Olenna Tyrell had outlived a husband, two kings, a Hand, a rebellion, and very nearly all of her enemies. She had assumed, somewhere around her sixtieth year, that she had seen every trick a man could play. Men were not complicated. They wanted gold, or glory, or a woman, or a chair to sit in, and occasionally all four, and once you knew which, you knew everything about them that mattered.
She had not expected to be surprised by a boy of fourteen with mud on his boots and a fistful of roses.
She sat now in the solar of the apartments the crown had given her, a glass of Arbor gold untouched at her elbow, and turned the thing over in her mind the way a jeweller turns a stone, looking for the flaw. Outside the window, the sun was sinking over the Blackwater, and somewhere below, the feast in the king's honour was getting drunker and louder by the minute. She could hear Robert Baratheon laughing from three floors up.
She had not gone down. Let them wonder why. It would do them good.
She had first heard of the boy the way the whole realm had—a raven from King's Landing, fourteen years ago, announcing that Queen Cersei had been delivered of a son. A trueborn prince of House Baratheon. Heir to the Iron Throne.
Well, she had said to Luthor's empty chair, the Lannister girl's done her duty, at least. That's one thing she's managed.
She had not thought much of it after that. Royal babes were born and royal babes died, and a sensible woman did not spend her affections on either until they had survived long enough to be useful. And when word came, a few moons later, that the prince had taken a fever, Olenna had assumed that was the end of it. Half the babes in Westeros died of fevers. There was no reason a prince should be different.
He had lived.
And he had kept on living, and growing, and the reports had kept coming—from her ladies at court, from the Tyrell men in the gold cloaks and the kitchens and the stables, from all the little bees that a clever old woman keeps in a city where she does not live. The prince was healthy. The prince was large—a great strapping lump of a boy, taller at five than most children of seven. The prince was clever. Uncommonly clever. Reading at three, doing sums at four, arguing history with the Grand Maester at eight. The prince was well-mannered, which was more than anyone had ever said of his father, and quiet, which was more than anyone had ever said of his mother.
And then his mother had given Robert three more, and every one of them black-haired as a crow, and half the gossips in the Seven Kingdoms had been obliged to swallow a great many things they had been saying about the queen and her handsome brother.
Olenna had not swallowed anything. She had never said them aloud. That was what separated her from gossips.
Then there had been Loras.
He had come home from King's Landing two years ago with a bruise on his cheekbone the size of a plum and a look on his face she had never seen there before. He had fought the prince in the yard, he said. Beaten him, of course. But the boy had walked into a blow that should have staggered a grown man and put Loras on his heels for half a dozen strokes, and Loras had thought, for one bright, terrible moment, that he was going to lose to a child of twelve.
He'll be the best knight in the realm, her grandson had said, flinging himself onto a couch in her solar. In five years, no one will touch him. Not even me.
Olenna had raised an eyebrow. Loras did not say such things about anyone. Loras had not, to her knowledge, ever admitted in his life that another man might be his better.
She had begun to pay closer attention after that.
And then this spring, the business with Baelish.
The court had been told that the king had found out the traitor, and the king had certainly been the one who swung the hammer. But Olenna's little birds had sung her a different song. That the queen had been pulling threads for a year—calling in favours, placing clerks, reading letters that were not hers to read. That the queen had never shown the least interest in the treasury before in her life. That the queen, for all her pride and her temper and her lion's claws, had never been clever enough to run a scheme like that without help.
And that the prince had been in her solar, nearly every night, for the whole of that year.
When Robert Baratheon had stood up at his feast and bellowed to the whole court that it was his son who'd caught the traitor, half the lords in the hall had laughed and thought it a father's boasting.
Olenna had not laughed. She had packed her trunks for King's Landing.
She had been at court a full moon before the tourney, and she had spent it doing what she did best, which was drinking tea and asking questions.
She had taken tea with the queen three times. Cersei had been exquisitely polite on each occasion, in the way a cat is polite to a mouse it has not yet decided to eat. Olenna had asked after the prince's health, his studies, his training. The queen had answered with a mother's pride and a lioness's caution, giving away precisely nothing. But Olenna had watched her face when she spoke of her son, and seen what was there, and filed it away.
She's not a clever woman, Olenna had thought, sipping her tea. But she loves that boy more than she loves her own reflection, and that's saying a great deal. Whatever I do, I must never make her think I'm taking him from her.
She had taken tea with Lord Arryn, and found him greyer and quieter than she remembered, a man carrying something heavy that he would never be able to set down. She had taken tea with Lord Renly, and found him charming and useless, as she had expected. She had not taken tea with Lord Varys, though he had offered twice, because she did not drink with spiders.
And she had watched the prince.
