POV- Varys
He was losing this game, and there was no other way left to fool himself otherwise.
Varys stood at the edge of the yard with his hands folded into his sleeves, the picture of a fat, plump and harmless eunuch enjoying the morning air, and watched two shadows wheel above Harrenhal's broken towers, black scales and green, wings enough between them to blot out a modest patch of sky. Drogon and Rhaegal and upon their backs, small as children's toys at this height, rode Daenerys Targaryen and the boy the realm was meant to call Aegon, Sixth of His Name, and for one unguarded moment Varys allowed himself to feel what he had felt the very first time he had seen a dragon fly, all those days ago in King's Landing. He had won something with this, whatever else the coming days took from him, no one could say he and Illyrio had not, between the two of them, put dragons back into Westeros, as was the realm's want.
But wonder was a poor coin to spend against what waited inside those walls, for Varys had never once in years of the game thought that a rogue would lay waste to it all.
This Aemon had done in a season what Varys and Illyrio had spent a lifetime building toward one careful step at a time, and there was a cruelty in that arithmetic that Varys made himself sit with rather than flinch from, the way a man made himself hold his hand over a candle flame long enough to understand exactly how much it would hurt before the fire ever touched him for true. Stannis Baratheon knelt to the boy now, or near enough to kneeling as made no difference, and where Stannis went the better part of the Stormlands had gone with him in spirit if not yet wholly in banners, House Swann muttering discontent, House Connington's own smallfolk asking why their lord marched for a prince half of them had never laid eyes on. Renly sat a prisoner. That had been meant to matter more than it did.
Dorne had not come at all, not for Aegon, not for a single moment of the whole campaign, and Varys had spent enough sleepless nights turning that fact over to know precisely how much it had cost them. Doran Martell did not forgive easily and did not forget at all, and Ser Gerold Dayne's lust for Starfall and Arianne and Euron Greyjoy's lust of power in the Morne's Gap had handed the man every excuse he needed to call Aegon's blood a lie without ever once having to prove it was.
The Vale, at least, was not wholly lost. Petyr had done what Petyr always did, make himself indispensable to men too proud to notice they had become dependent on him, and the lesser houses of the Vale had followed Lord Baelish's soft, reasonable voice the way sheep followed a shepherd, men and women like Lyn Corbray and Lady Anya Waynwood. But Yohn Royce had not followed, and Yohn Royce was the name that mattered in not just Vale but the whole Seven Kingdoms too, the name that carried the weight of Runestone and their years of service to the realm, and every lord Petyr brought to their banners was worth, in Varys's private ledger, perhaps a third of what one true Royce sworn to Aemon would have cost them.
The Reach was the worst of it, and Varys knew it precisely because the Reach ought to have been the surest thing in the whole calculation. Highgarden stood with them, Mace Tyrell fat and pliable and delighted with his own daughter's crown, and that alone should have carried the whole of the Mander valley behind him the way it always had. Instead House Tarly had turned, and House Rowan with it, and House Ashford, and then the Hightower itself, and it was Hightower that kept Varys awake at night for long hours after wiser men had gone to their beds.
Hightower meant Oldtown and that meant the Faith, the Starry Sept and the High Septon's own blessing, hundreds of years of septons crowning kings and unmaking them again when it suited the Faith's own purposes, and Varys had built no small part of his wager on the assumption that the Faith of the Seven would never willingly bow its collective head before a boy raised on old gods. That the Hightowers themselves, of all the great houses in Westeros, had been the ones to break that assumption first was the kind of thing that made a spymaster question whether he had been playing the wrong game his whole career.
His little birds had brought him whispers of a reason, half-formed things gathered from kitchen maids and drunk squires that Varys did not yet trust enough to call knowledge. Something about a raven that had come to Leyton Hightower himself rather than to any of his maesters, unread by any eye but his own, and a night the old man had spent alone in the Hightower's highest room with every candle in the castle burned down to nothing by morning. Whatever the raven had said, Lord Leyton had not left his tower to argue about it, had not called his bannermen to debate it. He had simply written back, and three days later Ser Baelor had a letter in his own hand telling him to show its true colors. Varys did not yet know what words had passed between an old man who had not left Oldtown in a decade and his son, a son hundred miles away in Riverlands fighting against North then. He intended to know before this council ended.
