The Battle of the Trident

By the spring of 283 AC, Robert Baratheon's rebellion had gathered enough strength and enough grievance to force a reckoning. Rhaegar Targaryen, absent from the fighting until then, took the field himself at the head of the royal army and met the rebels at a ford of the Trident that would not keep its old name much longer.

The armies crashed together in the shallows, and amid the general slaughter the two principals found each other, as songs and histories both insist they were always going to. Robert Baratheon, wielding the war-hammer he preferred to any sword, broke through Rhaegar's rubied armor and crushed the life from him; the gems scattered into the river as the prince fell, thick enough that men waded in afterward to fish them from the mud, and gave the crossing the only name it has answered to since.

With their prince dead, the royal host broke and fled. The battle did not end the war — King's Landing still had to fall, and Eddard Stark still had promises to keep in Dorne — but it broke House Targaryen's ability to resist in the field, and made Robert Baratheon, whatever else men said of him after, unquestionably a king who had won his crown with his own hands.