SANSA
She woke to the loss of his warmth.
It was always the warmth and its disappearance. Joffrey would ease himself out from beneath the covers before dawn, careful, slow, trying not to wake her, and it was the careful slowness that did it every time, the cool air sliding into the place where his body had been.
Sansa surfaced just far enough to feel him lean over her in the dark. He kissed her. Once on the lips, soft, and once on the brow.
"Sleep," he murmured. "It's early yet."
"Mmm." She was already sinking back. "The yard?"
"The yard." A smile in his voice. "I must needs keep myself sharp, and I do not believe you would appreciate a fat husband. Sleep, wife."
And then he was gone, the door easing shut behind him, and Sansa burrowed back down into the warm hollow he had left and pulled it round her like a second blanket. She knew his mornings.
The yard at first light, while the dew was still on the cobbles. She had learned her husband's days as one learned a song, with care so she could hum it without thought. There was a comfort in that she had not expected. She let it carry her back down into sleep.
And in sleep Sansa was a wolf.
She had grown used to these dreams, though they still felt strange when she woke from them.
She was Lady—she ran four-legged and grey through the halls of the Red Keep, and Sansa ran inside her, seeing through her yellow eyes, smelling the world the way a wolf smelled it, a thousand scents braided together where a girl would have smelled only stone and rushes.
It always felt so real. More real than dreaming ought to feel. As though some nights, while her body slept, the truest part of her slipped its skin and went padding off through the dark on four grey legs.
She padded down a serpentine stair. She knew the way without knowing quite how she knew it. The Keep was a tapestry of smells to her now—old smoke and tallow, the green reek of the moat, bread baking somewhere far below, and threaded through all of it the scents of the people she loved, faint trails she could follow like ribbons.
She followed one now.
It led her out into the grey morning and the cold clean air of the yard, and there he was.
Her wolf-self knew him at once. Gold and lion and stag, with a particular warm smell that was only his, the smell she pressed her face into every night.
Joffrey, stripped to a padded jerkin, a blunted sword in his hand, his breath steaming in the chill. Sansa-as-Lady sat on her haunches in the shadow of the wall and watched.
He was so beautiful. Even more so when he fought. She had always thought so, but the wolf saw it differently. His balance, the economy, how he never wasted a motion.
He went against Ser Barristan first, the old white knight, and the old man pressed him hard, their blunted blades ringing across the empty yard. Then Ser Jaime, who fought like water, quick and bright and laughing, and the two of them traded blows and traded jests in the same breath, too low for even a wolf's ears to catch the words half the time, only the easy music of men who liked each other.
"Best not drop that shoulder again, Your Grace," Ser Barristan called.
"I have not done that in years."
"Truly?" The old knight smiled. "My eyes must be deceiving me, you drop it when you tire."
"He drops it when he's losing," said Ser Jaime.
"Nuncle, if this is what losing looks like, I should lose all the time." Her husband japed, they went back at it again, laughing and hacking at each other.
Once that was done, Loras came, all grace, and he and Joffrey went through their drills together, the same forms over and over, the Knight of Flowers calling the counts soft and patient, and Sansa watched her husband's body and thought she would never grow tired of the sight.
Her brother and Joffrey sparred last, and that was different from the rest. There was no jesting in it, not at first—they fought hard, harder than the others, each knowing the other's tricks before he tried them. Lady's hackles rose at the fury of it until she understood it was not fury, it was love, the rough wordless love of brothers, and then she only watched, and was glad.
"Yield," Jon said at last, panting, half keeled over himself, with his blade at Joffrey's throat.
"Never."
"You're dead, Joff."
"A king is never dead. Tis Treason to say so." And Joffrey was laughing, and Jon was laughing, and they clasped arms, both of them streaming sweat in the cold.
After, the men stripped and soaked the ache out in the bathhouse off the yard, still trading their easy talk, and then they dressed, making for the horses, and Lady rose and followed, soft-footed, at a distance.
It was Ghost who noticed her first, and then shortly after, Jon.
"It seems we have a shadow." He had stopped, looking back at the grey wolf in the colonnade. Something eased in his stern face. "Ghost will be glad of the company. They can experience the city together."
Joffrey turned and looked at her.
And for a moment—just a moment—something passed over the king's face that Sansa did not understand. His gold eyes met her yellow ones, and there was a strange knowing in them, a sharpness, almost as though he saw past the wolf to the girl inside it.
As though he knew.
Lady's ears went flat. Then it was gone, smoothed away into his usual warmth, and Joffrey smiled and crouched and held out his hand to her the way you would to any dog.
"Come on, then, my Lady," he said, very serious, as if he spoke to lady of court. "You can pray with us. The Maiden won't mind another wolf."
So she went with them through the city to the great sept, doing her best to ignore the scent of the city and all the new sensations she was feeling in this strange dream.
The High Septon met them at the doors atop the steps and he greeted Joffrey with a real fondness, clasping the king's hands in both his own.
"Your Grace. You honour the gods with your devotion. Few kings have prayed so faithfully."
"Few kings have had so much to pray for, Your High Holiness." Joffrey's voice was light, but there was something under it. "How go the readyings for Dragonstone? The fleet's near gathered. You still have no reservations, yes?"
"The Faith is with you in this, utterly. A war against a man who burns septons is no war at all, but a cleansing. I have said as much from these very steps, and I will say it again until every smallfolk in the realm knows it." The old man's eyes gleamed as they walked. "And the other matter? The ceremony? All is in readiness, Your Grace."
"Soon, then." Joffrey said. "Once my lords are ready to depart."
What ceremony? Sansa wondered, deep in the wolf. What are they speaking of? But Lady had no words to ask, and the men were kneeling now before the altar of the Father, and Joffrey bowed his golden head to pray, and the wolf lay down at his side with her chin on her paws and watched the candlelight, and—
Sansa woke.
She lay still a while, blinking up at the canopy, the dream draining slowly out of her.
Strange, she thought. How strange they are, these dreams. She had been having more and more of them. At first they had come only rarely, but of late they came most nights, and they had a vividness that her other dreams lacked, a realness, as though she truly had been padding through the Keep on grey paws while her body slept. She could still half-smell the bathhouse steam and the candle-smoke of the sept.
It's only my fancy, she told herself. Arya was always the one who wanted to be a wolf, not me. I'm a lady.
Lady slept most nights on the warm stones by the hearth in the outer room, and surely that was all it was—she fell asleep listening to her direwolf breathe, and her sleeping mind made her a wolf because the wolf was near. That was surely all it was. A girl's fancy, nothing more. She would not think on it further.
And yet, the first time she had dreamed it, she had woken and gone to find Lady, and the direwolf had lifted her head and looked at Sansa with her yellow eyes in a way that made the hair stand up on Sansa's arms—as though the wolf had been somewhere, and only just come back, and knew it. Sansa was not sure she liked where that thought led.
A soft knock came at the door.
"Your Grace?" Brienne's voice, low and careful as the woman herself. "Your maids have come, if you're ready for your bath. And the kitchens want to know what you'll break your fast with."
"I'm ready, Brienne. Thank you." Sansa sat up and pushed the hair from her face. "Whatever the kitchens think best. I'm not overly particular this morning."
The maids came in with the hot water and the soaps, three of them, and went to their work, and Sansa let them. They were good girls, and they liked to talk, and Sansa had found she liked to listen—it was how a queen learned what truly went on in her castle, far better than any council.
While they scrubbed and rinsed and combed the tangles from her hair, they chattered of the doings of the Keep, and the city beyond it.
"—all up and down the Street of Steel, Your Grace, every smith working day and night. They can't forge fast enough."
"It's the fleet," said another, working oil through Sansa's wet hair. "The Redwyne ships, they've started coming into the bay. Ever so many of them. My brother counted forty yesterday and says there's more behind."
"And the men. You've never seen the like, Your Grace. Pouring in from everywhere, all wanting to sail for the king against the wicked uncle. The inns are full to bursting and there's tents going up outside the walls."
"For the gods as well, they say. Because of the burning. The septon's been preaching it every day, how it's holy work, fighting a man who'd burn the Seven."
Sansa listened, and said little, and learned much.
They love him, she thought, with a warm secret pride. They love my husband so, that they come from the ends of the realm to fight for him. And they are right to.
