Chapter 28: Robb Starkton's Victory and Its Cost

The battle at Crossford Bridge lasted four hours and twenty minutes, which Robb Starkton thought insufficiently long for the reputation it subsequently produced.

He had not planned for reputation. He had planned for the ford.

The Lannisford advance column had been moving northeast along the river road for three days, a force of eight hundred infantry and one hundred and forty cavalry under the command of Lord Tywin's nephew, a gentleman named Stafford Lannisford who was possessed of considerable family confidence and a tactical imagination that had not, in the event, extended to the question of what might be positioned in the woodline above the western bank. Robb had positioned himself in the woodline above the western bank. He had also, on the advice of his father's old bannerman Lord Rickard Karstark, who had fought in the last war and retained strong feelings about rivers, split his cavalry into two bodies and sent one around a ridge road that Stafford Lannisford's scouts had apparently not thought worth the trouble of examining.