Chapter 13 - ed and Bobby B

EDDARD​

The council was already waiting when Ned arrived, and the shape of it told him, as it always did these days, how much the world had changed in the moons since he had come south.

Renly sat in green and gold, with the careless ease of a man for whom every room had so far been kind. Lord Paxter Redwyne had the chair beside him, neat and spare, his reddish hair gone mostly to grey and his clever eyes already moving over the parchments laid out on the table. And at the far end, in the two seats that had no rightful claim to be there at all, sat Lord Tywin Lannister and Lord Mace Tyrell.

Advisors, the prince called them — a soft word that meant they held no office but were valued regardless. Joffrey had wanted them in the room. Joffrey usually got what he wanted, and what unsettled Ned most was how often the wanting seemed to prove wise.

There was a fifth man Ned knew only by name, broad and soft and damp-looking, with the Tyrell colouring run to fat.

Garth Tyrell, called Garth the Gross behind his back by the same men who had to smile to his face. He had come to fill the seat that Petyr Baelish had vacated by way of the tower stairs, and the choice had come down to him or Lord Wyman Manderly of White Harbour, and Ned was not at all certain the better man had won.

But Mace Tyrell had pressed, and the Reach was rich, and the realm wanted a master of coin, and so here sat Garth Tyrell with his hands folded on his belly, looking so very pleased to exist.

"Lord Stark." Renly smiled at him. "We were laying small wagers on whether you'd slept. I see I've lost."

"I slept," Ned said, which was half a lie. He took his seat at the foot of the table, where the Hand sat. "Lord Garth. Welcome to the council."

"An honour, Lord Hand. A very great honour." Garth had a moist, eager way of speaking, as though every word had been dipped in butter. "I mean to serve the realm most faithfully."

"Serve its coin faithfully first," said Lord Tywin, not looking up from the letter in his hand, "and the realm will tend to itself."

Garth's smile wobbled and held.

They made small talk. The weather, the harvest, the price of Dornish wine. It was a careful nothing that filled the time and told each man where the others stood. Ned had learned to endure it. He had learned a great many things in King's Landing he would rather not have needed to.

Then the door opened, and the prince came in.

Joffrey was dressed for the work he had been doing, with black ringmail beneath a gold half-cape stitched with the crowned stag of his house, the harness of the Lord Commander of the City Watch and not the silk of a crown prince. He had been doing that work in earnest. Since his knighting he had given his nights to the streets, drilling the gold cloaks, walking Flea Bottom himself in the dark, putting the fear of consequence into men who had not feared it in twenty years.

It showed. The boy looked tired. There were shadows beneath the gold eyes, and a tightness at the corners of them that a moon ago had not been there.

He drives himself too hard, Ned thought, and was surprised, not for the first time, by how much concern filled the thought.

"Forgive me, my lords." Joffrey took his seat, the chair to the left of the kings. "I was at the River Gate until the small hours. Let us begin."

"There is good news, for once," Lord Paxter made to start, "so we had best savour it before the rest." He glanced at his sheet. "Crime is down. Sharply. Theft through Flea Bottom and along the riverfront has fallen by a third or better since his grace took the gold cloaks in hand. The merchants have noticed. Two guilds have sent the crown letters of thanks, which I cannot recall a guild ever doing before, as it costs them ink."

"A third." Mace Tyrell's heavy face was caught between approval and suspicion. He approved of order; he was wary of how it had been got. "How, your grace? You've hardly had the time to hang enough of them to frighten the rest."

"Oh I have hanged a few, but I doubt that is what did it," Joffrey said. "The answer is bread, my lord."

Mace blinked. "Bread."

"Most theft in this city is hunger wearing a thief's face." The prince set his hands flat on the table, unhurried, the way he laid out everything. "Most men do not steal because they are wicked. They steal because they are poor and their children are crying and there is food on the far side of a stall they cannot pay for. Children steal most of all — they are small, and quick, and have the least to lose. So we feed them. We hand it out from the sept steps and the watch posts. A man with a full belly, and full-bellied children at home, steals far less. It costs the crown less in grain than we were losing in stolen goods and the wages of men sent chasing after them. I have also been recruiting more for the watch, food and board is all most require."

"You feed thieves," Mace said slowly as if unsure, "so that they will cease to be thieves."

"I feed hungry people so they need not become thieves at all. There is a difference, my lord, and it is the whole of the matter." Joffrey's voice stayed patient. "And there is a second part to it. I have let it be known through the low streets that any child who brings the watch true word earns extra bread for the telling. They know every alley and gutter in this city. They see everything and everyone. Some of them were the Spider's eyes once." Something passed behind the gold eyes, there and gone. "He took their tongues for it. We give them bread. And so the poorest people in King's Landing now have a reason to wish the watch well, where before they had every reason to fear it."

The table was quite a moment.

"That is either very wise or very dangerous," Lord Tywin said, "and I have not yet decided which."

"Both, Grandfather," said the prince. "The useful things generally are."

Renly laughed softly into his wine. Lord Paxter inclined his head, the small nod of a practical man recognising a practical thing. Mace Tyrell still looked faintly as though he had been cheated of a hanging he had been promised, but he let it lie.

They moved through the rest of it, item by item, the slow machinery of governing a realm.

Varys first, because Varys was the wound that would not close. The Spider had slipped into his own walls and out of the city and left not a thread behind. He was across the Narrow Sea by now, surely, at the cheesemonger's elbow in Pentos, spinning whatever a man like that spun for Viserys and his army of horselords.

We cut off the head, Ned thought, and the head simply walked away and went home to plot against us at its leisure.

It sat ill in him. A known enemy was a danger a man could plan against. A vanished one was a shadow at the edge of every plan, and Varys had been a shadow even when you could see him.

"Nothing at all?" Renly asked. "Not a whisper of where the fat one's gone?"

"He whispered for thirty years," Lord Tywin said. "He will not be easy to hear now that he wishes to be silent. We watch the ports. Beyond that, we wait, and we prepare for the boy he means to land on us."

Then they turned to the Vale.

"The Vale lords have moved faster than we hoped," Lord Tywin said. "When the Royces carried the news with them, the manner of Jon Arryn's death, and the question of the Arryn boy's blood, six of the great houses bound themselves by formal pact, signed at Runestone. They style themselves the Lords of the Pact. The pact being, they say, to uncover the truth of Lord Arryn's murder and see justice done and ensure the rule of the vale is put to rights." A thin pause and a twitch of the lips that did not quite reach a smile. "Bronze Yohn leads them. They have begun mustering their strength beneath the Giant's Lance. They mean to set a blockade about the Eyrie and starve the Tully woman down to answer for herself."

Ned kept his face still, but it cost him. He thought of Lysa as Catelyn had described her. A soft laughing girl at Riverrun, before grief and miscarriage and fear had hollowed her into the trembling creature she had become. He did not know what he wished for. He knew only that he wished it quick, and that quick was rarely the way of the mountain.

"How long?" Ned asked.

"No man can say," Lord Tywin said. "The Eyrie cannot be stormed. There is perhaps no stronger seat in the Seven Kingdoms. But it is small, and it cannot be supplied in winter, and a patient blockade will bring it down in the end. A moon. Two. A year. It turns on her stores, and on her nerve, and she has never been a woman known for the latter."

And on the boy, Ned thought. Whatever is done to Lysa, there is a sick child up in that hall who has done no wrong to anyone. He said nothing, because there was nothing useful to say.

"Stannis," said Renly, and the name changed the air in the room.

"Still nothing?" Ned asked.

"Still nothing." Renly's easy manner had an edge beneath it whenever it touched his brother. "We sent him a royal summons. Plain as bread — come to King's Landing, take up your seat on this council, the crown has need of you. A reasonable thing to ask of the king's own brother, you would think." He turned his wine cup by the stem. "And my brother Stannis, being my brother Stannis, has answered with the one weapon he has always wielded better than any blade. Silence. Cold, grinding, righteous silence. He sits on his rock and says nothing, and we are all of us meant to feel the weight of his displeasure across forty leagues of water."

"The messengers," Ned said. "Have any come back?"

"None," said Lord Tywin. "Which is itself a kind of answer."

Ned did not like that, and liked less that he could not say precisely why. Messengers who did not return meant a man who had decided their messages did not merit the courtesy or a man readying something he did not wish observed in the readying.

Stannis Baratheon was known the hardest and coldest man in the realm, and the one most jealous of his own due.

He had not been made Hand. He had not been made much of anything. He had been left to sit on Dragonstone with his grievances curdling, and now he sat there in his silence, and silence in a man like Stannis was the most ominous thing he could offer.

"Lord Paxter." Joffrey turned to Redwyne. "Send word to your fleet. I would have your ships come up from the Arbor toward King's Landing. Slowly, no banners, no alarm, an ordinary movement of vessels and nothing more. And I would have you take the office of master of ships in the meantime, until matters with my uncle resolve themselves the one way or the other."

