, and Ben Blackwood later described them as desperately hungry fighters who continued to attack despite losses. Cold, snow, and nightly assaults wore down the column before it reached the Vale’s entrance.

One night, men from the force climbed toward a cave mouth visible above the road, hoping to find shelter from the wind. Bones lay near the entrance, but the men pressed on and disturbed a dragon. Sixteen were killed in the encounter and sixty more suffered burns before the brown dragon took flight, carrying a ragged woman on its back. The woman was Nettles, and the encounter became the last known sighting of her and Sheepstealer recorded in Westerosi annals. Stories among the mountain clans later remembered a fire witch dwelling in a hidden vale, where youths sought to prove their courage by bringing her gifts and returning with burns.

Losses at the Bloody Gate

The dragon encounter was only one of the column’s perils. By the time Ser Robert Rowan’s force reached the Bloody Gate, a third of its men had died from cold or hunger or been killed in attacks by the mountain clans. Ser Robert himself was among the dead: clansmen brought down part of a mountainside, and a falling boulder crushed him. Bloody Ben Blackwood, still months short of manhood, took command. He had already acquired extensive experience of war, and now led the survivors through the final stretch of the approach.

At the Bloody Gate, the survivors found food, warmth, and welcome. But Joffrey Arryn, the Knight of the Bloody Gate and Lady Jeyne Arryn’s chosen successor, judged that the crossing had left them unfit for battle. The high-road force had reached its destination, yet its condition made it a burden rather than the reinforcement Joffrey might have expected. This distinction captures the campaign’s uneven result: the army had endured the route into the Vale, but endurance had not left it ready for further fighting.

Submission and Consequences

By the time the lords assembled in King’s Landing in 136 AC, Alyn Velaryon and Bloody Ben Blackwood had forced the Gilded Falcon, the Mad Heir, the Bronze Giant, and their supporters to bend the knee and do homage to Joffrey Arryn as their liege. Gunthor Royce, Quenton Corbray, and Isembard Arryn accompanied Alyn to the gathering, along with Joffrey Arryn himself. Their presence at the assembly made the political consequence visible: the campaign had brought the contested Vale leadership into submission, and its central result was recognized beyond the region.

That success did not erase the cost or make the military effort uniformly effective. The seizure of Gulltown had required severe losses in the streets; Moredo’s communication failure had compounded the confusion there; and the mountain column arrived at the Bloody Gate diminished by a third and judged unable to fight. The campaign’s account also closes on an unresolved trace: Nettles and Sheepstealer escaped into the mountains, where the annals lost them and local stories preserved their memory as a dragon woman in a hidden vale.