"To sum up: your father, whom you love, dies, you are his heir, you come back to find that hardly was the corpse cold before his young brother popped onto his throne and into his sheets, thereby offending both legal and natural practice. Now why exactly are you behaving in this extraordinary manner?"
End of an Era
Oberon's reign had lasted, for all intents and purposes, forever. While we had a year of his reign — 2,496 was the last year by the official reckoning — the number was meaningless. Since the misty depths of prehistory, Oberon had ruled Amber.
In order to understand the second rebellion that Amber has ever experienced, we must look at the first, and Amber's two kings, Oberon and Brand.
Certainly, Brand was never considered a top contender for the crown. With Oberon's first two sons, Osric and Finndo, dead, and his third, Benedict, cursed and seemingly uninterested, Corwin and Eric his fifth and fourth sons, respectively, seemed the obvious choices, with Corwin having a chance due to some irregularities in Eric's legitimacy. Indeed, Corwin and Eric's rivalry knew no bounds, and there are strong reasons to believe that they attempted to kill each other. Bleys, Oberon's sixth son, also stood between Brand and any possible succession -- or so it seemed.
It began even further back, in 1,223, when Oberon married for the first time (that we have record of), to a woman named Cymnea. She came from a far-off Shadow so old that its name has been forgotten, and she was the descendent of an ancient line. She bore Oberon three sons, Osric, Finndo, and Benedict, and then Oberon anulled their marriage to take up with Faiella.
Osric and Finndo took their mother's side, while Benedict stayed true to his king. This was the first rebellion, and Oberon has ordered all records of it burned, so our knowledge is scarce. What is known is that Finndo cursed his brother, Benedict, while Osric cursed Amber itself.
From that time forward strange things would come out of Shadow from time to time. Some of the more notable were the Moonriders of Ghenesh pass, the Ghost Fleet of Darylia, and, finally, the Dark Circle in Garnath.
Oberon was imprisoned by the creatures of the Dark Circle, and with his disappearance came chaos in the realm. Corwin and Eric fought bitterly over the throne, with Bleys on the wings, and it was only Brand who sought out Oberon, rescued him, and laid bare the wound in Garnath, whose trail snaked all the way back to that ancient, far-off Shadow of Cymnea's origin.
And Oberon, seeing that the land would never heal with Osric's curse upon it, took the Jewel which was the source of much of his power, told his children that, if he did not return, it was Brand who was to take his place.
The Dark Circle closed, and Oberon was never seen again.
Eric, shamed that his quarrels with Corwin had put the realm into such danger, was the first of the Royals to swear fealty to Brand, and, in those days, his most earnest champion.
The First Century
For a century after Brand's coronation, things were copacetic. Oberon's seventh son took to the throne with seemingly endless enthusiasm. With the stain of Osric's curse lifted from the land, Brand was determined to make Amber a nation of comfort, wealth, and beauty to match its military and mystical might. He ordered the construction of Amber's great Aqueduct, bringing water from Lake Vanteria down to Amber City, allowing the city to grow much larger than it had in Oberon's reign, as well as providing new farmlands to the west of the city.
Brand championed the reclamation of Garnath after the devestation of the Dark Circle there, and founded the city of Ejienne. He rebuilt the lighthouse of Cabra and put his siblings to work finding new Shadows to trade with.
Brand did not merely have the enthusiasm for building up Amber, but an ineffable genius for it. He was shrewd in his diplomacy, sharp-witted in his resource management, and visionary in his innovations. In short, Amber prospered.
In that time, Brand met Lyda, the Contessa Z'Overnus of Bhiram, a Shadow near the Golden Circle. They had a whirlwind romance, a stately wedding, and, shortly thereafter, a son, Lot.
The troubles truly began with the birth of Mordred, though the symptoms did not show up until much later.
Mordred
Moire, Queen of Rebma and Llewella's sister, has always been a cagey leader, out to increase Rebma's stature. And, for years, she had attempted to put one of her own into the line of Amber's succession. Brand's marriage to Lyda was greatly offputting to Rebma's Queen, and relations between the two states deteriorated.
