BARRISTANThe boy reminded him of Rhaegar.
Ser Barristan Selmy had been careful, over the years, not to say this aloud. There were few men left who had known Prince Rhaegar Targaryen as Barristan had known him, and fewer still who would have understood the comparison as anything other than treason, given who the boy's father was and how Robert felt about the prince he had brought down on the trident.
So Barristan had kept it behind his teeth, as he had learned to do as a kingsguard. But he thought it, and he had thought it for years now, and watching the prince at the feast — newly knighted, flushed with victory, the crown of roses in his betrothed's auburn hair beside him — he thought it again.
It was not the look of the boy, exactly. The colouring was all wrong; Rhaegar had been silver and violet, and Joffrey was gold and gold, the Lannister gilt run all through him. It was something underneath the look. A quality of apartness, even in a crowded hall. A stillness inside the motion. Rhaegar had carried it too, that sense of a man who was present at the feast and the tourney and the council and was also, always, somewhere else, working at something that the rest of them could not see.
And then there was the sadness.
Rhaegar had been a melancholy prince, and the singers had made much of it after he died, the way singers will, but Barristan had known the truth of it, which was simpler and sadder than any song. Rhaegar had been born in grief, at Summerhall, in the fire that took so much of his family, and the grief had been the water he swam in all his life.
He had read about it as a child instead of playing. He had become a warrior not from any love of it but because he had read somewhere that he must. He had never, in all the years Barristan knew him, quite learned how to be happy.
The prince had that in him too, Barristan thought, Or had once.
The old knight remembered when he first saw it.
The boy had been seven years old when the accident happened. A fall, the maesters said, though no one had quite seen it, a blow to the head that left him senseless for the better part of two days. When he woke, two things had changed.
The first was small and strange and much remarked upon at the time and then forgotten: his eyes, which had been green like his mother's, like his uncle's, like all his siblings, were gold. The maesters said children's eyes sometimes changed. Grand Maester Pycelle said something learned and useless about humours. The eyes stayed gold.
The second change was larger, and no one remarked upon it, because Barristan was perhaps the only one positioned to see it.
The boy had been sad.
Not sickly, not slow, not damaged in the ways the maesters had feared. Sad. A deep, quiet, settled sadness, entirely unlike the petulance and temper that if Barristan was being honest, and at his age he tried to be, had observed in the prince before the fall.
The boy who woke from that injury moved through the Red Keep for weeks like someone in mourning. Like someone who had lost a great deal and was carrying it alone. Barristan had seen grief enough in his long life to know it when it sat on a child's face, and he had not understood it, because the child had lost nothing that anyone could name, and he had wondered about it, and he had said nothing.
And then one morning the boy had come to him in the yard and asked to be trained.
This too was strange. The prince had shown no interest in the yard before the fall — he had been a child who preferred his mother's solar to the practice ground, who cried when he fell, who had to be cajoled into so much as holding a sword and was unruly at the best of times.
The boy who came to Barristan that morning was different. He was solemn and he was determined and he asked to be trained the way a penitent asks for a hard penance, as if the work itself were a thing he needed rather than wanted.
I want to be a true knight, the boy had said. A real one. Will you teach me, Ser?
Barristan had looked down at the small sad serious child and felt something turn over in his old soldier's heart, and he had said yes.
He had thought of Rhaegar then, too.
Rhaegar had come to his swordwork the same way. Not from joy. Never joy, but from some private necessity, some sense that the world required it of him and he must needs meet the requirement.
Barristan had trained two princes in his life who approached the blade as a duty rather than a pleasure, and the first had died in the Trident with a hammer through his chest, and the second was on the dais by the riverside now, with a crown of roses given to a Stark girl and the whole realm singing his name.
Barristan knew how it looked. He did not like to think too hard about the symmetry of it. He was an old man, and old men saw patterns everywhere, and not all of them were real.
He knew one thing for sure however, Robert hated Rhaegar still.
That was the irony Barristan turned over, watching the king bellow with laughter at the feast, his great red face shining. Some sixteen years gone, and Robert Baratheon still hated the dead prince with a passion that had not cooled — Barristan Selmy had heard him, more than once, deep in his cups, promising to kill Rhaegar again in whatever hell the man had gone to, to kill him a thousand times. The grief for Lyanna Stark had never healed in Robert. It had calcified into hate, and the hate had become a kind of monument, and the king tended it like a shrine.
And his son — the son he loved, the son he was so proud of that he wept at tourneys — was more like Rhaegar Targaryen than any living man Barristan knew.
The prince went into the city to play his lute, the way Rhaegar had gone among the smallfolk with his silver harp. The prince read histories and thought about kingship as a thing one studied rather than merely inherited, as Rhaegar had. The prince had that quality of making people love him without seeming to try, the quality the singers called grace and which Barristan Selmy, who had served four kings, knew to be far rarer and more dangerous than the singers understood.
If Robert ever saw it, truly saw it, the way Barristan saw it, Barristan did not know what the king would do. But Robert would never see it. A man does not look for the thing he hates in the thing he loves. It was, perhaps, the one mercy in the whole arrangement.
The feast was winding toward its close when the prince rose and announced that he would keep a knight's vigil.
"You don't need to," the king said, frowning. He had drunk a great deal and his good humour was at its peak, expansive and affectionate. "You're already knighted, lad. Did it myself, on the field, before the whole bloody realm. There's no septon alive who'd say it wasn't proper."
"It would feel incomplete, Father," the prince said. "I'd keep the vigil. A knighthood ought to be earned in full."
"At least sleep first. You've been on a horse all day, you fought Loras to a standstill—"
"Tonight," the prince said, gently and immovably, in the way Barristan had watched him all these years be gentle and immovable about a hundred things. "While the meaning of it is fresh. I'd rather not do it for show, after I've rested and it's become a ceremony. I'd do it now, when it costs me something, as it should."
A murmur went through those gathered. Even drunk and tired, half the lords of the realm in attendance, and the boy would keep an all-night vigil rather than take the easy road. It was exactly the kind of thing the singers would carry out of the hall and into the realm by morning. Lady Sansa looked at the prince with so much affection it hurt.
Barristan, who was not a cynic but had watched a great many men perform piety, found himself believing the prince meant it. That was the thing about the boy. The performance and the sincerity were the same thing. He did the right thing in the most visible way, and he did it because it was right, and the visibility was simply a tool he never wasted.
"I'll stand with you," Jon Snow said, rising. The bastard — the prince's shadow, men called him, the closest of all his companions. "If you'll have me."
"And I," said Loras Tyrell.
Barristan was not surprised at this. The boys were thick as thieves. They had grown up together and the prince had been there for both their vigils. In the Godswood for Jon and the sept for Loras.
The prince smiled at them both. "Thank you, my friends."
Barristan looked at Ser Jaime.
The Kingslayer was watching his nephew with an expression Barristan had learned to recognise over the years and never quite known how to name. It was something almost wistfulness, in a man who worked very hard to appear incapable of it.
Their eyes met. Neither of them said anything, but a thing passed between them, old soldier to younger, the two men who had trained this prince between them through all the years of it.
If the boy could keep a vigil after a day like that, what excuse did they have?
They went to join them.
A vigil is meant to be kept in silence.
The custom is old and strict: the knight-to-be kneels before the altar of the Warrior, through the long hours of the night, and contemplates the vows he is about to take, and the witnesses keep their silence and do not interrupt his contemplation.
The point of it is to be alone with the meaning of the thing, even in company.
Barristan had kept his own vigil forty five ago, after King Aegon had laid the sword on his shoulders, and remembered it still — the cold of the sept, the candles, the long slow hours of a boy becoming something more.
The prince knelt before the Warrior in the great Sept of Baelor for three hours without a word.
Barristan kept his own silence and watched him, and watched the others — Jaime, kneeling stiff and disciplined; Loras with his head bowed and his pretty face for once entirely serious; Jon Snow, as always, dark and still.
