Chapter 45: Tyrion's Gift
Luwin worked fast.
He had the leaf under his nose before anyone else in the room had finished processing what they were looking at. He turned it over in his fingers, brought it close, inhaled once with the careful attention of a man who has spent forty years learning what things smell like when they are trying to kill someone.
He set it down on the side table and looked at it for a moment with an expression that was professional rather than emotional, which was the most alarming possible expression under the circumstances.
"The Long Farewell," he said. "Applied to the leaf — not ingested directly. The onset is slow through skin contact, which is why it took this long to present." He was already moving to his kit, which he had kept in the room since the first night, because Luwin was the kind of maester who anticipated needing his kit and kept it where he could reach it. "I need to work now. Everyone who isn't helping, step back."
He had administered the counter before Catelyn had fully understood what he had said.
She stood beside Bran's bed while Luwin worked, and the understanding settled into her in stages — the leaf, the contact, the slow seeping of it through days of proximity, the careful deliberate patience of someone who had planned for this to take time. When the full shape of it was clear in her mind she reached for the bedpost and held it, and Robb got to her before her legs made a decision she hadn't made.
"Mother—"
"The leaf." Her voice came out steady, which surprised her. "The leaf was Tyrion's. Cersei took it and brought it herself. She told me to lay it against his face. She said it was a northern custom, that it would help him heal." She stopped. "I didn't use it that way. I left it beside the pillow. If I had—"
She did not finish that sentence.
Robb's face had gone through several things in quick succession and had arrived at a controlled fury that looked very much like Eddard Stark's face when Eddard Stark was keeping himself in check. He looked at Bran. Then at the leaf. Then at the door.
Theon was leaning in the doorway with his hand resting on his sword hilt, which was where Theon generally put his hand when he wanted to look like he was contributing to a situation.
"Poison," he said, with the contempt of someone who has decided on his position and is going to state it at volume. "If the Lannisters had the nerve to walk through the gate and do this with a sword, I might respect them for it. As it is—"
"Theon." Robb's voice had the particular sharpness of someone who does not have the patience for this right now and is being clear about it.
Theon shrugged and shifted his weight and said nothing further, which was the most useful thing he had done since entering the room.
Robb turned back to his mother. He was working something out — she could see it in his face, the process of a young man trying to think like a lord rather than a son, and finding it harder than he'd expected.
"Why Bran?" he said. "He's a child. He was unconscious. What could they possibly—" He stopped. The answer arrived while he was still forming the question. "He saw something. Before he fell. He saw something and they pushed him, and now they're making sure he doesn't wake up to say what it was."
"Yes." Catelyn let go of the bedpost. She had herself back now, or enough of herself. The grief and the exhaustion had been there for days — the fury was new, and it was clarifying in the way that fury sometimes is. "And your father is riding into King's Landing without knowing any of this. Your sisters are with him."
"Send a raven."
"To the Red Keep?" She shook her head. "A raven addressed to your father arriving in that castle goes through the rookery. The rookery is staffed by men who serve the castle, not Ned specifically. If Cersei has people watching the correspondence—" She left it where it was. "We cannot trust a raven with this."
"Iron Fist Keep, then," Robb said. "Henry has men there. He and the Lannisters—"
"Henry is at Castle Black escorting Joffrey. His return date is uncertain and your father cannot wait." She looked at her son. "I'll go myself. By ship — south from White Harbor, fast passage, we can reach King's Landing before the column if the winds hold."
"You're not well enough to—"
"I am well enough." The words came out with enough finality that Robb did not try again immediately. She looked at Luwin, who was watching Bran's face and monitoring his breathing with the focused attention of a man who was not yet satisfied. "Maester Luwin. Will he live?"
Luwin did not look up. "The contact was indirect and the exposure limited. The fact that it presented as it did rather than more severely suggests the dosage was insufficient for a direct kill — likely calculated for prolonged exposure that would look natural." A pause. "He is stable. Whether he wakes is still not something I can answer with certainty."
Catelyn nodded. One thing at a time.
She looked at Ser Rodrik, who had been standing against the wall with the stillness of a man who has been in difficult rooms before and knows that stillness is sometimes the most useful thing he can offer.
"Ser Rodrik. I need you to ride with me." She looked at Theon, briefly, and made a calculation she did not appear to enjoy making. "And you."
Theon straightened, the swagger returning in the automatic way it returned to him whenever he was being given something rather than lectured.
"White Knife to White Harbor," she said. "Then by sea. Fast as we can make it."