In the end, all sources indicate that it was Lyda who insisted that Brand marry Moire as well. She felt, it would seem, secure in his affections, and, as a noblewoman herself, understood the needs of political marriage. One night's passion to consumate the marriage seemed a little price to pay.
But Moire conceived in that one (and, to all appearances, only) night of passion, and Mordred was born.
Even that didn't seem to break Brand's luck. Lyda accepted the matter, and, while Mordred was a legitimate child, Lot, the firstborn, was Crown Prince.
Anullment
Black moods had always plagued Brand, but in the first century, they were quick to pass and more quickly forgotten. Then, almost on the eve of the 100th anniversary of his coronation, Brand and Lyda fought. History does not record the origins of the fight, but it may well have been something minor. Brand fell into a rage as intense as his constructive energy had been, and, within the day, anulled his marriage to Lyda, banished her from Amber, and declared Lot illegitimate and Mordred the Crown Prince.
His revenge did not diminish his anger, and, within a week, Brand had banished six people from Amber and beheaded another two. The nation was shocked to publically see, for the first time, this side of their king.
Some say that even after the mood passed, Brand never fully recovered. Perhaps his heart was broken by Lyda, whom he had, by all appearances, truly loved. Perhaps he was simply overdue after 100 years of such positive works. Though he rescinded the banishments from the others, he did not retract Lyda's, nor his anullment of their marriage, nor Lot's abrupt bastardization.
Brand resumed his previous efforts to build Amber's fortune, but all his achievements afterwards seemed to have a pall over them.
Falling Towards Rebellion
Brand had always been demanding of others, but his own inexhaustible enthusiasm was inspiring, and there had been few complaints. After his falling out with Lyda, when his dark moods came with increasing frequency, the complaints began. Quietly at first, then louder.
The New Port in Ejienne, while necessary, most agreed, could have been completed in a more leisurely manner, and doing so might have prevented the deaths of the workers when the storm of 119 hit. During the harsh winters of the 160's, the Crown might've been more generous with its grain stores, and prevented some of the starvation. The tariffs on trade continued to climb, and the merchants grumbled.
Then there was the war with Kashfa of 173. "Thoroughly unnecessary," Eric was heard to call it, though he fought valiantly. And Eric was hardly alone in that opinion. The war with Kashfa seemed to be more a matter of perceived insult from the ambassador than any sound military or political reason.
Even the various Royals offended Brand. In 177, after a heated argument, Benedict simply left Amber, for the first time since he had come back to deal with the Dark Circle. He did not return to Amber until the end of the rebellion.
The offenses, from the point of view of the rebels, continued to mount. It is not the place of this history to judge the right or wrong of anyone's actions: Brand's supporters claim, not without some justification, that even in the worst of times, Brand was a firm, intelligent, capable presence on the throne.
Disappearance
Presence, that is, until 190, when Brand abruptly declared Eric Regent and vanished for two years. It appeared that nobody in the Royal Family knew where he was, or even if he lived. Then, as inexplicably as he had gone, he returned in 192, and, proceeded to undo literally every decree that Eric had made as regent. Eric, by all reports, was furious.
Brand launched a new project, the Western Highway. He declared that he wanted to make more of the Western mountains and the ores they carried, and that a well-maintained, broad road would be the first step towards doing so.
Many were dubious of the project, which called for this road to be carved out of steep hills and to travel through an area of light population and little interest. However, Brand was adamant, and the work began.
Hardly had the project began, though, before Brand lost interest in it and fixated instead on building a great Cathedral to the Unicorn. When his advisors told him that the state could not afford to begin so ambitious a project and continue the road at the same time, he cancelled work on the Highway.
It seems certain that Eric and Brand exchanged heated words about this. Then came the event which, finally and inexorably, led to the rebellion.