Four knights keeping the vigil of a fifth. It was a strange and beautiful thing, and Barristan, who had thought he was past being moved by ceremony, found himself moved.
When the prince finally spoke, his voice was quiet in the great dark space.
"Do you remember your vows?" he asked. He did not turn from the Warrior. "Truly remember them. Not the words. The meaning."
It was not how a vigil was meant to go. But the boy was already knighted, and Barristan could not imagine a septon alive who would object, and there was something in the question that made the breaking of custom feel less like impiety than like a deeper kind of observance.
"I remember mine," Jaime said, after a moment. There was an edge to his voice. "I've had cause to think about them."
"Tell me," the prince said softly. His voice was weary but there was strength in it still. "All of you. What did you think they meant, when you took them? What do you think they mean now?"
And so they talked, in the dark, in the candlelight, of the things knights swear — to defend the weak, to protect all women and children, to be brave and just and true.
They talked of how the vows looked to a boy of fifteen and how they looked to a man of sixty, and the gap between, and how a man spent his life trying to close it.
Barristan spoke of things he had not spoken of in years. Even Loras, who wore his knighthood like a fine cloak, said things that surprised Barristan with their weight.
And then the prince said: "And the Kingsguard vows."
The air changed.
"Obedience," Prince Joffrey said. "You swear to obey the king. To guard him and his secrets, to serve him, to give your lives for his. But you swear the knight's vows too — to protect the innocent, to do no wrong." He was quiet a moment. "And sometimes those two sets of vows do not agree with each other. Do they, Nuncle?"
The Kingslayer said nothing at all.
"I've wanted to ask you something for a long time," the prince said, and now he turned, and looked at his uncle in the candlelight. "And I'm ashamed I never did, it was cruel of me not to. So I'll ask you now, here, with the Warrior listening and all the other gods who decide to aswell." He paused. "Why did you kill the Mad King?"
The silence that followed was total. Barristan felt it in his chest.
He had wondered, of course. Everyone had wondered, for fifteen years, and everyone had decided they already knew the answer. That Jaime Lannister was a man without honour, who had murdered the king he was sworn to protect, who had done it for his father or for advantage or simply because the killing was there to be done.
Barristan had decided it himself. He had thought less of the man for fifteen years, had refused him the respect a Sworn Brother was owed, had carried a quiet contempt for the golden knight who had broken the most sacred vow a man could take.
He had never once asked him why.
"No one ever asked," Jaime said. His voice was strange. "Fifteen years. You're the first." He laughed, and there was no humour in it at all. "Everyone knew. The Kingslayer killed his king. What more was there to ask? The judgment was already written. I saw it in Lord Stark's eyes when he walked into the throne room and found me sitting up there, with Aerys dead at my feet, and I decided — gods help me, I was seventeen and proud — I decided that if that was what they wished to believe, I would not give them the satisfaction of an explanation. Let them think the worst. A lion has no need to explain himself."
"Tell us now," the prince said softly.
And Jaime Lannister told them.
He told them about Aerys, and the wildfire.
He told it haltingly at first and then in a rush, fifteen years of it coming out in the dark of the sept, and Barristan listened with a growing horror that he could feel reaching all the way back into his own memory and rearranging it.
The king had gone mad with fear, Jaime said. He saw traitors everywhere. And in the end, with Robert's army marching on the city and the war lost, Aerys had commanded his pyromancers to place caches of wildfire beneath the whole of King's Landing — beneath the Sept of Baelor and the hovels of Flea Bottom, beneath the stables and the storehouses, at all seven gates, in the cellars of the Red Keep itself. Enough wildfire to burn the entire city to ash. Half a million people.
Burn them all, the king had said. Let my cousin be king over charred bones and cooked meat. Let him be King of the Ashes.
Aerys had believed, in his madness, that he would not die. That the fire would transform him, as it had failed to transform the Brightflame before him. That he would rise from the ashes reborn as a dragon and turn his enemies to cinders.
And Jaime had stood at the foot of the Iron Throne in his white cloak and heard all of it, because Aerys did not trust him and liked to keep him close where Varys could watch him. He had heard the king give the order. He had heard the pyromancer Rossart take it.
"When my father's army took the city," Jaime said, "Aerys sent his last command to the pyromancers. Burn them all. And he gave me a command— to bring him my father's head, to prove I was no traitor. Rossart was already gone to fire the caches." His voice was flat now, emptied out. "I killed Rossart first, in the halls. And then I went back to the throne room and I killed Aerys, before he could find another man to carry the command. I opened his throat from ear to ear. And then I sat down on the throne to wait, because I did not know what else to do." He laughed again, that terrible empty sound. "And honerable Lord Stark walked in. And looked at me. And I saw what he saw — the Kingslayer, lounging on the throne he'd murdered his way onto — and I decided I would rather be hated than explain myself. I have regretted very few things as long as I have regretted that pride."
The sept was silent.
Barristan found that his hands were trembling. He looked at them as though they belonged to someone else. I judged him, he thought. Fifteen years I judged him, and I never asked, and the truth was that he saved us all and let us hate him for it because we were too quick to believe the worst.
The shame of it was a physical thing, sitting in his old chest like a stone. He had been at Duskendale. He had pulled Aerys out of Duskendale with his own hands and his own blade, earned his name anew doing it — Barristan the Bold — and he had seen, even then, what the king was becoming, and he had served on, and said nothing, and when a younger man finally did the thing that needed doing, Barristan had despised him for it.
"I didn't know," Barristan said. His voice was not steady. "Ser Jaime. I— in all these years, I never— forgive me—"
Jaime looked at him with something that might have been surprise. "There's nothing to forgive, old man. You believed what everyone believed. I made sure of it."
It was Jon Snow who spoke next, and his voice was careful and his eyes were piercing even in the dark.
"Why did you say nothing, though?" the bastard asked. "When Lord Stark found you. You could have told him. You could have told everyone. Why let them think it?"
"I told you. Pride. The judgment was already in his eyes—"
"The judgment was in his eyes," Jon said slowly, "because while you were sitting on that throne, Elia Martell and her children were being murdered across the castle by your father's men, after they had finished sacking the city."
The words fell into the dark like stones into a well.
Jaime was quiet for a long moment.
"Yes," he said at last. "That is the other thing. I have two great shames, and that is the deeper one. I told myself no harm would come to them. Elia and Rhaenys and Aegon. I told myself my father only meant to take the city, that there were lines even he would not cross." His voice had gone very low. "I was wrong. I knew my father, and I told myself a comfortable lie because the truth was unbearable, and a princess and two babes died for my comfort. Rhaenys was hiding under her father's bed. They dragged her out." He stopped. "If I could undo one thing in my life, it would not be Aerys. It would be that. I would have left the king alive an hour longer and gone to that nursery instead. I think of it more than I think of anything."
No one spoke. There was nothing to say to it.
The candles burned. Outside, the first grey of dawn was beginning to soften the high windows of the sept.
"The wildfire," the prince had turned back to the warrior. "The caches. Are they still there, Nuncle?"
Jaime looked up. "Some. Most. The pyromancers I could find, I killed — Rossart, Belis, Garigus. But they'd done their work by then, and the caches were placed by then, hidden all over the city." He frowned. "I've kept watch on them since, as well as I'm able. Every few years I have the wisdoms check the major caches, quietly. The stuff is stable, for now. Wildfire grows more volatile with age, but it hasn't gone off, and the wisdoms keep it—"
"It is still beneath the city," the prince said. "All of it."
"Most of it. Yes."
Loras had gone white. "Are you mad!?"
Barristan felt cold. Even the dawn light seemed colder.
Jon had stood and was pacing.
"That," the prince said, "will need to be addressed." He rose from his knees, unhurried, and looked at the Warrior a moment longer, and then at the four of them. "Thank you. All of you. For the vigil, and for the honesty. It was a better vigil than I could have asked for."
