The lists looked different when they were full.
Alex had seen them empty, had walked the grounds two days before and understood the scale of them intellectually.
But understanding something and seeing it filled with ten thousand people were different things entirely.
The noise alone was something he hadn’t prepared for, not the noise of a crowd exactly but the noise of many crowds layered on top of each other, each one having its own conversation, all of them happening at the same time until the air itself felt thick with it.
They found spots in the middle tiers.
Not the noble stands, those were cordoned off with Lannister guards at every entrance, the lords and their families already settled behind silk banners and cushioned seats.
Not the ground level either, where competing knights and their retinues had their designated areas.
The middle tiers were for everyone else, merchants, smallfolk, hedge knights, servants who’d been given the morning off to watch.
It was loud and slightly cramped and smelled of the people around them and Alex found, somewhat to his surprise, that he didn’t mind any of it.
Edwyn was already there when they arrived, three seats along from where they’d agreed to meet, with a better sightline than seemed strictly fair.
“How,” Mikal said, looking at the seats.
“I got here early,” Edwyn said.
“We got here early.” “I got here earlier.” Mikal sat down without further comment.
The herald’s voice carried across the lists with the trained projection of someone whose entire professional value was the ability to be heard by ten thousand people simultaneously.
Houses were announced in order of rank.
Banners were raised.
The crowd responded to each with varying degrees of enthusiasm, politely for some, genuinely for others.
The Tyrells got a warm reception.
The crowd liked the Tyrells, or at least liked what the Tyrells represented, generosity, spectacle, the Reach in its best aspect.
Then the royal party emerged from the far end of the lists and the noise changed completely.
Alex had been waiting for this.
He’d known it was coming, had been sitting with the anticipation of it since they arrived in Lannisport, and it still landed differently than he expected.
Aerys II Targaryen was not what he’d imagined.
Not a monster.
Not visibly broken.
Just a man, tall, silver-gold Targaryen hair worn long, richly dressed in black and red, acknowledging the crowd with the particular quality of someone who had been acknowledged his entire life and found it entirely unremarkable.
He smiled when the crowd cheered.
Raised a hand.
Looked around the lists with the expression of a man at his own entertainment.
But something sat slightly wrong.
Alex couldn’t name it precisely.
It wasn’t one thing, more like several small things that individually meant nothing and together meant something he didn’t have the right word for yet.
The way Aerys’s eyes moved across the crowd without quite settling on anything.
The way the lords around him watched him with a specific quality of attention that wasn’t quite admiration.
The way the Kingsguard knights positioned themselves, professionally correct and somehow slightly too alert for a celebratory occasion.
‘Like a door hung a fraction off its hinges,’ Alex thought.
‘Still opens and closes.
Just not quite right.’ Then Rhaegar came out behind his father and the crowd’s reaction shifted so immediately and completely that it was almost startling.
Warmer.
Louder.
More genuine, the difference between noise that people made because it was expected and noise that came out of them without thinking about it first.
Rhaegar at seventeen was exactly what the stories had suggested and somehow still surprising in person.
The Targaryen colouring like his father but worn differently, the same silver-gold hair, the same purple eyes visible even from this distance, but arranged on a face that looked like it had been put together with deliberate care.
He rode well.
He acknowledged the crowd well.
He did everything a crown prince was supposed to do at an occasion like this and managed to make it look like it cost him nothing.
Alex watched the gap between how the crowd responded to the father and how they responded to the son and filed it away without comment.
He looked up at the noble stands.
Jon Arryn was visible near the front, an older man, measured, with two boys seated beside him.
Alex looked at them briefly without knowing who they were and looked back at the lists.
The mummer shows ran through midday while the archery setup was arranged on the field.
Alex used the time to move.
Not aimlessly, he drifted with purpose through the areas of the grounds open to common spectators, tracking the edges of conversations, watching how people grouped and regrouped.
You learned different things from a crowd in motion than from one sitting still.
People talked more freely when they were walking.
They dropped their guard between destinations.
He was moving through the area near the eastern stands when the Martell group passed.
He noticed them first by the colours, orange and red, half a dozen people moving together through the crowd with the ease of people who were used to crowds adjusting around them.
Guards at the edges, not aggressive, just present.
A young man at the front who moved with the particular energy of someone who found everything around him faintly amusing and possibly worth challenging, Oberyn Martell, Alex thought, though he wasn’t certain.
Beside him an older man, quieter, watching everything.
And at the edge of the group, slightly separate from the others, a young woman.
Alex stopped.
Not dramatically.
Just, stopped moving forward for a moment while the crowd moved around him.