Vialle
The long courtship, marriage, and subsequent close relationship between Vialle and Eric is well documented elsewhere. For the purpose of this history, we will simply note that, in the year 120, Vialle, a blind woman from Rebma, and Eric met, and, contrary to the expectations of anyone in Amber, fell in love. Their first son, Tsark, was born in 160. In 210, Vialle was again pregant.
The life of a Prince of Amber can be busy, and Eric was often, if reluctantly, seperated from Vialle during the pregnancy. During those times, she was wont to visit the various friends she had made in the 60 years she and Eric had been married. Unfortunately, Vialle, while heavily pregnant, decided to visit a family in the town of Vahki, in day 37 after Midwinter..
The Vahki riots could never have been predicted. The town had been placid, at least from all outside appearances, for years. Certainly, like many areas in Amber at the time, there was some discontent. By 210, the golden age of Brand's rule was indispuitably over, and the people were grumbling over innumerable inconveniances and hard facts. But Vahki had never been close to revolution.
It is widely believed that a member of the small army garrison in Vahki raped some farmer's daughter, though Rebied of Begma has done an admirable job in arguing that the root cause of the riots was, in fact, a drunken argument. In any case, the peaceful town flared up suddenly as soldiers and civilians brawled in the streets. By the time the news reached Brand, it was thought that the entire garrison had been killed by the suddenly violent civilians.
Brand, utterly furious, demanded that the town be surrounded and burnt to the ground. While Bleys and Julian argued against the extreme response, it seems certain that nobody in the castle knew that Vialle was in the town. Eric was performing a diplomatic visit to Delma, and Tsark was hunting down bandits in Arden.
At midnight, Brand had sent a company of cavalry to raze the town. Vialle, blind, had no use for Trumps, and no way to inform her husband of her peril.
At dawn, Bleys called Eric via Trump and informed him of their monarch's extreme actions. Eric, naturally, was terrified, and, when he attempted to call Vialle via Trump, his suspicions were confirmed.
Brand, by all reports, was horrified by what he had done, and begged Eric's forgiveness. Eric refused, and told Brand in no uncertain terms that Brand was unfit for the Throne and that, if Brand would not voluntarily abdicate, Eric would kill him.
Brand refused to step down, and the rebellion, officially, began.
Gathering Allies
Surprisingly, Eric's first allies were among those whom he had previously never found friends with. Besides his son, Tsark, Corwin and Random both declared that Brand was a monster, and left Amber to show their support for Eric. Shortly thereafter, Deirdre left Amber. Lot, who already had absented himself from his father's court, was a natural. Orlando soon followed.
What evidence there is suggests that Martin followed Random (ironically enough), and Miriam joined after failing to convince Jonas of the rightness of the cause, and that she drew in Caine.
We have no documentation as to the conversations which must have gone on from that point, but, from the time-frames involved, it seems clear that the nascent rebels wasted no time in gathering their armies. All of the frustrations of the latter part of Brand's reign came boiling forth into martial fury.
Encircling Amber
Their allies recruited, Eric and Corwin were faced with the challenge of how to prosecute the war. While they had practically infinite resources available to them in Shadow, so did Brand, and, in addition, the loyalists had Amber's own not-inconsiderable might.
Eric felt that it would be suicidal to allow Brand's forces to be reinforced with Shadow troops. However, cutting them off meant blocking every entrance to Amber, and preparing to be attacked from out in Shadow. Eventually, Eric elected to create five seperate forces.
His own troops would attack the most difficult approach to Amber, Ghenesh pass. Corwin's army, the largest one available, would engage in a ground assault on Arden. Caine would lead the rebel Navy. And Lot and Random would both lead roving rear-guard armies whose job it would be to remove pressure from the assault forces. Meanwhile, the various other Royals in the rebel cabal would serve as small-scale commanders and champions to reinforce the attack.
Just after Spring Equinox of year 210, the rebels made their presence known, simultaneously attacking from the north, the south, and the sea.
The Initial Months
Beginnings are critical for any endeavour, and it was, perhaps, an omen for the war that the first engagements of the rebellion were full of mixed results.