She had watched him at feasts, seated at the king's right hand, eating like a starving man and speaking very little. She had watched him in the yard with Ser Barristan, patient and tireless, doing the same drill over and over until the old knight nodded. She had watched him in the passages of the Red Keep, stopping to speak to a servant whose name he knew, a kitchen boy, a laundress. She had watched him at his lessons, through a door left conveniently ajar, asking the Grand Maester a question about the yield of the Mander farmlands that Olenna would not have expected from her own steward.
And once, at a feast, he had come to her table.
He had bowed—a proper bow, not the careless nod most young lordlings gave to old women—and asked after her health and her journey and the roses of Highgarden, and she had answered in kind, and they had spoken of nothing at all for a quarter hour. It had been perfectly pleasant. He had been perfectly courteous.
And then, just before he took his leave, he had asked her how long the granaries of Highgarden could feed the Reach, if the harvests failed.
"Why ever would you want to know that, Your Grace?" Olenna had asked.
"The maesters say the last winter lasted three years," the prince had said. "It seems a wise thing to know."
And he had smiled at her, and bowed again, and gone.
Olenna had sat there for a long time afterwards, thinking. She was still thinking about it now.
What does a boy of fourteen want with granaries?
And then, today, the tourney.
She had watched the squires' melee from the Tyrell stand with her son on one side of her, sweating and shouting, and Margaery on the other, composed and attentive. She had not expected to be much interested. Squires' melees were an amusement for the smallfolk, a chance for lordlings to bloody each other's noses before the real fighting began.
She had been wrong about that too.
She had seen a great many fighters in her life. She had watched the tourney at Harrenhal, all those years ago, when a young Rhaegar Targaryen had crowned the wrong woman and set the whole realm on fire. She had seen Barristan Selmy in his prime, and Arthur Dayne, and Robert Baratheon himself. She knew what she was looking at.
She had never seen a boy of fourteen fight like that.
It was not that he was big, though he was—gods, he was, a full head taller than half the field and built like a castle gate. It was not that he was strong, though he threw grown squires about as if they were straw men. It was that he was patient. They had come at him in a pack, a dozen of them, and he had not charged, had not flailed, had not lost his head. He had stood there and let them break against him like waves against a seawall. He had fought, at fourteen, like a man who had been fighting for twenty years and was a little tired of it.
The Umber boy—a great red-bearded brute who looked like he ate horses for breakfast—had been beaten. The Baratheon cousin—quick, clever, dangerous—had been beaten. And when it was done, the prince had stood alone in the lists with forty squires scattered in the mud around him, and fifty thousand people had screamed his name, and he had simply raised one arm, with a silly little black ribbon on it, and waved to his baby sister.
"Well," Mace had said, when he had finished bellowing. "Well. Mother, did you see that? Did you see? That's the one! That's the one for Margaery, I've always said it, I said it when he was born—"
"You said it about the Martell boy, too," Olenna had said. "And that Hightower cousin with the squint."
"But this is the prince!"
"I'm aware of who he is, Mace. I have eyes."
And then the boy had walked to the edge of the lists, and bought a bunch of roses from an old woman, and turned around, and walked straight toward them.
She had not seen it coming. That was what she kept returning to, sitting here in the dark with her wine going warm.
She had been at court a full moon, circling. Probing. Asking her careful questions, making her careful friends, feeling out the queen and the Hand and the king's brothers and all the little lords who would have an opinion. She had known about the Stark girl—of course she had, Robert had been talking about it over his cups for weeks, and the king's cups were not known for their discretion. She had been planning, in her careful, patient way, how to steer around it. A word in Lord Stark's ear. A word in the queen's. A long, slow, quiet game of a year or two, perhaps more, at the end of which Margaery would be betrothed to the heir to the Iron Throne and everyone involved would think it had been their own idea.
And the boy had simply walked across the field and done it.
Not a proposal. He was far too clever for that. Princes did not propose; kings and councils did that, over wine and ledgers, and a prince who tried would be laughed at. No. He had made a gift. A gift of golden roses, the colours of House Tyrell, from the champion of the squires to the daughter of the Lord of Highgarden, before fifty thousand witnesses and every lord in the Seven Kingdoms.
It committed him to nothing. It committed his father to nothing.
And it made it very, very difficult for anyone—the king, the queen, the Hand, the Lord of Winterfell—to marry that boy to anyone else without looking like they had slapped House Tyrell across the face in public.
It was the most elegant thing Olenna had seen anyone do in twenty years.
She had stared at him. She knew she had. She had sat there with her mouth open like a landed carp, like a Florent, and the boy had looked up at her from the mud, and laughed.
He had laughed at her.
She had been furious for about as long as it took to draw breath. Then she had looked at his face again—that big, open, handsome face with its first shadow of a beard and its clever green eyes—and understood that he was not laughing at her. He was laughing the way a player laughs when he has made a move he is proud of, and knows the other player has seen it, and knows the other player knows he knows.