"Your grace." Lord Paxter dipped his head, and Ned saw that the man was pleased, and saw too that it was a sound choice.

The Redwyne fleet was the greatest in the realm save the royal fleet itself but the royal fleet rode at anchor under Stannis Baratheon's hand at Dragonstone, and might as well have been on the moon for all the good it did the crown.

"It is a good appointment," Ned said. "Though I would far rather this ended with your uncle at this table my prince, than have him as a thing to be dealt with."

"As would we all," Renly said brightly. "But I have known Stannis since the cradle, Lord Stark, and I will tell you for nothing — my brother has never once in his life walked through a door held open for him, when he might climb in through a window instead and resent you for the door. If he will not come for a summons, we may have to go and prise him out of that castle like a winkle from its shell." He gave a cutting smile. "We shall bring a long pin. And patience. Chiefly patience."

Ned was not enthused at the prospect, and let his silence say so.

The wildfire next. It was slow and frightening work to move it. They could only transport the substance at night, in small loads, with the wisdoms of the Alchemists' Guild fussing over every cart as though it bore sleeping infants, which in a manner of speaking it did.

"The wisdoms have another recommendation," Renly said, glad of a subject that was not his cousins or his brother. "The oldest caches, the ones the Mad King laid down, the most apt to go up if a man so much as sneezes near them, they say the cold of the Wall will thicken the stuff and make it safer to hold. So the eldest and worst of it goes north, to Castle Black. The younger and steadier batches to Lannisport, the Shields, the Dornish Marches, as we agreed."

"Let it be done then." Ned said. The stuff could not stay beneath the city. On that, at least, no honest man could differ.

"There is word from the Wall besides." Lord Tywin turned his pale eyes on Ned. "Their Lord Commander is dead. Jeor Mormont. The Watch has chosen in his place."

Ned went still. "Who?"

"Benjen Stark."

Something turned over in Ned's chest, pride and grief twisted too close to pull apart. Benjen. His little brother, who had taken the black as a young man with the war still raw in all of them, who had ridden into the cold and made a life of it and never once complained of the choice. Lord Commander Stark.Their lord father would have been proud past the saying of it. Their father was sixteen years cold in the ground and would never know.

"He will serve well," Ned said quietly, when he trusted his voice. "He is a serious man, my brother. The Watch could have chosen far worse." He looked round the table. "He will need everything we promised them, and more. A new commander, a host of wildlings coming south, and a thousand men to hold three hundred leagues of ice."

"He will have it," Joffrey said. "If you'll remember I wrote to Mormont about the gift and the watch's vows. You can attract more with honey than without. Perhaps your brother would be more amendable, Lord hand?"

"I do believe he would—"

The door opened and Grand Maester Pycelle came through it.

Ned knew before the old man spoke. He could see it on the old maesters face. Pycelle was grey and short of breath, his great chain hanging askew, his soft folded face gone slack with distress, and he stood in the doorway and his rheumy eyes went to Prince Joffrey first then Ned immediately after, and the floor of Ned's belly fell away beneath him.

"My lords. Forgive me. It is the king."

The room came to a point.

"What of the king?" Ned was already on his feet.

"He is dying."

The word dropped into the chamber and lay there where it fell.

"Explain yourself." Lord Tywin's voice was a door swinging shut. "Plainly. At once."

Pycelle's hands worried at his chain. "The cuts, my lords. From the Iron Throne. His Grace has been sitting it these past moons — hearing petitions, doing a king's work as he had not troubled to do in years. And the throne cuts. It has always cut. The barbs, the blades half-melted, they catch a man who shifts in the seat if he is not careful. Small wounds, most of them no cause for concern. But one festered, upon his thigh, and then a second, and then another and the rot crept into them, and I have fought it a full moon now. I have done everything in my art. Poultices, boiled wine, the maggots to eat the dead flesh away. I took two fingers from his hand when the corruption reached them, to stop its spread." His voice cracked like old parchment. "It has not stopped. It is in him now, my lords. It mortifies. The flesh goes black and the rot spreads inward toward the blood, and once it has the blood—" He did not finish. He did not need to.

Ned was around the table without recalling having moved. "A moon," he said, and his voice came out strange to his own ears.

"You have known a moon that the king was dying, and you said nothing?"

"I hoped to halt it, Lord Stark — I have halted worse — I did not wish to cry alarm before I was sure—"

"He was a strong man." Ned heard the heat in his own voice and could not cool it. "Robert Baratheon was as strong as any man in this realm. I have seen him take wounds in the field that would have killed three lesser men and laugh them off before the maester reached him. And you sit there and tell me a chair has killed him? That a few cuts have laid him in his deathbed while you fumbled at poultices and held your tongue?"

"My lord Stark." Pycelle drew himself up, and for once there was something behind the watery eyes that was not performance — grief, perhaps, or fear, or the two together. "I am old, but I am no fool, and I have served kings before this one. I tell you the wounds alone should not have brought him to this. A hale man throws off such a corruption. His Grace—" He faltered. "His Grace has not been throwing it off."

"What does that mean?"

"It means, my lord, that the humours of the mind govern the humours of the body. I have seen it many times across my long years. A man whose spirit has turned away from the world — a man who does not, in the deep places of himself, much wish to mend — such a man does not mend, whatever the strength of his frame. The flesh follows where the will leads it, and if the will turns toward the dark…" The old man spread his soft hands helplessly. "His Grace has been in a black humour a long while now. Before ever the wounds came. The wine, the brooding, the way he sits and stares at nothing at all. You have all seen it my lords. I have watched it grow. I believe his body does not fight the rot because some part of the man no longer wishes it to."

Mace Tyrell's mouth had come open. "You are telling us… what? That the king does not wish to live? That is grotesque. That is unnatural—"

"I am telling you," Pycelle said heavily, "that there is more than rotten flesh at work in this, and that I am only a maester, and that there are limits to what poultices may do against a sickness that is half seated in the soul."

The chamber had gone very still. Ned looked from one face to the next and saw his own dread thrown back at him from one or two of them, and from the rest the cold quick arithmetic of men already reckoning what came after, and in that moment he hated every soul at the table who was thinking past the dying man to the empty chair.

"We must send to the Citadel," Lord Tywin said. "Tonight. As you should have done Grand Maester." He turned his pale gold-flecked eyes on Pycelle. "For every maester who has made a study of the healing arts. Whatever can be done, will be done. And you will return to your king and you will labour harder, Grand Maester, while there remains a king to labour for."

"At once, my lord." Pycelle bobbed, and turned to shuffle out.

"Grandfather." Joffrey's voice was barely above a whisper but it rang loud in the room. The prince had not spoken since Pycelle entered. Ned looked at him and could not read the boy's face — it had gone very still, the gold eyes fixed on a point in the middle of the table. "The man we spoke of. Have you reached him?"

"He is already upon the road," Lord Tywin said. "He should be within the walls in a few days."

"Good."

"Who?" Ned asked. "What man is this?"

"A healer," Lord Tywin said. "A man called Qyburn. His knowledge of these matters runs past the common measure of maesters."

"A maester?" Ned said.

"A maester of sorts," said Lord Tywin.

Renly's brows climbed. "Of sorts? What is that meant to mean, of sorts? A man wears the chain or he does not."

"It does not matter what he is," Joffrey said, and there was an iron in it that closed the question like a fist. "My father is dying. If there is a man living who can halt it, I want him at that bedside, and I care nothing for what letters trail after his name or what the grey sheep of the Citadel make of him." He looked at the old maester, and the iron went out of his voice, and what was left under it was younger than Ned had heard from him in a long while. "Go. Try harder. Please."

The council concluded. There was nothing more in any of them to say.

Robert was propped against the pillows of the great bed when Ned came to him, and the sight was a blow under the heart.

The king was wasting.

There were no kinder words for it. The vast body that had always seemed to fill whatever room it stood in had begun to fall inward on itself, the flesh hanging grey and loose, the great black beard shot through now with more white than Ned remembered, lying lank against a face gone gaunt and yellowish. His right hand was bound in linen where Pycelle had taken the fingers. And the smell in the room was a smell Ned knew from old battlefields, the sweet and rotten reek of a wound gone bad, only half smothered beneath burning herbs and the thick syrup-stink of poppy.

A cup of milk of the poppy stood at the bedside, near full. Robert had never in his life been a man to refuse a thing that dulled pain. That he was refusing it now told Ned more than Pycelle had.

"Ned." The voice was thinner than it had been, but the eyes that found him were clear. "They keep at me to drink that muck. Makes the whole world go soft and far away. I told them I'd take a little — enough to dull the worst of it — but I'm damned if I'll go into the dark too fuddled to know I'm going." He grimaced. "A man ought to meet it with his eyes open. Sit. Sit, damn you, you're looming."

