Chapter 23: Petty Tricks
The Tower of the Hand was one of the tallest structures in the Red Keep, its walls built from thick bluestone that had been dressed smooth by masons long dead.
The mortar between the blocks had darkened to near-black over the centuries, and the corridor that wound up through its interior was lined on both sides with portraits of past Hands — Jon Connington, Qarlton Chelsted, Owen Merryweather, and older faces still, going back to names that only maesters remembered. Candles burned in the alcoves even in daylight.
The flames moved in drafts that came from nowhere visible, and the painted faces shifted in the light in a way that made them seem less dead than dormant.
The stone steps had been worn concave by generations of feet. Henry noticed that they varied subtly in width — not by accident, he suspected. A man in full armor moving fast would stumble. Someone had thought about that when the tower was built, in some war that no one now living could remember fighting.
He knocked on the open door of the solar and stepped inside.
"Lord Hand. I'm Henry Reyne, Lord of the Bay of Crabs, invested by His Majesty the King. I've come to take possession of the lordship and Iron Fist Keep, currently held under royal stewardship." He gave a short bow, right hand to chest.
Jon Arryn looked up from his documents slowly, the way a man looks up when he's been reading for hours and his eyes need a moment to adjust to something farther away than a page. The candlelight caught the lines in his face — deep ones, the kind that come from decades of work rather than years of weather.
"King Robert mentioned you," Arryn said. His voice carried the weight of a man who had governed a kingdom for seventeen years and was tired in a way that sleep didn't fix. "He called you his brave little lion."
His shoulders still held the shape of the warrior who'd fought in the War of the Ninepenny Kings, but everything else about him had settled into age. His smile was genuine enough, even if it showed fewer teeth than it once had. On the desk before him, a stack of documents sat with ink still dark at the edges of the seals — the transfer papers, stamped in the crimson of the Hand of the King.
"I'm honored by his confidence."
"The land documents are signed and ready." Arryn picked up the topmost parchment and held it for a moment before setting it down again. His expression became careful. "But I want to say something plainly before you take them. I know about the history between your house and the Lannisters. I'll keep them in check where I can. But you'll need to show restraint on your end as well. The crown can't afford open friction with Casterly Rock right now — we're in the middle of negotiating a loan from Tywin."
Henry kept his face neutral. He'd known the crown was deeply in debt by the time Jon Arryn died, but he hadn't realized the borrowing had already started this early. "I understand, Lord Hand."
"Go settle into your new seat first." Arryn's expression eased back into something warmer as he held out the sealed document. "Once things are in order, come back to King's Landing. We'll talk at length then."
"Thank you, my lord." Henry took the parchment, tucked it into his cloak, bowed, and left.
He turned it over in his mind as he descended the stairs. Arryn's age was plain enough — the congested breathing, the deliberate pace — but the man was clearly still capable of conducting business. Sharp, even. Which brought Henry back to the same question that had been sitting in the back of his mind since the previous afternoon.
Why had Mandon Moore held him at the gate for an entire day?
The answer presented itself before he'd finished the thought.
Outside the Red Keep's main gate, more than eighty Lannister soldiers in red and gold were escorting a column of heavy wagons away from the direction of Baywood. The wagon beds were covered with dark canvas, but the outlines beneath it were angular and metallic, and the wheels sank deep into the road. The men with them didn't look at Henry's party as they passed. They didn't need to.
"My lord." Maewyn's voice was flat. "The gate."
Henry looked toward Iron Fist Keep. The iron portcullis had been dropped. The inner doors were shut. There was no one visible on the walls or in the gatehouse — no guards, no servants, no movement at all.
Corlen walked to the base of the curtain wall and looked up. A rope hung down from the battlements, still swaying slightly.
"They barred it from the inside," he said, "then went over the wall." He spat into the dirt. "Clever."
"Corlen. Take five men up the rope and open the gate."
Henry's sailors had spent years working rigging in open water. Climbing a rope was nothing. Five men stripped off their armor down to their padded jacks, buckled their swords back on, and went up the wall in less time than it would have taken a knight to find his footing. A few minutes later, the portcullis groaned and rose, and the inner doors swung open on an empty gatehouse.
Henry walked through first.
The training yard was a wreck — fence posts pulled up and thrown down, practice weapons scattered across the ground, dirt churned where something heavy had been dragged. Someone had made at least a halfhearted attempt to clean it up before leaving, which somehow made it worse.
They searched the keep in teams: the great hall, the towers, the solar, the stables, the kitchen, the undercroft. No one was hiding. That was the good news. Everything else was the bad news.
The place had been stripped to the stone. Furniture gone. Bedding gone. Shutters pulled off the windows, door panels taken off their hinges. The kitchen had been cleared down to bare shelves — no pots, no pans, no salt, no stores. The servants had been dismissed or taken along. Even the window glass, where there had been window glass, was gone.
Henry stood in the middle of the great hall and looked at four stone walls and a flagstone floor and not much else, and felt something that took him a moment to identify as cold amusement.
It was petty. Genuinely, thoroughly petty — the kind of petty that required real effort and careful planning and produced nothing except the knowledge that you'd inconvenienced someone. Tywin Lannister, whatever else he was, didn't operate this way. If the old lion wanted to hurt you, he sent men to your castle in the night, not men to take your copper pots.
This was Cersei. Had to be. She'd reached into the Kingsguard to arrange the delay — Mandon Moore was hers, or Lannister money had put him where he'd be useful — and then used that extra day to strip the keep bare and be gone before Henry arrived with his documents in hand. She'd mistaken the inconvenience for a victory.
"We're pitching tents," Corlen said. He didn't sound particularly upset about it. "At least it's not raining."
Maester Winston stepped forward before Henry could speak. "My lord, the Baywood has good timber — there's no shortage of it. I spent two years studying construction methods at the Citadel. If you'll allow me to hire carpenters from King's Landing in the morning, I can have this place livable within the month. Properly livable."
Henry nodded. He looked around the empty hall one more time, then turned to his men.
"Corlen — King's Landing tomorrow. Carpenters, servants, whatever we need to make this functional. Maewyn — take a party with the transfer documents to Mill Town, Waterside Town, and Greyhelmet Castle. I want a full company recruited — a hundred men, properly equipped. And send word to the town mayors: there'll be a meeting here in one month."
He looked up at the bare stone ceiling, where pigeons had already found a way in through a gap in the rafters.
"We have a castle," he said. "We'll make it one."
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