Chapter 29: Year's End Accounts
As the year wound down, Henry sat in the high seat of Iron Fist Keep's great hall and listened to Maester Winston read through the annual accounts. Joffrey occupied a chair in the gallery above, technically paying attention.
"To summarize on the income side," Winston said, running his finger down the parchment, "physical taxes — grain, livestock, and craft goods from across the Baywood territory — convert to approximately twelve thousand gold dragons at current market rates. Monetary taxes — port customs, the town market levy, and the obligatory labor commutation payments — bring in a further eight thousand. Total annual income: twenty thousand gold dragons."
He turned the page. "Expenditures: forty percent of the obligatory tax goes to the crown by custom, totaling eight thousand gold dragons. The annual donation to the Faith of the Seven runs one thousand. Beyond that — the stipends for your fifteen sworn knights, pay and equipment maintenance for the four hundred men of the garrison and the River Guard, the wages of the town officials across Greyhelmet, Mill Town, and Waterside, plus ongoing repair work on the roads, the port, and the castle fabric." He looked up. "Total expenditure: seventeen thousand gold dragons."
"So we're ahead three thousand," Henry said.
"Yes, my lord."
Henry rubbed the back of his neck. He'd expected to be spending down reserves for another year at least. The territory was performing better than he'd budgeted for.
"Why do we pay the Faith anything at all?" Joffrey leaned forward in the gallery, frowning. "They own half the property in the Seven Kingdoms. Their septs pay no taxes. The smallfolk donate to them constantly. Why are we giving them more money on top of all that?"
Winston answered with the careful patience he'd developed for Joffrey's questions over the past months. "The Faith governs the religious life of most of the realm, Your Highness. They preside over marriages, funerals, namings. They shape how common people think about justice, about loyalty, about what a lord owes his people and what a king owes the gods. A house that maintains good standing with the Faith has an easier time governing — and a harder time being painted as tyrannical." He paused. "Your grandfather Lord Tywin recently made a significant donation to the Faith, by all accounts. Consolidating that relationship ahead of — well, ahead of whatever comes next."
"Tywin did nothing during the rebellion," Joffrey said flatly. "He sat in Casterly Rock counting his gold while my father broke Rhaegar at the Trident, and then marched in at the end when the outcome was already settled. My father is far too generous to have kept him as Warden of the West."
This was not unusual. Since arriving at Iron Fist Keep, Joffrey had become increasingly free with his contempt for the Lannisters, which had produced some interesting moments given his parentage. Maester Winston had mentioned quietly to Henry that he'd found a board nailed to a post in the yard outside the castle with something uncharitable about House Lannister written on it in the Prince's handwriting. Winston had removed it without comment.
"Your Highness," said Dominic, standing near Henry's chair, "Her Majesty the Queen is herself of House Lannister."
Dominic Bolton was a younger son of a northern house who had made his way south after hearing of Henry's elevation and asked to serve as a second squire. He was quiet, observant, and useful, and he had a northern directness that Henry appreciated.
"My mother married into House Baratheon," Joffrey said, with the confidence of someone who has reasoned his way to a satisfying conclusion. "She's Queen Baratheon. The Lannister part is beside the point."
Henry let it go. "Joffrey. The donation to the Faith isn't charity — it's governance. The Faith has reach into every corner of the Seven Kingdoms that our soldiers don't. Sometimes a septon's word in a village does more to keep the peace than a patrol. You can resent the arrangement and still understand why it exists."
Joffrey looked like he was about to say something, then didn't. Then the expression Henry had come to quietly dread moved across his face — the one that suggested he'd just had an idea he found very clever.
Henry turned back to the ledger before the idea could be shared.
Joffrey had become a genuinely complicated problem to think about.
Henry had not expected this. He'd expected, taking the boy away from Cersei's household, to get a slightly less spoiled version of the same child — a Joffrey who was cruel in a more restrained way, perhaps, or whose worst impulses had been redirected into something less destructive. Instead, stripped of the environment that had cultivated his particular cruelties, what emerged was something more like an ordinary difficult boy. Arrogant, yes. Self-centered, yes. But also capable of listening when he chose to, capable of shame after the execution, capable of something approaching genuine feeling when he spent time with his father.