He had been laughing with her. He had been inviting her to the game.
And Olenna Tyrell, who had not been invited to anything by anyone in thirty years—who did the inviting, thank you very much—had found herself inclining her head to a boy of fourteen, the way one player acknowledges another across the board.
She was still not entirely sure how that had happened.
"Grandmother."
Margaery came into the solar without knocking, as she always did, and sat down on the couch across from her, as she always did. She had changed out of her tourney finery into a simple gown of pale green, and brushed out her hair. The roses sat in a vase on the table between them. Someone—Margaery herself, Olenna suspected—had put them in water.
"You're not at the feast," said Margaery.
"Neither are you."
"I thought you might want to talk."
"I always want to talk. It's everyone else who never wants to listen." Olenna picked up her wine at last and sipped it. It was warm. She drank it anyway. "Well? You've had half a day to think on it. What do you make of him?"
Margaery considered. That was one of the things Olenna loved best about her—that she considered. Her son had never considered anything in his life.
"He wasn't flattering me," Margaery said at last. "Men flatter me all the time. I know what it looks like. They want something from me, or from Father, or they want to be seen wanting it. He didn't want anything from me. He barely looked at me at all, until the very end." She tilted her head. "He was looking at you."
"Yes," said Olenna. "He was, wasn't he."
"He knew you'd been asking about him. He knew what you were planning. And he decided he'd rather make the move himself than wait for you to make it for him." Margaery paused. "That's rather frightening, isn't it?"
"It's terrifying," Olenna agreed. "It's also the most promising thing I've seen in a Baratheon since the Conquest." She set down her cup. "And you blushed."
Margaery had the grace to look faintly annoyed. "I did not blush."
"You went as pink as a Dornish ham, child. The whole realm saw it."
"He surprised me." A little defensively. "That's all. No one's surprised me in—" She stopped.
"In a very long time," Olenna finished. "Yes. I know. He surprised me too, and I'm older than the Wall." She studied her granddaughter. "That's the thing to remember about this one, sweetling. I've spent my life marrying clever women to stupid men, and I'm very good at it. You take a stupid man, and you find out what he wants, and you give him a little of it, and you steer him where you like. It's no harder than steering a horse. Easier, usually. Horses have more sense."
"And this one isn't stupid."
"This one is not stupid. This one," said Olenna, "is going to steer you, if you let him. And if you try to steer him, he'll know it before you've picked up the reins." She leaned back. "So you won't. You'll do something much harder. You'll walk beside him, and learn where he's going, and make very sure that wherever it is, House Tyrell gets there first."
Margaery was quiet for a moment. Then, slowly, she smiled.
"Where do you think he's going, Grandmother?"
"I haven't the faintest idea," said Olenna. "And that's the first time I've been able to say that about a man since your grandfather rode off a cliff. It's rather exciting."
Mace came in an hour later, red-faced and wine-sodden and bursting with it, as she had known he would.
"Mother! Mother, the king—the king was laughing, he thought it was the best thing he'd ever seen, he kept saying the boy's picked his own, the boy's picked his own—and he drank to us! To House Tyrell! In front of the whole court! I think—I really think, if I went to him tonight, while he's in his cups—"
"If you go to him tonight," said Olenna, "I'll have you locked in a privy."
Mace deflated. "But Mother—"
"Sit down, Mace. Before you fall down." She waited while he did. "You will not go to the king tonight. You will not go to him tomorrow. You will not go to him at all, until I tell you to. Do you understand?"
"But he's happy. He'll say yes to anything tonight!"
"And tomorrow morning he'll wake up with a head like a smashed melon, and remember that the Lord of Highgarden came begging while he was drunk, and his wife will remind him of it, and his Hand will remind him of it, and he'll feel he was taken advantage of. And Robert Baratheon, whatever else he is, does not like to be taken advantage of." She sniffed. "Ask Balon Greyjoy."
Mace opened his mouth, closed it, and sat back.
"The boy has made his move," Olenna went on. "The whole court saw it. Let them talk. Let them whisper. Let them wonder what House Tyrell will do. The longer we wait, the more they wonder, and the more they wonder, the more it seems a thing already decided." She held up one thin finger. "We do not look eager. We never look eager. Eager is for merchants."
"Then what do we do?"
"You do nothing. You go down to the feast and drink with the king and laugh at his jokes and tell him what a fine son he has. If he mentions Margaery, you smile and say she was very honoured, and change the subject. That's all." She turned to Margaery. "You will be seen. At chapel. In the gardens. At feasts. Kind to everyone, especially the queen's ladies, and especially the little princesses. Everyone should see what a queen you'd make, and no one should see you trying to be one."
Margaery nodded.