Eric's army fared the worst. Ghenesh pass is famous for its defensibility, and Eric knew that he had to get through the pass before opposition forces could be mobilized to reinforce the garrison already present. To that end, he had created several specialized siege weapons meant to crack the fortifications in Ghenesh and allow him to spill into the Dehm valley in a matter of days.
Though the attack on the fortifications worked, the unexpected strength of the defense of the Ghenesh garrison delayed Eric just long enough that, when he finally won through, he did not have enough time to deploy his army through the pass before being met by Bleys in one of the fiercest battles of the war, the battle of Ghenesh, in which Bleys, despite incredible casualties, managed to put the genie back in the bottle, forcing Eric to retreat up into the pass, where he was trapped.
On the naval front, too, the fight quickly became a stalemate. Caine enjoyed some initial success in his raids against Gerard's loyalist fleet, but even in the first major battle, things went rather poorly for him. The Kraken, Caine's flagship, was an immense dreadnought, and served as the hammer of Caine's offense. But, in the intense first battle, a boarding party of loyalists, including Gerard himself, boarded the Kraken, and Gerard single-handedly felled the mainmast of the Kraken before being driven back to the safety of his own flagship, the Unicorn. While the Kraken remained unscuttled, its mobility was crippled, and Caine would not use it as the decisive force it was meant to be until much later, when he finally secured a replacement for the gigantic mast. Further, Caine's supply lines were stretched the thinnest of any of the rebel forces, and he found himself unable to commit fully to major offensives.
However, Caine's fleet did accomplish its most important goal of keeping the waters of Amber in contention and, if not fully blockading Amber by sea, then at least preventing a fleet of the size necessary to bring in major relief armies from reaching the loyalists.
Corwin's forces in Arden enjoyed much greater success, suffering no major setbacks in the first few months. However, with the broadest front and the challenge of fighting through Arden, it had always been expected that Corwin's army would be slow in advancing, and, particularly after Bleys was able to strip much of his force away from the Ghenesh pass and send it south to aid Julian's defense, Corwin's slow and steady gains seemed unlikely to bring the speedy victory that the rebels desired.
The Waiting and the Dying
Arden and the seas of Amber ran red with blood in the autumn of 210 and into the mild winter of 211. The northern front was quiet, with neither Eric nor Bleys able to effectively attack the other, but the southern front was broad and vicious, and one bloodbath followed the next. Corwin's army continued to make progress, albeit at horrific loss, but the defensive forces controlled by Julian refused to break.
At sea, Gerard and Caine seemed almost perfectly matched, neither able to gain an upper hand on the other. While the death counts were numerically much lower, the fighting was no less intense, and the naval theatre was perhaps the most important of them all, as it was the only place it seemed possible that the loyalists might break through the rebel encirclement.
Perhaps as intense as the fighting was the political game that Eric and Brand played, trying to convince the few remaining neutral Royals to pick sides. Only Eleanore, Llewella, Benedict, and Flora had not taken up arms. Of those, Eleanore, prodded on by her loyal father, eventually and somewhat reluctantly joined the loyalists, and Llewella, receiving unknown promises from Eric, began advocating the rebel view within Rebma. Benedict refused to become involved, and Flora did not seem willing to admit that there was a war on.
Dispersement
Come the spring of 211, it was clear to the loyalists that they would need more troops if they were to stop Corwin's advance. Eleanore and Mordred, who were judged most likely to be able to move a large army quickly, were sent into Shadow to raise troops and bring them to Amber.
Meanwhile, Corwin massed a large strike that crushed a division controlled by Jonas, opening a temporary hole in Julian's line. He sent a regiment of elite heavy infantry, commanded by Deirdre, up past Julian's lines and into the interior of Amber, with a mandate to open the Ghenesh pass, and then a larger screening force, meant to distract attention from Deirdre's troops, led by Eric's son, Tsark.