Ned sat. He could not believe his eyes.

Robert had taken to attending council meetings and sitting the throne after the tourney. In the last weeks he had stopped, and Ned and the council had thought he had returned to the Robert of old.

He had looked a bit pale but no one thought it anything to truly worry about, but now…

He did not know what to say. He had never truly known what to say to Robert, for all the years and all the love between them — they had been close as brothers as boys and grown into strangers who loved each other, which carried its own particular grief.

"I never once saw you sick," Ned said at last. "In all the years I knew you. Not so much as a fever."

"Strong as a bull, me." Robert's laugh dissolved into a wet cough. "Strong as a bull, and brought low by a chair. There's a song in that somewhere, if any singer's got the stones to write it and sing it to my face."

The king stared up at the canopy. "I asked Pycelle to say nothing, I did not want them to see their king in this state. I thought it would pass… You want to know the true jest of it, Ned? The part the gods are laughing at?"

Ned didn't want to know but he said, "Tell me."

"All those years I couldn't be bothered with any of it. The ruling. The sitting. Listening to fat lords whine about their neighbours' boundary stones. I let it all slide. Let Jon carry it, then the council, would have let Joff if he asked." A slow breath that rattled. "And then we learn what Littlefinger and the Spider had been at, the thieving and the poison, years of it, right under my nose while I drank, whored, hunted and made merry. And I thought — Robert, you old sot, you've been a disgrace. A drunkard on a throne who let vipers nest in his own rafters. I thought I'd put it right. Be a proper king for once, with whatever time I had left in me. Sit the bloody throne. Hear the bloody petitions. Do the work." His mouth twisted. "And the work has killed me. The throne itself opened me up and let the rot crawl in. Fifteen years I dodged that chair, and the one year I sit it like a king is meant to, it murders me by inches." The laugh came again, awful and wet. "If that's not the gods having their sport with Robert Baratheon, I don't know what would be."

"Don't talk as though you're already gone," Ned said. "Pycelle is sending to the Citadel now. There's a healer on the road, Tywin's man—"

"Tywin's man." Robert snorted. "Aye, I'm sure Tywin's man will set me right as rain." He shook his head against the pillow. "I've seen the wounds, Ned. I've smelled them. I'm a soldier, same as you. We both of us know what black flesh and that stink mean, and it isn't a long and happy dotage." He said it without much fear, and in that he was most like the old Robert he had been all evening. He had never feared the thing itself. Only the smallness of life, the tedium of the days. Death he could look in the eye.

It was the living he had never learned the way of.

They sat in silence a while. Beyond the window the city went about its evening, knowing nothing.

"Do you remember the Eyrie?" Robert asked softly. It was so at odds with the boy he had grown up with and the man he'd known. "When we were boys. Jon Arryn working us half to death in that yard. You and me, the wolf and the stag, and old Jon trying to make something of the pair of us." His king smiled faintly. Ned could remember it as if it was yesterday. "Gods, I was happy there. I didn't know it then. Two lordlings with nothing weightier on us than the next bout in the yard and the next girl in the village. I'd have stayed a boy at the Eyrie forever if they'd have let me. I never wanted a crown, Ned. You know that. I wanted a hammer and a horse and a war to point them at."

"I know it," Ned said quietly. It was true. Robert had never reached for the throne. It had been forced on him, by Aerys who wanted their heads, by the dragon blood of his grandmother that made him a claimant whether he willed it or no, by a war begun over Lyanna and ended with a prince dead on the Trident.

"Went a bit sideways for us, didn't it," Robert said. "The two boys in that yard."

"A bit," Ned said.

They spoke of the old days. Of the rebellion, of men long dead and battles long won. Some of the old fire crept back into Robert's voice in the telling, and for a while Ned could almost see the young man he had been, the laughing giant with the warhammer who had seemed, once, as though he might carry the whole weight of the world on his shoulders and never feel it.

And then, as Ned had known he would, Robert came round to Lyanna.

"I dream of her still," the king said. "Every night. Your sister. After all these years and all these leagues. I see her face and I think — that. That's what it was all for. The whole bloody war, all of it, to win her back, and I never did. Rhaegar won damnit. He stole her from me before I ever—" His voice thickened and snagged. "I loved her, Ned. Gods, how I loved that girl. I'd have made her happy. I'd have laid the whole world at her feet."

Ned said nothing, because there was nothing both kind and true to set in that silence.

You never knew her, he thought, as he had thought a thousand times across sixteen years. You loved a song you made of her. You saw her beauty and her spirit and you built a maiden out of them to keep in a ballad, and you never once saw the iron underneath, or the wildness, or the wolf blood that ran in her. You'd have laid the world at her feet and she'd have hated being given anything she had not seized for herself. She did not love you, Robert. She told me so, but for you I would not listen and I pushed it. You have spent sixteen years grieving a woman who never quite existed, and the grief of it has hollowed you out and helped to kill you.

He said none of it. Some truths were only cruelty.

"She would have been proud of the realm you leave behind," Ned said instead, which was the kinder lie.

"The realm Jon, you and Joff leave behind, you mean." But Robert smiled saying it, and there was no rancour in the smile, only a worn and weary pride. "He's a good lad, Ned. Better than me by a long road. I don't know where in seven hells he came from, that boy. Some mornings I look at him and I am certain he cannot be mine." He turned his head on the pillow, and the clear eyes found Ned's, and they were urgent of a sudden. "That's the one regret I'll carry down. The one thing. The wedding. I won't live to see it, will I? I'll not see my boy take your girl to wife — a Baratheon boy and a Stark maid, the stag and the wolf, the very thing you and I should have had between our houses and never got."

His good hand came out and closed on Ned's wrist, and the grip of it was weaker than any grip of Robert's had a right to be, and that frightened Ned more than all of Pycelle's words. "Promise me, Ned. When I'm gone — don't let them smother it under a year of mourning and propriety. Let them wed. Soon. Let the realm have one bright thing to look at when they lower me into the ground. Let every man in the Seven Kingdoms see that what comes after Robert is golden — that the boy and his wolf girl will give them better than ever I did." The eyes burned in the wasted face. "Promise me, Ned. Promise me you'll see them married."

Promise me, Ned.

He felt his heart break.

The words came down on a wound sixteen years deep. Another bedside. Another person he had loved past sense, gripping his hand with the last strength in them, asking him to promise. He had kept that first promise sixteen years at the cost of nearly everything he had, had built the whole architecture of his life around the keeping of it. And now here was Robert — who had loved that same lost girl, in his way — gripping the same wrist, asking him for another.

"I promise," Ned said. The words were thick in his mouth but he forced them out. "I'll see them wed, Robert. As soon as it's decent to. You have my word on it."

Robert sagged back into the pillows, the grip loosening, something easing out of the ruined face. "Good," he breathed. "Good. That's good, then." His eyes drifted toward closing. "The stag and the wolf. Should've been us, eh, Ned. Us and Lyanna, all those years ago. Should've been…" The poppy and the weariness took the words. "Should've been…"

He slept. Ned sat on at the bedside a long while in the rotten-sweet dark, listening to the king breathe, his face was wet, the room must have been hot.

He found Sansa in her chambers with the evening light coming gold through the windows and Lady stretched the length of the floor at her feet. Brienne gave them some privacy, withdrawing to the door.

His daughter was sewing. She was always sewing now — Ned had marked it, the way she carried the work everywhere, the patient careful attention she gave it that she had never given her stitching as a girl in Winterfell.

Sansa looked up when he came in, and smiled, and the smile was so like her mother's that it caught him under the ribs.

"Father." She set the work down in her lap, but not before he saw it. A doublet, half made — deep blue and gold, and worked along the hem and across the breast in fine small stitches were running figures, astonishingly well wrought: white direwolves and golden stags, racing together across the cloth, wolf and stag and wolf and stag, all of them running the same way, as if toward the same far-off thing.

"That's fine work," Ned said. "Finer than I knew was in you."

"It's for Joffrey." She said his name the way she always said it, her voice bubbling with a warmth she did not trouble to hide. "I've been at it for moons. I want it perfect." She smoothed the cloth with one hand. "The wolves and the stags. Our two houses. Running together."

Ned looked at the racing figures, and thought of Robert in his bed, and of a tower in Dorne, and of a promise sixteen years old and one just made, and he was silent long enough that Sansa's smile began to falter.

"Father? What is it?"

He sat down across from her. He did not truly know how to begin. "Sansa. I need to ask you a thing, and I need you to answer me true. Not the way you think a daughter ought to answer her father. True."

"Of course, father."

"Do you still wish to marry him?"

She blinked. "Joffrey?"

