Chapter 60: Maewyn
On the south bank of the Blackwater Rush, outside King's Landing's walls, the tourney grounds had taken on a life of their own. A hundred tents or more lined the riverbank, their pennants snapping in the river breeze — the colors of a dozen houses from the Crownlands and beyond, mixed with the plain canvas of knights without great names who had come anyway, because a king's tourney was a king's tourney.
The crowds outside the wooden barriers were thick enough that moving through them required patience or elbows. Vendors worked the edges with meat pies and watered ale. Children darted between adult legs. Horses stamped and blew at the noise. The whole field smelled of trampled grass and cookfire smoke and the particular human warmth of several thousand people pressed together in the open air.
In the lists, armored knights rode in slow procession before the platform, the sun catching their plate and the silver ornaments on their destriers, drawing the roar that crowds at tourneys have always given to the sight of gleaming steel on horseback.
Robert sat in the center of the royal platform, Myrcella pressed close on his left and Tommen on his right, both children leaning against him with the ease of children who had recently rediscovered their father. Robert's face was flushed from the morning sun, the loose skin at his jaw moving slightly with his breathing — but he looked, to anyone watching from the field, like a king enjoying a fine day. The goblet that had lived in his hand for the better part of a decade was conspicuously absent. Cersei sat to Tommen's right, watching the field with the expression she wore at most public events — present, composed, and somewhere else entirely.
To the left of the platform, Eddard Stark sat with Arya beside him. Arya had been leaning forward since she sat down, watching the horses with the focused attention of someone who has decided that paying close attention is the same as participating.
Joffrey sat between the Stark and Baratheon ends of the platform with Sansa beside him, their hands loosely joined. He looked, for once, like a boy at a tourney rather than a prince performing being at one.
On the right side of the platform, Lord Mace Tyrell occupied considerably more space than the seating strictly required, his wife Lady Alerie composed and pleasant beside him. Margaery sat at her mother's right, her eyes moving across the field with an attention that took in considerably more than the horses.
Maewyn Sarsfield sat his horse at the near end of the lists.
He was in full armor — the gauntlet-and-raised-fist crest on his helm the same one Henry had first noticed years ago in White Harbor, the crest of a man who had chosen it himself rather than inherited it. But the surcoat was new. Red fabric, with a diagonal band of silver-white running from shoulder to hip, and centered on the band, a single arrow with an arrowhead dyed a sharp, deliberate gold.
It was a modification of the House Sarsfield sigil — the green arrow of his birth house, reworked into something that belonged to him rather than to his father's hall. The red of the field was the red of the lion he served. The gold on the arrowhead was his own addition, and he had his reasons for it.
Across the lists, at the far end, his opponent had already turned his horse to face the field.
The white cloak of the Kingsguard lay over gilded plate worked with a snarling lion at the breast. The lion-head visor covered most of Jaime Lannister's face, but the easy confidence in his seat needed no face to announce itself. The golden sword at his hip caught the morning light.
Maewyn looked at him across the length of the lists and said nothing.
Jaime nudged his horse forward until the gap between them had closed enough for quiet conversation.
"House Sarsfield." He looked at the surcoat with the mild interest of a man identifying something he has very little opinion of. "Bad luck, drawing me in the first round."
Maewyn did not answer.
Jaime had never found silence a satisfying response. He brought the horse another half-step closer. "Does your father know you've ridden all the way from the Westerlands to play sworn sword for what's left of the Reynes?"
"I'm a younger son," Maewyn said. "No inheritance waiting for me. I'm free to choose my own lord."
"Free." Jaime let the word sit for a moment, as though examining it for flaws. "You chose to ride a thousand miles to guard a gate in King's Landing. A bold use of your freedom."
Maewyn looked at him steadily. "Lannister — when you're standing your watch outside the King's chambers in that white cloak, and you can hear Robert through the door with your sister — how does that sit with you?"
The pleasantness left Jaime's expression as completely as a candle going out.
He recovered in a moment, but the moment was visible. "Hiding your house's green arrow, are you?" His voice had gone cooler. "Ashamed of where you came from, so you've invented a new device to serve under?"
"It's not a hiding." Maewyn touched two fingers to the silver band on his surcoat. "I'm a Red Arrow in service to the Red Lion. The sigil says exactly what I am."