Henry had made one significant decision early, and quietly. He'd sent Maester Winston to King's Landing on the pretext of organizing the Reyne family genealogy — borrowing, from Grand Maester Pycelle's library, a copy of The Lineages and Histories of the Great Houses of the Seven Kingdoms. The book that, read carefully and cross-referenced against known dates, made Joffrey's parentage very difficult to defend.
The book had not made it back to Pycelle's shelves. A candle had been knocked over in the maester's chambers one evening, and the fire that followed had been contained quickly enough to save everything except that particular volume.
Henry did not spend much time second-guessing it. The alternative — Robert finding out, or being told, or being positioned to find out at a moment not of Henry's choosing — led to outcomes he couldn't control and couldn't afford. Robert was not a man who would receive that information quietly. He was a man who had once shattered a knight's armor at the Trident with a war hammer and who had never, in Henry's observation, responded to humiliation with measured restraint. The revelation that none of his three children were his own would not produce grief and withdrawal. It would produce something considerably worse.
Beyond that, there was the matter of Robert's safety more generally. A king who hunted carelessly, who went into the Kingswood with too few men and too much wine and a boar population that had gone unmanaged for years, was a king who might one day fail to come home. Henry had applied to Jon Arryn for authority to extend the River Guard's patrols into the Kingswood — on the stated grounds of preventing a resurgence of organized banditry, citing the old Kingswood Brotherhood as precedent. Arryn had approved it immediately, happy to have a willing lord taking on obligations the crown would otherwise need to staff itself.
What this meant in practice was that the boar population of the Kingswood had declined significantly over the past year. Henry hunted them with a focus that his men found slightly alarming — spear work, mostly, close quarters, the kind of practice that translated directly to the skills needed to stop a charging boar before it reached a rider who'd had too much to drink. The poachers who worked the forest's edges had taken to calling him the Boar Slayer, and the name had filtered into King's Landing.
When it reached Robert, rather than objecting to the unauthorized use of royal hunting grounds, he had apparently laughed for a full minute and then added Henry to his personal hunting invitations as a matter of course. Every time the court rode out to the Kingswood, Robert now swung past Iron Fist Keep to collect Henry and, by extension, Joffrey.
It had produced something Henry hadn't predicted: Joffrey spending real time with his father. Not formal time, not court appearances, but riding together through the forest, competing over who spotted quarry first, sharing meals around a fire after a long day. Robert, Henry had come to understand, genuinely did not know what to do with his children in any structured setting, but hunting he understood. He was an easy, enthusiastic companion on a horse with a spear in his hand, and Joffrey — for all his posturing — watched his father with an attention that looked very much like longing.
It was more than the boy had gotten in King's Landing. Henry wasn't sure it was enough, but it was something.
"My lord." One of the gate guards appeared at the hall entrance, slightly out of breath. "Riders outside. A dozen, flying the Lannister lion — the gold one. The man leading them is a dwarf."
Henry was quiet for a moment.
"Tyrion," he said.
"My lord?"
"That's Tyrion Lannister." He leaned back in the chair. This was the first time anyone carrying Lannister colors had come to Iron Fist Keep directly. He had to admit he was curious what had brought the youngest Lannister to his door, and more curious why Tywin had sent him rather than someone else, or whether Tywin had sent him at all. "Bring him in. Courteously."
From the gallery above, Joffrey had stood up and was gripping the railing. "You're letting them in?"
"He's a guest. We'll hear what he has to say."
"I put up a sign," Joffrey said, with what appeared to be genuine grievance.
Henry looked up at him. "What sign?"
"In the yard. I wrote it myself." A pause. "It said Lannisters weren't welcome."
Henry turned to Maester Winston, who had developed over the past several months a very specific expression for moments like this — the look of a man who had seen the sign, had decided not to mention it, and was now regretting that decision.
"Have someone take it down," Henry said. "Now, please."
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