"Joffrey."

"More than anything in all the world." There was no hesitation in it, not so much as a heartbeat's worth. "Why would you ask me such a thing?"

"Because betrothals are made by fathers and kings," the king's hand said, "and they are made for the good of houses and realms, and a girl of thirteen is not always asked whether the thing being arranged over her head is the thing she would choose. I made this. Robert and I, years ago, before you were old enough to have any say in it at all, and again at Winterfell. And I would not have you bound to it — for the realm, or for my given word, or for anything — if it is not what you want. If you wished to be free of it, even now, even this late, I would find a way. Whatever the cost of it. You are my daughter before you are anyone's queen."

Sansa was quiet a moment. And then something came into her face that Ned had never quite seen there before. It was not the dreaming sweetness he was used to, not the careful courtesy she had learned at court, but something harder underneath all of it, something with iron in the grain of it.

"I am not being forced, Father," she said, and her voice had gone very level and very certain. "I want you to hear me, because I do not think you have, not truly. This is not a thing being done to me. This is the thing I have wanted most in the world since I was a little girl, and there is nothing — not you, not the realm, not anything under the sun — that is going to keep me from marrying him." Her chin came up. "I love him. He loves me. We are going to be wed, and we are going to rule together, and it will be everything the songs are made of. Nothing is going to stop us. Nothing."

At her feet, Lady lifted her great grey head and looked at Ned, and growled low in her throat — not a threat, but a sound with teeth somewhere down inside it, a wolf agreeing with her girl.

Ned looked from the direwolf to his daughter, and for the first time, he saw it.

He had always thought Sansa the least like Lyanna of all his children. Arya was the wild one, the one the old word fit, the one with the wolf blood plain on her.

Sansa was the lady, the southron flower, the gentle child who loved her songs and her stitching and her courtesies. He had believed that for years. He saw now that he had been wrong, or half wrong. The wildness in Sansa did not run the way it ran in Arya, loud and out of doors and forever in some fresh trouble. It ran underneath it all. Quiet, hidden beneath the courtesy and the auburn hair and her careful needlework and it was no softer for being hidden.

She has the wolf blood too, he thought, somewhere between pride and dread. I never marked it, because she carries it the way her mother carries it. Underneath. Where a man only finds it on the day he crosses her.

Lyanna was still holding those dried roses the dragon prince had given her when she made him promise. Against all sense, against the whole weight of the realm and her family and her own betrothal, and nothing had turned her from it, and it had ended in blood and fire and a tower in Dorne.

And here was her niece, with the same iron under the same soft surface, wanting her golden prince with the very same absolute certainty.

Gods grant it ends better this time, Ned thought. Gods grant all it leads to is happiness.

"All right," he said gently. "All right. I only wished to be certain. I'd not have you carried off somewhere you did not wish to go." He reached out and laid his hand over hers, over the half-made doublet with its racing wolves and stags. "You'll be wed soon, then. Sooner than we had planned. The king— Robert wishes it. Before…" He could not make the end of it.

Sansa's face changed, she heard what he could not say, and the iron softened into something gentler. "Father. Is the king very ill?"

"Yes," Ned said. "Yes, sweetling. He is."

She was quiet a moment. Then she turned her hand over beneath his and gripped it, the way her mother might have. "Then we will make the wedding beautiful," she said. "For him. So that the last great thing he sees is something golden." She looked down at the doublet in her lap. "I'll have this finished, and then I shall start the wedding cloak. It shall be perfect. I'll make certain of it."

Ned looked at his daughter — at the wolf blood he had only this hour learned to see in her, at the iron certainty in her that nothing living was going to move — and he thought of Robert gripping his wrist, and of Lyanna gripping his wrist, all the people he had loved who had held his hand and asked him to carry some weight the rest of their road for them. And he found that his eyes were stinging again, and was glad the light had gone gold and low, so that she would not see it in him.

"I know you will, sweetling." he said. "I know."

Outside, the sun went down over King's Landing, and somewhere in the Red Keep a king lay dying by inches in a rotten-sweet dark, and here in this gold-lit room his daughter bent her auburn head over her work again and went on sewing wolves and stags to run together forever across a doublet for the boy she loved.

And Ned sat and watched her, and kept, as he had always kept, the promises he had made to the dying and the dead.

ROBERT​

Robin was dreaming of the yard at the Red Keep when the shaking woke him.

It was his favourite dream. He had lived at the Red Keep in the Tower of the Hand with his mother and his father, back when his father was the Hand of the King and the most important man in the realm save the king himself.

Everyone had said so. Robin had been small then and he was bigger now, six whole years old, but he remembered the Red Keep better than he remembered anything, and best of all he remembered the yard.

In the dream, the sun was warm and there was no wind. There was never any wind at King's Landing, not the way there was wind at the Eyrie, the wind that lived outside the walls and screamed and worried at every shutter all night long. At the Red Keep the air was soft and warm and smelled of the sea and of cooking, and Robin would sit in the gallery above the practice yard wrapped in a light cloak, and watch the older boys train.

Three of them were the best. Everyone knew it. One was golden, one was dark and one smelled of flowers.

The golden one was the prince. Joffrey. He was the best at everything, he never seemed to fail, and he was the best at being kind, and Robin had loved him because Joffrey was everything he wanted to be.

Joffrey had never once been cruel to him, not the way some of the squires were cruel when they thought no one was looking, the ones who called him Sweetrobin in the voice that meant it as a poison.

Joffrey had given him a wooden sword once, painted blue, and shown him how to hold it, crouching down to Robin's height in the yard with all the court watching. Watch and practice Robin, and one day you might be better than me, Joffrey had said, very serious, the way Robin had seen him talk to father. Robin had kept the blue sword under his pillow until his mother took him away to the Eyrie and it got lost in the moving.

The dark one was Jon. The prince's shadow, the squires called him, but they did not say it like a poison when they said it about Jon, because Jon was a bastard but he was also a good fighter, though not as good as Joffrey of course, and you did not poison a boy who could put you on your back in the dust.

Jon had been kind to Robin too. Quieter than the prince, but kind. Jon had carried him on his shoulders all the way up the serpentine steps once when Robin's legs had gone weak, and had not made him feel small about it.

The one who smelled of roses was Loras. He was always making jokes. He was not particularly nice, but he was not cruel either.

Father had been beside him in the gallery. That was the best part of the dream and the part that made it ache. His father, with his kind tired face, not grey and not sweating, the well face, the before face. Watching the boys with him. Naming the strokes for him. See how the prince keeps his feet under him, Robin? A knight who loses his feet loses everything.

"I want to be a knight, Father," Robin always told him. "A real one. A winged knight, like Ser Artys Arryn, who flew up the Giant's Lance and threw down the Griffin King. I want to fly."

And his father would smile and put a hand on his head and—

The shaking woke him.

It was always the same. Trembling that started in his hands and climbed his arms and took the whole of him until his teeth knocked and his heels drummed the bed and he could not stop any part of it. The old grey men had a long name for the sickness that Robin could never hold in his head. He only knew it as the shaking, and the shaking did not care that he was the Lord of the Eyrie.

It came when it wished and it left when it wished and there was nothing in between but the holding on.

The warm yard was gone. The Red Keep was gone. There was only the cold dark of the Eyrie and the wind outside, and his body that had stopped being his.

"Hush. Hush now, my sweetling. Mother's here."

She was always there. The moment the shaking started she was there, as though she never slept, as though she lay awake every night of her life waiting to catch him.

Her arms came round him and pulled him in against the warm of her and she rocked him and made the sounds that were not words but were softer and better than any of them.

"Hmm. There now, there now. Mother won't let anything hurt you. Mother will never let them have you. Hush, my sweet Robin, hush. Mother is here."

The shaking would not stop on its own. So she did the thing she did, that the old men kept telling her he was too old for. Mother opened her robe and gave him her breast, and Robin took it, and slowly, slowly, the trembling began loosen its hold.

Robin was six years old. He knew that the squires at King's Landing would have made a poison of it if they had seen, that even Joffrey might have looked at him differently. But the squires were far away and Joffrey was far away and his father was dead and gone, and his mother was the only warm thing left in the whole cold castle in the sky, and so Robin took the breast and sucked and held mother close so he could feel her warmth and the beating under her skin. Robin let the shaking ebb and did not think about the stupid squires.

"There's my brave boy," his mother whispered. "There's my little lord. Take as much as you want. You're safe. You're always safe with Mother. No one will ever take you, not ever, I won't allow it, I'll never—"

The door crashed open and the shaking came back at once. Robin lost the breast and seized, his whole body snapping tight.

Men came through the door. Most of them wore the sky-blue cloaks of the Eyrie guard, the men who were supposed to do whatever Mother said, and at the front of them walked a knight Robin knew.

