The children were safe.
Only then did Rhaena turn the table back to King’s Landing.
“The Lord of Air held the realm’s purse.
No one steps into that work in a week.
I wonder what my brother will do with the men who killed him.”
Power in the Seven Kingdoms ran through the king.
After Jaehaerys took the throne he had made his advisers a fixed thing: six seats on a small council, each man speaking from his own craft.
The Hand of the King stood nearest.
If the king named no regent and was not in the Red Keep, the Hand could sit the Iron Throne and rule in his name.
The master of ships held the royal fleet and could call other sails besides.
Every man who had worn that title so far had been a Velaryon.
The master of laws was the king’s counsel in the statutes.
The dungeons of the Red Keep were his, and the gaols, and the men who swung the sword.
Learning in this world belonged to the Citadel in Oldtown.
Those who trained there were maesters, sent to lords for letters and physic.
The one sent to the king was Grand Maester.
He was a scholar and the royal physician both.
The master of whisperers took any word worth taking: the Red Keep, the city, the Seven Kingdoms, and what moved across the Narrow Sea.
Men loved the office and feared the man in it.
The master of coin was the king’s purse.
He kept the count of what came in and what went out.
He took the reports of lesser officers.
He watched the taxes and the customs, the loans, the treasury, and the three royal mints.
Under him sat a crowd: keepers of keys, royal counters, men of weights and measures, the masters of the three mints, the harbormaster, tax farmers, customs men, wool factors, toll-keepers on the roads, ship-officers, wine agents, and more besides.
Six offices.
The Shivers had already taken Grand Maester Benifer and Lord Albin Massey, master of laws.
Now a mob had left Lord Rego Draz in a gutter and cut the strings of the purse.
The realm had no floor under it.
Rego Draz had been Pentoshi, a man of Essos.
They called him the Lord of Air because he seemed to pull coin out of nothing.
Ten years in the seat.
He had set the Iron Bank of Braavos against the banks of Tyrosh and Myr and borrowed cheap from their hatred of one another.
That gold had paid for work on the Dragonpit on Rhaenys’s Hill.
He had set duties by where a thing was made, how much of it there was, and how far it had to travel.
He had put a tariff on the foreign stuff lords liked to wear and drink.
In less than ten years a treasury emptied by war had stood full.
The king’s purse was a different corpse.
No one at the table would guess aloud what Jaehaerys would do.
They sat on their thoughts and waited for Rhaena to answer her own question.
Lord Tully, still warm from being given a task, opened his mouth again.
“Lord Rego’s death is a loss.
The king is merciful.
He will take the killers and give them an open trial.
The law will be seen to be the law.”
He thought he had said a thing that cut nothing and saved the king’s name besides.
When he finished, every face at the table turned to him and stayed there, pretending thought.
On the listening bench Rhaegar’s backside had had enough of the board.
He stood on the seat and then sat in it cross-legged.
The air had gone stiff.
Rhaena saw him move and used it.
“What would you do with them, little Hardbar?”
He was four.
She was putting a blade in his hand and standing behind him.
He knew it and played along, all innocence.
“I don’t know.
And I am not little.”
A few polite breaths.
Then real laughter, or a good copy of it.
The hall loosened.
Cut their stones.
Sell the wives and the daughters.
Open the graves and pull the fathers out.
That was the sentence in his head.
A child of four saying it would have dropped half these men where they sat.
He had heard the other talk too, the talk that said he was simple.
Wave a sweet in front of a boy and the boy is meant to smile.
Keep your face shut and they call you slow.
A man who has only lived through summer has nothing to say about ice.
The people who fed him knew his mind was whole.
That was enough.
When the laughter died Rhaena went on.
They will come up through the Red Keep and try for the king.
Jaehaerys knows what the hour is.”
The table did not love that.
Twelve years on the throne he had spent refusing Maegor’s road.
When men pushed him he used his head and left the swords sheathed.
A treasurer killed in a street, they thought, would be a matter for the law.
A week later a rider came from King’s Landing.
Rhaena had called it.
The word of the killing reached the Red Keep and Jaehaerys went to fury.
He put his councillors’ caution aside and named the rising a rebellion.
Ravens took that name to every corner of the Seven Kingdoms.
He called the nearby lords to arms, put them with what was left of the City Watch, and swept the city.
Every thief they could find went into chains.
The Kingsguard dragged the men who had been at the killing into the dungeons under the keep.
Whether a man had swung or only stood there did not matter.
If he had been in the street when Rego Draz died, the king called it death.
The law allowed a condemned man to take the black and keep the Wall until his last day.
Jaehaerys refused them that door.
They hung more than a hundred on the walls of the Red Keep, in a single line.
The headsmen opened them while they were still screaming.
Gut and blood ran down the stone.
The city watched the rats do the rest, living men to clean bone.
He had named it rebellion first, in the hearing of the realm, and only then used the knife.
The lords did not bristle.
They called him wise.
The Shivers had just lifted.
Every seat in the country was either fighting over a dead father’s name or putting down its own hungry men.
A king who moved first would find them behind him.
He had been gentle too long.
Cruelty, used on the right morning, told two stories at once: that he could think, and that he was not a soft king who lived only in his skull.
The Seven Kingdoms still honored a man who could ride to war.
The lords who already stood with Jaehaerys wanted a king who could do both.
The lords who had stood against him went quiet and stopped feeding him half-answers.
Rhaegar put the king a mark higher in his private count.
Maegor the Cruel could have done the same thing a dozen years back and the histories would have called it slaughter, whatever the cause, and written it down to stink forever.