He looked at Jaime, "And thank you, Nuncle. For telling us. You should not have carried that alone for fifteen years."
"It's what I'm for," Jaime said, but his voice was rough with feeling.
Jaime and the prince went to break their fast with the family. Barristan went to his bed and did not sleep, lying with his eyes open and his shame turning over in him, an old man rearranging fifteen years of his own certainty.
Later that day, on the melee field, before the fighting began, the High Septon came down to anoint the prince of the realm with the seven oils — a great honour, rarely given, and the crowd had roared for it.
Barristan had watched the boy kneel in the dirt of the field and receive the oils with his head bowed, and had thought, again and helplessly, of the silver prince.
It was deep in the night after the melee, after the last of the feasting, that the summons came.
The prince gathered the four of them who had kept his vigil.
"You are going to look at the wildfire," he said, without preamble. "I want to know what we're dealing with before I bring it to the council. Quietly, tonight, the four of you. I would join, but other matters require my attention." What those matters were, the prince did not say and they did not ask.
Prince Joffrey had pyromancers waiting — members of the Alchemists' Guild, sworn to discretion and frightened enough of the prince to keep their word. "Ser Jaime, Ser Barristan, you'll take the eastern caches. Ser Jon, Ser Loras, the western. A wisdom with each pair, to handle the substance. Touch nothing yourselves. Just look, and count, and report."
And so Barristan found himself, in the small black hours, walking the underways of the city he had guarded for most of his life beside Jaime Lannister, with a pyromancer scuttling ahead of them holding a shielded lantern as though it might bite him.
It was awkward between them.
Barristan did not know how to be, beside this man. For sixteen years he had known exactly how to be — courteous, correct, and privately contemptuous. That certainty was gone, knocked out from under him in a single night, and what remained was a guilt he did not know what to do with and a question he could not stop asking himself: what would I have done? In his place, seventeen years old, the king giving the order to burn half a million people — what would Barristan the Bold have done? What would I do now?
He did not know. That was the worst of it. He had always believed he knew what honour required in any circumstance, and now, in his old age, he had found a circumstance where he did not know, and it had taken Jaime Lannister to show it to him.
They walked in silence to the first cache — a low cellar beneath what had once been a granary, the air thick and strange. The pyromancer knelt by the clustered jars, the wildfire within them glowing a sullen green through the clay, and began his careful examination, murmuring to himself.
Jaime watched him work.
"Tell me something, Ser Barristan," he said, not looking away from the green glow. His voice was quiet, careful, as if afraid of the answer. "Is it in the blood?"
Barristan glanced at him. "Is what?"
"The madness. Aerys." Jaime's jaw was tight. His words were bitter. "Was he always going to become what he became? Was it there from the start, waiting, written in him because he was a Targaryen and that's what Targaryens are? Half the realm believes it. Every other dragon comes up mad, they say. Coin flip. Is that true? Was there ever a version of Aerys that didn't end with him ordering me to bring him mine own father's head?"
Barristan was quiet for a while. He thought back to all he had seen.
"No," the old man decided. "It is not in the blood."
Jaime looked at him.
"I knew Aerys when he was young," Barristan explained. "You did not. By the time you came to the Kingsguard he was already far gone, and so you never saw the other man, and it is easy to believe a thing was always so when you only saw the end of it." He searched for the words; he had not spoken of this in many years. "Aerys was a good king once. Truly. When he came to the throne he was generous, and clever, and full of plans. He had reforms in mind. He wanted to do great things, build great things… He was bold in his youth. During the War of the Ninepenny Kings he fought well, beside your father and beside Lord Steffon Baratheon, and the three of them were friends then, if you can believe it. There was nothing of the monster in him. Nothing."
"Then what happened?"
"The world happened." Barristan looked at the green glow of the wildfire. "Life happened. It broke him by inches. The stillbirths and the dead children — Rhaella lost so many, and each one took something from him. The growing distance between him and your father, the friendship souring into rivalry and then into hate. And Duskendale." He paused. He could almost feel the arrows he had shielded the king from. Would that he had been less bold. "Duskendale was the end of it, I think. Lord Darklyn took the king prisoner, you'll remember. Held him half a year in the Dun Fort, and the things they did to him in that time — the fear of it, the helplessness — when I brought him out, the man I carried from that castle was not the man who had gone in. Something in him had shattered, and it never healed. The fire was always there in the Targaryens, the love of it, but a healthy mind keeps such things in their place. Aerys's mind stopped being able to. After Duskendale, he saw treason everywhere, and trusted no one, and the only thing that ever comforted him was fire." He shook his head slowly. "It was not the blood, Ser Jaime. It was a man being broken, again and again, until he broke for good. The world is cruel that way. It is as cruel to dragons as it is cruel to everyone, and crueller, mayhaps, because dragons have further to fall."
Jaime absorbed his words silently. The wildfire reflected in his eyes, green on green.
"Rhaegar wasn't mad," his sworn brother said eventually. It was almost a question.
"No," Barristan said. "Rhaegar was the sanest man I ever knew. And the saddest." He thought of the silver prince, the harp, the melancholy that no victory ever lifted. "He was born in fire too, you know. Summerhall, the night he came into the world. They say his mother's screams and the screams of the dying were all mixed together. He grew up grave and bookish and sorrowful, a boy who read when he should have played. I do not think he ever once knew how to be happy." Barristan's voice softened. "Perhaps the Stark girl gave him that, at the end. A little of it. I would like to think so. But who can say. Whatever passed between them, it ended in blood and fire like everything the Targaryens touched, and he died on the Trident, and the world was poorer for it… whether the world knew it or not."
"You think it was madness?" Jaime asked. "What he did? Taking her?"
"I do not know what it was," Barristan admitted honestly. He had spent years thinking on it with no answers. Barristan would likely never get it. "He did not seem mad. He seemed certain as we marched on the Trident. He had not a lick of fear, as though he already knew how the day would end. Rhaegar had that quality. Of being certain about things the rest of us could not see." He stopped, because he had heard himself, and because the description fit another too well — a golden boy, just knighted.
Jaime had heard it too. Their eyes met over the green glow of the wildfire.
"He reminds me of him," Jaime confessed quietly. "Joff. He reminds me of Rhaegar. I've thought it for years and never said it to a soul, because of who his father is."
"I have thought it too," Barristan said. "Every day."
They looked at each other, the old knight and the Kingslayer, two men who had spent the night having sixteen years of certainty taken apart, and something settled between them that had not been there before. It was not friendship, not yet, but it was the beginning of an understanding.
"We failed the last one," Barristan said. He meant the Prince of Dragonstone. He meant the Mad King. He meant all of it, the whole long catastrophe that he had lived through and survived and never managed to prevent. "We were there, and we were sworn, and we failed them all. Aerys. Rhaella. Rhaegar. Elia and her babes." His old voice was rough. "I will not fail this one. Whatever he becomes. Whatever it costs. I have failed enough princes for one life."
"No," Jaime agreed. "Nor I."
The pyromancer rose, dusting his hands, and reported that the cache was stable, and they moved on to the next, and they did not speak of it again. But the vow was made, and Barristan, who had broken faith with no man in sixty years except by the silence of his judgment, intended to keep it.
They joined Jon and Loras at dawn and went together to the small council, and in the courtyard of the Red Keep they met Tyrion Lannister.
The Imp had clearly only just returned to the city — he was travel-stained and tired and smelled faintly of a brothel.
"My favourite knights," the dwarf drawled. "All four together and looking like you've been up to something. Where's my nephew? I've come straight from the Wall with all manner of grim tidings and I find the yard empty."
"He's called the small council," Jaime told his brother.
"Has he. At this hour?" Tyrion's mismatched eyes sharpened. "That's never good. What's happened?"
"You should perhaps wait," Barristan said. "It is council business."
