The westermen came east under Lord Jason Lannister to bring the riverlands to King Aegon's peace, but their lord was slain at the Red Fork by a common soldier called Pate of Longleaf, and thereafter their host wandered the Trident leaderless and adrift, its command passing uneasily from one knight to the next. Seeking to join Ser Criston Cole and add their strength to the greens, the westermen marched toward the heart of the riverlands, not knowing that the black lords had gathered to meet them at the place where the forks of the Trident come together.
There, at the confluence of the rivers, three separate host converged upon the Lannister column at once: the river lords loyal to Queen Rhaenyra, the fierce Winter Wolves out of the north under Lord Roderick Dustin of Barrowton, and the men of House Blackwood led by the boy lord Benjicot Blackwood, whom the singers would come to call Bloody Ben. Caught between three armies with no dragon and no clear commander, the westermen were surrounded and butchered. The slaughter was so great, and so many corpses were flung into the waters of the Trident, that men said the fish fed for a fortnight after; and so the battle earned the grim name by which it is remembered, the Fishfeed.
It was among the most one-sided victories of the whole Dance, and it broke the strength of the westerlands in the riverlands for a season. Yet it settled little in the greater war, for Ser Criston Cole's host still marched, and the black lords who had won so bloody a field would soon be called to fight again. The Fishfeed stands in the chronicles as a testament to the ruin that overtook any army caught upon open ground by the massed lords of the Trident.