By mid-summer of 211, there could hardly be said to be a front. Tsark's force in the interior of Amber was not so large as to be able to attack City Amber directly, but it was too large and too mobile for Amber's forces to pin down and destroy, though Jonas was hell-bent on trying. The rebels subsisted on ravaging the farmland between Arden and Kolvir, and striking at Julian's supply lines. Meanwhile, Deirdre's infantry, intent on avoiding detection until it was too late, swung wide and west around Kolvir, moving through the hills towards the Dehm valley.
Finally, Mordred and Eleanore returned with a reasonable-sized army, only to be cut to pieces by Lot's and Random's troops before they could engage the rear of Corwin's army. Mordred and Eleanore returned to Shadow to find a larger force, and, unbeknownst to the loyalists, Lot split his army, adding half his force to Corwin's for reserve troops and half to Eric's, prepratory to being freed from Ghenesh.
Chaos
Maps of the troop positions in late 211 become very confused, as Jonas harried Tsark's forces and Caine, for the first time, made some landings south of Amber to add to the confusion. As the armies slowly broke up into less contiguous units, the commanders attempted to hide their exact locations, a tactic useful for military leaders, but frustrating for historians.
It was in this period that the tactic of jamming Trumps by destroying them on the Pattern came into common use, as the various forces jockeyed for position and attempted to cut off lines of communication for those few hours surrounding a succesful attack.
In this time, Jonas, interrogating a prisoner, learned of Deirdre's presence within the Amber perimeter and, eventually, found her and guessed her target. However, his force was too small to stop hers.
Flora's Death
Often it is claimed that Flora's death was the turning point in the rebellion. Though the rebels' fortune continued to climb for more than a year after her murder, no other death so incensed the family-members, and no other death's exact circumstances were so shrouded in controversy.
What is known is that Deirdre was marching her infantry regiment to the Ghenesh pass in order to relieve Eric's bottled-up forces. Deirdre's troops were low on supplies, and were foraging on the way. Flora's summer mansion was directly in the line of the march.
Flora had sworn fealty to Brand when he became King, and had never publically disavowed that oath, so she is popularly ascribed to the side of the loyalists. However, her contribution to the conflict had, in fact, been so minimal that she might be better-described as a neutral. Indeed, she did not appear to have the capability or inclination to swing matters one way or the other.
In the wake of Deirdre's regiment's passage, Flora's summer mansion was destroyed, and Flora herself was killed. King Brand immediately claimed that Deirdre, who had long been known to have no particular love of her sister, had killed Flora, and his claims were widely believed. Among other things, it would seem unlikely that, barring deliberate effort from Deirdre, Flora could have been killed before she could effect an escape. However, certain scholars have been able to make an argument that the regiment's arrival might have come at night, and that Flora could have been taken unawares by non-Royals.
Deirdre claims no knowledge of Flora's death, and, after the end of the rebellion, Brand, without retracting his accusation of murder, did not mention the crime when dispensing justice to Deirdre.
The Battle of Rallan
Deirdre's regiment of heavy infantry reached Ghenesh without significant opposition (the remnants of Julian's cavalry, led by Jonas after the battle of Daven's Ford, harassed them along the way, but were too few to inflict serious losses). Once they arrived, Bleys' seige would be reversed, pinched between Eric's and Deirdre's forces.
Rather than face certain loss, Bleys prepared a complex subterfuge. The night before Deirdre's forces were expected to arrive, his men lit campfires, but abandoned them to a skeleton force of fire-tenders, and stole a night march south towards Deirdre, attacking her camp in the pre-dawn hours.
Bleys and Deirdre's forces were nearly equal, numerically, and Deirdre's were much better rested, but the rebels were almost exclusively heavy infantry with only light cavalry as the barest of perimeter screen, while Bleys had a full company of heavy horse, and the element of surprise. Nevertheless, the battle was touch and go. In the end, Bleys and Jonas both took the field, and the attack succeeded in devestating Deirdre's infantry, but the victory was hollow, with Bleys taking serious casualties and Eric free to come boiling out of Ghenesh.