He would learn why, in time. He always did.
The castle itself told its own story to a man who knew how to read. They had been given the East gate to hold, an honor and a leash both at once, room enough inside the walls to garrison their own men and quarter their own lords in some comfort, while Aemon's own colors flew thick and undisturbed over the North gate and the greater part of the yards beyond it. An invitation between equals, the arrangement was meant to look like, and Varys let himself smile at the pleasant words that arrived in that parchment, here where no one but the morning air could see him do it.
Equals. As if Jaime Lannister was not already inside these walls in chains, and Loras Tyrell beside him, and half a dozen lesser lords of the Reach and Riverlands whose families would not sleep easy again until they came home. They had not come to Harrenhal because Aemon's invitation had been generous. They had come because there had been nothing else left to do, because a king who already held your family hostage in his own dungeons had earned the right to ask you to dinner and call it courtesy.
Tywin Lannister had come, straight and upright and giving away nothing, and Olenna Tyrell had come with him in spirit if not in company, her son Mace at her back and her granddaughter's own wagon riding uneasy on the political winds, and behind them both trailed the other lords, loyal to the two great houses, sons and daughters and grandsons enough to fill three columns on the ride south.
"Never thought I would see this again," Tyrion Lannister said, coming to stand beside him at the rail with a cup already in his hand though the sun had barely cleared the towers, and Varys did not need to ask what he meant by this. Harrenhal, dragons overhead, a war's ending weighed out in lords and banners rather than swords.
"Nor I, my lord," Varys said, and meant it more than the dwarf likely credited him for.
"You sound almost disappointed by that, Lord Varys." Tyrion turned the cup once in his hand without drinking from it. "I would have thought a man in your trade preferred words over swords. Gives you something new to sell."
"You mistake my profession, my lord. A man in my trade prefers to already know the ending before oyhers do, my lord. Surprises are for those who do not know how to play the game." Varys let a small, self-deprecating smile settle over his own mouth. "I confess this ending has left me somewhat behind on mine."
"Welcome to Harrenhal then." Tyrion drank then, deep enough that Varys suspected it was not his first cup of the morning. "My father hasn't said an unnecessary word since we crossed the Crownlands, which for him passes for open panic."
House Lannister had surrendered to Aegon and Daenerys, in the end, rather than to the boy who had taken his brother's sword arm and left the man to bleed out his pride in the mud of a battlefield, and Varys understood the choice even as he privately doubted its wisdom. Only the Westerlands stood behind that choice now with any real conviction, gold and crimson banners thick enough around the great hall. Pockets remained elsewhere, a scattering of Riverlands lords who owed Tywin a debt they could not otherwise repay, a handful from the Reach who were too deep into Lannister interests to easily climb back out, a few grim Stormlanders. But nothing from the North and nothing at all from Dorne.
He found Lord Baelish across the yard before they went in, standing near the inner doors with Lady Anya Waynwood at his elbow and, a half step behind her stood the boy she had fostered, tall, fair and young with sandy hair and deep blue eyes, Harrold Hardyng.
Petyr caught Varys's eye across the distance and offered him the smallest, most private of smiles, the kind two men exchanged when each knew precisely what game the other was playing and neither intended to say so aloud. Varys returned it in kind. There was courtesy in that much, at least, between men who had learned their trade in the same city.
He drifted near enough, on his way past, to catch the tail end of what Petyr was telling the Waynwood woman, pitched low and reasonable and utterly without heat. "The boy has no cause to fear this council, my lady. Whatever crown is decided in there, House Waynwood loses nothing by having stood beside the winning claim early, Lord Harrold is the righful heir of Vale."
Lady Anya's face gave nothing back to him, she stood with stone-faced patience, a woman who had spent thirty years in the Vale playing game of her own. Varys filed the whole small exchange away without breaking his own stride.
"You collect men and women for your own benefit the way other young lords collect hounds, Lord Baelish," he murmured to himself, low enough that only he could hear it, and found he was not entirely certain whether he meant it as an insult or a compliment. Both, perhaps. Petyr had never much cared for the distinction either.
