特典映像｜ヴェイルの力と詐欺師の野望

Impregnable. Thats how the Vale sees itself. Shielded from Westeros by its mountains. They call the entrance to their lands the Bloody Gate because, during the Age of Heroes, a dozen armies supposedly smashed themselves against it. Even if they’d gotten through, the roads of the Vale are narrow, steep, and treacherous. Half the men would have slipped to their deaths, or frozen in the mountain snow, or so the common wisdom goes.

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Except the Vale has been conquered. Those vaunted mountains didn’t stop the Andals who came by the eastern sea. The people of the Vale say that Ser Artys Arryn, the Andal general, flew on the back of a giant falcon and slew the Griffin King on top of the tallest mountain. During Aegon’s Conquest, one of his sisters did the same, flying a dragon over the Bloody Gate and up to the Eyrie, the Arryn stronghold. And the Arryn boy king yielded the Vale in return for a ride on the beast.

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Do you sense the theme here? The rationalizing of defeats with mythical beasts and the whims of children, instead of acknowledging the root cause. the arrogance of isolation. The men of the Vale are so proud of their mountains they can’t abide any flaw in them. As with the mountains, so too with their blood. The first Andals landed in the Vale, as its most powerful lords, the Arryns, the Waynwoods, the Corbrays like to brag. Through their veins runs the blood of the oldest Andal nobility in Westeros. But through their brains runs an even older folly, that blood matters. If it did, those pureborn lords should have been able to exterminate the hill tribes centuries ago. But those primitive raiders whose tribes more resemble kennels than families, continue to plague the Vale, even kidnapping an Arryn once.

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Until Tyrion Lannister, an outsider, No Vale lord ever thought to turn the tribes to the Vale’s advantage. That a desperate warlike people could be useful, not to mention inexpensive. But perhaps the Vale lords consider such thoughts beneath them. After all, the Vale’s isolation does breed an abundance of honor and pious bleating, which governs their decisions instead of foresight.

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Like a blind man who can only guess where his horse is taking him, I doubt Jon Arryn had even prepared for civil war when he raised his banners instead of handing over his young wards, Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon, to the Mad King. Honor demanded, and Lord Arryn obeyed. He’d have done the same if the boys hadn’t been the lords of two Great Houses, who could field mighty armies of their own. But perhaps I give him too little credit. After all, if the war went against them, only Lord Arryn had a nice impregnable castle to retreat into; and he was wise enough to take poor Lysa Tully into his bed to win the Riverlands as allies. Jon Arryn won, then Jon Arryn died.

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Wisely the Vale stayed out of all the ensuing chaos. Its crops did not burn or wither in the fields from lack of men to tend them. Its strength was not drained by forced marches to futile skirmishes. In the Vale, life proceeds as it always has. Calm, proud. A world of high honor undisturbed by armies and men of low birth with high ambition. Impregnable.

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No army in the Seven Kingdoms can match the pride and chivalry of the Knights of the Vale. After all, they were the first true knights in Westeros. The Knights of the Vale were originally the knights of Andalos, an eastern nation whose people invaded Westeros thousands of years ago.

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From the sea, the Vale seemed to the Andals an ideal new home. A wide, fertile valley isolated from the rest of Westeros and its kingdoms by a great mountain range. The First Men who held it, moreover, were sparse and divided and waded into battle with bronze axes and armor that couldn’t match Andal horses and steel. But what the First Men lacked in weaponry they made up for in ferocity. Finally uniting behind King Robar Royce, the First Men smashed the Andals in battle after battle, reclaiming the Vale and pushing the invaders back to the sea from whence they’d come.

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Learning from the First Men, the remaining Andals united behind a leader of their own. Not a king or a lord, but a knight who’d been born in the Vale and knew it as well as the First Men. Ser Artys Arryn, known as the Falcon Knight. The armies of the First Men and the Andals met beneath the Giant’s Lance to decide the fate of the Vale. Ser Artys had many more mounted knights than the First Men, who preferred to fight on foot. But the First Men had seized the high ground, digging trenches in front of their ranks and lining them with sharpened stakes smeared with offal and excrement. Six times the Andal knights charged, and six times the First Men threw them back. But on the seventh, a fearsome Andal warrior broke through the ranks of the First Men, and the Andals rushed through the gap. If King Robar had been wiser, he would have retreated and saved his army for another day. Then again, if he’d been wise at all, he’d never have risked his army of foot soldiers against mounted knights in the first place.

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When King Robar saw the falcon helm of Ser Artys across the field, he wagered that the Andals would break if they lost their leader and rode hard for the Falcon Knight. The singers paint a pretty picture of the battle—the king in flashing bronze armor, the knight in silvered steel. But the duel lasted no longer than a verse of the songs. For King Robar had taken a Valyrian sword off a dead Andal lord, and it sheared through Ser Artys’ helm much like a bird’s wing through the air. As the Falcon Knight tumbled to Earth, King Robar thought he’d won his desperate gamble. Then he heard the trumpets behind him. When he turned, he saw 500 fresh Andal knights pouring down the Giant’s Lance, and the man at its head was also the man at Robar’s feet.

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For Ser Artys, unique in that age, or indeed any age, esteemed cunning even more than martial strength and had clad one of his knights in his spare suit of armor, leaving him to die at Robar’s hand while Ser Artys took his best horsemen up a goat track he knew from childhood. The charge of the Andal knights broke the last great army of the First Men, who would never again threaten the new Knights of the Vale. Some of the defeated would even join their ranks in the years to come, but many more fled to the mountains, choosing savagery over submission.

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Ever since, the Knights of the Vale enjoyed an exclusive position in Westeros. They could sally forth from the Vale at will, knowing that if battle went against them, they could retreat through the Bloody Gate where no army could follow. Until the dragons changed the game. When Aegon the Conqueror landed in Westeros, the Queen Regent of the Vale shut the Bloody Gate against the Targaryens and massed the Knights of the Vale behind it to lock it. But Visenya simply flew her dragon to a balcony of the Eyrie, where the boy king was playing and gave the boy a ride around the castle in return for his mother’s submission.

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With the Conquest, no more could the Knights of the Vale hide behind their mountains, nor, they soon discovered, did they need to. For thousands of years, the other kingdoms had warred and treated to balance each other’s might. whilst the Vale kept to itself. None realized what power the Vale could have until Jon Arryn defied the Iron Throne, refusing to surrender Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon to the Mad King. The North, the Riverlands, and the Stormlands couldn’t have beaten the other three kingdoms be themselves. But the Knights of the Vale rode with them.

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Now the North is freezing, the Riverlands are burnt, the Stormlands are spent, Dorne is distant, the Westerlands are weakened, and the Reach is paralyzed. Of all the great armies in Westeros, only the Knights of the Vale have yet to suffer exhaustion or defeat. The Bloody Gate is opening again onto Westeros, and through it passes opportunity.

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