The Long Retreat
With Eric past the pass of Ghenesh and into the long, low river-valley of Dehm, the rebel momentum seemed unstoppable. Bleys and Jonas organized a seemingly endless series of delaying tactics, fighting guerilla warfare throughout Dehm as Brand struggled to fortify City Amber for the seige that, for the first time, seemed inevitable. As Corwin's and Caine's forces continued to bar Amber to the reinforcements that Mordred and Eleanor offered, and Eric's and Lot's armies were able to come together in a slowly-closing noose around Brand's neck, the rebels' eventual victory seemed inevitable. However, here we can see signs that all was not going as Eric and Corwin had first planned. While they had thought that, as they gained momentum, Brand would lose supporters, the loyalists remained united, perhaps in their anger over Flora's death. Further, their progress through Dehm was agonizingly slow, and Bleys' brilliant performance in the year-long retreat is widely agreed to have been the best generalmanship displayed in the course of the war.
However, the many small and bloody battles of the Long Retreat are outside the scope of this history, and so we turn our attention eastward.
The Naval Game
Rebma finally threw in with the rebels after the Battle of Ghenesh, and, with the resupply that provided Caine's fleet, the naval battle, long stalemated, began to fall together.
Caine repaired the mainmast of the Kraken and, while drawing Gerard's attention with a series of raids on the Alenosian islands, threw the majority of his ships of the line into a daring assault on the town of Ejienne. His success there gave him the only thing Rebma couldn't -- a local port.
Once the rebel fleet was able to match the loyalists' in terms of supply chains and repair facility, Gerard was forced to pull back to a tight defense of the Amber harbor and coast.
The Rebel Zenith
Winter of year 212 brought the high-water mark of the rebel cause, as the loyalists were rocked with two major losses.
First, an increasingly desperate Bleys finally met his luck's end, when Lot and Orlando managed to turn a daring raid into a trap. With his retreat cut off, wounded, Bleys met Lot in single combat and died, pronouncing his curse on Lot, who earned the epithet Kinslayer.
With Bleys' death, Lot's and Eric's forces were able to push aside the remaining opposition in the Dehm valley and put city Amber under partial seige. Julian, for fear of fighting on two fronts, was forced to withdraw his forces to the west, allowing, for the first time, a rebel corridor through Arden. While Caine's naval advantage was not complete enough to cut off city Amber completely, it seemed only a matter of time before Brand was fully trapped.
Then the loss of the loyalist's best general was followed by the loss of their greatest champion, Jonas. Throughout the conflict, though Jonas and Miriam had been on opposed sides, each had assiduously avoided coming into direct conflict with the other. However, as the zone of fighting contracted, the potential for mistakes increased.
Jonas had been fighting south of Amber city, trying to keep the Western Road which linked the city Amber forces to Julian's. However, on the 73rd night after Midsummer, Brand recalled him via Trump to participate in a raid on Deirdre's infantry division to the north of the city. Meanwhile, Miriam, who had spent the duration of the war engaged in the naval battle, acting as her father's assistant, had come to conference with Deirdre, and was spending the night on dryland for the first time in several fortnights.
Inevitably, in the course of the raid, Jonas came upon an armored female with dark hair, and, in the heat of the fight and the darkness, assumed that it was Deirdre. Miriam, no match for Jonas' sword, lasted barely long enough to cry out his name.
Jonas returned from the raid a broken man, utterly dispirited. While his personal ferocity had turned several battles in the past, he was unwilling to fight any longer, and nothing Brand or Fiona could do would change his resolve.
Morale was extremely low for the loyalists, and, by the 10th day after the Equinox, Caine had completed the beseigement of Amber city.
Benedict Enters the War
Loyalist forces were in dire straights in the fourth quarter of 212. City Amber was under seige, and Julian's army in Arden was being cut to pieces by Corwin's larger force. Meanwhile, Mordred and Eleanore's army, half again the size of all the other loyalist forces put together, was being effectively held off by the rearguard of Corwin's army in entrenched positions, with healthy resupply.