The hall, when they finally filed inside, was already thick with the low, constant murmur of several hundred lords and knights all trying to speak quietly and none of them quite managing it. Hundreds of torches burned in brackets along walls still scarred black in places from a fire three centuries ago, and the air carried the must of old stone and smoke. Lord Tywin took his place near the front with the greater part of the Westerlands lords settling in around him, and Lord Mace arranged himself and what remained of his Reach loyalists close beside, the whole cluster of them forming one solid, unmistakable mass of crimson and gold and of gold and green. Across the wide strip of ancient carpet that ran the length of the hall, the other half of the room had gathered in its own equally solid mass, and the two sides regarded each other over that carpet the way hounds regarded each other across a kennel yard, all bristled quiet and no barking yet. Varys could pick out the banners of that second gathering without half trying, the towers of Hightower thick near its front, the huntsman of Tarly beside it, the golden tree of Rowan, and further back the sun-and-spear of Dorne standing apart from all the rest the way Dorne had always stood apart, needing no one's company to feel secure in its own convictions.
It struck him, watching the two masses breathe at each other across that carpet, that neither side had troubled to hide its numbers from the other, and that this too was its own kind of message. Fear needed shadows to work in. Whatever this council intended to become, it did not intend to hide.
It was a woman's voice that broke the silence first, and Varys, who made it his business to know every voice of consequence in the Seven Kingdoms, placed it before he had even turned his head.
"How could you do this, Father." Lady Alerie Tyrell, born a Hightower, stood with one hand pressed white-knuckled to the back of a chair, her eyes fixed across the carpet on the old man in the high seat there. "Against your liege lord, against my husband, against your own grandson."
Lord Leyton Hightower did not so much as stir, and it was left to the younger man standing at his shoulder to answer for him, a handsome, dark-haired and hard-jawed.
"You forget yourself, sister." Ser Baelor Hightower's voice carried easily across the whole width of the hall, pitched for every ear in it rather than only hers. "It was you who allied yourself with Lannisters. Men whose swords put Elia Martell's children to death, in the worse way possible."
A low sound moved through the room at that, the sound several hundred people made together when a thing too true to argue with had just been said too plainly to ignore. Varys watched Cersei Lannister's face across the hall go the shade of red that meant fury, and watched Tywin's own expression remain precisely as unmoved as it had been a heartbeat before, which reminded him of rumor that only stone is found in heart of Casterly Rock.
Mace Tyrell, oblivious as he so often was to the exact currents drowning the room around him, leaned toward his mother with a puzzled frown creasing his broad, pink face. "What has Elia Martell to do with any of this? That's a years past."
Dornish heard that and bristled with the words of dumb Reachmen.
"Hold your tongue, Mace," Olenna said, not looking at him, her eyes still fixed on the Hightowers across the carpet. "For once in your life, hold your tongue and let a wiser mouth speak."
It was a voice from the Aegon side of the carpet that answered next, though not the voice Varys had expected, thick with the flat, salted accent of the Iron Islands and pitched to carry every bit as far as Baelor's had.
"Yet it is you Andals who side with the Blackfyre," Lady Alannys Harlaw said, and did not trouble to soften a word of it.
Varys allowed himself the smallest private satisfaction at that. So they had the Iron Islands too, not many men behind the banners, never many with the ironborn, but enough voices in this room, and it was voices rather than swords that this day would spend. He had not been entirely certain of Pyke's loyalty until this very moment and they had gone with Tywin's plan of painting Aemon as Blackfyre.
"Yet it was your king," came Doran Martell's voice, soft as it always was and somehow more cutting for the softness, "who keeps the Golden Company in his service, and sent them to invade Dorne."
That, Varys thought, was the whole of the trouble laid bare in a single sentence, and he watched it land across the hall, ripples spreading out in every direction at once until the whole surface of the room was moving. Voices rose on both sides now, overlapping, no longer troubling themselves with even the pretense of quiet, Reach men shouting down Stormlanders and ironborn trading insults with men of the North and Riverlands. Somewhere near the front a Tarly knights and a Westerlands knight had drifted close enough to trading words that their men-at-arms had to physically pull them apart by the shoulders before it became something a maester would need to sew shut afterward.