"Mother." Robb's voice had changed again. The lord's voice, not the son's. "Winterfell needs someone here. I'll manage the castle. But you need to understand what you're walking into." He held her gaze. "Jon Arryn is dead. Bran was pushed. The Hand's wife wrote to you saying the Lannisters killed her husband. And now this." He glanced at the leaf on the side table. "This isn't a family matter anymore."
"No," Catelyn said. "It isn't."
She looked at Bran one more time — the slow breathing, the pale face, the slight improvement in color that Luwin's intervention had already begun to produce. She memorized it, the way you memorize something you are going to have to leave and do not know when you will see again.
Then she turned and began to think about what to pack and how fast a ship out of White Harbor could be arranged.
The Shieldhall at Castle Black was large in the way that neglected things are large — the space was there, but it had been accumulating the evidence of disuse for long enough that the size mostly served to make the emptiness more apparent. Black stone walls, oak rafters darkened by decades of fire smoke to the color of old iron, a floor that bore the ghost of better-attended feasts in the worn patterns of the stone. The Night's Watch had made it functional for the Gold Cloaks — cleared the worst of the dust, blocked the cellar entrance where the rats had established tenure, pushed enough torches into the wall sconces to make the space habitable rather than merely large.
On the walls, the remnants of what had once been the hall's purpose. The shields still hung where brothers had left them across centuries — each one representing a knight who had come to the Wall, hung his family colors here as a last acknowledgment of who he had been, and taken up a plain black shield in its place. Twenty-odd remained. Their colors had faded to suggestions of colors, the heraldry still legible in most cases if you knew what you were looking at, the wood warped and split in a few places where the cold had gotten into the grain.
Henry had looked at them on the first evening and thought about what it meant to choose to leave a thing on a wall.
Tyrion had gotten everything he wanted out of Castle Black.
He had stood on top of the Wall in the wind and the cold and looked north for a long time, and he had pissed off the edge, which he had announced in advance was the primary reason for the visit and which he accomplished with evident satisfaction. He had spent three days in the library going through the older manuscripts — the histories, the ranging reports, the records that went back far enough that the handwriting styles had changed three times. He had drunk with the brothers in the evenings and asked questions that were either idle curiosity or something more focused, and the brothers had answered because Tyrion was easy to talk to when he chose to be and because a dwarf who has climbed to the top of the Wall in northern winter and seems genuinely interested in what you have to say is not a common visitor.
Now he was leaving, and not by the route Henry had assumed.
"You're going back overland," Henry said. It was not quite a question.
"With Yoren's group," Tyrion confirmed. He had the borrowed books from Winterfell's library under his arm, wrapped in oilcloth against the weather. "Several of the crows are heading south to recruit. I'll travel with them as far as Winterfell and return the books I borrowed. It would be rude not to."
Henry looked at him. "You borrowed books from Winterfell's library."
"Stark hospitality extends to the library. I availed myself of it." He shifted the wrapped bundle. "There are texts there that don't exist anywhere else — ranging reports from three centuries back, accounts of what was found beyond the Wall in the years when the Watch still ranged deep." He paused. "Interesting reading."
"And you're going back to return them."
"A man who borrows books and doesn't return them is a thief with pretensions," Tyrion said. "I have many faults. That isn't one of them."
Henry studied him for a moment — the expression, the books, the slightly too-casual tone of a man who has decided on a course of action and is providing a reason that is true but not complete.
He did not press it. Tyrion would tell him what he wanted to tell him when he wanted to tell it, and pressing Tyrion for information he had decided to withhold was an exercise that produced only more elaborate justifications.
"Take enough men," Henry said instead.
"I have my two guards and Yoren's company, which has survived worse than the Kings Road in winter." Tyrion glanced at the wrapped books. "I'll be fine."
He turned to go, then stopped without turning back.
"Henry." A pause. "Whatever Bran Stark saw before he fell. Whatever it was — it was enough to be worth silencing him for." Another pause, shorter. "Keep that in mind when you get back south and start asking questions."
He walked away before Henry could respond, his two guards falling in behind him, his shadow short and unhesitating on the Castle Black stone.
Henry watched him go.
The raven that had taken up semi-permanent residence on his shoulder for the duration of the visit chose this moment to arrive and settle, which Henry had come to accept as something the bird did when it had opinions about a situation and no other way to express them.
"I know," Henry said, to the raven.
The raven said nothing. It looked in the direction Tyrion had gone with its black eyes for a moment.
Then it looked north, which was not the direction Tyrion had gone.
Henry looked north too.
The Wall rose above them, patient and immense, and whatever was on the other side of it was on the other side of it, for now, and the morning was getting on and there was a ship at Eastwatch and a long road back to King's Landing still ahead of him.
He put Tyrion's last words away in the part of his mind where he kept things that needed to be thought about later, and went to find Joffrey.
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