She was standing still while her companions moved, looking at something across the grounds with an expression that was simply present, not performing for anyone, not arranging herself for observation, just existing in the space with a quality that made everything around her look slightly less defined by comparison.
Then she turned slightly and the light caught her eyes.
Violet.
Not the pale lavender of Targaryen eyes, a deeper, warmer violet, the colour of something that shouldn’t be a real eye colour but clearly was.
She was standing beside a young woman Alex recognised after a moment as Elia Martell from the orange and red she wore.
He stood there for perhaps four seconds.
Five at most.
Then the crowd shifted and the group moved on and he started walking again.
‘Oh,’ he thought, with the specific quality of someone who has just understood something that had previously only been words.
‘That’s what all the fuss was about.’ He went back to watching the crowd.
The archery drew sixty-three competitors.
Alex watched from the fence near the field’s edge, close enough to see form clearly.
He wasn’t watching for entertainment, he was watching for information, the same way he’d watched the smaller tourneys on the road.
Pressure revealed things about people that normal circumstances didn’t.
Who tightened up in front of a crowd.
Who performed better with eyes on them.
Who had good form and who had drilled the same bad habit so many times it looked like good form until something went wrong.
By the halfway point he’d picked three men he thought would make the final ten.
Two of them did.
One didn’t, eliminated in the last round by a Westerlands knight Alex hadn’t rated highly enough.
He noted the mistake and what had caused it.
The ten finalists were announced for tomorrow’s second round.
The crowd dispersed for the evening feast.
Day two was quieter in the way that second days always were, the initial scale of everything slightly less overwhelming now that it had been slept on.
Alex moved through the mummer shows in the morning with more confidence, covering more ground, staying longer in places where conversations seemed worth following.
Near one of the side tents at the northern end of the grounds he passed a small cluster of older men, two in maester’s grey, one in plain merchant’s clothes that were slightly too good for a merchant, talking in the lowered voices of people who were not trying to be heard beyond their own group.
He caught a fragment as he walked past.
Something about fire.
About how it behaved differently under certain conditions.
A word he didn’t recognise, a compound word, technical sounding, the kind of word that belonged to a specific field of knowledge he didn’t have access to yet.
He didn’t slow down.
Didn’t look at them.
‘File it,’ he thought.
‘Don’t know what it means yet.
But file it.’ He kept walking.
The archery finals ran through noon.
The ten men shot in sequence, three rounds each, the crowd following more closely than yesterday now that the field was small enough to track individual performances.
Alex watched from the same fence position as before and picked his favourite by the second round, a Reach archer with a consistency of draw that the others weren’t matching.
His pick placed second.
He spent a moment working out what he’d gotten right and where his read had fallen short.
The winner had a slightly unorthodox release that Alex had initially read as a flaw.
It wasn’t.
He filed the correction.
The evening feast was quieter than the first night.
The initial celebratory energy had settled into something more comfortable and sustained, people who had been strangers two days ago now having second and third conversations, the social landscape of the tourney establishing itself.
Mikal and Edwyn were deep in competition talk by the time Alex finished eating.
Specific, practical, which knights Mikal had watched in the practice yard, who moved well, who had tells in their lance positioning, what the ground conditions near the eastern end of the lists did to a horse’s footing.
Alex listened and ate and said nothing for most of it.
Then: “The grey roan that Lord Prester’s knight rode in the opening parade.
It was favouring its left foreleg slightly.
Not badly, you’d miss it if you weren’t watching the feet.” Mikal looked at him.
“If he’s drawn in the first joust round tomorrow,” Alex said, “his horse won’t be at full performance.” A pause.
Mikal looked back at Edwyn.
Then back at Alex.
He nodded once, the small nod, the one that meant the information had been received and assessed and found useful, and returned to his conversation with Edwyn.
Alex went back to watching the room.
They walked back to the inn when the feast wound down, the three of them moving through streets that were still busy despite the hour, Lannisport apparently not having a strong concept of when things should quiet down.
At the inn Edwyn said goodnight with the cheerful brevity of a man with no particular internal weather and went upstairs.
Mikal sat at the small table in the common room for a while.
Not drinking.
Just sitting.
Alex sat across from him.
Outside the city went about its evening.
Inside the inn was warm and low-lit and quiet enough that the sounds from the street came through clearly, voices, a cart somewhere, the distant sound of the harbour that never fully went away in Lannisport no matter where you were.
Tomorrow the Melee began.
Alex didn’t say anything because there wasn’t anything useful to say.
He just sat there until Mikal looked up and gave him the short nod that meant ‘go to bed,’ and he went.