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In the deep stillness of the early hours, well past midnight, the full moon shone high in the sky.
On the edge of Flea Bottom, a filthy-faced drunk in a dark blue robe staggered down the street.
The reek of wine coming off him was so strong it could be detected from far away. Even the Gold Cloaks passing on patrol wrinkled their noses and chose to avoid him.
Two wretches hiding in the darkness of Flea Bottom saw in that drunk a fat, easy mark. The moment he passed out of the Gold Cloaks' sight, the two of them moved in, grabbed him from either side, and dragged him into a dark alley.
After all, to the wretches of that place, everything on that man was wealth. Even his body itself might well end up in a bowl of brown.
Curiously, only a few minutes later, the drunk came staggering back out onto the street as if nothing had happened.
Perhaps the two poor bastards had "fallen asleep" by accident.
When the drunk reached an old two-story house with the sigil of "a coin drawn over a checkered board" carved into the door, he immediately stopped staggering and moved nimbly, heading straight for the back of the building.
That drunk was Robb, imitating Varys's disguise.
And that old two-story house was the residence of Ilyn Payne, the king's executioner.
The house had doors and windows at both front and back. As soon as he reached the rear, Robb tested both the door and the window.
As he had expected, both were tightly locked.
Which made sense. On the edge of Flea Bottom, if someone left doors and windows open at night, they might well wake with not even their own corpse left to them.
Robb drew the short dagger from inside his clothes and began working at the old window latch.
With a light crack, the wooden latch gave way.
Holding the loosened window steady, Robb tilted his head and listened closely for any sound from inside.
After confirming that the house was silent, he carefully lifted the window and squeezed inside.
Clink... roll...
The house was filthy.
With the moon that night providing enough light, Robb could make out food scraps scattered across the floor, bottles, trash, and dirt everywhere.
But moonlight was not the same as candlelight.
The instant he planted his feet on the floor, he accidentally kicked a bottle.
The sound of the glass rolling made his whole body go rigid.
Even so, Ilyn Payne seemed to be sleeping deeply. Robb heard no movement from the upper floor.
A few minutes later, he began moving again.
This time, far more carefully, avoiding every bit of clutter and every obstacle on the floor.
The room he had entered through must have been the kitchen.
He then moved into the front room on the ground floor, where there were whetstones of various sizes and many tools used in the maintenance of weapons.
As the king's executioner, Ilyn certainly sharpened the execution sword there often.
Since his target was not on the ground floor, Robb naturally started up the stairs with the dagger in hand.
He had barely passed the steps and set one foot onto the second floor when a candle was lit in a room to the right.
The instant he narrowed his eyes to adjust to the sudden brightness, he heard the familiar sound of a greatsword cutting through the air.
At the same time, he saw a shadow coming from the right, straight toward his neck.
But compared to the Mountain's monstrous strike from earlier that day, this attack was much slower.
Slow enough for him to duck his head and roll to the left.
The giant sword missed its mark and carved a huge gash into the wooden wall beside the stairs.
With an agile roll, Robb regained his balance and came back to his feet.
That was when he saw Ilyn Payne, nearly bald and hollow-faced, holding Ice, his father's sword, and staring at him with wide eyes, visibly astonished.
Ilyn had not expected this either.
Sleeping upstairs, he had heard noise from below and caught the strong smell of wine. At first, he had assumed it was just some Flea Bottom wretch drunk enough to stumble into his house.
He had thought that by lighting the candle at just the right moment and using the transition between darkness and light, he could take the intruder's head with a single blow.
But the intruder had dodged with ease.
And seeing the partly cleaned face beneath the grime, he recognized who it was at once.
Robb Stark.
After all, when he had accompanied King Robert to Winterfell, he had taken a good look at the Young Wolf, whose fame he had heard of all along the way.
What Ilyn could not understand was something else.
Everyone believed Robb was hiding somewhere near the Mud Gate.
So how in all the gods' names had he ended up inside his house instead?
Tongueless, his tongue having been torn out by order of Aerys II, Ilyn could not speak.
So he let Ice speak for him.
Unlike the Mountain, who wielded a two-handed sword with only one hand, Ilyn, being an ordinary man, needed both hands to use it.
His right hand settled near the guard of the sword, and his left gripped the end of the hilt. Then he turned his body and swung it in a wide arc.
CRAAASH!
With its own weight, added to Ilyn's strength, Ice struck with brutal force where Robb had been standing just an instant earlier.
The solid wooden floor was cut through with ease, as if it were butter before Valyrian steel.
But Robb had already moved again.
Ilyn, who was long accustomed to fighting with a two-handed sword, had clearly not expected to hit with the first blow.
The moment he completed the swing, he stepped forward with his left foot and, lifting the sword full of wood splinters, slashed upward from low to high.
Robb kicked back with one foot and arched his body, leaning his head backward to avoid the tip of the sword by a hair's breadth, finishing in a backward flip before regaining his balance once more.
But Ilyn had already chained into the next movement.
After the rising slash, he stepped forward with his right foot and brought down another vertical blow from above.
His style of attack was like the three heavy chops of a wildling's axe.
It had only one goal: kill.
Simple. Efficient. No wasted movement.
At that moment, Robb felt regret.
When he had come up the stairs and been attacked from the right, he had instinctively rolled left.
If, instead, he had dived to the right and closed the distance at once, he would not now be caught in Ilyn's rhythm.
The house was cramped.
When Robb dodged the descending blow once again, he ended up trapped against the wall.
When he was younger, Ilyn Payne had been captain of Tywin's guard. In those days, he had used precisely that simple and brutal sequence countless times to kill for his lord.
But he had grown old.
After delivering three full blows with that huge sword, the transitions between each movement had already begun to slow visibly.
And Robb, who had already grasped the rhythm of the attack, seized the chance.
Before Ilyn could gather strength for another rising slash, Robb threw the short dagger at him and, in the same instant, shoved hard off the wall, shooting forward like an arrow.
Under the candle's wavering light, Ilyn saw the dagger flying and lifted the sword to knock it aside, deflecting it.
But that was exactly what Robb wanted.
To break the continuous flow of attacks and open a chance to enter close range.
When Ilyn knocked Ice away and tried to raise the sword again, Robb was already in front of him.
Robb's right fist crashed directly into Ilyn's right hand, and the absurd force of the blow numbed the arm instantly. Because of that, the sword dropped to the floor.
Without giving him even a second, Robb followed with a left hook to Ilyn's face, striking his hollow-cheeked features so hard that blood and old teeth flew from his mouth, and he fell backward.
Robb did not stop.
He stepped forward, straddled the fallen man, and began punching him over and over, alternating fists.
One blow.
Two.
Three...
THUD! THUD! THUD!
The upper floor of the house filled with the dull thud of punches.
By the time he finally suppressed the urge to keep hitting, Ilyn Payne no longer looked remotely human.
His head looked like an oval mass of blood and flesh, partly caved in.
One eye had been crushed.
His nose had collapsed into his face.
His jaw had been broken and displaced, hanging open in a way that could no longer close.
Huff... huff...
Even so, no red mist rose.
Hearing the man's faint, dragging breath, Robb realized he was still alive.
Ilyn's one remaining eye was still staring sideways at him, full of tangled emotions: pleading, surrender, incomprehension.
Perhaps he truly did not know why he was being killed.
It was true that with Eddard Stark imprisoned, his sword had been left temporarily in Ilyn's keeping.
But under normal circumstances, that should not have earned him a death sentence.
Robb rose slowly and looked down at him.
Then he spoke in a low voice.
"I'm sorry. But you're on my sister's list."
His foot came down.
And the red mist rose.
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