When the maids had her bathed and oiled and dressed—a gown of pale grey trimmed in blue, with her hair caught up the southron way—she thanked them prettily and went down to break her fast with her family, while she still could.
She would not have them much longer. The thought brought a sad ache to her chest.
Her mother and Arya were in the small solar that looked east over the river, and her father, and little Rickon, and they broke their fast together with new bread and honey and a dish of sausages that Arya fell upon like a starving animal.
"You eat like the Hound," Sansa told her.
"How would you know?," Arya said around a mouthful, "You spend all your time staring at beautiful King Joffrey."
"I do not!" Sansa flushed. "And he's my husband, so it doesn't—"
"Girls," said their mother, but she was smiling, and her father huffed the quiet laugh he kept for when his children squabbled, and Sansa found she did not even mind, because soon enough there would be no Arya across the table to make it.
Rickon sat in his mother's lap and would not be still, reaching for the honey with sticky fingers, babbling some three-year-old's nonsense. He had grown shy of Sansa these past weeks—he scarcely remembered her, she had been gone from Winterfell so long—but he had taken a fierce liking to watching Bran train in the yard, and wanted only to talk of swords and Shaggydog and when he might have a sword of his own.
Catelyn caught his hand from the honeypot without once breaking off her talk, with the practised ease of a mother of five, and Rickon scowled exactly the way Arya scowled, and Sansa loved them both so much in that moment.
"You'll be glad to be home," she said to her mother, and tried to keep the wistfulness from it.
"I'll be glad to see Robb again." Her mother's eyes softened. "He'll have grown more solemn than ever, holding Winterfell alone all these moons. He was not made to sit still, that boy, no more than his father was." She reached over and tucked a stray hair behind Sansa's ear, a gesture out of Sansa's whole childhood. "But it is no easy thing, leaving a daughter behind. Two of my wolves I take home, and two I leave in the south." Her gaze went, for a moment, toward the door, toward the wider castle where her second son was no doubt already up and at the yard. "Bran a squire, you the queen. You all grow so quickly."
"Robb will want every detail," Arya said. "He'll be cross we saw the wedding and he didn't. He'll make us tell it ten times over." She grinned, sharp and wicked. "I'm going to tell him your crown was ugly."
"It was not—"
"I know. That's why it'll work."
Sansa laughed despite herself, but the laugh had an edge of grief in it, because Robb should have been here.
Her own brother, the heir to Winterfell, and he had not seen her wed. There must always be a Stark in Winterfell. She knew why, and Sansa wouldn't complain, it wouldn't be proper but she did not have to like it.
"He'll see the next one," she said, half to herself.
Her father's grave face eased. "Before the heart tree," He agreed. "Aye. The king and I are of one mind on it."
At some point they would go north, as they would visit all the kingdoms.
"And you'll all be there," Sansa said, her throat tight. "All of you. At home, where it should be."
For a moment no one spoke. Then Ned Stark reached across the table and laid his hand over his daughter's small one.
"Of course sweetling," The kings hand said. "No matter what, you'll never be alone. We're a pack. When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies—"
"—but the pack survives." They finished together.
Sansa smiled, taking comfort in the words and turned her hand over under her father's, and held it, and they finished breaking their fast together while the morning sun climbed over the river and the days they had left grew quietly fewer.
After, she went back to the rooms she shared with her husband. Most married couples did not share a bed. Septa Mordane had been very clear on the matter, in those grave instructive talks. A highborn wife kept her own apartments, the septa had said, and a husband his, and a lady need only suffer her lord's bed when he wished to get an heir on her, and might otherwise keep her own company and her own peace.
If you find the man disagreeable, the septa had said, not unkindly, that is a mercy. You need not see overmuch of him.
When the betrothal had not been confirmed, Sansa had braced herself for that. A husband she saw at meals and in the dark when he wanted her, and the rest of her life her own.
It had not been like that at all.
She crossed to the wide bed they shared and sat on the edge of it and let her hand rest in the place where he slept.
They had not consummated the marriage—not yet, for all her wishing and her attempts to convince the king otherwise —but they shared this bed every night regardless, the two of them, and they talked in the dark until one of them slept, and she woke each morning in the circle of his arms.
Sansa had never in her life slept so well as she slept now, with her husband's heartbeat under her ear and his warmth all around her. She felt safe there, sometimes she woke in the night and simply lay there listening to him breathe, marvelling that this was hers, that she had wanted a thing so badly as a girl and had it turn out to be real and better than the wanting in every way.
I am the most fortunate girl in all the world, Sansa thought, and took great pleasure in it.
She was still a little sad about the other thing. She would not pretend otherwise, even to herself. She wanted him—wanted the whole of him, the thing the songs only ever hinted at and her septa had made sound like a duty and a dread.
She did not believe it would be a dread, not with Joffrey. But he would not, not yet, and she understood his fear even as she thought it foolish, and so she waited, and shared his bed, and was happier than she had any right to be.
She had not been back in their rooms an hour when she heard his step in the corridor.
She knew his mornings, so she had food waiting—cold fowl and fruit and a wedge of hard cheese, the things he liked after the yard. He came in looking a little pale as he tended to these mornings and kissed her, before he fell upon the food with an appetite that made her think of Arya.
"You're as bad as my sister," she told him.
"Your sister has excellent instincts. A man should eat after he works." He tore the leg from the fowl. "Sit with me. Tell me about your morning."
So she did, and he ate and listened, and they talked of small things, easy things—her mother's leaving, Arya's threat to malign her crown to Robb, the Redwyne ships in the bay. It was nothing, and it was everything; it was the warp and weft of being married to him, these small unhurried exchanges that asked nothing and gave so much.
When he had eaten she dressed him for the day.
She liked to do it herself. There were manservants whose whole office was the dressing of the king, and Joffrey had offered, the first time, to call them—you needn't play my squire, Sansa—but she had found she wanted to.
There was an intimacy in it that she treasured, in smoothing the fine wool over his shoulders, in working the small clasps, in setting his collar straight with her own hands. It was a wifely thing. It was hers.
Sansa frowned a little as she saw the new cuts and bruises he had picked up in the yard, but they would heal in time. She did up the last clasp and set her palms flat against his chest and looked up at him, and he looked down at her, and for a moment neither of them moved.
"We'll be late to council," she said.
"Mm. We will." He did not move. He was looking at her but it seemed as if he was looking through her. He seemed lost in thought.
"Joffrey." Sansa called, she treaded her fingers through the back of his golden hair.
He blinked. "I'm looking at my wife. A king is allowed to look at his wife." Her husband smiled, and kissed her brow, and they went down to the council together.
She sat at his left hand at the council table,, and she listened more than she spoke, as her father had taught her a good councillor should.
The great matter of the morning was the city itself. Joffrey had given his uncle Tyrion a new office—Master of Infrastructure, a word Sansa had never heard before the king coined it—and Tyrion sat at the table looking torn between pride and dismay.
"The sewers," Joffrey was saying, "are a disgrace." He spread a map across the table. "Uncle, you'll have Garth, and Grand Maester Pycelle, and the maesters we've sent to Oldtown for. Send for the other workers you'll need. Builders, architects, stonemasons and the like. You'll have Bywater and his gold cloaks to map every street and every drain and every forgotten tunnel under theses hills. We'll take Oldtown and Lannisport for our model and we will remake King's Landing from the stones up. The greatest city in the world ought to smell like it."
"It's an ambitious charge, Your Grace." Tyrion turned his wine cup, mismatched eyes wary. "I confess I'm not certain I'm the man for it."
"You don't need to be certain," said Lord Tywin, who sat as always like something carved from a colder stone than other men. He did not look up from his papers. "You are my son, you will get it done."
A small silence. Lord Tyrion's misshapen face did something complicated.
"Grandfather has the right of it, Nuncle, though his delivery needs work." Joffrey's voice had gone lighter, smoothing the edge of Lord Tywin's words. "Besides—you're forever complaining you're bored. Idleness rots a clever man. Well. Here's the cure for it. You'll be too busy drowning in drains to be bored ever again. I've made you the most high born plumber. You should thank me."
"I'm sure I'll thank you daily, Your Grace," Tyrion said dryly, "in language I'd not use before the queen."
Sansa hid her smile behind her hand.
