In the Prince’s Pass, the outlaw lord Andrey Blackmont and a handful of his men crept from their hiding places in the fastnesses and tracks of the red mountains of Dorne. Their purpose? A parley with Lord Qorgyle’s castellan, Ser Mavros Uller, a man once exiled from Dorne and now rising high thanks to an old, blind lord’s trust and the esteem of the Young Dragon. For weeks now, Ser Mavros at the head of a troop of Qorgyle spears played a cat-and-mouse game with the rebel who had done so much to choke traffic across the Prince’s Pass and who bedeviled Ser Wallace Chester in Starfall. A number of skirmishes had taken place, until suddenly Ser Mavros received word from King’s Landing that the king wished him to speak under a peace banner with Lord Andrey, to offer him a conditional pardon, the promise of honorable treatment and respect for his courage, and a new son in the form of the heir to Storm’s End when he married his daughter, the hostage Lady Valeria.
After much effort, Ser Mavros seemed to prevail on Andrey Blackmont to meet with him. In a high mountain vale they were to meet. Yet perhaps in recollection of the secret meeting with the Qorgyles that led to the death of that other rebel lord, the one-armed Caston Vaith, it seems Andrey Blackmont did not intend to hold his arms under the peace banner. What transpired, precisely, would not be clear in King’s Landing when the first raven arrived bearing the news. The laconic words, written small on a scrap about the bird’s leg, merely said that Blackmont used the parley to try to ambush and kill Ser Mavros and his companions, and that he failed and his outlaw followers were now scattered.