Good, Varys thought, watching it all with the placid, folded-hands and calm mind. Let them shout themselves hoarse. A room full of men too busy hating each other would never let the great council succeed and Varys could still, perhaps, find some use in yet.
Then the dragons roared, both of them at once, close enough now that the sound rattled the ancient glass in Harrenhal's high windows, and every voice in the hall died at once as though a hand had reached down and closed every throat in the room together.
He had asked it of them, this staged and deliberate arrival, dragons kept circling a while longer than strictly necessary before either rider brought their mount down to earth, so that every lord gathered here might be reminded, in the marrow of his bones where reason could not quite reach, precisely what manner of power he was being asked to bend his knee before. It could work, Varys had seen fear moving harder men than these toward decisions they would otherwise have died before making. He searched the faces nearest him now for some sign it had, and found instead the same hard, unmoved expressions that had been there before the roar, Doran Martell's heavy-lidded patience, Lord Royce flat stare, Baelor Hightower's cold contempt. Fear, it seemed, no longer bought what it once had, not in a hall that had already watched one dragon burn enemies on the field.
The Lannister chamberlain found his voice at the doors, pitched loud and formal over the last of the murmuring. "Aegon of House Targaryen, Sixth of His Name, King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, rightful Lord of the Seven Kingdoms. And Daenerys of House Targaryen, Mother of Dragons, Queen of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men."
They entered together, and Varys watched the hall's eyes go to them the way eyes always went to gold and silk and the beauty dragonsblood royalty seemed to carry with it wherever it walked. Aegon wore silk richer than anything else in the room, black shot through with red, and Daenerys beside him wore jewels enough to ransom a Great House twice over, and upon her brow sat a crown Varys knew intimately, having spent no small portion of Illyrio's coin recovering it from the merchant who had bought it off a desperate, drunken Viserys years before any of this had begun. Queen Rhaella's own crown, restored to a Targaryen queen at last. It should have meant something to this room. Varys watched their faces and saw that, to most of them, it did not.
Behind the two monarchs came their Kingsguard, seven white cloaks moving in careful formation, and it was the sight of them together that told Varys, in one cold instant, precisely how deep the rot in this arrangement had already spread. Ser Jorah Mormont walked among them, which surprised him not, he knew the man's history and his devotion to Daenerys. But the other six were strangers to that white cloak in every way that mattered, hard-faced sellswords of the Golden Company that Aegon had knighted into Westeros's oldest and most sacred order in the space of a single ceremony, and Varys did not need his little birds to tell him what the knights of the Reach and the Vale standing along both sides of carpet thought of watching mercenaries and an exiled knight caught for trading slaves, wear a cloth that their own forefathers had died for. He caught Leyton Hightower's mouth twist, just slightly, at the sight of them, the contempt of a man raised on the old stories watching something sacred handled by men who had never once heard those stories properly.
It was at the base of the dais steps that Ser Jorah stumbled, and for one confused moment Varys thought the man had simply misjudged the stone beneath his own boots. Then he followed the direction of Jorah's stricken stare and understood.
An old man stood near the front of the hall on other side of that ancient carpet, black-cloaked, white-bearded, a face carved from the same hard stone as other Northmen, and the fury banked behind that face was scary and deep enough that Varys felt it from twenty feet away like heat rolling off a forge.
"Father," Jorah said, and though the word came out barely above a whisper, the hall had gone quiet enough by then that it carried to every corner of it regardless.
Varys's own head came around sharp at that, because the black he had taken for simple cloth on the old man now resolved itself, with the whole weight of its meaning attached, it was the Night's Watch. Here, this deep inside the realm, this far from the Wall that had held those men bound to their duty for eight thousand years by oath and custom both. And beside the old man stood others in furs and bone that Varys, cataloguing quickly and with rising unease, took for wildlings, though he could not yet have sworn to it before witnesses. If he was right, and Varys was very rarely wrong about a thing once he had troubled himself to look at it twice, then this Aemon had done something at the Wall that Varys did not yet have the answer of, something large enough to bring free folk south of that ice under a black-cloaked escort and under peace rather than invasion.
Lord Commander Jeor Mormont said nothing at all to his son. It was the man beside him who spoke instead, thin and dour and grey-haired, his voice pitched low but carrying the relish of a man who enjoyed watching another man suffer just enough to make the suffering worse.