She knew what this was, though the table spoke only of drains and gold cloaks. She knew because she had heard the truer version of it in the dark, his head beside hers on the pillow, his voice gone soft and earnest.
There are so many things to do but I fear I shall not have the time. I am being pulled in so many directions. I must give the people better everything. Better roads. Better sanitation. Better living. Just… better. It would cost more gold than she could imagine and take, he had said, his whole reign and likely longer. I'll likely not live to see it finished. But it shall be worth it. The best things are more than one man—more than one lifetime. She had fallen asleep against his shoulder, listening while he talked.
He wants to make their lives better, she thought, watching him bent over the map with the rest of the council, the morning light in his golden hair. All of them. Every soul in the realm. That is the whole of what he wants. And she loved him so fiercely in that moment that she had to look down at her hands.
In the afternoon, Sansa took her tea by the lake, with her ladies all around her.
It had become her favourite hour of the day, this one—the green quiet of the godswood-that-wasn't, the little lake bright under the sun, and her ladies gathered on cushions and low chairs with the tea things between them. Margaery was there, and her cousins Elinor and Megga and Alla; and Desmera Redwyne, freckled and merry; and Myranda Royce, who knew every wicked thing about everyone; and Roslin Frey, gentle and shy; and Wynafryd Manderly, all northern sense; and Jeyne Poole, who had been her friend since they were small.
Ser Arys Oakheart stood guard in his white cloak, and Brienne in her blue, the two of them an odd pair, the graceful knight and the great plain warrior woman, but Sansa was glad of them both.
The talk was all of the war, at first.
"My father says it'll be over in a month," said Desmera, pleased. "Once our ships reach the island. The Redwyne fleet against a handful of sellsail and a mad lord—it's hardly a war at all."
"It's the why of it that has everyone roused," said Wynafryd. "Burning the septon. You can't do a thing like that and expect men to follow you. The faith would have likely urged the king to action even if Lord Stannis was not committing treason."
"They say half the smallfolk in the city have tried to take up swords for it." Megga put in. "Wanting to fight for the king and the Faith both."
"They say," said Myranda Royce, with the particular relish she brought to gossip, "that the comet is a sign. King Joffrey's Comet, the smallfolk are calling it—come to herald his reign, they say, a red sword in the sky to show the gods are with him against the wicked uncle." She arched a brow. "Though I did hear a drunk septon in the Flea Bottom swearing it meant the end of the world. But a drunk septon will swear to anything."
"It's beautiful, whatever it means," said Roslin softly, and they all looked up for a moment at the faint red smear of it, just visible against the blue, hanging over the city like a wound that would not close.
Then, the war and the comet exhausted, the talk turned—as it always turned, with her girls—to men.
Myranda led them there, as she always did. "Now. We are all friends here, and the queen will forgive us, I hope, for we are dreadful."
She leaned in, eyes dancing. "Confess. Who is the handsomest man at court? And you may not say the king, Your Grace, it isn't sporting, you've already won him."
Sansa laughed. "I'll allow it. He is rather handsome, though."
"Disgracefully so. It's unfair to the rest of them." Myranda waved a hand. "No, we want the also-rans. I'll start, since I've no shame. The Knight of Flowers."
Margery giggled softly. "Truly Myranda? I can let him know if you wish."
The vale girl grinned. "Oh I doubt his heart lies with me."
"Lord Dondarrion looked dashing at the wedding tourney did he not?" Asked Jeyne.
"He did." Alls nodded.
"He's quite old isn't he?" Sansa asked. She had heard he was almost three and twenty.
Her ladies nodded in agreement. Myranda took back the reins. "He is, but not so old as to be unpleasant, trust me. Hmm, Ser Balon Swann has a very fine jaw. And the younger Lannister boy, Lancel, is coming along nicely now he's grown into his chin—"
"Lancel." Sansa seized on it, careful to keep her voice idle, a lady making conversation. "What do you think of him, Myranda? Truly."
She had her reasons for asking. Joffrey's warm voice came to her. Lancel wants knighting and a wife and a purpose, and Myranda Royce wants a husband who isn't three times her age and half dead, and the Royces are the vale now and will be wanting a tie to the Rock. A match between them is likely to serve everyone.
She wondered if Myranda knew her future was being woven in a marriage bed she'd never see.
Myranda considered, head tilted. "Handsome enough," she allowed. "But then, most Lannisters are—it's the gold, it covers a multitude of dullnesses." A wicked glint. "Still. He's young, and he's pretty, and his teeth are all his own, and at this point, Your Grace, I'll tell you truly—anything is better than another grey old lord with gout and three dead wives. If the boy can dance and doesn't smell, I'd not send him from my door."
The ladies laughed, and Sansa laughed with them, and filed it away to tell Joffrey in the dark. She'd have him, she would say. And it would be one more thread drawn tight, one more corner of the realm bound to the center, and Myranda would never know that her queen had spun it over tea by a lake.
That evening the king and queen took their supper alone, in their rooms, as they did when the day's business let them.
And after—after the plates were cleared and the candles burned low and the great Keep settled into its night—they kissed.
That was usual. They kissed most nights, slow and warm, and then they lay tangled together and talked until they slept, and Sansa had made her peace with it being only that, because there was care in Joffrey's every word, movement and touch, and only that was more than most wives ever got.
So Sansa expected the kissing to gentle into talk, the way it always did, and was already half-drowsy and content when she felt the change in him.
He drew back, and looked at her, and there was something different in his face. She could see him deliberating something, his emotions at war with each other across his face.
"I've been a poor husband to you," A sigh left his lips.
Why should he think that? She had no complaints in truth. He was simply perfect. "You have not—"
"In one thing." He touched her cheek. "I've been remiss in my duties, wife. I've been neglecting some." And he bent and kissed her throat, just below the ear, slow, and warmth ran down through her whole body like wine, and Sansa felt the breath go out of her in a small surprised rush.
"Oh," she said. Were they doing this? Now?
He kissed her throat again, lower, and she felt herself flush from her breast to the roots of her hair, a heat that had nothing of shame in it and everything of wanting. Then, gently, he drew back to look at her, and she made a small sound of protest that made him smile.
"I changed my mind," he grimaced. "You deserve an explanation I think. Are you not curious?"
"I had decided not to ask, husband." Sansa admitted. "I was afraid you'd talk yourself back out of it."
That made him laugh, but the laugh faded into something graver. "I have been lectured and lectured this last week. Jon and I had words as well. He put a thing to me I couldn't unhear." He took her hand and turned it over in his, tracing the lines of her palm, not quite meeting her eyes, the hesitation still clung to him. "I've held off for my own reasons and for fear of the childbed. That fear is honest, and I'll not pretend it's gone. But I was so busy guarding you from one danger that I never saw the other I was leaving you in." He looked up then. "The realm is not so secured as I would have hoped for when I took the throne. Stannis today, and after Stannis the gods only know what—the realm's never short of men who'd see me fall. And they say a king with no heir of his body is a brittle thing. If aught happened to me with no child of mine to follow… I love my brother, but I know him. He would not enjoy ruling, and though he would do his best, he hasn't the heart for it. The realm would crack like ice on a pond. If ill were to befall me, first soul they'd reach for to mend it would be my queen. A childless widow is a prize to be married off, or worse. But the mother of the king's heir—" his hand tightened on hers "—she is the realm's own treasure, and near untouchable, and safe. By keeping you a maiden I thought I was protecting you. Jon made me see it was not so simple and reminded me that somethings are bigger than my wants."
"So this is—" Sansa's throat had gone tight. Fear and disappointment squeezed her heart. "This is the realm. Duty."
"No." He said it at once, fierce. He brought her palm to his lips. "You are more than that. More than the realm. Do not ever believe I come to you merely out of duty. Duty cannot light a flame. " He smiled, that gentle wicked thing. "And it is not a substitute for desire."
And Sansa, who had braced for him to talk himself out of it again, felt the last of her fear go out of her like a tide, and caught his face in both her hands, and kissed him with everything she had.
"Will it—" She had to stop and find her voice. "Will it hurt? Very much?"
"A little." He did not lie to her; he never lied to her. "The first time. I'll make it hurt as little as I can."
In the end it was better than the wedding, better than the crown, better than the dreams she'd dreamed as a girl when she'd dreamed of this very thing and gotten every part of it wrong. She had not known. No one had told her. How could her septa have known and never told her?
