Original subtitles

LlTTLEFlNGER: 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.

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.

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.

lf 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.

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 jewel 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.

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

whilst 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.

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 round the castle in return for his mother's submission.

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 lron 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 by themselves.

But the Knights of the Vale rode with them.

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