"I've just ridden four hundred leagues, Ser Barristan, I am owed some gossip." And the imp fell in with them, ignoring their attempts to dissuade him, short legs working to keep pace, and none of them had the heart to stop him.
They entered the council chamber together.
And stopped.
Lord Petyr Baelish lay dead on the floor in a spreading dark stain. The king sat at the table with blood on his hands, staring at them as though they belonged to a stranger. And the prince stood beside his father with one hand on the king's shoulder, composed, unhurried, as though a dead master of coin on the council room floor were a thing he had entirely expected to be standing beside this morning.
Tyrion stopped mid-step. "Well, well." he said, after a moment, into the silence. "I see I've missed a great deal."
The council turned to look at them. It was Lord Tywin who spoke, his pale eyes moving over the four knights and the dwarf the came with. "What are you doing here?"
"They were running an errand for me, Grandsire." the prince said. He looked at Tyrion. "Nuncle. You've come from the Wall."
"I have." The dwarf announced.
"Sit, then. Tell us. How was it?"
And Tyrion, who Barristan had to credit with the ability to read a room faster than most could blink, took a seat at the council table as though dead men on the floor were an ordinary feature of his mornings, and told them.
The wildlings were on the move, he said. Gathering, in numbers no one at the Wall had seen in living memory. They were following a man — a King-Beyond-the-Wall called Mance Rayder, the brothers said, though Tyrion had not seen him — and they were coming south, all of them, the whole of host of wildling, and the Night's Watch had perhaps a thousand men to hold three hundred leagues of Wall against them. They needed men.
They needed them desperately.
"They shall have men." the prince said. "Some might be less men than others, however."
A member of the city watch, who was holding some papers snorted. Barristan figured he was missing something. He glanced at where littlefinger lay dead. More than something.
It would come up when it was important, he reasoned.
"The north will send what it can," Lord Stark said. "But the Watch needs more than the north. The whole realm should answer this."
"It will," the prince promised. He turned then, and his manner changed, became graver. "But there is something the council needs to hear first, and it cannot wait, because it touches the safety of every soul in this city."
"There's more?" Muttered Lord Tyrell. He had no seat on the council — Ser Barristan glanced again at the dead man and the freerider beside him — but this did not seem a normal meeting and his four companions did not have seats either.
The kings son ignored the murmur and looked at his uncle. "Ser Jaime. Tell them what you told us in the sept. About the Mad King. And the wildfire."
Barristan watched Jaime Lannister go still.
For a moment he thought the man would refuse — would retreat back behind the fifteen years of armoured silence, the comfortable hated certainty of the Kingslayer.
But the prince was looking at him, and Barristan understood, suddenly, what the prince was doing. He was giving Jaime the thing the man had been denied for fifteen years. He was giving him the room. He was making the most powerful men in the realm sit and listen to the truth they had never asked to hear.
Jaime told them.
Barristan watched the council's faces as it came out — the wildfire, the caches, burn them all, the king's last mad command, the murder that had saved the city. He watched Ned Stark's face most of all, because Ned Stark had been the man who walked into the throne room, the man whose eyes had carried the judgment, and he watched the Hand of the King go grey and then white as fifteen years of his own certainty came apart exactly as Barristan's had come apart in the night. When Jaime finished, Ned Stark was looking at him with an expression Barristan had never seen on the man's grim northern face — something that might have been the beginning of an apology too large to fit into words.
Tywin Lannister was staring at his eldest son, as he had been since the tale began. There was some emotion swimming in his eyes that Barristan could not begin to decipher.
"And the wildfire is still there," the prince continued, into the shocked silence. "Beneath the city. Most of the caches Aerys ordered placed, still where the pyromancers hid them, growing older and more volatile every year."
"We confirmed it last night. The four of us, with the wisdoms. Enough wildfire beneath King's Landing to burn it to the ground. The Sept of Baelor. Flea Bottom. The Red Keep itself. All of it." Said Loras Tyrell.
The council erupted into alarm — Pycelle's distress, Mace Tyrell's bluster, Redwyne's sharp questions. The king said nothing. Barristan looked at Robert and saw a man who was not in the room at all, who was still somewhere with blood on his hands, staring at the table, his mind gone somewhere none of them could follow.
The prince let the alarm run its course.
"There is more," he said once calm had returned. "When we searched Lord Varys's chambers — after his treason was discovered — "
Barristan Selmy blinked.
Joffrey was continuing before he could even get the question out. "—we found a map. The locations of the caches. All of them, marked." He looked around the table. "Varys knew. Varys has known for years. And Varys has fled, to help the Targaryen pretender across the Narrow Sea." He let that land too. Barristan was feeling a headache coming on. "So we are not merely sitting atop enough wildfire to destroy the capital. We are sitting atop it while the man who knows precisely where every cache lies has gone over to our enemies. It must be dealt with. Now."
That sobered the gathered lords. Even Mace Tyrell.
"Then we dispose of it," said Lord Redwyne. "Carefully, and quickly, and have done. Drown it, dump it in the bay, whatever the wisdoms advise. What is there to discuss?"
Joffrey drummed his fingers against the desk and sighed. "I am not certain we should waste it so."
What followed was the longest debate Barristan had heard in that chamber in years.
The prince laid out his thinking with the unhurried clarity Barristan had come to know. He did not want the wildfire beneath the city — that was madness, an accident waiting to happen, a knife at the throat of half a million people. But he did not want to simply destroy it either. He wanted it moved. Distributed, carefully, to the places where the realm might one day need it.
Some to the Wall, against the host of wildlings now marching south — a hundred thousand of them, if the reports were right, and a thousand black brothers to hold them. Wildfire on the Wall might be the difference between holding and falling.
Some to Lannisport, Fairisle and the Shield Islands, against the ironborn — because the ironborn would rebel again, the prince said, it was only a question of when.
Some to the Dornish Marches, against the possibility that the Targaryen pretender landed in Dorne and tried to come up through the passes.
"It is too dangerous," Pycelle quavered. "Moving it at all is a terrible risk. Wildfire is treacherous, my prince. It grows worse with age, a single accident—"
"Burning men alive is an obscene way to wage war," Lord Stark said quietly. "Whatever the enemy. There is no honour in it."
"There's no honour in losing, either," Tyrion Lannister put in. He had been listening with the sharp attention all throughout. "A hundred thousand wildlings against a thousand crows? If I were holding the Wall I'd want every advantage the gods and the alchemists could give me, honour be damned. Honour doesn't hold three hundred leagues of ice."
"I don't intend to use it lightly," the prince said. "I would rather not use it. I do not want war." His gold eyes moved around the table. "But if war comes anyway — if the wildlings break the Wall, if the ironborn rise, if a dragon lands — then I intend to win it so completely that no one ever considers trying again. That is what wildfire buys us. Not a battle. The ending of the question."
"The ironborn won't rise," Ned Stark interjected. "I'll grant you the Wall, and even Dorne maybe, as a precaution. But Balon Greyjoy is beaten and cowed, and I hold his last living son as ward at Winterfell. Theon. Balon won't risk the boy."
The prince blinked at him.
"Has Theon Greyjoy ever received a letter, Lord Stark? In all the years you've held him. From his father, his sister, any one of his house?"
Ned Stark frowned. "...No."
"Of course not," Tyrion said dryly. "The ironborn can't write. And the Greyjoy words are, We Do Not Read."
A few men laughed. The prince did not. He leaned back in his seat.
"Theon Greyjoy is nothing to them," Joffrey told the council. "He has been a hostage in the north since he was a child. To his father, he is a greenlander. Soft. Ruined. Balon Greyjoy will not be checked by the threat to Theon's life because Theon's life means nothing to him." He paused. "Taking his head, if it comes to that, will not cost the ironborn a single night's sleep. They have already buried him in their hearts. You hold a hostage worth nothing, my lord, and they have made certain you do not know it."
Ned Stark sat back, troubled.