And then she understood why, perhaps.
Sansa remembered, after, lying spent and tangled and impossibly happy in his arms, a passage from The Seven-Pointed Star. The Book of the Maiden, that her septa used to read to her in the cool hours, in that grave devotional voice. Awaken not the pleasures of the flesh before their proper season, the Maiden's book warned, for it is a hard thing to put a sweetness back into the box, once you have taken it out and tasted it.
Oh, Sansa thought, dazed and laughing inwardly at herself. Oh. That's what they meant. That's what they were guarding against. Because she understood now, with her husband's heartbeat slowing under her cheek and her whole body humming, exactly why a girl should not be given this too soon. She would have begged him for it every single night since the wedding, Joffrey likely wouldn't have been able to give an excuse since they had already done it. Sansa wanted to beg him for it again now, this minute. She understood his hesitance at last, the hesitance she had thought so foolish, and found it had not been foolish at all.
"Joffrey," she whispered into the dark.
"Mm."
"I love you." Her voice cracked on it, and she found, to her surprise, that her eyes had filled and spilled over, the tears running warm and silent down into his skin where her cheek rested against him. They were not sad tears. She had not known a body could weep purely from being too full of something. "I love you so much I don't know where to put it all. It frightens me a little. I didn't know there was so much of it."
He turned his head. She felt him find the wet on her cheek, and go still.
"You're crying," he said softly.
"I know." She laughed, wet and helpless. "I can't help it. I'm not sad. I've never been less sad in all my life. It's only— it's too much, Joffrey. There's too much of it to hold."
His arm tightened around her, drawing her closer, until there was no space left between them anywhere. He kissed the tears at her cheeks, one and then the other.
"Then leave it here," he said. "With me. I'll keep it safe for you. However much there is."
"Say you'll stay, say we'll always be together."
"We will." Joffrey promised. "I plan to always come home."
Sansa clung to his promise and held him even tighter still. As she closed her eyes, and listened to her husband's heart, and thought that no girl in all the long history of the world had ever been half so happy as she was in that moment.
RENLY
The wind smelled of salt and tar and the thousand small reeks of a fleet at sea, and Renly Baratheon stood in the prow of the Arbor Queen and thought that war, for all the songs made of it, began with a great deal of waiting and a sour stomach.
Behind him the fleet came on across the grey water, more sails than a man could count, fat-bellied Redwyne war galleys and Arbor wine-cogs pressed into harder service, sleek narrow-sea ships and the great dromonds following suit. They flew two banners between them.
The grape cluster of the Redwynes, burgundy on blue, that had ruled the Arbor since before the Conquest. And the king's own colours, which were new, and which Renly could not look at without a small private smile—a golden stag, crowned with a rendition of the kings own crown, littered with red rubies and black diamonds, upon a field of black and a border of gold. The reverse of the true Baratheon arms, the black stag on gold that Renly himself wore.
Trust the boy to take his father's sigil and turn it inside out, and make it look as though that had been the right way all along. It should not have worked. Black was a hard colour to love. Yet it did work; the gold stag blazed on the black, and the smallfolk had taken to it at once, as they seemingly took to everything their young king did.
As they had taken to the sending-off.
Renly had seen a great many spectacles in his life, and helped staged not a few of them himself. He had a weakness for pageantry. He knew it for a weakness and indulged it anyway, because something done beautifully could move men in ways that a thing done plainly never could.
Renly had thought, going in, that there was little more his nephew could show him about a show. He had been wrong, and he did not mind admitting it, even to himself.
They had gathered the host before the Great Sept of Baelor, on the morning of the sailing. Thousands of men in mail and boiled leather, and behind them and around them and on every rooftop and in every window, the smallfolk of King's Landing, come in their tens of thousands to see their king bless his war.
Joffrey had climbed the marble steps alone, in cloth-of-gold, with the High Septon in his crystal crown beside him, and he had spoken to them. Not as a king commonly spoke, in proclamations read by a herald, but as a man speaks to other men, his clear young voice carrying somehow to the very back of that vast throng, so that fishwives in Flea Bottom swore after that they had heard every word.
"Men of the Seven Kingdoms!" the boy king had begun, and the words had gone out over them and quieted them, rank on rank. "Look to your left. Now to your right. Look at the man beside you." Renly had watched ten thousand heads turn, and turn back. "That man is your brother now. Not your brother in blood—better than blood. Your brother in salt, in the sea you'll cross together, in the danger you'll share. Before this is done, some of you will hold that man while he dies, and some of you will live because that man held you. Remember his face. There is no bond in all the world stronger than the one you forge this morning, and you forge it with true and honest men, some of whose names you do not yet know."
He had let them feel it. Then he had lifted his voice.
"They will tell you that you go to fight my uncle. You do not. You go to fight a man who took fire to a septon—bound him, and lit him, and stood and watched him burn, an old man whose only crime was to keep the gods our grandfathers kept. You go to fight a man who threw down the Father and the Mother and the Crone and put them to the torch in their own holy house, to please a foreign witch and her foreign fire. This is no rebellion you sail against. A rebellion is an honest thing, a quarrel over who shall rule. This is a sickness. This is a man who would burn the Seven out of the world, and you—you—are the cure the gods have sent. When the singers make the song of this, and they will, they will not call you soldiers. They will call you the men who saved the Faith."
The roar had begun then, and the king had ridden over the top of it.
"I know what waits for you on that black rock. I will not lie to you—I will never lie to you, that is my oath to you this morning and every morning I am your king. Some of you will not come home." He had let the silence crash back down, and it had, total, and thousand of souls had gone still as stone. "I'll not pretty it. War takes its tithe, and some of you standing in this square will pay it on Dragonstone's sand. So hear me swear this, before the gods and before the city and all its people. The man who falls in my name does not fall into the dark. His children will be fed at my table. His widow will be kept under my roof. And his name—" his nephew's voice had cracked across the square like a whip "—his name will be carved into the stone of this sept, and read aloud from these steps on this day every year that there is a King's Landing to read it in. A thousand years from now, men will speak your names who never knew your faces. That is what I can give you against your one short life. It is not enough. I know it is not enough. Nothing could be. Nothing will ever be."
And then—and this was the moment Renly would remember to the end of his days, the moment he understood he was watching something rarer than mere cleverness— Joffrey had dropped his voice, and somehow it had carried further soft than it had loud.
"And it shames me. Do you think it does not? You will cross the sea and storm the walls and bleed into the sand, in my cause, for my crown, in my name—and where will your king be? Behind his walls. Safe. Warm. Clean." He had said the word clean as though it tasted foul. "My council forbids me the deck of a ship. They are right, gods curse them, they are right, and it is the bitterest cup I have drunk since the gods placed this golden crown atop my head. There is no place in all the world I would rather be than at the front of you with a sword in my hand. They will not let me. So I have found another way to come with you."
And he had drawn back the cloth-of-gold from his right forearm, and shown them. Renly had been near enough to see. A cut, half-healed, and below it the faint silver lines of older cuts, many of them, a ladder of them up the inside of the arm.
"Since the day my uncle's treason was cried aloud," the king had said, "I have come to this sept each morning, and after my prayers, I have opened my arm. A little. Here, before the Father and the Mother, where oaths are made." He had lifted the arm so they could see the bright bead of new blood welling. "So that some part of me might bleed alongside you, even if my councillors will not let the rest of me come."
There was a wave of buzzing at his words. Then King Joffrey had called them up the steps. Lord Redwyne. Lord Renly. Come forward.
Renly had climbed the marble in the hush of fifty thousand held breaths, and knelt, and the boy-king had dipped two fingers in his own blood and drawn a stripe down Renly's right cheek, warm and wet, the same way the wildlings beyond the Wall were said to paint themselves, the way no civilized southron lord had done in living memory.
"You go with my blood on you," Joffrey had said, low, only for the two of them, and then louder, for all the world: "Every man who sails in my name shall wear it! Let my uncle's sellswords look across the water and see ten thousand faces marked with their king's blood, and know that I am with every one of you, that your king loves you and goes with you, that I have bled for you before ever you draw steel!"
The High Septon had raised his hands then and pronounced the thing holy—the war blessed in the sight of the Seven Who Are One, the victory assured, the men who fell made martyrs and seated at the Father's own table.
