The Battle of the Bells

After an early defeat, Robert Baratheon went to ground in the river town of Stoney Sept, wounded and hunted, while Jon Connington — Hand of the King and a man with every reason to want Robert's head — combed the town house by house. The townsfolk, for reasons the maesters attribute variously to sympathy, bribery, and simple contrariness, did not give him up.

Connington's search dragged past its welcome, and Eddard Stark arrived with a relief force before the town could be fully turned out. What followed inside Stoney Sept's narrow streets was less a pitched battle than a rout in close quarters, the royal army caught strung out through the town it had spent days searching instead of fortifying.

The defeat finished Jon Connington as Hand of the King — Aerys II stripped him of the office and exiled him for the failure, a decision that would have consequences far beyond 283 AC. For the rebels, the bells that had rung through the search became a story told for a generation after: the town that hid a king and broke a Hand.