"You should thank King Aemon for the guest right, Ser Jorah." His mouth twisted around the courtesy title as though it tasted foul in his mouth. "Looking at the Lord Commander now, I'd say he wants nothing more in this world than to skin you where you stand."
A ripple of low laughter went through the black brothers gathered near him, quickly strangled into silence by a single look from the Old Bear that needed no words behind it at all.
Varys watched Daenerys's face harden, watched her mouth open on whatever furious rebuke she meant to deliver to a man who had just insulted her own sworn knight in front of several hundred witnesses, and never learned what words she had chosen, because that was the exact moment the second roar came.
It was nothing like the first. Drogon and Rhaegal's roars, terrible as they had been, were the roars of young dragons still growing into the adult of what they would become. This roar came from somewhere outside Harrenhal's walls, and it did not merely rattle glass, it moved through the stone itself, up through the soles of Varys's soft footwear and into his bones, a sound with age and anger behind it that silenced even the memory of every other sound that had come before it in that hall.
No chamberlain called out this time, there was no need for one. The doors at the far end of the hall simply opened, and they walked in.
A direwolf came first, white as pale bone and silent on enormous paws, red eyes sweeping the gathered lords with an intelligence that unsettled Varys more than he cared to admit even to himself. Behind it walked an old knight with a hawk's watchful stillness in every line of him, Ser Barristan Selmy, hand resting easy and ready on his sword's pommel, eyes already moving across the crowd the way, he had spent a lifetime looking for the blade aimed at someone he had sworn to protect. On the other side walked a woman Varys did not know by name, though he intended to correct that ignorance before this day was done, silver hair loose about a face too striking to have escaped his little birds' notice for long, one eye dark as deep water and the other green as new spring grass, her own hand as ready on her hilt as Barristan's, her gaze moving over the assembled lords as though she had already decided, well before entering this hall, that not one of them posed a threat worth the trouble of naming.
And between them walked the boy who had done all of this. He wore no silk at all, only black armor plain enough that a lesser man might have mistaken it for a common soldier's plate at any distance greater than ten feet, save for the three-headed dragon worked across the breastplate in dark red, its eyes had rubies that caught the torch light and threw it back like something alive and watching. But it was the boy's own eyes that held the hall captive the moment he stepped through that door, red as the rubies set into his breastplate and red as nothing else in this world, and Varys, who had spent years playing the game and learn every kind of power a man could carry into a room, understood in that single unguarded instant precisely why every scheme he and Illyrio had built across years now stood on ground this uncertain.
The king had finally arrived.
He came down the length of that ancient carpet without hurrying, without so much as glancing toward the dais where two other Targaryens already stood dressed in silk and jewels and the whole considerable weight of Illyrio's gold, and the hall parted before him the way water parted before the prow of a ship, lords and knights on both sides drawing back a half-step whether they had sworn to him or not, some out of loyalty and some, Varys suspected, out of nothing more complicated than the same animal instinct that had once sent every horse on a battlefield rearing at the sound of wings.
He stopped at the base of the dais, close enough now that Varys could see the exact moment Aegon's composure, so carefully worn all morning, began to waver.
"You are late to your own council," Aegon said, and if he had meant the words to carry lightly they did not, they came out clipped and a shade too fast, the way words came out of a man who had rehearsed them in private.
"I called it. I am never late to a thing I have called." Aemon's voice, when it came, carried none of the strain Aegon's had. It was almost gentle yet commanding.
A sound moved through the hall at that, not laughter, nothing so open as laughter, but the low collective intake of several hundred people recognizing, all at the same instant, that they had just watched the first blow of this council land, and that no dragon had needed to be involved in the landing of it.
Aegon's jaw tightened, and for a moment Varys thought the boy might do something unforgivably foolish, reach for the sword, or say some further thing that could not be unsaid once several hundred witnesses had heard it. He did neither.
Neither boy spoke again for three long heartbeats, two claims to the same throne standing together, and Varys stood in the watching silence of several hundred lords and understood, that whatever this Great Council decided today, it would not be decided by dragons at all.
It would be decided by which of these two boys the room believed.
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