And the roar that went up from the host and the city both had been a living thing, a wall of sound that Renly had felt in his breastbone and the soles of his feet.
I have staged pageants my whole life, Renly had thought, standing there with the warm blood drying on his cheek and his ears ringing with the love of so many strangers, and I have never in my life staged anything to touch that.
He had meant to study the boy's tricks, as one mummer studies another. He had found, somewhere in the middle of it, that he had stopped studying and started believing, along with all the rest.
And the worst thing—the part that should have frightened him more than it did—was that he could not for the life of him say which parts the boy had meant and which he had merely performed, because Joffrey performed even the things he meant, and meant even the things he performed, and somewhere under the gold there was a furnace that Renly had never once been allowed to see.
Last, the king had given them their tokens of office. To Redwyne, a baton of black wood with tassels of gold thread, the marshal's staff of the king's host. And to Renly—
Renly's hand went, now, to the dagger at his hip. Valyrian steel, the ripples in the dark blade like smoke frozen in metal. The king's own blade, that his father gave him, that Robert gave him, that I am to bear until this is done and lay back in his hand when it is.
It was worth a castle, the dagger, worth a dozen castles. Not just because it was Valyrian steel, but because it was the kings dagger. Joffrey had handed it over as easily as another man might lend a cloak against the rain.
"You talked me down. So you go in my place. Bring it back to me with Stannis' blood on it," the king said, grave, his gold eyes piercing. "Or don't bring it back at all."
A gull screamed overhead and brought him out of it.
Renly touched his own cheek, where the blood was, and frowned. It had been three days. The mark should have dried to a brown flaking crust by now, should have washed half away in the sea-spray.
It had not.
The stripe down his cheek was as red and wet and bright as the morning it was painted there, as though the king had marked him an hour ago and not some hundred leagues behind them.
Qyburn, he thought, and the name left a taste in his mouth like a coin held too long under the tongue. The boy's creepy pet chainless maester, the one no one quite spoke of.
There was no doubt some trick to it, some alchemist's cunning mixed into the blood to keep it fresh and red. He did not care to know the particulars. There were corners of his nephew's reign that Renly had decided, very deliberately, not to look into too closely. A wise man knew which stones to leave unturned.
Still. Every man in the fleet wore the mark, and every man wore it red and fresh, and there was not a one of them who did not touch it now and again the way Renly had just done, and stand a little taller after.
Whatever it is, it works. That thought was Joffrey entire. Renly had stopped trying to decide whether to be charmed or unnerved by his nephew somewhere around the coronation, and had settled on both.
"My lord." Lord Paxter Redwyne came up beside him at the rail, a small spare man with a great hooked nose and the two-coloured hair gone mostly grey now, marshal's baton tucked under his arm. He wore the blood-stripe too; it sat oddly on his sober face. "Driftmark's bastard wants a word. I thought you'd want to hear it with me."
Aurane Waters had come across from a different ship by boat that morning, and he joined them now at the rail, sea-silver hair whipping in the wind, Joffrey's mark on his cheek, looking as much at home on a heaving deck as Renly felt out of place on one.
He has the Velaryon look, Renly thought, the old dragon-blood, pale and pretty. There's a deal of that look about, lately. More than is comfortable.
"No doubt you want assurance," Waters said, before either lord could ask. "About my brother. About the turning."
"I want certainty," said Redwyne, "which no man can give me, so assurance will do. When we close with Stannis's fleet, the narrow-sea lords come over to us. You're sure of it."
"I am, as I've already told you. As sure as a man can be of other men." Waters leaned on the rail. "Understand, my lords—nobody loves Stannis. Nobody ever has."
And wasn't that just the saddest thing, Renly thought, amused despite himself.
The bastard was still speaking. "You don't follow Stannis Baratheon for love; you follow him because he's capable or perhaps you're afraid, well now the red woman's burnings have used up most of the fear's usefulness and turned it to disgust. Those lords came to Dragonstone as loyal men. If they could have fled, they would have, sick to the stomach as I was. My brother is no liar and he will not follow a madman as our father did. The moment your line dresses for battle and they see which way the wind sets, they'll come about. They've no wish to drown for a man who burns the Seven and has no coin left to spare" A thin smile.
Renly felt as if he had found a kindred spirit when he heard the bastard speak of his surly older brother. "Stannis is rich in righteousness and poor in everything else. Righteousness doesn't caulk a hull."
Redwyne grunted, which from Redwyne was a kind of satisfaction, and went off to see to his ships.
Renly stayed at the rail a while longer, watching the grey swells, and thought about how history rhymed.
Sixteen years ago there was a man besieged, while Redwyne galleys sealed the water around him and starved him slow. That man had been Stannis, in the rebellion, holding Storm's End against the Tyrells while Paxter Redwyne's ships closed the bay.
Stannis had been a rebel then too, but for good reason. He had done as commanded, had eaten rats and boiled leather rather than yield his brother's seat.
Renly had been a boy inside those walls, too young to remember much beyond the hunger. And here was Stannis again, on a rock in the sea, with Redwyne ships closing round him. The same besieger. Near enough the same prisoner. Only everything else was turned about.
Last time Stannis was the one who would not bend, holding faith past all reason, and the realm sang of it after.
This time, Stannis was the madman who burned holy men alive, the usurper, the traitor crying lies about a king the whole realm loved—and Renly was on the besieger's side, standing on a Redwyne deck beside a Velaryon bastard who wore a face that reminded him of cousin Rhaegar, sailing under a banner that was the old Baratheon arms turned inside out.
The world had put its clothes on backwards and somehow looked the better for it.
He almost laughed. If anyone had told me, that hungry winter, that one day I'd help besiege my own brother on a boy's behalf, I'd have thought them moon-mad.
The strangest part of it, the part Renly turned over and could not quite get comfortable with, was that the rebel could have been him.
He had thought about it. He was honest enough with himself to admit that much, in the privacy of his own skull.
Renly Baratheon, beloved, handsome, rich in friends—if any man in the realm had been placed to reach for a crown, it was he, not sour joyless Stannis. He had the charm Stannis lacked and the friends Stannis lacked and the easy way with men that made lords want to follow and smallfolk want to cheer. He could have made a very fine king, in the way that mattered to crowds, which was the way of seeming.
But that was the jest of it, wasn't it. He had no need.
He had everything he wanted already.
Storm's End, and his tourneys and his feasts and beautiful young knights, and a nephew on the throne who valued him and gave him real work and real honour and the king's own dagger to carry to war. Why reach for a crown, and all the grief that came chained to it? And more than that—Joffrey is loved.
That was the wall against which any ambition broke. A man might usurp an unloved king and call it deliverance.
Reach for the throne of a king the realm adored however… a king the smallfolk named comets after, and you became Stannis. You became the villain of the song.
Renly had no taste at all for being the villain of the song. He much preferred to be the gallant uncle in the gold-and-green, applauded wherever he went.
Better Joffrey crowned and me his right hand, he thought, than me crowned and hated, or me dead.
He remembered Joffrey's proclamation that he would go himself to claim Dragonstone. They had all of them gone pale at that.
Foolish nephew, he thought, a young king, beloved, newly crowned, with no son of his body yet—you cannot hazard yourself on a battlefield. We have walked this road before. Remember Daeron, the Young Dragon, who conquered Dorne at fourteen and was dead at eighteen with all his conquest undone the day after. The realm cannot lose you. If you fell, what then? Tommen on the throne at—what is he, eight? A child king and a nest of regents squabbling over his head, and everything we've built come apart in a season. No.
It was good that he had seen reason.
Better this, Renly thought again, firmly, Better me and Redwyne at risk than you. Though I suppose you are here aren't you? In your own way. The blood was still just as wet, still just as red.
He looked out at the men. They were singing, somewhere amidships—a marching hymn the septons had taught them, about the Warrior's burning sword.
They were in better spirits sailing to war than most men Renly had known went to a feast. Every face marked with the king's red blood, every heart full of the king's borrowed courage.
That is his true gift, Renly thought. Not the cleverness, though he's clever. Not the planning, though gods know he plans. It's that. He can put his own courage into ten thousand chests and send them off to die smiling, and make every one of them feel he goes with them.