"And there is the matter of the oath," the prince went on. "When Balon Greyjoy bent the knee to my father after his rebellion failed — did he swear on the Drowned God? His own god? Or did he swear on our gods, which mean nothing at all to a holy man like him?"
Ned was quiet a moment. "... The old gods and the new. The oath was given in the rain on the courtyard on Pyke."
"Then it is no oath at all, to him. The ironborn hold that only the Drowned God is real. An oath sworn to false gods binds nothing." The prince's voice was level, certain. "Balon Greyjoy is biding his time. He swore an oath he does not consider binding, to a king he does not respect, and he is waiting — for the realm to weaken, for my father to die, for me to be untested and new on the throne, for any moment of weakness. And then he will rise, as the ironborn always do, because reaving and raiding is the whole of what they are and they have been forbidden it for seven years." He looked around the table. "Once, they feared dragonfire. The Drowned God's children learned long ago what dragonfire could do. But the dragons are gone now. The fear is gone with them."
Joffrey looked between the gathered men. "Wildfire burns just as hot, my lords."
The chamber was silent.
It was a formidable argument. Barristan watched the council weigh it. Some of them — Tywin, Redwyne — were nodding slowly, drawn to the cold logic of it. Others were troubled. Ned Stark looked like a man who had come to refute something and found himself half-convinced against his will, which was not a comfortable thing for an honest man.
"It is too dangerous," Pycelle said again. He was tugging at his beard, looking truly ruffled. "And too cruel. Death by wildfire—"
"—Is no crueller than death by famine when a city is sacked, or death by the sword when a line is broken," Tywin said flatly. "War is cruel. The only mercy in it is to make it brief, and nothing makes a war briefer than an enemy too frightened to begin it."
Tywin Lannister looked at his grandson with approval. Barristan did not know how to feel about that.
The debate went back and forth. Half the council came around to the prince's thinking; half remained uneasy, whether from fear of the risk or distaste for the method. In the end, as such things did, it came down to the king.
They all turned to Robert.
The king had not spoken through any of it. He sat at the head of his own council with blood drying on his hands and his eyes fixed on nothing, and Barristan understood, watching him, that whatever had broken loose in Robert Baratheon when he killed Littlefinger with his own hands had not yet settled back into place. The man was elsewhere.
The fire and rage of the morning had burned down to ash, and what was left was a tired old king who did not want to be in this room, who perhaps did not want to be king at all anymore, who had spent everything he had a long time ago and was running now on nothing.
"Your Grace," Lord Tywin said. "The decision is yours."
Robert blinked slowly. He looked around the table, at the men waiting on his word, and his gaze passed over them without much landing, and came at last to rest on his son.
"Joffrey speaks with my voice," the king said. His own voice was rough and far away. "Him and Ned both. Whatever the two of them decide." He pushed himself heavily to his feet, suddenly looking every one of his years and more. "I am tired. Sort it between you." And he walked out of the council chamber, past the body of the man he had killed, without looking down at it.
The door closed behind him.
The council sat in silence. Loras coughed, and then Jon smacked him on the back of the head before Barristan could.
Prince Joffrey looked at Ned Stark — the king's other voice it seemed — and Ned Stark, who had argued against it and been half-talked round, looked back at the boy who would marry his daughter, and they seemed to come to an understanding. The Hand of the King let out a slow breath.
"The Wall, certainly," Ned said. "Dornish marshes and Lannisport as precautions, I'll grant. We'll move it carefully, in stages, with the wisdoms at every step." He paused. "And we'll pray we never have cause to use any of it."
"Agreed," the prince said quietly. And it was decided.
Barristan Selmy stood against the wall and watched the golden prince and the grey northern lord settle the fate of the wisdoms prized possession between them, while a dead man cooled on the floor and a broken king walked away down the corridor.
On the last day of the tourney, King Robert would sit the Iron Throne and listen to petitions. He would step down from the chair covered in cuts. It would become a familiar sight in the weeks and months to come.
Barristan Selmy would watch and remember, hoping as an old man that he was seeing what was not there, but knowing the answer deep down.
Another old king. Another perfect prince.
The Kingsguard remembered his vows, he would not fail them this time.
ILLYRIO
The exile arrived with the dust of half the world upon him, and Magister Illyrio Mopatis knew before the man had crossed the floor that the news would be bad.
He knew it as all merchants knew a soured cargo by the smell before the hold was even opened.
Ser Jorah Mormont had ridden hard and far and slept little, and a man did not ride that way to bring glad tidings. Glad tidings came at their leisure. Only grief came at a gallop.
"My friend." Illyrio rose from his couch with the ponderous grace of a very fat man who had long since made his peace with his own size, the rings on his fingers flashing as he spread his arms. Onyx and opal, ruby and jade, a green pearl that had cost a small estate. "You have ridden a long road to my door. Come, sit, take wine. Take meat. The cook has made a fine lamprey pie, and there is a wheel of blue-veined cheese from the Velvet Hills that I would not share with the Prince of Pentos himself." He lowered himself back down, and a serving man set a bowl of figs and salted almonds at his elbow, and Illyrio took a fig and ate it whole. "Whatever has happened, it will sit easier on a full stomach. It always does."
"It won't sit easier, Magister." Mormont did not sit. He stood in the centre of the beautiful solar dirtying it with road-stained leathers. He was a big shaggy bear of a man with grief carved into his blunt face, and he came out with it plain as a hammer-blow.
"Daenerys is dead."
Illyrio went still with a fig halfway to his lips. He had spent forty years learning to keep his face, and he kept it now, the soft and pleasant attentiveness of the cheesemonger who took every loss as the gods sent it.
But the fig had gone to ash on his tongue, and somewhere beneath all the schooled and oiled flesh, a cold thing opened its eye.
The girl. The dragon's last daughter. The egg upon which so much had been built.
He set the fig down, uneaten, which was for Illyrio Mopatis a thing close to grief made visible.
"Tell me," he said.
Illyrio began to pour the wine himself, which he did for no man, and pressed a cup into the knight's scarred hand, and made him sit upon the cushioned chair across the low table, and Ser Jorah told him.
"In the night," the exile began. "In her sleep. She had seemed hale enough. Weary from the riding, but the babe sat well in her and there was colour in her cheeks. The handmaids found her cold come morning. The black dragon egg still cradled in her arms." His jaw worked beneath his beard. "The dosh khaleen could not say what took her. Half the crones swore it was the childbed — that sometimes the babe poisons the mother in the womb, they have some Dothraki word for it. I forget. The other half whispered poison of another sort. There was a flagon by her bed. A sweet wine, a gift, they said, sent to honour the mother of the stallion." Mormont drank as if the wine was fleeing. "From the crones themselves, it was said. The crones deny it. No one knows. No one will ever know now."
"And the babe?" Illyrio asked, though he already knew the answer.
"Died in her. A son, the women said, though how they knew I cannot begin to tell you." Mormont's voice was rough as a rasp. "So there it is, Magister. The girl is gone and her child with her, and the last hope of the dragon's house snuffed out like a candle in the wind."
Not the last, Illyrio thought, but he kept the thought to himself, and let the knight believe the world poorer than it was. There would be time for the rest of it. There was always time, if a man was patient, and Illyrio Mopatis had made patience his whole life's art.
"A sweet girl," Illyrio said, and meant it, more or less. "Timid as a fawn. I had not thought there was any dragon in her." He sighed, and the sigh moved through all his bulk. The knight had no mention of their would be king. "And the brother? What of Viserys?"
Ser Jorah's mouth twisted into something that was not quite a smile.
"I was coming to him," he said.
The bear rose and paced the length of the solar, and Illyrio watched him from the couch with his hands folded upon his belly and the rings winking in the morning light, and ate a few almonds, slowly, because a man thought better when his mouth was busy.
