Chapter 147: Corlys's Concession
HELAENA
Three days after the memorial, Corlys Velaryon asked for a private audience. Helaena granted it for midday. He came to the small council chamber instead, an hour early, salt still in his cloak and the harbour's tar on him, and he stood at the foot of the long table until she looked up from Orwyle's book.
"You asked for the solar, my lord."
"I did. I've thought better of it." He leaned his weight into the back of a chair he hadn't sat in yet. The knuckles were swollen with forty winters of wet rope. "A thing said in a solar is a rumour by supper. I'd rather it were a record."
"Then it will be said in front of eight men and written down."
"That's my intention, Your Grace."
He wouldn't tell her what it was. He stood at the window with his back to her, the gulls quarrelling over the Mud Gate, and she let him have the quarter hour. Something had settled on the ride up from the harbour; hurrying him would only cost time.
They filled the room by the hour bell. The Master of Coin with his tally sheets, the Master of Laws, the Master of Ships, Grand Maester Orwyle with the great book open and a fresh nib, Criston Cole at the wall because he still didn't trust chairs in rooms with one door. Ulf took the seat at her right hand. The chamber smelled of beeswax and cold stone and the ink Orwyle mixed too thick.
Beyond the door, eleven stewards waited on the day's petitions with their hats in their hands. She'd ordered that door kept open every session since the spring, so men who waited could hear that business was being done.
Orwyle wetted the quill. "Eleven items, Your Grace. The first is the Maidenpool ferry."
"The first is Lord Corlys. He was here before the rest of us."
Corlys rose from his seat at the Small Council table. The chamber was silent.
"When I first returned to this city, I expected a regency in chaos. A queen who'd hidden in a fishing village. A protector who'd won his position through sorcery." He said it flatly, without apology, as a man reads out a bad manifest. The Master of Coin looked at his sheets. Nobody else moved. "I was wrong. On every count. The Queen Regent has governed with more wisdom than any monarch I've served in forty years. The Lord Commander has proven his power serves the realm. And the young king has shown more courage at seven than most men show in a lifetime."
He turned then and faced Helaena directly.
"The Velaryon fleet will back your regency with everything it has. Unconditionally."
Orwyle's quill had stopped somewhere in the middle of it. It hung and gathered ink and dropped a bead onto the page, and he never noticed.
Helaena kept her hands flat on the table. In her first month of the regency she had counted twice: the lords who would obey her, and the lords who believed her. The first list ran to four pages. The second had four names, three of them in this room, and Corlys Velaryon was on neither. He had paid his levies, sat his chair, answered what he was asked and volunteered nothing, and she'd told herself compliance was enough, that she'd never get more from men who had been lords before she was born.
She started counting hulls before she could stop herself. Ninety keels, the Gullet, the Stepstones, what the number would do at Fossoway's next supper table when somebody said it out loud. She put the sum down. It would keep an hour. It would keep a year.
She was quiet, then: "The realm thanks you, Lord Corlys. Your unconditional support will do more to stabilize the realm than any policy I could enact."
Corlys almost smiled. "It's not a policy. It's a judgment. I've never been wrong three times in a row. I'm too old to start now."
"No." She stood, which she had not planned to do. "Then let me answer the judgment and not the ships. My lord, when I came back to this city I had a boy of six and a wet cloak and no notion whether any man over fifty would ever look at me and see a queen instead of a girl they had watched at her mother's skirts. You were the one I stopped hoping for. I'd made my peace with your silence." Her own voice went thin, and she let it. "I would rather have this than the fleet. I am glad the fleet comes with it."
Corlys studied her a moment. "My wife would have said the same and said it shorter," he said. "Sit down, Your Grace. There's work in it."
Ulf had a sheet of paper out before either of them was seated. "Then let's fix it in terms today, my lord, while everyone's warm. Goodwill goes vague by the second month."
"Spoken like a man who has waited on a promised cargo." Corlys pulled his chair in. "Say your terms."
"Nine hulls out of Hull, sailing before the turn of the moon. Timber and seed grain to Maidenpool and Saltpans, then up the mouth of the Trident as far as the draught allows. The crown pays the crews at harbour rate and the crown's clerks ride with them, so the count at loading and the count at landing match." Ulf did not look up. "Second, a standing patrol between Sharp Point and the Gullet. Six ships, rotating every third fortnight, answering to your captains and reporting to Ser Criston's table. Third, your masters carry crown writs and clear at the Mud Gate like any other hull. No exemption. If Driftmark buys nothing from this, no lord in the Reach can say Driftmark bought the alliance."
The Master of Coin made a small pained noise about the harbour rate. Corlys ignored him.
"Twelve hulls," Corlys said. "Nine will be seven by the second run. Ships break. And I'll not have the Trident mouth until my own men have sounded it, so give me until the moon after that, and I'll give you the sounding lines when it's done. Copy them into your book, Grand Maester. The crown should own its own charts." He tapped the table twice with two fingers. "The patrol I'd have offered you regardless. Pirates have been eating my losses for a year and calling it weather."
"Twelve," Ulf agreed. "Write it, Grand Maester. Twelve hulls, the sounding, the patrol, the writs. Copies to every lord with a harbour, and to the ones without, so they hear it from us and not from a singer."
Orwyle was already writing, and the scratching filled the room. That was the part the court would eat, Helaena knew. Not the words. The copies. By Maiden's Day every lord who'd been waiting to see which way the wind had settled would hear Corlys Velaryon's own sentences read out by his own maester, and would have to say something in front of his household about where Driftmark stood.
"One more thing, and it's likely nothing," Corlys said, half out of his chair already. "Three of my captains put in along the Reach coast for water this winter. All three came back with the same complaint. Grain leaving small harbours that have no business selling grain in the cold months, bought up by factors who pay in good coin and won't give the name of a house. My men thought it was a poor harvest at somebody's back door. I've been at sea long enough to know that grain moves before men do."
"Names of the harbours," Ulf said.
"You'll have them tonight."
"Then I'll have the factors by the turn of the moon." Ulf wrote four words and did not underline them.
Corlys sat back down. Ser Criston began it from the wall, one hard slow clap of a gauntleted hand against the flat of the other. Then Orwyle put down his quill and did it properly, and the Master of Laws, and the Master of Ships, and even the Master of Coin, who was still unhappy about the harbour rate. It lasted a dozen breaths, and there was nothing courtly in it.
Helaena didn't thank them, or raise a hand, or move the session on to the Maidenpool ferry. She sat in the noise with her palms pressed to the wood and let it come to her, and for the first time since they'd put the regency on her shoulders she spent no part of it wondering what it was worth.