Men would say Robert had been able to do something similar in his prime. Renly did not truly remember. When he thought of his older brother now, he thought of him in his cups or at the end, drunk on the poppy. And so if Renly didn't remember…
Where did he learn it? Renly wondered, not for the first time. No one taught him. Cersei's poison and Robert's drinking, and out of that comes—this. This golden thing.
It was the great riddle of the reign, and Renly had given up expecting an answer.
Dragonstone rose out of the sea on the fourth day, and it was every bit as grim as Renly remembered from the last time he was here seeing Edric off.
How are you doing my boy? Renly wondered. I hope you are well still.
Stannis might well be mad, but he did not believe he would harm the boy, especially not when he was so beloved by his ugly little daughter.
She had grown fond of having an older brother when Joffrey had visited and when he returned to the city of kings, she had begged and begged for another brother to play with, going so far as to plead with Robert himself. Edric, that sweet young lad, was the answer, to Selyse's great displeasure.
The island remained black fang of rock, and the great castle that crouched upon it was blacker still—those queer Valyrian towers worked into the shapes of dragons, the thousand gargoyles snarling from its walls, the whole brooding pile sitting in the shadow of the Dragonmont, the smoking mountain at its back. Always a thread of smoke rose from the mountain's broken summit, faint and grey against the sky.
Renly remembered the smell of the place, sulphur and salt and old ash, and fancied he could smell it already across the water though they were still too far for that to be true.
"There." Redwyne had come back to the rail, baton in hand, all business now. He pointed. "Stannis's fleet. Forming up at the harbour mouth, see. He means to fight us on the water before we land." He squinted his old sailor's eyes. "Fewer than I'd feared. Half what he should have. The bastard's lords have already started slipping their moorings, I think, or he's spent his coin and can't man what he has."
The two fleets came together in the grey afternoon, under a sky where the comet hung red and impossible by daylight, and it was less a battle than a betrayal made visible.
It began ordinarily enough—a flight of arrows, the crash and grind of a galley ramming a galley, the first screams carrying thin across the water. Renly drew his warhammer and kept a hand on the king's Valyrian blade and felt useless having done so, a lord on a deck with no one yet to fight.
Then, even as the lines closed, it happened, as Waters had promised. Up and down Stannis's line, ships came about. Not fleeing—turning.
Narrow-sea galleys that had been bearing down on the Redwyne van suddenly heeled hard over and fell upon the ships beside them, their own erstwhile fellows, oars churning the grey water white. Renly saw a great dromond run out oars on both sides and smash into two of its neighbours at once, and saw men leap from deck to deck with axes, and saw a banner come down—some sea-lord's sigil he didn't know—and the white flag of surrender run up the mast in its place, to a ragged cheer that carried across the chop.
It was over almost before it was a battle.
Stannis's fleet, such as it was, came apart from the inside like a rotten apple, half of it turning on the other half, and what few ships stayed loyal to the rebel were swarmed and boarded and taken or sent to the bottom.
Renly never once swung the hammer. He stood in the prow and watched his nephew's war win itself.
"That," said Redwyne, with grudging wonder, "is the easiest sea battle I have fought in fifty years on the water."
"Perhaps His High Holiness was right and this was all ordained by the gods," Renly said.
They put their boats over and made for the strand below the castle, the loyal fleet and the new-turned ships together, a great mass of men splashing ashore onto the black sand of Dragonstone in the long red light. Above them the castle brooded, silent, its gargoyles watching. No sortie came out to meet them. No arrows fell.
Stannis pulls back behind his walls, Renly thought, to make us pay for them stone by stone.
Well. They had men enough, and time, and the kings blood and the gods, or so the High Septon said.
Renly's boots hit the wet sand and he looked up at the black towers and thought, We have you now, brother. Such a long strange road, to come to this.
And then the world changed.
The comet above flared.
There was no other word for it. The red wound in the sky, that had hung there bleeding for a moon and more, brightened—suddenly, hugely, casting a second crimson light across the black sand so that for an instant every man's shadow doubled, one shadow thrown by the dying sun and one by the burning star. Men cried out and shielded their eyes. Renly's breath stopped in his chest.
Then came the sound.
It rolled across the island from somewhere up the mountain, or under it, or inside it—a screech, vast and grinding and alive, a sound no throat that Renly knew could make, a sound like the world's own hinges tearing, like a thing waking that had slept a thousand years.
It went on too long. It climbed too high.
Ten thousand men stood frozen on the black strand with the doubled red light on their faces and that screaming filling the sky, and not one of them so much as breathed.
And the Dragonmont answered.
The mountain's broken summit, that had smoked so gently all these years, split with a roar that flattened men to their knees. Fire vomited up into the bleeding sky, a column of it, red and gold and furnace-white, and the earth itself heaved underfoot, and a wave of heat rolled down the slope and across the strand like the breath of something enormous.
Ash began to fall. The sea hissed where the first burning stones came down.
Renly Baratheon stood on the black sand with his nephew's Valyrian dagger forgotten in his hand and the king's fresh blood bright upon his cheek, and stared up at the erupting mountain and the screaming light, and for the first time since he was a boy hungry behind the walls of Storm's End, he was utterly and completely afraid.
What, he thought, in all the seven hells, has my clever nephew sent us to?
TYWIN
The boy spilled his blood as though he had a surfeit of it.
Tywin Lannister, Warden of the West, Lord of Casterly Rock, Lord Paramount of the Westerlands and former Hand of the King, stood at the solar window and watched what remained of the host break apart below, the river of marked men flowing down through the city toward the bay, every face striped with the king's red.
The sea would have them within the hour. He had seen many armies march in his time. He could not recall one that went to war singing. The closest he could think of was when the whole realm had united to destroy the band of nine.
Behind him, at the desk that had been Robert's and Aerys's before him, the king sat over his ledgers with a quill in hand, signing and stamping, as though he had not just opened his own arm before the city.
There was a flagon of Arbor gold at his elbow and two cups, yet empty and untouched.
"You spend your blood cheaply, Your Grace." Tywin said, not turning from the glass.
"Does that trouble you, Grandfather?" A thread of amusement; the boy was forever half-laughing at grave things. He had been that way since his accident, perhaps even longer, Tywin was not quite sure. The quill scratched on as his grandson spoke. "A few drops. You've spilled rather more in your time."
"Other men's." Tywin turned and countered. "Yours is the blood royal. You let it run down your arm for a mob, and the first rain will wash it off their cheeks. A gesture that lasts a morning is a morning wasted."
"Ordinarily perhaps, but it won't wash." Joffrey set the quill in its stand, sanded the page, and rose. "Qyburn put something in the bowls they distributed it out in. The mixture will hold a sennight on the skin, perhaps two, even with the rain and sea-spray. It will stay as red as when they were marked." Joffrey came round the desk and crossed to the window, to stand at his grandfather's shoulder, and looked down with him at the departing men and the raving small folk. "So it isn't just a morning's gesture. It will still be bright on their faces when they take Stannis' walls."
Below them the host poured through the square, and the smallfolk lined the way ten deep, throwing flowers, lifting their children to see the men that had spent the morning being marked. The sound of it came up faint to the top of Aegon's high hill, a sea-roar of love.
"Look, grandfather." The boy said. "They believe I go with them. It will give them comfort, perhaps even strength, and so they will fight harder when the time comes. Everyone is happy. The fighters and those who remain. That's worth a few drops of me."
Tywin looked. He did the boy that courtesy. He saw the king spoke true.
Some of the commoners were gathered about the red keep. All of them smiling and cheering. A woman below had hoisted a babe onto her shoulders and the babe's face too had been daubed with a red stripe, a mother's foolishness, paint not blood.
Tywin saw men and women flying the new royal banner as well. He saw the jest for what it was.
"Stannis names me bastard." The king had chuckled when he had put forth the design. "Let him fall to bastard colours."
Tywin thought it foolish. "If anyone suspects—"
"Why would they?" Joffrey questioned. "Because of the word of a madman? No. Even if there was evidence, they will not believe. They will not want to. The same way you do not."
Even bringing up his grandson's supposed bastardry left a foul taste in his mouth. The argument had not been flawed, Tywin Lannister still did not want to believe that the whore spoke true, perhaps she had just lied to get under his skin. But then he remembered Jaime's eyes.