"And I," said Olenna Tyrell, "will do what I came here to do."
She laid it out for them, in the end, because they were her blood and they needed to know. But she laid out only half of it, because Mace could not keep a secret to save his life, and she did not intend to be let down by her own son twice in one lifetime.
The queen came first. Always the queen. Robert Baratheon might sit the Iron Throne, but Cersei Lannister sat in her son's heart, and no marriage would happen without her blessing, whatever the king said. So Olenna would take tea with the queen again, and this time she would not probe or ask questions. She would give. She would give Cersei what Cersei wanted most in all the world, which was to be reassured that she would not be replaced.
A daughter, Olenna would say. Not a rival. Margaery was a sweet girl, raised to honour her elders, who would sit at the queen's feet and learn from her and never dream of taking her place. The Tyrells had no wish to come between a mother and her son. The Tyrells only wished to join their house to a great one, and to serve.
It was all perfectly true, from a certain angle. Most of the best lies were.
And she would mention, very lightly, how grateful the Reach would be to be bound to House Lannister as well as House Baratheon—how the Lord of Casterly Rock and the Lord of Highgarden, working together, might put the crown's finances to rights in a single generation. Cersei would carry that to her father. Tywin Lannister had wanted the Reach bound to him for thirty years. He would not say no.
Then the Starks.
That was the delicate one. Robert wanted the Stark girl for his son; he had wanted it for a moon and dreamed of it for longer, some sentimental fancy about binding himself to Eddard Stark in blood as they should have been bound through the sister. But Olenna had been watching Lord Stark's face in the royal stand today, when the prince handed Margaery the roses. And what she had seen on that long, solemn northern face had not been insult or disappointment.
It had been relief.
Ned Stark did not want his little girl promised away while she was still more child than maiden, to a boy built like a siege tower, prince or no. He had only been too loyal and too honest to tell his king so to his face.
His lady wife was another matter. Catelyn Tully had looked like she'd swallowed a lemon whole. She wanted her daughter to be queen. Of course she did. What mother wouldn't?
So Olenna would give her something else to want.
Willas was the heir to Highgarden, and gentle, and clever, and kind, and patient enough to wait as many years as a betrothal required before any wedding. He limped, and he always would, but he would be Lord of the Reach one day, and his wife would be the Lady of Highgarden, the richest seat in the Seven Kingdoms. Not a queen. But very close. Close enough that a disappointed mother might look at it and think it no step down at all.
And Robert could have his Stark bond another way—through the triplets, perhaps. Olenna would have a word with Lord Renly, who had the king's ear and liked nothing better than to be helpful in ways that cost him nothing. He would suggest it at the right moment, over the right cup of wine, and Robert would think it his own idea, and be delighted.
Stag and wolf. Stag and rose. Rose and wolf. Everyone bound to everyone else, and at the centre of it all—in every thread of the web—House Tyrell.
That was the half she told them.
The other half she kept to herself.
The other half was that she did not know what the boy wanted. And that frightened her, a little, and intrigued her a great deal more.
She had watched him for a moon. He was courteous, and clever, and patient, and strong. He asked questions about granaries. He had found out Littlefinger when no one else in the realm had so much as suspected him. He had made his mother, who had never had a clever idea in her life, into a weapon, and used it. He fought like a man twice his age and thought like a man three times it. He had looked at a whole crowd of marriage prospects and chosen, deliberately, the one house in Westeros with the most grain and the most swords and the cleverest old woman at its head.
He's planning for something, Olenna thought. Something he hasn't told anyone. Something big enough that he's thinking about how many people the Reach can feed through a long winter.
She did not know what it was. But she knew this: the boy had not chosen her granddaughter. He had chosen her.
He wanted House Tyrell on his side, for whatever it was that was coming. And he had wanted it badly enough to make his move in front of the whole realm, before she had finished making hers.
She would find out what it was. She always found out, in the end. And when she did, she intended to make very, very sure that whatever that boy built, House Tyrell would be standing in the middle of it.
When Mace and Margaery had gone, she sat alone for a while in the dark, with the roses on the table before her and the noise of the feast rising faintly from below.
Then she rang for her maid.
"Find me paper," she said. "And a quill. And the good ink, not that watered piss the steward gave us."
The girl brought them. Olenna wrote a single line, in her own spidery hand, and folded it, and sealed it with the golden rose of Highgarden.
The Lady Olenna of House Tyrell would be delighted if His Grace Prince Alyn would take lemon cakes with her tomorrow at noon. She finds she has a great many questions about granaries.
"Take that to the prince," she said. "Tonight. Put it into his hand yourself. Not his squire's, not his maid's. His."
The girl curtseyed and went.
Olenna Tyrell sat back in her chair, and picked up her wine, and found it had gone quite cold.
She drank it anyway, and smiled.