Chapter 140: Mysaria's Silence
ULF
The study smelled of tallow and old ink, and Marsh had been talking for two hours.
He'd come up from the Street of Silk with a satchel that hadn't been emptied since the city fell, and he emptied it now across Ulf's table in stacks he sorted by hand. Grain prices out of the Reach, running high and refusing to come down. Harbour tallies. Three separate accounts of a Braavosi cog landing dyed wool that wasn't wool. A ratcatchers' guild meeting again in a cellar under Cobbler's Square, which meant nothing, and might mean everything. Rain ticked against the shutters. Ulf read, marked, pushed each page left, reached for the next.
"The coast road," Marsh said. "You wanted men on it."
"Two. Off the harbour rota."
"The harbour rota is four men and one of them is coughing blood." There was no bitterness in it. He'd kept this network alive since it was six drunks and a girl who sold oysters, and he knew every head in it by name and by cost. "I've seven in the Reach because you asked for the Reach. Nine on the coast. And two standing in a hedgerow outside a cottage in the hills, watching a road nobody uses, because a woman in Lyseni silk once put a price on your family."
"Dalla's cottage."
"Dalla's cottage." Marsh laid his palm flat on a thin stack he'd kept apart from the others. "I want your mark to stand them down. I've wanted it since spring. I didn't ask, because you'd have said no."
"I'd have said no."
"You'd say no now, if I let you answer fast." He pushed the stack across. "So read first. It's your own hand on the top sheet. Fourth month, you flagged it, and you never came back to it."
Ulf turned the page toward the candle. His own mark was there in the corner, a small cross he used for *later*, and later had never come. The report under it was five months old and written in a scribe's cramped hand.
"The White Worm has gone silent," Marsh said. "Our contacts confirm Mysaria's network dissolved months ago, around the time Rhaenyra's court collapsed. The bounty on Helaena and the children was withdrawn. Her agents were dismissed. She herself hasn't been seen since the city fell. Dead or fled. Either way, she's no longer hunting your family."
Ulf read it twice. Then a third time, slower, because the first two had gone past him without landing.
Withdrawn. Dismissed. There were names under it, six of them, cutpurses and message-carriers who had gone back to cutting purses and carrying messages for merchants instead. One had taken ship for Pentos. Two had turned up on the payroll of a wine factor in the Street of Steel and stayed there, which was the least dramatic ending a man could ask for. Mysaria hadn't been driven off. She'd simply turned her face somewhere else, toward Rhaenyra's court while it came apart, and she hadn't bothered to explain herself to anyone who wrote reports.
She had been a shadow over the whole war. The spymaster whose bounties had threatened Helaena and the children through every month they'd spent in hiding, the reason Aegon was kept secret from his own siblings, the reason every supply run into the hills had been planned like a raid, three routes, two false starts, nobody riding the same road twice. He had carried her in the back of his skull the entire time. He'd been carrying her tonight. And she'd let go of them in the spring, quietly, while he was busy learning to live through a siege.
His shoulders came down, and he let them.
"One less threat," Ulf said. "One more reason to bring the family together instead of keeping them scattered."
Marsh had been reaching for the next stack. He stopped.
"The secret son," Marsh said. "Aegon." He met Ulf's eyes. "The lords won't like it. A bastard son of the Queen Regent and her protector, acknowledged publicly. It'll raise questions about succession."
"The lords don't get to decide whether a child knows his mother." Ulf folded the report. "That's Helaena's choice. And she's made it."
"Then I'd like it in writing before somebody asks me what I knew and when."
"You'll have it." Ulf drew the pen across. "Stand the cottage watch down. Wyl and Bregg?"
"Wyl and Bregg."
"Put them on the coast road out of Duskendale, the stretch I marked for you last week. I want the fishing hamlets watched, not the harbour. The harbour is watched by everyone." He signed it, sanded it, and slid it back. "That puts the coast at eleven. The Reach keeps its seven."
Marsh looked at the page a moment longer than the page needed. "All that time," he said. "I've been paying two men to be afraid of a woman who forgot us."
"So had I. I just wasn't paying them in silver."
The rain thickened. Somewhere below, a shutter banged twice and someone swore at it. Marsh gathered the dead reports into the satchel, stood, and got one arm into his cloak before he thought better of it and put the last stack down again.
"One more, and then I'll go. You'll want to hear it tonight rather than in a fortnight." He turned the sheet around. "Ser Aldrik Symons. Steward to Lord Denys Cobb, out of the holdfast east of Rosby. He's been asking questions about the debt-forgiveness rolls."
"Everyone's asking questions about the rolls. Half the Crownlands wants to know if the crown means it."
"He's not asking whether the crown means it. He's asking which districts the rolls cover, who holds the master copy, and whether a lord's own ledgers get inspected when a debt is struck out." Marsh tapped the sheet twice. "Then he paid a scribe in the Guildhall four silvers for a copy of a list the crown hands out for nothing. Do you know what a steward's yearly wage is?"
"No."
"Nor do I, exactly. But it isn't the sort of coin a man spends to be told a thing he could be told free, unless he wanted no one to know he'd been told." Marsh set the page under the candle. "He asked after your name too. Not the Queen's. Yours."
Ulf reached past the signed order and took a clean sheet from the drawer. He set it square, dipped the pen, and wrote *Symons* at the top, and under it *Cobb*, and left the rest of the page empty for the things he didn't have yet.
"Sit down," he said. "Start again from the road east of Rosby, and this time give me every name he spoke to."
Marsh unfastened his cloak.