Chapter 53: The Widow's Petition
HELAENA
Three days after the Mud Gate the stones were washed and the court had finished deciding whose fault it was.
Nobody said it in those words. They said the queen had gone out among them, and they said nineteen people died in a gateway, and the two facts were laid down beside each other in every corridor of the Keep until the gap between them closed on its own.
Court sat in the lesser hall. The king couldn't be carried down to the throne room, and no one wished to hold a court day under an empty chair.
Her mother sat on the dais in grey. Helaena sat below and to the right, in a seat that had been carried in that morning by somebody who had thought carefully about where it ought to stand.
Ulf stood behind it. He had given his sword to the door guard, which nobody had asked him to do.
She counted the ladies while the herald worked through the preliminaries. Nineteen. She counted again, because the first count was the sort of trick her head played to hurt her, and the second came out nineteen as well.
Lady Meredyth Rosby came forward when her name was read. Black wool, no jewels but her husband's ring, a folded page she never once looked at.
"Your Grace," she said to Alicent. "I speak for eleven houses of the Crownlands, and I will be brief, since brevity is a courtesy and I intend to be discourteous shortly."
Someone laughed. It stopped.
"There are two matters. The first is the trials in the Dragonpit. The Crown intends to put baseborn men on dragons. The Faith names that an abomination. Bastards are not given dragons. Bastards are given bread and a trade and, if the gods are kind, a name at the end of it."
"The Crown intends to survive the winter," Alicent said.
"So do the eleven houses, Your Grace. That is why we stand here and not at Dragonstone." Rosby inclined her head, exactly enough. "The second matter is a household one. I would rather it were not spoken in a hall. I have been given no choice in that either."
She turned. She looked at Helaena when she said it, and there was nothing cruel in her face, which made it worse.
"The Queen's sworn protector keeps her chambers past the hour a sworn protector goes to his own. It has been three months. In the city they say he fed the poor from his own purse while the Crown fed them spears, and in the sept they say the Crown's answer to bastards is to hand them dragons, and neither of those things is said by any creature of mine. I am only the woman willing to carry it where it can be answered."
Every part of it was true. Helaena sat with her hands flat on her knees under the table and found no soft edge anywhere on it.
She wanted to say: he held a gate open with his shoulder while half the city ran past him, and he carried a nine-year-old girl out in his arms afterward, and he hasn't slept since. None of that answered anything Rosby had said. All of it made her case better.
"What would you have?" Alicent asked.
"The trials abandoned. The protector given a posting elsewhere. Neither is a punishment. Both are a door shut before the thing behind it comes through."
In the gallery, on the third bench, Septon Bernard's stylus moved across wax and stopped and moved again.
Alicent glanced up at him. "Does the Faith speak today?"
"The Faith has no position, Your Grace," Bernard said pleasantly. "The Faith has a record."
Her mother's hands closed on the arms of her chair, and Helaena watched her decide.
"The trials will be suspended," Alicent said. "Pending review by this court."
"They will not."
Otto Hightower had not risen. He did not need to.
"Forgive me, Your Grace. There are four dragons in that Pit with nobody on their backs and Rhaenyra has nine riders. I would trade a great deal for a fifth rider. I will not trade the Pit." He turned toward Rosby and smiled at her as though they had walked in together. "My lady is correct about the household, however. The Queen's women can be reordered. Her protector can be posted to the Dragonpit, where his particular gifts are wasted less. A reputation mends. A dragon does not."
"You are speaking of my daughter," Alicent said.
"I am speaking of the war. Your daughter is in it, as we all are."
ULF
I had given my sword to the door guard. In that room it was decoration, and I didn't want to be seen wearing decoration.
Septon Bernard sat on the third bench of the gallery with a wax tablet on his knee, and I could have crossed the hall and come back to my place before the wax cooled. Alicent had forbidden it in the sept two months ago and she'd been right. A dead septon on a petition day proves the petition. So he wrote, and I stood, and that was the whole of what I could do about him.
Nel had weighed nothing. That kept arriving at the wrong moments without being sent for. A child that age should weigh something in your arms.
They discussed where to put me for a while. Two lords, a widow and the Hand, four paces in front of me, settling it in the third person while I stood near enough to touch the back of Helaena's neck.
There was nothing in that room I could lift.
HELAENA
She stood up.
Queens do not stand at court. The chair legs barked on the tile and every face in the hall came around, and she had known they would, because she had spent her whole life watching what a room does when she goes away from it.
That was the useful part. She had never used it before.
She let her eyes travel past Rosby to the high window, and let her voice come out flat and unhurried and a little too slow, and felt the hall change temperature.
"There is a pit with sand in it," she said. "There are thirty-eight men standing in the sand. It is very hot, and the doors are shut, and there is nothing to drink."
She turned her head as though somebody behind her had spoken.
"One of them walks out. He has a hammer."
Nobody moved. A lady near the back made the sign of the star against her breast. Bernard's stylus had stopped.
"Your Grace," Rosby said, and there was a crack in it at last.
Helaena came back into her own eyes, and let them all see her do it.
"I dreamed that in the spring. I have told no one until this moment, because I did not want it, and wanting has never had anything to do with it." She set her fingertips on the table. "It will happen whether the Faith writes it down or not. So it will happen under my name."
"Helaena," her mother said.
"The trials are mine. I will pay for them from my own coffers and not the treasury. The rolls go out under my seal. The men who die in that sand die as my subjects, and I will bury them at my own cost, and their widows will take a pension from my hand and not the Crown's." She looked at Rosby, and made herself do it slowly. "If it is an abomination, my lady, then it is my abomination, and the Faith may address itself to me directly and not through my mother."
The hall breathed out.
"On your second matter. My protector goes where I go and stands where I put him. That is not an arrangement. It is an order I gave, and I will not be shamed out of an order in front of eleven houses." She paused. "You were right to say it aloud. Say it to me next time. I am less fragile than the arrangement everyone keeps discussing."
Rosby looked at her a long moment. Then she bent her head, and there was no defeat anywhere in it.
"Your Grace."
Alicent rose. "The matter of my daughter's household has been before me this past month," she said. "I have satisfied myself as to its nature. It is closed."
It was a lie, spoken in front of the Faith's own recorder, and nobody in that hall could reopen the question without naming the Queen Mother a liar. Her mother didn't look at her while she said it. She looked at her immediately afterward, two heartbeats, no more, and Helaena understood that a price had been set and would be named at an hour of her mother's choosing.
"Well," Otto said comfortably. "The Crown thanks Her Grace for her charity."
The hall emptied slowly, in knots, all of it talking.
Helaena sat down and put her hands under the table, and they shook hard enough that the tabletop carried it. Ulf's hand closed over her wrist, warm, so light it barely weighed on her at all.
She took her wrist back.
In the gallery doorway a man in the king's colours stood with nothing in his hands, writing nothing down, watching her fingers. He had been there since the trials were first named.
She folded her hands in her lap and left them there until the hall was empty and he had gone to tell his master what he had seen.
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