Chapter 33: The Death of the Hand
The bells of King's Landing rang for Jon Arryn.
They began at the Sept of Baelor and spread outward — one bell, then two, then half a dozen voices of bronze rolling across the city's three hills, down through the tangled streets of Flea Bottom, up past the towers of the Red Keep, out over the walls to the fishermen working the bay.
In King's Landing sound carried strangely. The hills caught it and threw it back, and by the time the tolling reached the harbor it had become something vast and shapeless, less like bells than like the city itself exhaling.
Inside the Great Sept, the light was different. It always was. The dome filtered the afternoon sun through crystal and colored glass until it fell on the marble floor in broken patterns of gold and crimson and deep blue, and the effect was of standing inside something that had decided to be beautiful regardless of what was happening inside it.
Jon Arryn lay on the stone bier at the center.
He had been a long man in life — tall and spare, with the kind of face that suggested he had been dealing with other men's problems for so long that the effort had carved itself permanently into his features. In death he looked smaller. They always did. Someone had dressed him in his finest, the falcon of the Arryns worked in silver thread on his chest, and his hands had been folded over the pommel of a ceremonial sword he had never in his life carried into battle.
In the days before the end he had muttered words that made no sense to the men sitting with him. Robert. The seed is strong. Over and over, until the words lost meaning and became only sound, and then there was no more sound at all.
Robert Baratheon stood at the bier with his hand wrapped around Jon's cold one, and wept.
It was not the weeping of a man performing grief for an audience. Robert had never learned that particular skill. He wept the way he did everything — completely, without restraint, without apparent awareness that half the noble houses of the Crownlands were watching him do it. His shoulders shook. His breath came in great ragged pulls. He was, Henry thought, genuinely devastated, and the sight of it was somehow harder to look at than simple ceremony would have been.
"Jon." Robert's voice was thick. "I swear it. I swear on my father's grave I'll protect your boy. Robert Arryn will want for nothing. You have my word."
The promise echoed up into the dome and dispersed.
Henry stood near the back of the crowd, in the shadow of one of the great pillars, and watched.
Robert had been a different kind of man at Pyke. Henry had fought beside him — or near enough to beside him, given the chaos of the assault — and remembered what the man had been then. Six and a half feet of muscle and fury, the warhammer rising and falling, the kind of fighter who made other men feel like they were standing in the wrong place just by existing near him. What stood at the bier now wore Robert's face under thirty additional pounds and a decade and a half of steady dissolution. The dark beard hid some of it, but not the belly, and not the dark hollows under his eyes, and not the way he had to pause between steps to catch his breath.
Fifteen years. That was what Jon Arryn had managed to keep upright, more or less, through the application of will and patience and the willingness to do the work that the king would not. Fifteen years of governing a kingdom on behalf of a man who preferred to hunt.
Now Jon was on a stone bier in the Sept of Baelor, and the kingdom was going to have to govern itself for a while.
Henry's gaze moved through the crowd.
He was doing arithmetic that had nothing to do with grief. Jon Arryn had known something in the weeks before his death — had been asking questions, following threads that led somewhere dangerous enough to get him killed.
Henry had known about it and had not moved quickly enough, and now the man who might have answered the most important questions was silenced permanently. Whatever trace remained of the investigation existed in scattered notes and the memories of men who might not know what they had seen.
His eyes settled briefly on Pycelle, resplendent in his maester's chain, head bowed in what appeared to be prayer. Then Varys, round and soft in his customary robes, expression one of practiced sorrow. Then Cersei, composed and dry-eyed at the king's shoulder, because Cersei was always composed and always dry-eyed, and Henry had long since stopped expecting otherwise.
He had learned, through the Watch, that Stannis had departed the city the night before Jon's death was officially announced — before the bells, before the formal notification, before any reasonable man should have known to leave. The Gold Cloaks at the River Gate had logged him out with his full retinue, moving fast, heading for the water.
Stannis had not bowed to the bier.
He had stood in the crowd long enough to confirm what he was there to confirm, and then he had walked out without ceremony, and by the following morning his ship was well clear of Blackwater Bay.
After the ceremony the sun was going down over the bay, painting the water red and orange, by the time Robert and his escort made their way back up to the Red Keep. Henry followed at the king's request, which meant following through three corridors and two staircases to the small reception room where Robert took meetings he didn't want recorded.
A fire had been lit. Robert sat in front of it for a long time without speaking.
"I'm going north," he said finally. "To Winterfell. To see Ned." He looked at the fire. "I need to see an honest man."
Henry said nothing.
"Send word to Stannis. Tell him to come back and hold things together while I'm gone." Robert paused. "And tell him — no, never mind. Just tell him to come back."
"Your Grace." Henry kept his voice even. "Lord Stannis has already left the city. The River Gate logs have him departing before dawn, with his full Dragonstone retinue. By now he's likely well at sea."
Robert stared at him.
Then he hit the table hard enough that the wine cup jumped and overturned, spreading red across the leather map pinned beneath it. A stain that looked, Henry thought, approximately like the Riverlands.
"Every man I need decides to run." Robert's voice had gone low and dangerous, the particular register that meant he was moving past hot anger into something colder. "Does no one in this kingdom have the spine to stay where they're put?"
"Renly is still in the city, Your Grace."
Robert breathed. Once, twice, the chest heaving. Then some of the tension went out of his shoulders, the way it always did when he found a solution he could live with, however imperfect.
"Renly, then. He'll manage." He waved a hand. "Him and Pycelle and Barristan and the rest of them. They can handle it between themselves for a few months." He looked at Henry directly. "I want you with me. Not in King's Landing — with me. Pick someone to hold your post while we're gone and draw whatever men you need from the Watch."
Henry thought briefly of Hadley — capable, loyal, the kind of man who ran a clean operation and didn't need supervision. But Hadley had one hand and could not ride hard if something broke wrong.
He recommended Ser Joss Hadley as acting Commander, noted the limitation, and arranged for a capable second to back him up. From the Watch he drew three hundred Gold Cloaks, veterans of the reorganization who had demonstrated they could handle themselves in something more complicated than a gate rotation. From his household garrison he added a hundred White Cloaks as close escort.
The royal decree went out the following day. Renly Baratheon, Master of Laws, would exercise the king's authority in his absence, assisted by Grand Maester Pycelle, Ser Barristan Selmy, Lord Petyr Baelish, and Lord Varys. The position of Master of Ships remained vacant pending Stannis's return, which everyone in the room understood might be some time coming.
They left at first light, through the Dragon Gate.
Seven hundred people, more or less — the king's party, the escort, the servants, the cooks, the supply wagons, the camp followers that attached themselves to any procession large enough to need them. Several Crownlands lords had joined the column with their own retinues, either out of genuine loyalty to the king or a calculation that being seen to accompany him was worth the trouble of the road.
The column stretched back far enough that the rearguard was still inside the city when the vanguard had cleared the walls. Henry rode near the front, close enough to the king's position to respond quickly, far enough back to watch the shape of the thing.
The King's Road opened ahead of them, running north through the farmland of the Crownlands toward the Trident and beyond. The bells of the city were long since silent. Somewhere behind them Jon Arryn lay in the Sept of Baelor, and somewhere ahead Winterfell waited, and the kingdom's future was in motion whether anyone was ready for it or not.
Henry rode, and thought, and kept his own counsel.
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