Tywin shook his head as he looked at the flapping banners, he thought it foolish still.
"You build your house on their love," Said Tywin.
Joffrey smiled. "In part."
"Then you build it on sand." He had spent a lifetime watching crowds, and trusted them not at all. "Love is the frailest thing there is. I have seen men loved by thousands fall in an afternoon." He nodded down at the cheering masses. The boy was risking it all on something he could not maintain.
"A bad harvest, a hard winter, a plague come up off those very docks—and the same throats that scream your name today will scream for your head before the snow melts. Love cannot be commanded. It cannot be relied upon." Tywin let his gloved hand rest on the cold stone of the sill.
"Then what, Grandfather?" Joffrey asked, though the boy was not stupid, there was only one answer, he likely just wanted him to say it. Tywin obliged him.
"Fear. A man may stop loving you between one breath and the next, for no cause he could name. A man who fears you at dawn fears you still at dusk."
"Spoken like the man who drowned the Reynes." Joffrey said it almost fondly, his gold eyes on the crowd. "I don't dispute a word. The West hasn't so much as twitched in thirty years, because every lord in it was raised on the Rains of Castamere and knows what becomes of a house that crosses you. Fear works. I'd never tell you otherwise."
"But." Tywin heard the word coming from a long way off.
"But it curdles." Joffrey set both hands on the sill and leaned, watching the knot of small folk making merry. "Push a man hard enough, long enough, and his fear turns to hate. And hate is patient, Grandfather. Hate waits. A feared king is safe until the hour he is weak—and then every man he ever frightened comes at once, with knives, because they have all been sharpening them for years. Aerys was feared. It did not save him on his own floor."
Aerys had been mad and a fool in the end. If he had but seen reason, seen Cersei—
He cut the thought off. The past was the past, Aerys was dead and it was Tywin's blood on the throne now as it would've been then.
"A king must never be weak." Tywin instructed.
"An easy thing to say." Said the king, amused.
Tywins lips thinned. "And what king has love saved? They weep at their funeral and laugh before the pyres run cold."
"Love is fickle, aye. I'll grant you that freely." The boy turned his head. "But mark the difference. When a feared king stumbles, they finish him. When a loved king stumbles—" he nodded again at the adoring crowd "—they help him to his feet. I would rather be helped up."
A silly notion, all sustained by continued performance. Tywin was no dancing monkey, not like his father. And the king seemed to be forgetting a detail. "Until the harvest fails."
"Then I'll have fear in reserve. For the men who understand nothing else." His grandson's eyes caught the afternoon light, and for a moment they were Joanna's eyes, and Cersei's, and not the boy's at all. "You have served well there, I think. As the reserve."
He would not be moved, Tywin knew. The boy could be quite stubborn when he wished to be.
Below, the host sang on toward the sea.
For a while neither spoke. They watched the last of the host file out, and Tywin Lannister let the silence work, because he had learned over a long life that a man revealed himself most in the lies he told, and in silence.
It was the king who broke it. "Come, let us sit."
They left the window, crossed to the desk, and Joffrey poured the Arbor gold at last—two cups, filling them himself, which a king need not have done.
"You did not bring me here to debate statecraft," Tywin said, accepting the cup. "Why am I here?"
"To watch the host off, of course. And to answer a question I've had, where no one can hear you answer it." Joffrey took a sip of his wine. "Elia Martell. Why did you have her raped and killed? Her, and her children."
Tywin's face did not change. It had not changed for graver matters than this, it did not change now. He drank, once, and set the cup down on the desk.
"I gave no such command. I told Ser Gregor to bring me the Targaryen children. The manner was his own." He did not soften it. Softening was for lesser men. "I did not tell him to spare the woman. I doubt I named her at all. I had Ned Stark's van rushing down from the Trident and a madman at my back. The princess was an afterthought. That she died as she died was Clegane's work, and Lorch's. Not mine."
"Mm." The boy made the small sound in his throat, and Tywin knew he did not believe a word of it.
He found he did not much care. He had told the lie to Robert, and to the realm. It served. It could not be disproved, and Gregor Clegane would go to his grave before he gainsaid it.
"Whatever its author," the king went on, "it has stained us. Sixteen years, and Dorne still smells it on us." He turned his wine cup. He seemed to decide something in that moment before he spoke again, seemingly changing the subject. "Lord Stark means to go home soon, I think."
The shift did not fool Tywin. The boy was circling. "He has been Hand a short while to be leaving it."
"He never wanted it. He took it for father, and then stayed to watch over Sansa. But Sansa is queen now, and surer of herself by the day." Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "And Winterfell is his home, and wildlings are massing north of the wall. He'll want to be there. I'll not hold him."
"Then you will want a new Hand." Tywin said it flatly. He had been Hand to Aerys for two decades and had ruled the kingdom for him in truth. They both knew there was only one man in the realm fit for it.
"I will." Joffrey met his eyes. "It cannot be you."
Tywin raised one brow, put it together and a cold part of him gave the boy a grudging mark.
"You'll want my reasons, I'm sure." Joffrey said.
"I know your reasons. You'll give them anyway." Tywin said, tone bone dry.
The boy almost laughed. "It's not for lack of competence. It's the memory you carry. Castamere. The Sack. Elia. The smallfolk see Tywin Lannister and some of them still hear children screaming in the Red Keep." He spread his hands. "They love me, Grandfather, without reservation. That love is worth more than your gold, and I'll not spend a copper of it on your good name. You may remain on the council, I value your advice but having you as my hand would cost me. Only a little maybe, but a little is too much, when I needn't pay it at all."
There was no pleasure in being weighed so by his own grandson, but Tywin was not a lesser man and so took it without flinching. There was a cold logic to it.
"This is your binding of the realm. You mean to court Dorne, and I am the price."
"No." Joffrey denied. Tywin blinked. "I have no plan to court Dorne, not while the Martells hold it. Doran is patient and Oberyn is poison, and neither will truly take my hand while you or Gregor Clegane breathe. I'll not give them you. And giving up Clegane now would do less than nothing." The gold eyes hardened. "But see what it costs me that I can't even attempt to court them. I am building a realm of seven kingdoms, and I am working with six. Five in truth. Dorne sits out. A closed fist in the south, a door an enemy may walk through one day. Because of one night, sixteen years gone. Because of you, and your Mountain that rode."
"You think it a mistake, Your Grace?" Tywin understood. That was not too surprising. The boy had some steel, but perhaps not as much as he'd hoped for. "The woman and the children." He took up his cup again and drank, watching the boy over the rim.
Joffrey was quiet a moment. The answer, when it came, was not the one Tywin expected.
"I couldn't tell you if it was wrong. I'm a poor man to lecture anyone." The king turned his gold eyes on the gold wine. When he spoke his voice was soft. "But I do know it was done badly. That much I'll say. Not the deed. The handling."
Tywin stilled, and then urged him on, intrigued to here his reasoning. "Go on."
"If you must be cruel, be cruel all at once. Choke the realm on it in a single swallow—and then wash the taste away with mercy, so the sweet is what lingers, not the bitter." King Joffrey set his cup down. "You did the opposite. You did the cruelty, and then you kept it. You let it be seen the Mountain did your work, and you rewarded him, and you keep him yet."
Tywin had done so for a purpose. "Gregor inspires terror. No other knight in the realm does it half so well."
"Yes and every time he rides into a tourney yard, the smallfolk taste that night afresh. Sixteen years, and you've made them drink it again at every tournament." The boy leaned forward, an elbow on the desk. "You should have cut yourself from that night the hour it was done. Named it the crime of men who exceeded their orders—your own story, so you'd not even have had to lie. Then taken Clegane and Lorch and quartered them before the Sept, slow, and left the pieces to rot where the realm could look and say, There—Lord Tywin suffers no butchers." He spread his hands. "You'd have lost two blunt instruments and bought a clean name. You could have had the terror and the love both, for the price of two men you'd no further use for. You kept only the terror." A beat. "You overpaid."
The solar was silent. Far below, faint through the glass, the small folk sang of their young, pious and beautiful king.
Tywin looked at the boy a long moment—at the gold hair and the gold eyes and the cold clean mind working behind them.
Sometimes he lost sight of the boy in the performance. His grandson was an enigma, his seeming a pretty, golden, harmless thing.
