Chapter 84: The Queen's Shadow
ULF
Eleven men stood in the wet yard under the Maidenvault and waited to hear whether they still had places.
I'd doubled the watch on the royal chambers the day after the crowning. By the end of that week I tripled it. Then I stopped trusting the lists other men put in my hand and started making my own.
I took them one at a time. Where born. Who paid you before this. Who does your wife's brother serve, and when did you last drink with him. What did you carry through the Keep the night Blood came over the wall, and whose hand put it in yours.
Ten answered me and looked at me while they did it.
The eleventh kept finding the mud beside my left boot. I asked him twice more and he found it twice more.
"Your cloak."
"My lord. I've eight years in this Keep."
"You've eight years and you can't hold my eye. Cloak."
He unpinned it and folded it over the rail without hurry. His hands were steady. His eyes were the trouble, and I'd have taken that trade the other way round without a word.
Two more went before the week turned.
THE SMALL COUNCIL
Tyland Lannister read the figure out with no opinion attached to it, which was an opinion. Sixty-one men standing watches that forty had covered under Aegon. Wages, boots, a second brazier on the gallery for the winter.
"This is excessive," Otto said.
"This is necessary."
"It is excessive and it is clumsy both." He folded his hands on the wood. "Half those posts belonged to sons of houses that expect them, and you've sent them home with no cause their fathers can repeat at their own tables. Men forgive a reason. They do not forgive a shrug."
"The previous guard arrangement served adequately—"
"The previous arrangement would have let Blood and Cheese into the Keep." I kept my voice flat. "They had the nursery drawn on a scrap of parchment and the gap in the patrol timed to fifteen minutes. They'd have reached the queen's children. They only didn't because I put them both in the ground first."
"You keep bringing that up."
"Because you keep questioning my methods." I leaned in over the table. "I stopped Blood and Cheese. I survived God's Eye. I'm the only reason three of the four Green dragons have riders who returned alive."
I let it sit in front of him.
"Question my methods when you have comparable credentials."
Otto's mouth opened. Closed.
Down the table, Criston Cole almost smiled.
"The grain levies," Tyland said, turning his page over, and the council moved on to Rosby and the price of oats.
Otto found something pleasant to say to me before the hour was out, which told me what it would cost.
MARSH
He met me in the yard behind his tavern, among the empties, and he didn't offer to take me inside. He hasn't since I laid Nel on his long table. I've stopped standing in the way that asks.
"Black agents in the city." He set one hand flat on a stacked barrel and left it there. "Not many, but active. They're mapping patrol routes, charting servant schedules, identifying entry points. There's a boy been sat on the Cobbler's Square gate nine days running with a bowl in front of him and never a thing in it."
"Same methods as Blood and Cheese?"
"Different. More sophisticated." He dropped his voice, which in an empty yard with nobody in it but the two of us meant something. "They're not hiring local criminals this time. These are trained operatives. Professionals, and paid like it."
"Names?"
"Working on it. They're careful."
"Work faster."
I put the pouch in his hand. Twice what we'd settled on. He weighed it on his palm, and then weighed it again, and arrived at the number, and didn't say the number.
"Daemon's ash at the bottom of a lake," he said, "and his coin's still walking round this city on its own legs. Your gutter men wanted their silver by Friday. These ones will sit on your wall a year and eat cold."
"I know."
"Then don't hurry me into a wrong name." He put the pouch away. "Wrong names get boys killed."
The night's reports came up the stair after the watch changed. Nine new servants taken into the Keep since the crowning, with references that checked out perfectly.
Too perfectly. Not a gap anywhere. Not one former master conveniently dead, not one year unaccounted.
I put watchers on all nine and told the watchers nothing about each other.
Someone will try again. Not whether. When.
THE THRONE ROOM
Helaena stood before the Iron Throne.
Not sitting on it. That was Jaehaerys's seat now, and the boy king looked lost on the massive metal structure, his feet a hand clear of the step, burnt blades leaning over his silver head.
She stood beside it in black mourning clothes heavy enough to hide the pregnancy, her pale face composed into queenly dignity, her hands still.
"My lords and ladies." Her voice carried clearly to the back of the hall. "My husband the king is dead. My son takes his rightful crown. The realm continues."
The court watched. Judged. Calculated.
"The war against the usurper continues as well. Prince Aemond fell in battle against the traitor Daemon. Both died killing each other. Their sacrifice was not in vain. The Black cause weakens daily."
Half true. The Blacks still have dragons. Still have armies. Still have Rhaenyra.
"During this time of transition, I ask for your loyalty. Not to me, but to my son. To the true Targaryen line. To the realm we all serve."
Murmurs of approval. A Crownlands lord went down on one knee and four more went after him because he had. Pledges of fealty, given in the voice men keep for promises they intend to be able to take back.
I watched from the shadow under the gallery stair, tracking who seemed genuine and who seemed calculating.
Too many of the latter.
The appearance ended. The hall had to see her walk out on her own feet, so she did, and the doors shut, and she turned into the side passage where I waited.
She made it three steps before her legs buckled.
I caught her.
"Orwyle. Now."
THE DIAGNOSIS
"The stress is taking its toll."
Grand Maester Orwyle delivered the verdict in Helaena's private chambers. She lay on the bed, pale, breathing shallow, one hand pressed to her stomach.
"The pregnancy?"
"Stable for now. But if this continues—these public appearances, these late nights, this constant tension." He shook his head. "We may lose mother, child, or both."
No.
"What does she need?"
"Rest. Quiet. Minimal stress." Orwyle set her wrist down and met my eyes, which he doesn't often trouble to do. "She needs to stop being Queen Regent."
"She can't."
"Then she can't carry this child to term safely."
The words hung in the air. The fire cracked twice and nobody filled the gap after it.
Helaena's hand found mine. There was no strength in the grip at all.
"There has to be another way."
"We delegate everything possible." I was already planning. "Reduce her public appearances. Let the council handle routine matters. Make Jaehaerys more visible. He's king, after all."
"A seven-year-old making decisions?" Orwyle said.
"A seven-year-old reading words we put in his mouth. They'll kneel longer to a boy on that throne than to a woman standing beside it. Let them."
"You mean to hide me." Her eyes hadn't opened. "Behind my own son."
"Yes."
"Say it plainly, then. Don't dress it."
"I mean to hide you behind your own son, and I mean to write what he says." I put my thumb across her knuckles. "Sleep. The rest of it is mine to carry."
"You've told me that before." Still without opening her eyes. "You told me the night Aegon died. You told me the night before that."
"And it was true on both of them."
Orwyle gathered his sleeves and found a reason to be elsewhere.
She slept before the second log had gone. I sat at the table by the window with a candle and wrote out what a seven-year-old would say to the small council in the morning, short lines, only words he already used, nothing he'd stumble over in front of Otto.
Four sentences down, I stopped and read what I'd made. A boy's mouth, and my hand inside it.
Then I went back to writing.