Jaime looked at the gold arrowhead. "What's the yellow meant to represent? Did your lord use you to wipe something off his boots?"
"It represents," Maewyn said, without inflection, "that my arrowhead will be stained with the gold Lannister blood when the time comes."
"Well." The cruelty at the corner of Jaime's mouth was the refined kind — the kind a man develops when he has been the best at something for long enough that ordinary contempt stops being satisfying. "See that your lance is as sharp as your tongue. Hear me roar, Red Arrow."
"I'd wager a man like you doesn't know the words of House Sarsfield." Maewyn held his gaze without moving. "It's True to the Mark. Remember that, Kingslayer."
The last word landed the way Maewyn intended it to.
Jaime looked at him for one long moment with eyes that had gone completely flat. Then he turned his horse without another word and rode for his end of the lists.
A Lannister squire was waiting with the lance. Jaime took it without looking at the boy.
At Maewyn's end, Corlen Sasman stepped up from the rail, temporarily filling the role of squire with the practical efficiency of a man who had done harder things. He held the lance out handle-first.
"Don't shame the red lion," he said.
Maewyn took it, settled his grip on the shaft, and felt the familiar rough texture of tournament wood against his palm.
The trumpeters at the field's edge put horns to lips. The long note cut through the crowd noise and hung in the air, and when it faded, the field went quiet in that particular way that only happens in the moment before a charge.
Both men spurred simultaneously.
The destriers launched from a standing start into a gallop in the space of a few strides, hoofbeats building from scattered thunder into something continuous and felt in the chest as much as heard. The distance between them collapsed fast — faster than it ever seemed it would from the platform, slower than it felt from the saddle.
At ten feet, both men lowered their lances and found their lines.
The tips struck shields with a single heavy impact — one sound rather than two, the timing close enough that the crowd couldn't separate them. Maewyn's arm went numb from wrist to shoulder. His body swayed. He found the horse with his knees, squeezed, and stayed in the saddle. At the far end, Jaime absorbed the hit with a shoulder dip, corrected his seat, and cantered his horse around to the opposite side of the tilt barrier.
First pass. No lances broken. No one down.
They came around to the far sides of the barrier, set their lines, and ran again.
This time both men hit with their full weight behind the lance. Two sharp cracks split the air as both shafts shattered at near-simultaneous impact, the splinters catching the sunlight as they fell. Maewyn lurched hard to the right, grabbed the reins with his free hand, and hauled himself upright by main force. Jaime rocked back a full count before his spine straightened.
Squires moved out to replace both lances. Maewyn flexed his arm carefully, working feeling back into it from the shoulder down. Jaime turned his new lance in his hands with the studied ease of a man who wanted his opponent to see how little effort this was costing him.
Third pass.
They spurred, the horses found their speed, and then Maewyn changed.
Instead of setting for the straightforward strike — the contest of mass and momentum that Jaime was expecting and that Jaime would win — Maewyn shifted his weight hard to the outside, leaning off the saddle in a way that left him dangerously exposed, and drove his lance in a long diagonal thrust rather than a direct charge.
The tip caught the edge of Jaime's shield and deflected up into the shoulder plate. Not a clean strike. Not enough to unseat him on its own.
But the shift in angle had cost Maewyn his guard. Jaime's lance hit him square in the breastplate with the full force of a galloping destrier behind it.
Two more cracks of breaking lances, and both men left their saddles.
Jaime hit the ground, got his weight under him, and stood — his left arm clutched against his chest at the wrong angle, the shoulder clearly gone. He was up before the crowd had finished reacting.
Maewyn's landing was worse. His left foot caught in the stirrup as he fell, and the horse carried him three yards before Corlen got to the animal's head and brought it to a stop. He freed Maewyn's foot and got him upright.
On the royal platform, Robert looked at both men for a moment with the expression of a man who has seen a great many jousts and knows a close result when he sees one. He raised his hand.
"Jaime Lannister wins."
The crowd gave him what he'd earned.
Jaime walked across the churned earth of the lists to where Maewyn was still getting his feet under him, his dislocated shoulder held careful and still.
He looked at Maewyn for a moment.
"What's your name, lad of House Sarsfield?"
Maewyn straightened up and met his eyes.
"Maewyn," he said.
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