The lean dark handsome one. Mother's favourite. Ser Lyn, who had come to court Mother along with all the others, the ones Mother did not like and put in the sky cells. He had a dark sword and a smile that was not a kind smile. Robin had learned the difference between kind smiles and the other kind very early, because he had seen so many of both.

"What is the meaning of this?" His mother had pulled her robe closed and come up out of the bed with Robin clutched to her chest, and her voice had gone high and shrill, and that frightened Robin more than the men did, because when Mother's voice went like that the world was coming apart. "How dare you, how dare you, coming into my chambers, my son's chambers, you forget yourself— guards! Guards, take him, throw him in a cell, I'll have his head—"

"Your guards are the ones holding the torches, my lady." Ser Lyn sounded as though something amused him. "You ought to look more carefully at the men around you. You seem to choose poorly. You should have thrown me in a cell with the others."

Mother snarled. "What do you want? What do you want from us?"

"To wake you." He came into the room as though it were his own, and the guards did not stop him, and that was wrong, that was all wrong, the guards always stopped people. "My brother and the rest of the Lords of the Pact are climbing your mountain even now, Lady Lysa. They will have passed Sky by this hour. By morning they will be at your gates, and there is no one left to bar the way."

"That's not possible." His mother's arms had gone too tight around Robin, crushing. "That's not possible, the Gates of the Moon—Uncle is there, and the Bloody Gate, no one passes without my leave!"

The dark knight tilted his head and the bad smile widened. "But you gave your leave. You sent a message to the guards to open the way, that you would meet with the Lords of the Pact to prove your innocence and that no harm should be done to them."

"I did not!—"

"It was me, my lady." And the old man was there, the one who forced Robin to drink foul medicine. Robin did not like him. Robin did not like his voice, or his grey robes or the chain around his neck that jingled as he walked. Robin especially did not like his ugly face. It was twisted into a grimace and made even uglier for it. No, Robin did not like him at all.

"You!?" Mother's voice was sharp as a whip. "You betrayed me, maester? You serve at my command!"

The ugly man frowned. "I serve the Lord of the Eyrie."

"My son is Lord of Eyrie—"

"Only because you killed Jon Arryn—"

"That is a filthy lie!"

"Petyr Baelish confessed and named you as an accomplice to the small council before he died." Ser Lyn laughed softly. "He told them how the two of you murdered Jon Arryn. The tears of Lys, poured in the old man's wine. How you had been Baelish's lover since you were a green girl at Riverrun. How you put horns on your lord husband for years." His eyes went to Robin, and Robin felt his skin itch. "How the little lordling might be no Arryn at all."

"LIES!" His mother was screaming now, full and shrieking, the sound flung off the cold stone walls. "Filthy lies, every word, my Petyr would never — and they killed him—they killed him! You said so yourself, you said he died — if any of it were true there would be a trial, there is always a trial, there would have to be a—"

"Who can say why the lions and stags do as they do." Ser Lyn studied his fingernails. "Perhaps your Petyr knew things they would sooner not see aired in an open court. Great men have quiet ways of stopping mouths." He looked up. "And I would not lean quite so hard on my Petyr, my lady, if you mean to go on swearing there was nothing between you. It rather spoils the performance."

"I want to believe you my lady," the stinky maester was fidgeting, "but you refused a royal summons. And when I read you the letter from the Lords of the Pact, you had their family members placed in sky cells with the promise of death if the lords did not march home. Their second letter I did not give you, and in it was all they had learned from Baelish's confession." Maester Coleman's eyes came to land on Robin, "I could no longer allow you to starve your son and everyone else in this castle in your quest to evade the kings justice—"

It was too much. The voices were too loud and too sharp and they went into Robin's ears like knives, his mother's shrieking, the dark knight's soft cruel amusement and the maesters chiding, winding round and round each other, and the shaking had the whole of him now, and a sound came out of him before he could stop it. A high thin wail that he could never stop once it started.

"Make them fly," Robin sobbed. As he spoke the trembling grew worse. "Mother, make them fly, make the bad men fly away, make them stop, make them fly—"

Because that was what you did, at the Eyrie, with bad men. When a man was wicked, when a man had to be punished, you made him fly out the Moon Door, and Mother said it was justice and the wind took them and they were never seen again.

He wanted the bad men to fly. He wanted it to be quiet again.

When he came back to himself, the dark knight was gone and the night was gone and he was in the great hall, and he did not remember being carried there.

That happened, after the bad shaking. There would be a hole in the world, and then he would be somewhere else, and no one ever told him how he had got there. He was in his mother's arms still, wrapped in a blanket now, and the great hall of the Eyrie was full of lords.

He did not think he had seen so many lords at once.

They stood in a half ring, armoured, cloaked, and not one of their faces was kind. At the head of them was a big old man, grim as a winter storm, in bronze armour all graven over with little runes. Robin knew him. Bronze Yohn, Lord Royce of Runestone.

His father had liked Lord Royce. His father had said Bronze Yohn was as good and true a man as the Vale had ever bred. He did not look good and true now. He looked the way the sky looked before the worst storms, the ones that kept Robin awake with the shutters banging.

"—will answer for it, Lysa." Lord Royce's voice was deep and slow and came up from the bottom of him like stones grinding. "Before the gods, and before the Vale, and before this boy who deserves to know the truth of his own blood. Jon Arryn raised half the lords in this hall. He was loved by every man here. We will know how he died."

"He died of a flux." His mother's voice was ragged from all the screaming. She turned and turned in the middle of the cold hard faces, looking for a friendly face, there were few. "Ask any maester. He was old, he sickened, he died, the way old men do, there is no mystery in an old man dying—"

"Lord Baelish confessed otherwise. Before the king's own council."

"Then Lord Baelish lied! Or you lie. Everyone lies. Everyone has always lied about me, all my life, my father and my sister and—" She was weeping now, and the weeping shook through her body and into Robin where she held him, and he hid his face against her shoulder and tried not to hear and heard all of it anyway. "I am the Lady of the Eyrie. I am the widow of the Hand of the King. You cannot come into my hall in the dark of night and speak to me so, you cannot—"

"The child doesn't favour him." A younger lord this time, with a pinched hard face. He pointed as he spoke. Robin frowned and twitched. He did not like being pointed at. "Look at the boy. Jon Arryn was an eagle even at the last, tall as a tower. That's a sickly little thing with no more Arryn in his face than I have. Now you set him beside Harry Hardyng, there's the Arryn look, there's the blood plain as—"

"You cannot read a boy's blood off his face, Templeton." Another lord, broader, scowling. "My own heir favours his mother's father and I'll thrash the man who says he's not mine—"

"It is not only the face. It is the sickness. No Arryn in living memory—"

"Sickness comes to every house, it proves nothing—"

"It proves enough when set beside the rest—"

And then they were all of them talking at once, loud, over each other, the great lords of the Vale arguing about Robin's face and Robin's blood and Robin's shaking sickness as though Robin were not there at all, as though he were a sick foal being looked over at a horse fair to see was he worth the keeping.

The noise climbed and climbed. His mother turned with her arms like iron round him, and Robin felt the shaking gathering again, low down, the way the wind gathered before it screamed, and he thought, I want to go home, I want to go back to the Red Keep and the warm yard and Father and the prince, I want it to be quiet, I want everyone to stop—

His mother moved.

He felt it happen — felt her wrench sideways, fast, faster than he had known she could move — and there was a scramble and a shout and then something bright and sharp was in her hand. A dagger. She had snatched it from someone's belt, from a table, Robin did not see.

She was backing away from all of them, dragging him with her, backing toward the wall, toward the place between the two pillars, toward the white wooden door with the moon carved into its face.

The Moon Door.

Robin began to scream, because you did not go near the Moon Door, never, never, it was the first thing mother told him, and his mother was carrying him straight to it!

"Get back," his mother shrieked at the lords. "Get back! All of you! Away from us, get away!"

The lords went still. The arguing stopped between one breath and the next.

"Lysa." Lord Royce had changed his voice. It had gone slow and careful and gentle, the voice the grooms used on a horse that was about to bolt. "Lysa. Put the knife down. No one in this hall means harm to the boy. You have my word on it, and the word of every man here."

"Liars." She had her back almost to the door. She held Robin hard against her with one arm and the knife in her other hand, and her heart was going so fast against him that it seemed it must break itself, and she was shaking now too, shaking nearly as badly as Robin did. "You came to take him. I know what you came for. You came to take my baby away, the way they took the first one, the way they are always, always trying to take my babies — well, you shan't. You can't. He is mine. He is Jon Arryn's trueborn son and he is the Lord of the Eyrie and the true Warden of the East and he is MINE, and I will never let you have him, never, never, never."

