Chapter 31: A New Appointment
The lookout horn sounded the morning after Joffrey's escort had ridden out — not the slow measured blasts of a ship sighting or a merchant train, but the quick repeated signal that meant a known party returning. Henry was in the solar going over grain tallies when he heard it.
Joffrey came through the gate at a gallop and didn't slow down until he was inside the hall. His cloak was still travel-dusty. He crossed the floor to Henry's desk and stood there with his fists clenched at his sides, jaw tight, the particular fury of someone who has just discovered they've been made a fool of.
"She wasn't sick." His voice shook slightly. "She wasn't sick at all. She was dressed for court. Her hair was done. She came out to meet me smiling." He stopped, steadied himself. "Tyrion didn't know. She lied to him to get him to come fetch me."
Henry set down his quill. "Sit down."
"I don't want to sit down."
"Sit down anyway."
Joffrey sat. He was breathing through his nose in the controlled way Henry had spent a year teaching him — the way you breathe when you're angry and you don't want it to show as much as it does.
"She used me," he said. "She used her own brother to run an errand and she used me as the reason. And when I got there she had every lord and lady in the vicinity watching while she embraced me." He looked up. "She wanted them to see it. She wanted it to look like she'd won something."
"She probably had," Henry said, without particular heat. "You went. That was what she wanted."
Joffrey's jaw tightened further. Then, slowly, he nodded. He didn't like it, but he followed the logic.
Ten days later, a royal messenger arrived from King's Landing with a decree.
Cersei had made her move in the throne room — publicly, tearfully, with an audience. The account that reached Henry via Maester Winston's sources was detailed enough: she had stood before Robert and the assembled court and described, at length, how her son was being kept from his family, how Henry Reyne was poisoning Joffrey against his own blood, how a lord with designs of his own had placed himself between the crown prince and his mother. She had wept. Robert, who had almost no capacity for sustained domestic conflict, had eventually given way.
The decree was a compromise. Joffrey would return to the Red Keep for one month each year. Cersei got her acknowledgment. Robert could stop hearing about it.
Henry read the decree twice, set it on the desk, and went back to work.
The month Joffrey spent at the Red Keep each year became, by his own account, fairly miserable.
Cersei approached his visits as reclamation projects. She seated him beside her at meals and talked at length about lineage — about the Lannister blood in his veins, about what that meant, about what people with that blood were owed and how they ought to conduct themselves. She expressed, repeatedly and in varied formulations, her view that Henry Reyne was a dangerous influence who was deliberately driving a wedge between Joffrey and his family.
Joffrey had spent enough time at Iron Fist Keep by now that the contrast was stark. Henry didn't manage him the way Cersei did — didn't arrange his environment, didn't choreograph his relationships, didn't require his opinions to arrive pre-approved. The freedom of that, once you'd lived in it for a while, made Cersei's household feel like a room with no windows.
He endured two months of it before something broke.
"I am Robert Baratheon's son," he told Cersei, in front of her ladies and two household knights, his voice cracking between registers in the way it still sometimes did. "I'm the heir to the Iron Throne. I am not a Lannister."
Cersei's hand came up. Joffrey stepped back fast enough that she didn't connect.
He rode back to Iron Fist Keep the next morning without asking anyone's permission.
The training yard, on a bright afternoon a few weeks after his return.
Joffrey had improved considerably. He still telegraphed his attacks, still shifted his weight before a lunge in a way an experienced opponent could read three moves out, but the fundamentals were solid now and the instincts were starting to catch up. Henry knocked him down five times in a quarter hour, which was down from the seven or eight it had taken a year ago.
On the fifth fall, Joffrey stayed down for a moment, breathing, looking up at the sky.
"She keeps telling me the lion's blood is what makes me who I am," he said, to the sky mostly. "Like I can only be what she says I am if I admit that's true."
Henry held out a hand and pulled him up. "You are Joffrey Baratheon. Robert's son. The stag, not the lion." He'd said it before, many times, and he'd keep saying it until it stopped needing to be said. "Again."
Joffrey raised the practice sword.
Maester Winston came across the yard at a pace that meant something had arrived. He was holding a sealed roll of parchment — not a royal seal. The Hand's crest in dark wax.
Henry broke it open and read it through once, then again more slowly.
Jon Arryn had been thorough. The letter outlined, in the careful language of official correspondence with a subtext that was considerably less careful, that the City Watch had become untenable. Janos Slynt's command had metastasized into something that collected money upward and delivered incompetence downward, and the City Watch had spent years functioning as the instrument of whoever was willing to pay for it. Arryn had obtained Robert's approval. Slynt was being sent to the Wall. Henry was being appointed Commander of the City Watch, effective within the fortnight, with a mandate to reorganize the force from the officer ranks down.
He'd be moving to King's Landing.
Joffrey had read his expression by the time he finished and had already arrived at the part about King's Landing. His face had closed down in the particular way it did when something was about to require him to go somewhere he didn't want to go.
"I could stay here," he said. "Maewyn can continue my training. I don't need to—"
"You're my squire," Henry said. "Both of you are." He glanced at Dominic, who was making no effort to conceal his enthusiasm. The boy had grown up in the vast and quiet North and had been hearing about King's Landing since he was old enough to listen to travelers' stories — the city's size, its markets, its chaos. He looked like a man who'd just been told his ship was ready. "Where I go, you go. That's how this works."
Joffrey looked at the ground. "Cersei's there."
"We won't be in the Red Keep. I'll buy a house in the city — somewhere in the noble quarter, far enough from the castle that you won't be running into her in the corridor." He picked up his water skin and handed it across. "You'll be with me, not with her. That's different."
Joffrey thought about it. He was still unhappy, but the distinction seemed to matter to him.
Dominic was already asking Maester Winston how long the river crossing took.
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