The khal had gone mad with grief, Mormont said. That was the root of it. Drogo had loved the girl — truly loved her, which had astonished them all, for no one had thought a horselord had it in him — and when she died, something tore loose in him that would not be put back. He had killed three of his own men in the first hour of it, men who had ridden at his side for twenty years, for no crime but standing too near.
And then Viserys, gods curse him for a fool—
"His sister not yet a day in the ground," Mormont said, "and the boy goes to Drogo and demands his crown. His ten thousand screamers. You have had your bride, I have paid your price, now give me my army!" The knight shook his shaggy head. "To a man who had just lost his wife and child both. Drogo gave him a crown. You will have heard the manner of it, I think."
Illyrio had heard. Gold, melted in a cookpot and poured steaming over a man's head — it was a cruel way to die, but the Dothraki were a cruel people. He had heard the tale carried west on the trade winds days ago, and had not known until this moment whose skull had worn that golden crown.
"A crown of gold," the cheesemonger murmured. "So both the dragons are dead. The mare and the colt both, in a single turn of the moon."
"Yes." The exile affirmed, though he frowned at Illyrio's blasé manner.
"That is a great pity." And it was. Illyrio took another almond. "But you have not ridden the breadth of the world to tell a fat man that a beggar boy got the death he was always begging for. There is more."
"There is more." Mormont repeated and stopped his pacing. "Drogo has gone to war, Magister."
Illyrio's hand paused over the bowl.
"Not our war," the knight said. "Not the west. He has turned upon his own. The grief wanted somewhere to go, and it found the Dosh Khaleen. He holds them hostage now. The crones had foretold that the girl's son would be the Stallion Who Mounts the World — the khal of khals, who would join all the khalasars into one and trample the earth beneath him. And when the boy died in the womb, the old women—" disgust thickened his voice "—the old women simply made a new prophecy. Overnight. Now they say the Stallion was never the babe at all. Now they say it is Drogo. That the stars meant him all along. That his destiny is to unite the Dothraki under his own banner and rule them."
"Ah," said Illyrio softly. "And the khal saw the shape of that I imagine."
"The khal is grieving, not stupid. He saw it whole. Old women telling a powerful man what he wants to hear, the very hour the truth turns inconvenient. They swore his son was a god, and his son died, and so they swear that he is a god, to keep their skins and their station." Mormont's eyes were haunted with what he had seen. "And it has not made him grateful. It has made him hate them. He means to burn the Dosh Khaleen out root and branch. He has declared war on every khalasar in the grass save his own, and any city that gives his enemies shelter he swears to put to the torch and enslave."
Illyrio sat with that a while, pondering the new unforeseen shape the world was taking.
The grass sea aflame. Khal against khal. The Mother of Mountains and the holy city under threat from the very horde that had always held them sacred. It was a great madness, and like much madness it had a terrible logic running through the heart of it.
"And you," he said at last, "walked out of the midst of this. An andal, a stranger, the dead queen's own sworn man. I have known men pulled apart by Dothraki horses for less. How is it you are sitting in my solar drinking my fine wine, ser, and not feeding the crows in the Dothraki sea?"
"I didn't escape," Mormont said. "Drogo let me go."
The magister raised one plucked eyebrow. He felt like laughing at the absurdity. "Drogo let you go."
"As a messenger." The knight's voice went flat as beaten tin. "He knew the Beggar King had dealings with the fat cheesemonger of Pentos. He wanted you to know what you had bought a part of. And he wanted the word spread to all the Free Cities besides. So he gave me a horse and a guide and the road, and a message to carry, and I am to carry it to you and to every city that will hear it."
Mormont spoke but the words were not his own. "Khal Drogo makes war upon all khalasars but his own. Any city that shelters his enemies will be burned and its people taken. Let the other khals come to him upon the open grass and face him as men, or let them cower behind their walls as the Khal of Khals slaughters and rapes the Dosh Khaleen. And when he is done, they shall learn that The Stallion can mount any wall."
The solar was very quiet. Somewhere below, in the kitchens, a cook was singing. The Northman's words were ringing in his ears.
"The man has gone mad," Illyrio replied.
"Mad with grief. But there's a cunning in it I don't like." Mormont frowned. "I heard things on the ride. He has already sacked towns near the grass — Lhazareen, mostly, the lamb men, but a Qohorik outpost too. When first I heard it, I thought he was provisioning. Gathering gold and horses to feed a crossing to Westeros. Perhaps to seek the kingdom his dead wife was from." He shook his head slowly. "I was wrong. He has no thought of crossing. He means to stay. To build."
"Build?" The word sat strangely in Illyrio's mouth. It tasted wrong. Building and Dothraki were two words he never thought would be uttered in the same breath. "Build what?"
"That is the part I cannot fathom." The knight's brow knotted. "He raids, but not in the usual way of the Dothraki. He takes the gold, aye, and the horses. But he is also taking particular slaves. The ones who can read. Who can cipher. Who know the raising of walls and the working of metals. Scribes. Masons. Smiths. As though he means to keep them, and not sell. As though he means to set them to labour."
The cold creature beneath Illyrio's flesh opened its eye a little wider.
"A kingdom," he breathed. "He means to raise a kingdom in the grass. Not a horde that rides and burns and scatters with the seasons, but a realm. Cities. Walls. A thing that endures."
"It may be. I don't know. No Dothraki in ten thousand years has wanted such a thing — the city is their enemy, the wall an insult to their Great Stallion. But Drogo has stopped thinking as a horselord thinks."
"He is a man who has lost everything," Said the magister, "and he means to build something so vast that the loss can never reach him again."
Mormont sank back into the chair, all the weariness of the road settling onto him at once. "Whatever he builds, Magister, it is no concern of ours. The concern of ours is that the army we needed has turned its teeth upon itself, and will not be crossing any sea for years, if ever. The plan is dead. The dragons we meant to use are ash, and the horde meant to point at the Seven Kingdoms is busy conquering grass and shepherds."
Mormont looked up, his eyes tired and pleading. "So tell me, Magister," he said. "What now?"
Illyrio did not answer at once. He found a fat black olive in a dish and ate it, and turned the pit upon his tongue, and thought.
He was thinking of all that the days news had cost him. Years of patient work, of coin laid out and birds set flying and threads woven careful across half the world. He and his old friend had built it strand by strand — the Beggar King and his sister, the dragon's last children, wedded to a horselord with a hundred thousand riders, the whole of it a blade meant to be buried in the soft belly of Westeros.
The realm would shatter into grief and war, and into that ruin the saviour would come. The one true king. The dragon returned to set the world aright, and be loved for it.
All of it gone now. The girl cold in the grass, the boy crowned in gold, the horde turned inward upon itself.
And Varys…
That was the colder thought, the one that had been gnawing at him for some while now beneath all the rest. The little birds that flew between Pentos and King's Landing had fallen silent. Too silent, and for too long.
Illyrio had told himself it was the storms in the Narrow Sea, the ordinary delays of letters carried in secret hands. But his spider was meticulous past any other man living. Silence was not in his nature.
Something had happened in the Red Keep. Something had closed the channel between them, and Illyrio did not know what, and a thread he could not feel was a thread that might already have been cut.
I may have to go myself. The thought sat ill with him. He was a fat old man who loved his manse and his cooks and his soft beds, and the sea did not love him back, and Westeros least of all. But if the spider had been caught at last in another man's web, then everything they had built stood naked to the wind, and Illyrio would need to learn how much.
He set the worry aside, as he set aside the olive pit, neatly, into a little silver dish.
There was a knight watching him. Waiting. And for all the grand questions of dragons and kingdoms, the knight was truly asking only one small, simple thing.
How do I get home?
That was the whole of it, under everything else. Jorah Mormont was an exile, condemned by Eddard Stark's own sentence for the selling of poachers into slavery — and Eddard Stark sat now as Hand of the King.