When Benedict took over the command of Mordred and Eleanore's relief army, all of that changed. With a series of precision strikes, he isolated and destroyed the fortified positions of Corwin's army and took pressure off of Julian. Within two weeks, Benedict had penetrated deep into Arden and it was suddenly Corwin who was fighting defensively.
There has been much speculation as to why Benedict entered the war when he did, on the side of the loyalists. Some have suggested that he deliberately delayed his entrance into the war in order to make the situation challenging enough to engage his interest. Other theories postulate that Benedict was insulted by Eric or Corwin. Still others claim that Benedict was somehow trapped by the rebel forces at the beginning of the war, and only in 212 did he win free. However, in this author's opinion, the best-founded theory is simply that Benedict decided that, barring his interference, the war would drag on for years and that much of the family would be slaughtered, and that, having decided to attempt to bring the rebellion to conclusion, Benedict could not find it in himself to betray his oath of fealty and go against the king. This is consistant with Benedict's actions after the war and what we know of Amber's misty pre-history.
Benedict Kills Corwin
Morale's influence on the fortunes of the rebels can not be overstated. For the most part the armies of the rebels were not at home in Amber, often coming from far-off Shadow. In general, they were motivated by a cult of personality based on one or more of the Royal rebels, not the most stable base for an ideology. When the rebels' fortunes were waxing, morale was high, but the deeper Benedict penetrated into Arden, the less resistance he faced.
Indeed, it was only one month before Corwin's army was at desperation status, struggling to keep Benedict's overwhelming forces off the back of the beseigement forces. Corwin increasingly took to the front lines in order to inspire his troops and lend his not-inconsiderable personal prowess to the weight of battle. Orlando, Corwin's son, joined Corwin's army to help in the battles, as Eric and Lot struggled to redeploy their troops to meet the new threat.
But Benedict, in an act that many consider highly uncharacteristic, took to the front lines as well, and met Corwin in battle. The Royal family seems to consider any of its deaths a private matter, and the exact circumstances of the battle have never been divulved. But it is known that Benedict killed Corwin with three black-fletched arrows, as Orlando watched, and Benedict was cursed by both Corwin and Orlando.
With Corwin's death, the Rebel army in Arden entirely collapsed, and Benedict and Julian had open passage to Amber city.
The Chase
After Corwin's death and his army's collapse, Eric knew he had to withdraw his army to a more defensible location if he was to have any hope of salvaging the rebellion. He broke the seige around City Amber and retreated northward, crossing the Dehm valley again, losing in days ground which had cost months to take.
Caine retained control of the sea, and it was probably this fact which gave the beleagured rebels hope that they could succeed. Without freedom of the seas, the loyalist army could not move around to encircle or flank Eric's ground troops. Meanwhile, Lot and Orlando went back out into Shadow to raise more troops to reinforce the rebel forces.
However, those reinforcements were never to arrive. Long before Lot and Orlando could return, Random turned against his erstwhile comrades and, with the help of his personal batallion, loyalist forces poured into the rebel command center and captured Eric and Deirdre. This battle is generally considered the end of the rebellion.
Justice
By all accounts, Brand wished to execute all of the rebels in his custody and issue warrants for the death of the rest, but Benedict, it seems, argued convincingly against that. Tsark was brought to custody by a threat on Eric's life, and Caine was captured three months later by Random and Fiona. However, in the end, none of the rebels were killed. Eric, as the leader of the rebellion, was blinded with hot irons and thrown deep into Amber's dungeons. The rest were kept under relatively comfortable arrest in Castle Amber, that arrest slowly loosening as the years went by.
Lot and Orlando were never captured, and they have not shown themselves publically in Amber since the rebellion. Llewella remained in exile in Rebma, but Moire interceeded on her behalf and Brand, reportedly reluctantly, has issued her a pardon. Martin was granted a pardon after his father's change of sides.