After the Fishfeed, Ser Criston Cole marched his green host across the riverlands, seeking to bring the queen's lords to battle and to restore King Aegon's peace by fire and sword. But the black lords of the Trident had taken his measure, and rather than meet him in open battle they harried and shadowed his column, cutting down his outriders and denying him supply, until at last they brought him to bay upon the shores of the God's Eye. There the river lords, the Winter Wolves under Lord Roderick Dustin, and the Blackwoods under young Benjicot Blackwood closed about the greens on every side.
What followed was less a battle than a butchering, and the singers named it the Butcher's Ball for the manner of the slaughter. Cole's host was surrounded and broken, harried by horse and hemmed against the water, and cut down in their hundreds. Ser Criston Cole, the Kingmaker, who had set the crown upon Aegon's head and done as much as any man living to bring on the Dance, was offered the chance to yield. He refused, and rode out alone to die, and there he was struck down by a storm of arrows, his body pierced through many times before he fell. With him died the last hope of a swift green victory in the riverlands.
The death of Criston Cole robbed the greens of their ablest field commander and their surest guiding hand, and the ruin of his army left the Trident firmly in the queen's grasp. The maesters reckon the Butcher's Ball among the great black victories of the war, for it broke a royal host and slew the man who had done more than any other to make Aegon king. Yet the Dance was far from spent, and fresh green armies were already gathering in the Reach beneath the banners of House Hightower.