While Robert Baratheon carried the war through the riverlands, the defense of the family seat fell to his younger brother Stannis, who held Storm's End with only a small garrison. Lord Mace Tyrell brought the great host of the Reach against the castle after Ashford and settled in for a siege, while the Redwyne fleet out of the Arbor, commanded by Lord Paxter Redwyne, closed the sea approaches so that nothing might reach the defenders by water. The ancient walls of Storm's End, raised in legend by Brandon the Builder, defied every assault, and so Mace Tyrell resolved to starve the garrison into submission.
The siege dragged on for the better part of a year. Within the walls the defenders ate through their stores, then their horses, then the dogs and cats of the castle, and hunger gnawed them to the edge of surrender. Deliverance came at last from a Flea Bottom smuggler who ran the Redwyne blockade in a black-sailed ship laden with onions and salt fish, keeping the garrison alive through the worst of it; Stannis would afterward reward the man with knighthood and lands even as he took the joints of his fingers as the price of his years of smuggling. The castle never fell. Only after Robert had won the war and Lord Eddard Stark marched south did Mace Tyrell dip his banners and bend the knee, and the siege was lifted with the storm lords' seat unbroken.