He let himself be seen that way, but sometimes, one was able to catch a glimpse of the dagger and mailed fist hidden behind all the piety and chivalry.
"You should have been my son." Tywin said into the silence. He had not spoken a truer statement this day.
The king gave a humourless laugh.
"Did you forget Grandfather? I am more Lannister than any son you have." The words landed where it was aimed. Tywin's face tightened despite forty years of schooling it not to.
He thought, against his will, of his children. Cersei, whom he had made a queen, rutting beneath her own twin and calling it love, and putting horns on the king and her bastard on the throne.
Jaime, the heir he had dreamed of, who had thrown the Rock away for a white cloak and a madman's whim—who had stood before him that day with a lie ready, Father, it isn't what you think, until Tywin looked into his golden son's eyes and saw the truth plain as a brand, and struck him, the only time he ever had.
Tyrion, a misshapen little creature who had killed his mother being born, and never let the world forget he was in it.
A queen who was a whore. A knight who was an oathbreaker, however understandable his reasoning. An imp who was an affront.
And before him on a stolen chair sat a boy with another man's name and Joanna's golden hair, who knew power in the marrow, untaught—and was not truly his.
"Names outlast blood," Tywin said, taking back the ground. "Whatever you are in your bones, the chronicles will call you Baratheon. Robert's son. The stag. That is the name on the coin and the name that endures." He paused. "Names and legacy are the only immortality a man is given. See you do not foul it."
"I mean to polish it." Joffrey reached for the flagon. "More wine?"
As they drank, conversation turned. They spoke of Cersei.
She would reach Casterly Rock any day, if she had not already—taken west under guard. Kevan would be waiting, and Genna. Between his brother's patience and his sister's iron, the whore would find little room to scheme.
Joffrey tilted his head, and his eyes were direct. "You haven't, have you? Had her seen to."
"No." Tywin took the cup. "She may yet be of use. I don't discard Lannister's because they displease me." A beat. "If I did, my line would be short indeed."
"Good. It's better this way I think." Joffrey drank. "Too many deaths too close together draw the eye. My father, then the court swept clean, then the dowager dead shortly after—even the dull would start counting." He was quiet for a time. "It is a risk leaving her in the rock, but… she is still… Tommen and Myrcella still need their mother."
"You have a soft heart." It was not a compliment.
"Do I?" The young king seemed a touch bemused. "Speaking of casterly rock, Tyrion —" Tywin's mouth thinned, as it always did at the name. "—will do well here as he did there. The drains, the maesters, all the work no one else will touch, and more important projects after. " Joffrey turned his cup. "You've no trueborn heir to the Rock, Grandfather. Jaime wears white. Cersei is a woman. By every law of the realm the Rock goes to Tyrion when you die, whether you will it or not. You've known it thirty years and refused to look."
Just the suggestion near made him scowl. "I have looked. The answer is no, Your Grace."
The king thought to push. "Name him openly. Settle it, and spare us the squabble when a great seat falls vacant unsettled. I'd back you. The crown would speak for his right tomorrow."
"No."
Tywin did not raise his voice. He set the word down between them like a stone. He said no more, but the old thoughts ran their worn grooves.
The law may give the Rock to the imp. I will not. There are ways to set a son aside, and I have been building them for years, and I will spend every one before Casterly Rock goes to the creature that killed my wife.
Tywin would not have the realm snickering that the proudest seat in the West was handed to a drunkard imp who filled his bed with whores.
He clawed the house up out of his father's shame. He did not do it to let it fall back when he was dead. That the imp had proved the least troublesome of his three children changed nothing.
Some things were not to be born.
Joffrey read it off his face—Tywin let him, there was no help for it—and his lips twitched.
"I thought as much. I had to ask." He drummed his fingers against the desk and leaned back. "Then let me ask another, since we're frank in a way we rarely are. Why did you never wed again? You weren't old when the Lady Joanna died. You might have had more sons. Better ones, to your taste."
Tywin looked into his wine.
He did not answer at once. The answer was the one soft place left in him, and he did not show it to people, and he was faintly surprised to find himself weighing whether to do so. In the end, he decided not to.
"I was busy." Which was truth, and yet not. Joanna had taken something into the ground with her that he had never found again, a warmth he had not known he carried until it was gone, killed in the birthing of the thing that now governed the restructuring of the city's sewers. He said none of that. "And it is too late now. I've no patience left to find a suitable bride, wed and get her with child, that might not even be a boy, and then raise them from the cradle to succeed me. That is young man's work." He drank. It tasted of nothing as it had since the imp was born. "Easier done before they're ruined."
"Tommen, then." Joffrey said it gently, he had heard what was beneath the words, but there was no pity, the king seemed to know better.
"For the Rock. After you." He continued, "Though he is currently Renly's heir and mine."
"That sword swallower had best do as you've done and get to making heirs then." The king nearly choked on his wine, the warden of the west let him gather himself before he continued.
"I have considered it. He is biddable. Too soft, as he is. Softer than you, and you are soft enough." A thin disapproval. "But softness in a child is clay, not stone. Begin early, and it can be worked. There is time to decide." He set down the cup. "He is, at the least, no dwarf."
"He's a good boy." Joffrey said, with nothing worked into it, only plain warmth. "Make him hard if you must. But leave him good. The realm has hard men enough. It runs short of good ones."
Tywin did not answer. He, brilliant as he was, could not work miracles. And from this talk, and all he had seen from his grandson since he had returned to the capital — he knew their definition of good differed greatly.
Looking at Joffrey, he concluded it was not such a bad thing.
On the fourth day after the host had sailed, the small council rode out to hunt.
It was the king's notion, as such things were—half a day in the kingswood to clear the head and loosen men's tongues.
Tywin Lannister had no great love of hunting; it was a deal of noise and discomfort after a thing a servant could fetch more cheaply. But he knew its uses. Men talked, on a hunt. Matters were settled between the saddle and the kill that would have wanted a moon of council sessions.
They talked as they rode—the harvest, which would be good; the Iron Bank's letters; the Dornish, quiet, which Tywin never trusted; the war at Dragonstone, which should by now be joined.
The day was bright and cold, the hard clear light Tywin liked, and the kingswood smelled of leaf-rot and woodsmoke from the outriders' fires.
They stopped at midday to break their fast in a clearing, the council on cushions and folding stools while servants laid out cold capon and hard cheese and brown bread and a skin of Arbor red.
Tywin ate sparingly, as he always did, and watched his boy across the little fire—Joffrey tearing into a capon leg with a young man's appetite, laughing at something the Imp had said.
Even at his ease the boy missed nothing, Tywin watched his gold eyes flick from face to face around the fire, weighing, sorting, the way Tywin's own did.
He never rests, Tywin thought, and was glad that someone from his seed had proved more than lacklustre, though it pained him to think of his getting and the fact he would be remembered as a stag not lion.
Joffrey took the deer himself in the afternoon—a clean cast, the spear in behind the shoulder, the animal down where it stood.
The huntsmen cheered. The king looked pleased in the plain way a young man was pleased by a thing done well, and for a moment Tywin could almost forget the solar, and see only a boy of four-and-ten with a good day's sport behind him.
They turned for the city as the light began to slant.
Tywin rode a little apart, turning over the Iron Bank, when he heard a thud.
He looked over. Joffrey had slid down from his horse, he had his head bowed, one hand drifting to his face.
"Your Grace?" said someone.
The king lifted his head. A thread of blood ran from his left nostril, bright on the pale skin, and Tywin had one cold instant to think poison, the old reflex, before he saw the boy's eyes.
They had gone strange. Wide, fixed on nothing, looking through the world at something behind it.
"Oh," Joffrey said softly, to no one.
Then his eyes rolled white, and the king pitched and struck the ground and did not move.
Men were shouting. Tywin was off his horse without knowing he had dismounted, on his knees in the leaf-mould beside the grandson who was twice his grandson, two fingers at the boy's throat. The pulse was there—fast, fluttering, wrong. Blood ran from his nose into the dead leaves.
Above them, through the bare branches, the comet flared. It brightened all at once, vast and red, until the whole western sky ran the colour of blood and the shadows of the trees fell double across the kneeling men.
Tywin Lannister looked up at the bleeding sky with the boy senseless in his arms, and for the first time in more years than he could number, did not know what to do.