"No one is taking anyone." Another old man spoke, he had a blackfish on his armour. Robin felt like he should know him but he could feel the shaking building and building m. "Put down the knife, niece, and let us talk, like reasonable folk. Please. No one shall harm you or the boy, I won't let them. I swear it."

"You don't believe me." She was crying and screaming at once now, the words coming broken and pained. "None of you believe me. You think me mad. You think me a liar, a murderess, a — you look at my Robin and you think he is some — some bastard, some baseborn—" Behind her back, the hand with the knife in it fumbled at the door, and Robin heard the scrape and clatter of a heavy bronze bar falling, and then a second, and then a third.

The Moon Door swung inward and the cold came in.

The wind came with it, screaming through the open door the way it screamed outside the shutters every night of Robin's life, only louder, here, with nothing between him and it.

Beyond the door there was nothing. No balcony. No rail. No floor. Only the white empty morning sky and the long, long fall down the side of the mountain that Robin had heard about. The bad men went out there. The bad men flew and never came back.

Robin screamed and screamed but as always no one payed him any mind.

"You see?" his mother howled over the wind, her hair and her robe whipping. "You see that I mean it? Leave my castle! Leave it now, or I swear before the gods I'll take him out the door with me before I let you have him! We'll fly! We'll fly together, the two of us, before I let you steal another of my babies!"

Fly.

Through the screaming and the cold and the terrible roaring wind, the word reached down into Robin and caught on the old memory, the yard and his father and I want to fly, Father, and his father's hand on his head, and his father's voice saying what Robin had not got to the end of before the shaking woke him.

"The lady's gone mad," some lord said, low and horrified.

"She'll do it. Look at her. She means to do it—"

"Someone—"

"Lysa, in the name of all the gods, step away from the door, you'll fall, you'll both of you—"

His mother was not hearing them anymore. She was past where words could reach. She stood on the very lip of the Moon Door with the wind tearing at her, holding Robin out over the edge of the whole world, screaming about flying and babies and Her Petyr and lies, and Robin shook in her grip, shook so hard that she staggered, so hard that her arms wrenched and slipped and caught and slipped again as she fought to hold him.

A knight broke from the half ring of lords.

He came fast and low, the way Joffrey moved in the yard, the way Jon and the flower knight moved, and he was shouting something Robin could not hear, and he caught Robin's mother about the middle and hauled her back from the open door with all his weight—

And everything came apart at once.

His mother screamed and twisted against the knight's grip. The two of them pulled against each other with Robin caught between, and the bright knife flashed somewhere, and Robin's body chose that one moment to seize with the worst of all the shaking, his arms and legs flying out wide beyond any will of his, and he felt himself slip. Felt his mother's arms, already wrenched and straining, lose their hold of him. Felt the blanket tear away. Felt the cold rush up to take him.

And then the floor was gone, and the wall was gone, and the screaming was behind him and growing small, and the white sky was everywhere.

Robin was falling.

For one heartbeat it was the most terrible thing in all the world, the cold wind roaring, the grey mountain rushing up, his small body turning over and over in the empty air, and Robin's heart near stopped with the terror of it—

And then it was not falling at all.

It was the yard. It was the dream. It was the thing he had wanted most in the world, the thing he had asked his father for, up in the warm gallery with the prince and his shadow flashing their swords below. Because Robin was not shaking anymore. The shaking had let go of him the very instant the floor let go, all at once.

Now there was only the air, and the air held him up, as gentle as mother and did not shake.

The whole of him went loose, and light, and free.

The Eyrie fell away above him, white and small and far, and the great mountain wheeled slowly past, and below him the whole of the Vale opened out in the dawn, green and gold and going on forever and ever, the most beautiful thing that Robin had ever seen or ever would.

The wind was cold but the cold did not matter. Nothing hurt. Nothing pulled at him. Not his weak legs, not his shaking hands, not his poor sick head that had never once in eight years left him be.

A laugh came out of him. A real one. A whole one, the kind he could never quite manage on the ground.

He remembered, then, the end of the dream. What his father had said in the gallery, the part the shaking had woken him before he could reach. He had it now. His father had smiled and put a hand on his head and said, You'll fly one day, sweet Robin. You'll fly so high.

Look, Father, Robin thought, with a joy that rose and rose to meet the rising world. Look. I'm flying. I told you I would.

And Robert Arryn, Lord of the Eyrie, Defender of the Vale and Warden of the East, who in all his short sick life had wanted only to fly, flew at the last. For the first time he could remember, and the only time that mattered, Robert Arryn was entirely happy.

Last edited: Jun 18, 2026

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#231

PYCELLE​

The king was dying, and there was nothing left in all of Pycelle's long years and longer learning that could stop it, and so the old man did the only thing that remained to a healer who could not heal. He kept the king comfortable, he watched, and he remembered.

That was how it was, when a man grew as old as Pycelle. Everything he saw put him in mind of something he had seen before. He had watched four kings die now. Aerys with his throat opened on the floor of his own hall. Sickness, and madness for Jaehaerys and Aegon. And now Robert, the Usurper some still sang, the Demon of the Trident, the strongest man Pycelle had known in fifty years, laid low not by axe or arrow but by his own throne and a corruption of the blood.

There was a lesson in that somewhere, Pycelle supposed, though he was too old and too tired and too frightened to go looking for it.

The chamber was crowded. Too crowded, by the maester's reckoning. A dying man wanted air and quiet, not a press of bodies, but no one was going to clear the room of the most powerful people in the realm, least of all a Grand Maester who had survived as long as he had by knowing precisely when to keep his mouth shut.

The High Septon stood near the bed in his cloth-of-gold, ready with the holy oils. The small council clustered by the windows, Lord Tywin still as carved stone, Lord Renly grey-faced for once with no jest in him. The queen sat rigid in a chair with her two younger children pressed against her skirts. Lord Stark stood apart with his daughter by his side, his northern face shut like a door, giving away nothing. And there, at the very bedside, where he had been for the better part of a sennight now, knelt the prince.

Joffrey had hardly left his father's side in seven days. There had been other visitors — the Stark girl, who sat and held the king's ruined hand and spoke softly to him of wedding preparations. Lord Stark, Lord Renly, the little prince and princess brought in to kiss their father and be hurried out again before they saw too much.

But it was Joffrey who stayed. Joffrey who was there in the deep of the night when the king woke raving from the poppy. Joffrey who had slept, when he slept at all, in a chair by the bed.

A good son, Pycelle thought, and the thought sat strangely beside the other things he knew.

And there, in the corner, half in shadow, stood the man who had made those other things impossible to forget. Qyburn. The man — not maester, never that, the man had disgraced himself and Pycelle would not refer to him as such — in his soft grey robes with no chain at his throat, watching everything with his mild and terrible eyes.

The kings pain had grown past bearing, these last days. It had got into him as the rot took root in his blood. It was total and relentless, and there was nothing for it but the milk of the poppy, and more of it, and more again.

Pycelle had dosed men of all sorts for sixty years and he knew the cruelty of the poppy as well as any man living. It took the pain, yes. But it took the man along with it.

Robert Baratheon, who had been a thunderstorm of a man, now drifted in and out of his own mind like a boat slipped its mooring, waking sometimes to lucidity and sometimes to terror and sometimes not truly waking at all, forgetting between one hour and the next what had been said, who had come, what he had asked for.

He was awake now, though. And the eyes that opened were clear, clearer than they had been in days. The poppy had a way of doing that, of granting a man a window of himself near the end, as though the gods wished him to have one last clean look at the world before they took it all away from him.

"You're all standing about like crows at a battlefield," the king rasped. There was a ghost of the old strength in his voice. "Waiting for me to be carrion. I'm not dead yet, damn the lot of you."

"No, Your Grace," the High Septon murmured.

"No." Robert's clear eyes moved over them all, slow, taking each face. They came to rest on his son, and softened. Then he lifted his bandaged hand, the one missing two fingers, and pointed it round the room. "Hear me, then, while I've the wits to say it. All of you. You look after my boy. You hear me? You look after Joffrey, and you serve him true, every man and woman of you, or I swear by the Father and the Stranger both I'll claw my way back up out of whatever hell they put me in and I'll haunt you. I'll rattle your shutters every night of your lives." A wet cough that might have been a laugh. "I mean it. Ned knows I do."

"I do, your grace." Lord Stark said quietly.

"Aye." The king's eyes lingered on his old friend a moment, they spoke without words, using the connection and brotherhood of their youth. Then Robert's gaze swept back to the rest. "Out. All of you. The council, the lot of you. I'd speak with my son alone." His eyes flicked, once, to the High Septon, and to Qyburn, and to Pycelle. "The grey men and the holy one can stay. I will likely have need of them."

The room emptied slowly, no one quite wishing to be the one who turned his back on the king for the last time.

