A year later the winter broke.
Spring came back to the fields, such fields as still had hands to work them.
Word out of the Seven Kingdoms put the dead near four parts in five.
With fewer bodies left to carry it, the Shivers burned itself out.
What the sickness had not done, the emptying did.
Acreage went to weed.
Carts stopped on the roads.
Lords were in the ground and their children were at each other’s throats for the name.
The men who had kept a peace were as thin on the ground as the rest.
Thieves first, then open bands, all of them hungry.
King’s Landing felt it worst.
The city had always been a mouth.
Now the mouth had no bread.
Talk ran the streets: the plague was the Seven’s answer to a king who, at Queen Alysanne’s urging, had put an end to the lord’s right of the first night.
Godly anger.
A punishment on all men.
The remnants of the Faith’s old armed bands found that talk useful.
They put seven-pointed stars on their sleeves and pulled the hungry with them.
What had been stealing became a rush down a street and through a door.
Men who held a crust fought for it.
The City Watch had died in the same beds as everyone else.
In a handful of days there were killings in the open.
Maegor had been pulled down for the blood he spent.
Jaehaerys spent almost none.
He sent for grain and tried to quiet the capital with food.
That held until Lord Rego Draz, master of coin, was dragged out in a street and beaten to death.
After that the riot had a chance to become a war.
The princes and the two Baratheons stayed at Harrenhal because they had no road home.
The five towers still leaked weather.
What was left—two or three floors at the roots of each, and the vaults under them—was still the largest fortress on the riverlands plain.
The boys were the realm’s future.
House Tully marched from Riverrun to say the defense of them was a Tully charge.
Lord Grover Tully was barely into his teens.
By his sixth day in the castle he was done sitting still.
He wanted a proper council.
He wanted Rhaena to write the king and have the duty given to him in the king’s name, on paper, in sight of men.
He also wanted the widow.
She was not yet forty.
She had kept her looks.
She could still bear a child if she chose.
The last lord of Casterly Rock had tried for her and failed.
In those days she had been in love with a woman named Elissa Farman.
Grover did not think the years between them mattered.
He had a lordship of the Trident.
He had a face he could live with.
He had come with swords for the royal blood.
If he looked well in a fight against a mob, Rhaena and her blue dragon would come to Riverrun and stay there.
Rhaena gave it the Hall of a Hundred Hearths.
It was the largest room in the Seven Kingdoms that sat under a roof.
Hearths stood in the walls by the score.
A thousand tables could have filled the floor.
Lord Maegor Towers could not keep a hall that size.
The place was a shell.
What furniture had not already rotted had gone into last winter’s fires.
The dozen stands of candles were Rhaena’s.
They hung the banners they had.
Targaryen, three red heads on black.
Tully, silver trout on red and blue.
Towers, five black towers on white.
Boremund’s crowned stag went up because Rhaena said the stone looked bare.
It was the first time he had sat for his house.
He could not keep still.
A man who did not know him would have sworn there was a nail in the chair.
Rhaena took the high seat.
Lord Towers, worn thinner than his years, was helped to her left.
Lord Tully took her right.
Two Kingsguard, some dozens of knights out of King’s Landing and Riverrun, even the lesser officers—every one of them had a place.
They still did not fill the dais.
The talk before the talk ran around the table.
Voices came back off the empty stone.
Rhaena had the servants set old wooden screens to break the echo.
“Hardbar!
Here!”
Aemon.
Rhaegar would not give him the satisfaction.
He made a sound in his throat and dropped onto a bench in the listening row.
Rhaena had used the name.
That had been enough.
It was all through the castle now.
The maids said Ser Hardbar when they stripped him for a bath.
He had been in a black mood for days.
Her knuckles hit the table.
The hall went quiet.
“Lord Tully.
Does this rising come as far as Harrenhal?”
“My lady.
I believe the mob will be here soon.
I give you my honor.
Any man who tries these gates dies on my sword.”
He had put on the silver plate his house kept for show.
The helm was still in his chamber.
He hooked a fall of red hair behind his ear and looked at her as if the answer were already a song.
He had taken Riverrun young.
He had been loyal enough.
At fourteen or fifteen he was already measuring a woman past thirty for a wife.
Rhaena had a grandson and still had color in her face.
More than the face, she was a Targaryen.
A husband of hers might one day have a dragon in his yard.
Plenty of lords had done that sum.
This one had a common look, a common sword-hand, a taste for wine and beds, and no gift for moving men.
If Harrenhal had to live or die by his command, it would die.
Rhaena knew the talk that followed him.
She gave him the nod courtesy required and turned to Ser Lucamore Strong.
“Your dispositions.”
Lucamore’s voice stayed level.
“Six ways in or out.
We have closed four with stone.
The main gate is open.
So is the water gate on the Gods Eye.
If they have no boats, we hold the gate that is hardest to take and let the rest starve on the grass.”
Ser Ryam took it up.
“We keep the wall.
We do not go out to them.
Princess Rhaena has Dreamfyre.
The stores and the men we have will last until King’s Landing sends relief.”
Knights and officers who had already walked the same ground nodded.
Rhaena saw the confidence and left the subject.
“And the king?”
“There is no rookery here,” Lucamore said.
“No courier rider out of the capital either.” The riot had cut the road.
The unease sat in him and did not leave.
“Then Harrenhal will have a maester in residence.
The children are here.
Rhaegar will be five.
It is time he had his letters.”
Lord Towers was already sliding toward sleep.
She sent a man for a blanket and had it put over him.
Grover’s face had gone sour.
She found a use for him.
“You brought a maester, my lord.”
He came back from wherever he had been.
“I—yes.”
They looked at each other.
He did not find the next sentence.
She gave it to him.
“He will write in my name.
I want more men from the king.
I want the Citadel to send a maester to stay.”
“At once.
After we rise.
We have a dozen ravens with us.” He wanted to look like a lord who could do a thing.
She had him before he knew he had been taken.
A Lord Paramount of the Trident sat in her hall and wrote what she told him to write.