Of all the ancient feuds of the riverlands, none is older or more bitter than that between House Blackwood of Raventree Hall and House Bracken of Stone Hedge, a quarrel whose roots run back to the Age of Heroes and the wars of the First Men. When the great struggle between Rhaenyra Targaryen and her half brother Aegon II came at last to the Trident, the two houses needed little cause to take up arms; that Lord Samwell Blackwood declared for the blacks was reason enough for the Brackens to declare for the greens. So it was that the first blood shed in the riverlands during the Dance of the Dragons was spilled not for queen or king, but for a grudge older than either.
The two hosts met upon the banks of the Red Fork, at a place remembered ever after as the Burning Mill, for the millhouse there was put to the torch in the fighting. The battle was fierce and confused, and by the accounts gathered at the Citadel it settled nothing. Lord Samwell Blackwood, a young lord and a bold one, was cut down by Ser Amos Bracken before the day was done, yet the Brackens could claim no clean victory, and both houses limped home to lick their wounds and nurse their hatreds afresh. What the Burning Mill did accomplish was to set the whole of the Trident alight: from that day the riverlords chose their sides in earnest, and the war in the riverlands, which would prove the bloodiest of any theatre of the Dance, was well and truly begun.