Whatever road home the knight had once dreamed of via a royal pardon was barred and bolted. The only way back across the water for a man so condemned was at the right hand of a conqueror with pardons in his gift.
Which meant the bear still needed the fat cheesemonger. That was good. A desperate man was a serviceable man, so long as one understood the shape of that desperation, and kept it well fed.
"You must have done one wise thing," Illyrio said, "before you rode out of that madness. Tell me you have them."
Mormont reached into his travel-pack and drew out a bundle wrapped in soiled silk, and folded back the silk, and there in his scarred soldier's hands lay a dragon's egg. Black it was, and scaled, swirled through with veins of deep dark red, and heavy past all reason for a thing of its size.
"I took it from her arms," the knight said, low. "It was chaos. I could carry but the one."
"Three would have been better, but you carried the right one at least." Illyrio held out his soft beringed hands, and the bear let him take it, and the magister cradled the egg against the great soft expanse of him and it felt cold as stone. "Do you know what you were holding, ser? This is worth more than that horselord's whole grass kingdom. In the right market, to the right buyer, an egg like this is worth a fleet."
"Then what happens now?" the knight asked again. He was a blunt man, Mormont, and a single-minded one. He would keep asking until he had his answer.
Illyrio placed the egg down and heaved himself up off the couch — it cost him, a man of his bulk, but some labours were worth the cost — and strode across the solar to the great carved chest that stood against the far wall beneath the faded tapestry of Valyria in her glory. He knelt, grunting, and worked the iron lock, and lifted the lid.
Within, swaddled in black velvet, lay the sword.
It was old and it was long and it was beautiful beyond words. The smoke-dark ripples of true Valyrian steel, deeper and darker than any common blade of that make, the pommel wrought as a dragon's head with ruby eyes gone dull and cloudy with the centuries.
Illyrio drew it forth, and the morning light came down through the high windows and ran along the steel like water over dark stone, and behind him he heard Jorah Mormont take in his breath.
"That blade," the knight said. "That's no common Valyrian steel. That's—"
"Blackfyre." Illyrio turned, holding the great sword across his two open palms the way a septon holds something sacred. "The sword of Aegon the Conqueror. The blade the Targaryen kings bore for three hundred years. Taken across the sea by a bitter man who would not yield. Lost, the histories tell us, when Maelys was slain by the Bold." He smiled, slow, through his forked and oiled yellow beard. "The histories, my friend, are not always so complete as the maesters would have you believe."
Mormont stared at the steel. "How does a cheesemonger of Pentos come to hold the sword of the dragon kings?"
"Sit," Illyrio said comfortably, "and I will tell you a tale. Perhaps not the whole of it. A man my age learns to keep a little back even from his friends, and you are not yet quite my friend, ser, though I have hopes you may become one. But I will tell you enough to be going on with. Eat first. You will hear it better with lamprey pie in you."
Mormont did as he was bid and Illyrio told the bear a story, and most of it was even true.
He told how he had come up out of nothing in the streets of Pentos, a bravo's son with a fine strong body in his youth, hard as that was now to credit, and few enough prospects beyond it. And how he had fallen in, in those hungry years, with another young man as friendless and as clever as himself — cleverer, in truth, the cleverest man Illyrio had ever known or ever would. A eunuch. A thief and a mummer in those days, and only later a whisperer of secrets, a spider in a web of his own spinning.
They had been friends from the very first, two penniless boys with sharp wits and sharper hunger, and they had risen together — Illyrio into trade and the magister's robes, his friend into the shadows behind the thrones of kings — and never once in all the years had they ceased to be friends, nor ceased to plan.
He did not tell the knight what blood ran in his friend's veins. That was Varys' secret to tell if he so wished.
He told the knight of Serra instead.
He drew the silver locket from within his sleeve and showed the painted likeness within — the great blue eyes, the pale gold hair shot through with strands of silver, the beauty that had cost him the closed gates of every noble house in Pentos when he, Illyrio Mopatis, whose first wife had been cousin to the Prince of Pentos, took to wife a girl out of a Lysene pillow house.
"I loved her past all sense and reason," he confessed, and the grief in his voice did not have to be feigned, for the grief was real even where the death was a lie. "She was taken by the grey plague, off a Braavosi galley that put in with cloves and saffron and death in her hold. I keep her hands in my bedchamber yet. Her hands, that were so soft."
It was the lie he told best of all his lies, for nearly all of it was true. Serra had not died of any plague. Serra lived, on a small boat with a discarded griffin, where she kept the guise of a septa and watched over the most precious thing in all the world.
But the grief was real — the grief of a man who could never be seen abroad with the wife he loved, who had buried her in a story so that no living soul would ever set her beside the boy and reckon the sum.
The hands in his bedchamber were stone, cunningly made. His love was not.
And then he told the bear of the boy.
"When the Mad King's days were ending," Illyrio said, "and the Usurper's host came down upon the city, my friend the spider did a thing he had long been readying. Prince Rhaegar had a son. Aegon, a babe at the breast, born of Elia of Dorne. When the city fell, the Lannister men murdered that child — dashed his head against a wall, the tale goes, and bore the broken little thing to the Usurper wrapped in a crimson cloak." He let the silence breathe a moment, and let the picture paint itself. "But the babe in the cloak was not Aegon. My friend had seen which way the wind would blow, and days before the end he took the true prince out of the cradle and laid a tanner's son of the same age in his place. The tanner's boy died for a prince, and no man living ever knew the difference." He let the lie settle, smooth and round and whole as any river stone. "The true Aegon was carried over the water, to me. I raised him as my own for some years before I handed him over to another. He is safe, with maesters to teach him and the finest blades of the Free Cities to train his arm. Aegon is a man grown now, ser. And he is all his father was, and more. Clever. Bold. Gentle where gentleness is wanted, hard where it is not. A king as the gods make perhaps once in an age."
Jorah Mormont heard him out to the end. He was no fool, this bear, for all his bluntness, and Illyrio watched him turn the tale this way and that and find the joints in it that did not quite meet.
"The Golden Company," the knight said at length. "You spoke of them before. You mean to use them for this boy of yours."
"I have bought them. They are sworn to the cause."
"The Golden Company was founded by Bittersteel." Mormont's voice had gone careful and slow. "They are the sons of the black banner. The heirs of five generations of exiles who spent their whole lives trying to pull the dragon kings down." He frowned. "Why in seven hells would such men ever fight to set a Targaryen up?"
It was the right question, and Illyrio had known it must come, and he had his answer ready and waiting.
"Because they are weary, ser." He turned the dark blade once more in the light, watching the ripples run. "Five generations of exile is a very long time. Five generations of selling their swords for other men's quarrels, of dying in foreign mud for foreign coin, of dreaming of a homeland not one of them living has ever seen with his own eyes or touched with his own hand. The Black Dragon's cause is dead. The last of that male line fell with the monstrous, the banner is folded away in the dark. What endures is only the longing. The bones of their fathers painted gold in foreign land, with only a dream of spring to carry them home." He smiled, soft and certain. "They no longer care, ser, whether the dragon they follow flies a red banner or a black one. They have waited too long and lost too much to be nice about the colour of a flag. They want to come home. That is the whole of it. And Black or Red—" the smile widened in his beard, laughter nearly spewed from his teeth, the words came so easily, "—a Dragon is still a Dragon."
The Golden Company would follow a true son of the black banner even if they did not know it, and his and Serra's boy would lead them home.
Mormont was not convinced. Illyrio had never thought he would be. But the bear was desperate. Desperation did things to a man, and desperation has no need of belief — only of a road. Illyrio Mopatis and his young dragon were the one road home the knight had left to him in all the wide world.
"You'll be wanting more than ten thousand swords, however golden," Mormont said, which was as near to agreement as a stubborn man comes. "The Seven Kingdoms are stronger now than they have been in a lifetime. Even out here on the grass I have heard it — the talk of the golden prince, the Stark girl he is to wed. You would be landing ten thousand men against a realm that is whole, and looking to be well-ruled." He shook his shaggy head. "We need an army. A true one."