The little prince broke from his mother's skirts. Tommen, about to be eight years old and round-faced and weeping, flung himself onto the bed and into his father's arms, and the king grunted and held him — gently, with the strength he had left, which was not much at all.

Myrcella came after, more careful, and kissed her father's bearded cheek, and Robert said something to the two of them too low for Pycelle to hear, and then the queen was there, drawing them back with her hands on their shoulders, her beautiful face a mask of grief that Pycelle found himself studying despite all his caution. As she turned to go, Qyburn's mild eyes followed her across the room, and then came to rest on Pycelle, and held there. And Pycelle, gods help him, looked away first.

Pycelle could not help what he remembered then. The old could never help what they remembered.

Qyburn had come too late. That was the bones of it. The false maester had arrived as the corruption was already reaching the blood, and he had examined the king for less than a day — less than a single day — and had come to Pycelle afterward in the corridor with that mild unbearable look and said, quietly, I could have saved him. Had I come a day sooner. The wounds are grievous but a man of his constitution should have thrown them off. Something is hindering the body. Something in the blood that ought not be there.

Poison.

Pycelle had suspected but had not wanted to believe it, and once the words were spoken, even if coming from a mad man, Pycelle believed it. The exile had found in a day what Pycelle had not found in a moon, and the shame of that sat in the old man's belly like a stone.

He was Grand Maester. He had forgotten more of the healing arts than Qyburn had ever learned, or so he told himself. And yet the disgraced man with no chain had looked at the king for an afternoon and seen the truth that Pycelle's own eyes had not wanted to see.

Not a great dose. That was the cunning of it. Pycelle understood that much, turning it over in the dark of his own chambers. Not enough poison to kill a hale man, nor even to be easily found. Only a little. A very little, given each day, just enough to weaken the body's struggle, to hold the door open for the rot.

A healthy Robert, a Robert with the will to live, would have thrown off such a trifling dose without ever knowing it was there. But the king had not wished to live. Pycelle had said as much to the council and it had been true. The king's spirit had turned toward the dark long before the throne ever cut him.

And a body that has stopped fighting cannot overcome even a little poison and a festering wound together. They fed and grew off each other. The despair, the infection, and the dose had killed him between them, when alone none of them would have brought him low so quick.

Why are you poisoning the king?

Qyburn had asked it plainly, there in the corridor, with no heat and no accusation, only curiosity, which was so much worse. And though it rankled him to be questioned by such a man, Pycelle had told him the truth, which was that he was not. That he had given the king nothing but what might mend him.

It was true. Pycelle clung to its being true.

Whatever else he was — and he knew what he was, an old man who had bent like a reed before every wind for sixty years, who had served the Lannisters' interests more than the realm's, who had let Aerys burn men and said nothing — whatever else he was, he was no poisoner. He was no kingslayer.

But…

The queen had come to him, in the early days of the king's sickness, and she had asked him — not in words any man could later swear to, never in words so plain as that, the queen was far too clever for that — but she had made him understand, that it would not displease her if the king did not recover. That a Grand Maester who saw to such an outcome would find the new reign very grateful.

And Pycelle had bowed, tugged at his beard, and said something soft and noncommittal, and had gone back to his king and tried to save him.

That was the thing he held to in the dark. He had not done it. Whatever the queen wished, Pycelle the coward, Pycelle the reed, Pycelle the feeble, Pycelle the fool, Pycelle who had survived four kings by never once standing upright in a storm, even he had found there was a thing he would not do, and the murder of his king was that thing.

He had given Robert Baratheon every art he possessed.

It had not been enough, because the queen had not waited on him. He understood that now. She had not trusted an old man's cowardice to do her work, and she had been right not to. She had seen to it herself, a little at a time, with her own hand or a hand she owned, and by the time Qyburn arrived and named the poison the king was already past saving unless they wished to try the discarded man's methods. No one did.

Pycelle had failed.

He had failed to heal the king, and he had failed to see the poison in time, and then — and this was the part that would not let him sleep — he had failed to tell anyone.

He had not gone to the prince with it. The prince who he had helped raise and saw like a grandson. He told himself there were reasons. The king was dying regardless; the poison only hastened what despair had already begun; to cry the queen has poisoned the king in the last days of a reign, with a Targaryen pretender and an army of barbarians gathering across the water, would be to throw a torch into a cellar of wildfire.

Better to let the king die in peace. Better to bring the truth to Joffrey quietly, after, when the new king's hand was firm on the realm and he could deal with his mother as he saw fit, away from the eyes of the court.

That was what Pycelle had told himself. He was honest enough, in the privacy of his own old skull, to know that it was also true that he was afraid. He had always been afraid. Fear had kept him alive when better men had died of courage.

He had hissed at Qyburn to hold his tongue. To bring nothing to the council. I will tell the king, Pycelle had said. His Grace Joffrey, once his father is at rest. It is his to know first, and his to decide. And Qyburn, who did not trust him, no more than Pycelle trusted Qyburn, had agreed only on the condition that he be present when it was told, to be certain it was told at all.

Pycelle had agreed to that. What else could he do. They were two men holding the same terrible secret, watching each other, waiting for a king to die.

"...want grandsons," Robert was saying, and Pycelle pulled himself back to the room. "A whole pack of them. Black and yellow haired little terrors. Promise me, boy. Fill that Red Keep up with Baratheon brats and Stark brats and let them run wild through it the way Renly and I never— " He coughed. "Give me grandsons, Joff."

"In time, Father." Joffrey's voice was very soft. He held his father's good hand in both of his own. "I promise. A whole pack of them. We shall name one Robert."

"Robert." The king's ruined face creased into something that wanted to be a smile. "Aye. Robert. Good." His eyes drifted, came back. "I won't see it, will I. The wedding. Your boys. Any of it."

Joffrey did not lie to him. Pycelle had watched the boy grow, he knew that he would not. "No, Father. I don't think you will."

"No." Robert lay quiet a moment, breathing. The pain moved through him visibly even through the haze of the poppy. Pycelle had given him as much as a man could take and still keep his wits, and it was not enough, it was never going to be enough against a rot in the blood. The king's face twisted. His remaining fingers tightened on his son's hand.

"Joff." His voice had dropped, gone rough and low and frightened, and Pycelle's old heart ached to hear it, because there is nothing in all the world so terrible as a brave man afraid at the last. "Joff, I'm— gods forgive me, I'm scared. I didn't think I would be. Thought I'd meet it like a soldier. But it's not a soldier's death, is it? It's slow. It's so bloody slow, and it hurts, it hurts past anything, and I lie here and I can feel myself rotting and I can't— I don't want to go like this. Not piece by piece. Not screaming in a bed like a— like a — I don't want to die like this, Joff."

He had said the very same thing the day before. Pycelle remembered it clearly. And the king had forgotten he had said it, the poppy made him forget everything now, so that each fresh agony came to him new, with all the horror of the first time.

There was no crueller mercy than the milk of the poppy.

"I know, Father," Joffrey said. "I know."

"You won't let me— you'll do something— "

"Qyburn has prepared something," the prince said gently. "For when you wish it. It will take the pain. All of it. And it will be quick." He paused, and Pycelle saw the muscles move in the young man's jaw. "You won't have to be afraid anymore."

"Quick." Robert breathed the word like a prayer. "Aye. Aye. Do that. Bring it, Joff. Bring it and let me— I'm tired, lad. I'm so tired and it hurts so. Bring me something for the pain and let me die. Let your old father go."

As he spoke, king Robert's good hand fumbled at his own brow, and found the thin gold circlet he had insisted on wearing even in his sickbed, the points wrought as stag's antlers, and he pulled it free, and pressed it firmly, as firmly as he could, into his son's hands.

Joffrey bowed his head, holding onto the crown and his father. Then he rose, and crossed the room to where Qyburn stood waiting in the shadows, and the foul man placed a cup in the prince's hand.

Pycelle had seen him prepare it, had watched the careful measuring of it, and had said nothing. There were things that were frowned upon, things that were done for those in pain that certain people felt clashed with a healers oath. But the despicable man was no maester, no true healer, so no one would judge him any more than they already did.

The prince carried the cup back to the bedside. He sat and slipped one arm beneath his father's shoulders to lift him, as if the king were a sickly child. Pycelle watched his prince hesitate before bringing the cup to his father's lips.

And Robert's clear eyes opened, and found his son's face bent over him, and the cup, and his brows drew together in confusion.

"Joff?" The king's voice was puzzled, almost peevish, "What are you doing, boy? What's that you've got there?"

He had forgotten. In the space of a minute, the poppy had taken it from him — the fear, the asking, the wish to die. He had forgotten that he had begged for this. He looked up at his son with a child's bewilderment, and Pycelle felt the whole weight of his sixty years come down on him at once, and thought he could not bear to watch, and watched anyway, because he was Grand Maester, no matter his failings, and he would be called upon as a witness to the kings final moments.