"I agree." And he did. Here was the very heart of the trouble, the splinter he had been turning beneath his own skin since before the bear arrived at his gate. The whole design had always rested upon Westeros being a thing in pieces. And Westeros was not in pieces.
Westeros, by every report varys birds had carried before they fell silent, was beginning to flourish under its golden boy. "Tell me your mind, ser. You have soldiered in the Disputed Lands. Where does an army come from?"
"Sellswords. The free companies—"
Illyrio sighed and waved one heavy hand, swatting aside the exiles words, the jewels on his fingers dancing. "Sellswords are water. They flow toward coin and away from steel. The very hour Casterly Rock outbids us — and Casterly Rock will always outbid us, ser, the Lannisters sit upon a mountain of gold and the crown's debts are being paid down rather than run up — the very hour that happens, your hired blades melt away like snow. No. We cannot win this realm with men who can be bought, for we should be fighting men with deeper purses to buy them out from under us."
"Then what?" The bear ground out.
"Men who cannot be bought," said Illyrio simply, "for they are not free to sell themselves." He let the knight come to it. "Slaves, ser. Slave soldiers. The Unsullied of Astapor — eunuchs gelded and broken to obedience from the cradle, who do not run and do not break and do not feel fear, and cannot be bribed for they own nothing under the sky and want nothing but the next command. Eight thousand of those would be worth fifty thousand sellswords on any field you care to name."
The distaste showed plain on Mormont's blunt face. The Westerosi knight in him, the old buried honour that even a slaver's exile had not wholly killed.
"Slaves." The word was spat out.
"You sold men into bondage yourself, ser, or so the Lord of Winterfell judged when he sent you running. Let us not turn delicate at this late hour." Illyrio said it gently, smiling, but he said it, for it did no harm to remind the bear now and again of the length of his chain. "The Unsullied are the finest foot soldiers the world has ever forged. With them, the Golden Company, the dornish who will surely rise for Elia's son, and what friends we may yet gather, we should have a host worthwhile."
"And how does a cheesemonger pay for eight thousand Unsullied? They don't come cheap, and you've a free company to keep besides."
Illyrio looked at the dragon egg, resting black and red upon the velvet where he had laid it down.
"There are buyers," he said softly, "who would pour out their treasuries to the floor for a dragon's egg. The Sealord of Braavos. The Archon of Tyrosh. A dozen magisters of Pentos, myself among them, were my coin not already promised elsewhere. One egg, ser, sold to the right hungry buyer, will buy your Unsullied and the ships to bear them west besides." He touched the scaled surface of it, tender, almost sorry to have to part with it. "I'll not pretend otherwise, it is a great deal to give up. But a sword does no work sheathed in a chest, and an egg does no work in a knight's saddlebag. We will spend it. We will spend everything we have, if the spending buys us that throne."
The pentoshi magister turned his eyes to the city beyond and the narrow sea, where just beyond — the gift he would give his son and wife lay.
"The Iron Bank," Mormont put in. "The Seven Kingdoms are sunk deep in debt to Braavos, are they not? If the Bank wished the realm weakened, so the crown might default and the Bank collect — the Bank could give us ships. Coin. Everything we might lack."
"The Iron Bank will give us nothing, ser, and you would do well to put it from your mind." Illyrio shook his head, and his jowls swayed with it. "You forget what we shall be. An army of slave soldiers, bred in the slaver cities of the Bay. Braavos was founded by slaves who fled their chains, ser — it is the one thing under all the stars that the Braavosi will never abide, not for any profit. They will hold the crown's debt, yes, and grumble over the usurper's spending, and perhaps even pray in quiet for a default. But to back an invasion raised upon the backs of the Unsullied? Sooner would they strike off their own sword hands." He spread his beringed fingers wide. "No. Braavos is a door shut and barred against us."
"Then where do your ships come from? Where do your friends come from? We have agreed Westeros is whole, you have told me the Iron Bank won't touch us, and sellswords will sell us. You are describing a war that cannot be won, cheesemonger."
"Not yet," Illyrio agreed, unruffled, reaching for a fig. "Which is the very reason we shall not rush it. The boy is young; he can well afford a few years' patience, and patience, ser, has ever been the sharpest blade in my armoury. We do not strike until the host is real and the friends are gathered and the moment is ripe." He stood and laid Blackfyre back into its velvet bed, slow and careful as a man laying a child to sleep, and brought the lid of the chest down upon it. "And there is a place, ser, that hungers for war. That has always hungered for it. And may soon hunger badly enough to be of use to us."
The Northman frowned, thoughts swimming in that savage Westerosi head of his. "You speak of Volantis."
"I do." Illyrio inclined his great head, pleased the bear had run ahead to it. "The eldest daughter of Valyria, and the proudest of them all, and the most divided against herself. You know how they are governed — three triarchs, chosen by the freeborn, and always the balance kept between the tigers, who would have conquest, and the elephants, who would have trade. For a long age now the elephants have held two seats of the three, and Volantis has grown fat and rich and peaceable." Illyrio smiled. "But I hear whispers on the wind. There may soon be a second tiger raised to the triarchy. And should the tigers hold two seats in place of one, why, then Volantis will be hungry again. Hungry for war. Hungry for conquest. Hungry for the old lost Valyrian dream of dominion over the earth. A Volantis ruled by tigers would want the very thing we are selling. A dragon. A cause. A war in the sunset lands, and a share of the plunder when it is all said and done."
"And how do you bind so great a city to a boy with no army and no kingdom and no name but a dead prince's?"
"The same way one binds all things." Illyrio's smile spread soft and slow through the forked gold of his beard. "Marriage, most likely. The tigers have daughters, and a Volantene bride for our dragon prince would buy a war fleet and forty thousand spears. Or some other coin — there is always a coin, ser, for everything, and I have spent the whole of my long life learning what men will pay, and what they will take in trade." He settled his bulk back down upon the couch, the dragon's egg gathered once more into his lap, and regarded the dusty, doubting, desperate knight across the breadth of his beautiful solar.
"It is a long road, I'll grant you freely. I'll not pretend it short. The girl is dead, the horde is turned, the realm is strong, the Bank is shut. By every honest reckoning, ser, we have already lost."
Jorah scowled. It was a harsh, sorrowful thing. "Then why do you sit there looking so well content?"
"Because I hold one thing, my friend, that none of them know I hold." Illyrio thought of the shy maid far away, and the silver-haired woman who warded it, and the young man within who had her great blue eyes and a mind honed keen as Valyrian steel and a name that was not his own by blood. "I hold the boy. The one true king. And a man who has seen all that I have, and has patience, and gold, and years enough to spend, may buy all the rest of it in time. Piece by piece. Friend by friend. Year by year."
Illyrio Mopatis looked down at the cold black stone in his lap, and across at the chest that held the sword of kings, and then to the high windows and the bright morning beyond them, and the sea past that, and the green kingdoms past the sea, where the stag sat strong and beloved upon a throne that Illyrio Mopatis meant, before the gods took him, to pull out from under him.
"I will pay any price," the cheesemonger said softly, as much to himself as to the bear. "Any price at all, ser. To see my—" and here he caught it, and smoothed it over neat as folding silk "—to see the rightful king upon the Iron Throne where he belongs."
If Jorah Mormont marked the little stumble, he gave no sign of it. He was a weary man, and a desperate one, and his thoughts had already gone running ahead down the long road west, toward the only door that might yet open for him, and the fat smiling man who held its key.
Below in the kitchens, the cook had stopped her singing. Outside, the sun climbed higher over the red walls and the bramble forests of Pentos.
And in a beautiful solar above it all, a very fat man cradled a dragon's egg in his lap like a sleeping babe, and ate a fig, and began, patiently, as he did all things, to plan the ending of a usurpers reign