For a moment, a heartbeat, the prince's composure broke. Pycelle saw it. Saw the grief move across that young face, naked and terrible, before he mastered it. When Joffrey spoke, his voice was thick.

"Succeeding you, Father," the prince said softly. The High Septon had begun to pray.

Joffrey set the cup to his father's lips, and his father — trusting, always trusting his golden boy, even confused, even at the very end — drank.

It was quick, as promised. Pycelle would give Qyburn that; the man was not an idiot.

The king's ruined face eased. The pain went out of it, all the long agony of the last moons draining away like water into sand, and what was left behind was peace, and something more than peace. Robert Baratheon looked up into his son's face — that golden face, so beloved, the one good thing he believed he had made — and he smiled. A true smile, the old smile, the one Pycelle remembered from a young king's coronation a lifetime ago.

"My boy," Robert said. "My good boy."

And then the king was gone, smiling, looking up at the son who had made him so proud.

The High Septon moved onto the rites at once. He anointed the still brow with the seven oils, and spoke the words of final atonement over the body, and gave the order for the great bells to be rung, and somewhere far below in the city the first of them began to toll, deep and slow, the sound that told the city of kings that their king was dead.

Joffrey did not move for a long while. He sat on the edge of the bed with his father's crown in one hand, his head bowed with the other hand over his eyes. The new king's shoulders shook and no one in that room dared speak or stir, not the High Septon, not Qyburn, not Pycelle.

The young man sat with his dead father and his grief, and the bells tolled, and the morning light came grey through the windows, and at last — minutes, it was, though it felt like hours — at last, he rose.

And every person in the chamber went to their knees.

Pycelle's old joints screamed at him, but he knelt, because the boy he had helped raise, who had come to him and begged him to teach him all manner of things, was standing by the bed with the antler crown in his hands was not a prince any longer.

The new king looked down at them all for a moment with those gold eyes, red-rimmed but dry, and then he walked from the room, and they rose and followed him.

Outside, the corridor was full. The small council, the seven of the Kingsguard in their white scale and cloaks, the queen with her younger children, the Stark girl, the bastard—Jon, the Tyrell boy. As the king came through the door they went down before him like wheat before a scythe, a wave of kneeling that ran the length of the hall.

It was Ser Barristan who spoke, the old white knight, his voice carrying clear and steady as it had carried over how many battlefields. "The king is dead." A breath. The world was still but for the ringing of the bells. "Long live the king."

"Long live the king," the corridor answered, in a rolling murmur.

"Rise," said Joffrey. "All of you. Rise."

They rose. And into the silence that followed came the Stark girl, Sansa, her face wet with tears that Pycelle thought were not entirely for show — the child had loved the old king, in her way, and loved the new one past all sense. She went to Joffrey's side and put her hand on his arm and rose on her toes to whisper something in his ear, something none of them could hear, and whatever it was made the new king nod. She kissed his cheek. He let her.

Pycelle, looking past them, found the queen.

Cersei Lannister stood among her children with her grief-mask still in place, and she was watching her son and the Stark girl, and the emotion in her green eyes was not grief at all. It was hatred, raw and undisguised, there and gone in the space of a heartbeat before the mask came back down — but Pycelle had seen it, and he understood it. She had killed her husband to set her son upon the throne.

And her son did not love her for it.

Her son did not cleave to her as he used to when he was young. Instead there was another by his side, younger, more beautiful some said, soon to be queen.

Pycelle had spent a lifetime watching the powerful destroy themselves over love and its lack, and he thought, looking at Queen mother's face, that he was watching the beginning of another such ruin.

The king began to walk, and the whole tide of them followed — toward the throne room, Pycelle guessed, because that was where the court would be gathering now, drawn by the bells, the lords and ladies and hangers-on of King's Landing assembling to see what came next.

The king spoke as he walked, and men hurried to catch his words.

"Send ravens to every lord in the realm," he said. "My father is dead. His heir reigns. They are to be told that the funeral, the royal wedding, and the coronation will be held in the same week." A pause. "Let the realm grieve my father and celebrate his son in one breath. It is what he wanted."

"Sire." The High Septon, hurrying at his elbow, breathless. "If I may — it would be more fitting for the coronation to come first, and stand a day or two apart from the wedding. Let the realm see its king crowned and anointed, let them have their king before they have their queen. A day, at least, between the two. It would be pleasing in the eyes of the seven."

Their new king considered it for the length of a stride. "Yes. You're right. The coronation first. Then the wedding, when the realm has had its king a few days." He nodded. "See to it then."

They came to the throne room, and the great doors were opened, and it was as Pycelle had foreseen — the hall was filling, had been filling since the bells began, the court of King's Landing gathering beneath the high windows in their silks and their finery, a sea of faces turning as one toward the doors and the young man who came through them with a dead king's crown in his hands.

Pycelle had stood in this hall for the crownings and the courts of four kings. He had seen Aerys rave from that twisted chair of swords. He had seen Robert sprawl on it bored and drunk. And now he watched a fifth king cross the long floor toward the Iron Throne, and the hall fell silent but for the toll of the bells, and the young man stopped at the foot of the throne.

He stood there a moment, looking up at it — the great black tangle of beaten blades, the seat that had cut his father to death by inches. Pycelle wondered if he was thinking of that. Then the king began to climb, slowly, with the care a wise man took on those cruel steps.

But he did not sit.

At the top, before the throne itself, Joffrey stopped. He kneeled and set his father's antler crown upon the seat of the Iron Throne — upon the very chair, where any man in the hall could see it — and then he sat himself down upon the topmost step, just below the throne and just below the crown, and looked out over the gathered court from there.

A murmur ran through the hall. Pycelle did not fully understand it himself, at first, and then he did, and the understanding raised the hairs on his old arms.

He will not sit the throne until he is crowned. He will not take his father's place until the realm has placed him there and he has been anointed for all to see. The crown sits the throne, and the king sits below it, until the gods and the Faith and the realm have made him king in truth.

It was humility, and it was theatre, and Pycelle had lived long enough to know that the two were not opposites, that the greatest men were those who could make a true thing and a shown thing the same thing. The boy had done it without a word. Half the hall was weeping. The story would grow legs and be told in half the winesinks by evening.

Joffrey spoke, then. Solemn words, well chosen. He spoke of his father, of his grief, of the duty that had come to him too soon and that he would strive to bear as his father would have wished. Pycelle did not attend to all of it. He was watching the faces in the hall, how they turned toward the boy on the step like flowers toward the sun, and thinking that he had served four kings and that this fifth one frightened him more than any of them, and he could not have said precisely why.

And then they came to swear to him.

The first to kneel were the Kingsguard, then the small council.

Pycelle's turn came, in what felt like no time at all. He went forward on his aching knees, the chains heavy at his throat, and he knelt before the boy on the step, and he raised his eyes to swear—

And found the king already looking at him.

Those gold eyes, fixed on him, steady and patient and knowing. They rested on Pycelle for a moment longer than they had rested on any other man who came to swear, and in that moment the old maester felt his bowels turn to water, because he was certain, suddenly and completely, that the king suspected. About the poison. Perhaps even about the queen.

How could he know? Pycelle did not understand how he could know. And yet…

He stammered out his oath. The king inclined his head and looked to the next man, and the terrible eyes released him, and Pycelle crept away on legs that did not want to hold him.

After came the bastard. Ser Jon Snow, the prince's shadow, who came and knelt at the foot of the steps and bowed his dark head and swore his service in a low clear voice, and the king came and reached down — as he would do for the Tyrell knight —and gripped his shoulder, pulling him into a deep hug. What passed between the boys, all gathered could see, was deeper than fealty.

Then the others, in their order, the great lords and the lesser, kneeling one by one to pledge themselves to Joffrey of the House Baratheon, the First of His Name.

Pycelle was not truly paying attention to who went up however. His eyes and thoughts were on the king.

I must tell him, the old man thought, trembling, as the court chanted its acclaim around him. Before he learns it from another tongue. Before Qyburn's patience runs out, or the queen does something more, or— I must go to him, in private, and confess all of it, the poison and the queen and my silence. He will likely have my head for it. No matter that I helped raise him, helped teach him. An old man who knew his king was murdered and held his tongue — yes, he will likely have my head.

Pycelle had spent sixty years keeping his head down so that it might stay upon his shoulders. And now, at the last, he found there was a thing more frightening than dying, and it was those patient golden eyes that already seemed to know.

I will tell him, Pycelle thought. Gods give me the courage. I will tell him everything.

Around him, rising and rising toward the high windows, the court of King's Landing lifted its voice as one and the bells continued to toll.

"Long live the King! Long live the King! LONG LIVE THE KING!"