The lemon cakes were excellent, which was the first thing that worried him.
Lady Olenna had received him on the terrace of the Tyrell apartments, under an awning of green silk, with a view across the rooftops to the glittering sweep of Blackwater Bay. There was a pot of Dornish tea, a jug of chilled Arbor gold, and a silver platter of lemon cakes so fresh the sugar was still crackling. There were no servants within earshot. There was no Mace Tyrell, which Alyn suspected was a mercy for everyone. There was only a small, wizened old woman in black and green, sitting very upright in a cushioned chair, looking at him with eyes like two chips of flint.
"Sit, Your Grace, sit. You make the terrace look small. Have a cake. Have six. You're a growing boy—gods know you're growing, I've never seen anything like it. What does your mother feed you? Oxen?"
"Mostly bacon, my lady."
"Bacon." She considered this. "Well, it seems to be working."
And then, for the better part of an hour, they talked about nothing at all.
They talked about the tourney—about the Smalljon, whom she called that red-bearded mountain, and the Baratheon cousin, whom she had never heard of and seemed to find deeply funny. They talked about Loras, and his bruise, and how insufferable he had been about it for two whole years. They talked about the roses of Highgarden, and whether the ones in the Red Keep's gardens were fit to be called roses at all. (They were not.) They talked about his sisters. She had heard about Argella and the candied cherries, and laughed until she had to set down her cup. She asked about Cassana, and he found himself telling her about the ribbon, and the lopsided knot, and you have to win, and the old woman's face softened for just a moment into something almost grandmotherly.
It was, from first to last, the most pleasant conversation Alyn had ever had with anyone at court.
And that was precisely why, by the end of the first quarter hour, every hair on the back of his neck was standing up.
She hasn't mentioned Margaery, he thought, taking another cake. Not once. Not the roses, not the tourney stand, not the marriage. Nothing.
Which meant, of course, that the whole conversation was about nothing else.
It was only when the platter was half empty that she came, at last, to the thing she had actually invited him to discuss.
"You asked me about granaries," she said, as lightly as if she were remarking on the weather. "At the feast. Do you remember?"
"I do, my lady."
"I've been thinking about it ever since. It's not a question I'm used to hearing from young men. Young men want to know about horses and swords and whose daughter is prettiest. Old men want to know about gold. No one ever asks about granaries except stewards, and stewards don't ask—they complain."
Alyn smiled and said nothing.
"So I thought I'd ask you," said Olenna. "Why granaries, Your Grace?"
He had known this was coming. He had lain awake half the night deciding how much to say. And he had decided, in the end, on the truth—or the part of it that would not get him locked in a tower.
He was not a fool. He was not about to sit on a terrace in the Red Keep and tell the cleverest woman in the Seven Kingdoms that the dead would rise from the snows beyond the Wall and march south under a king made of ice. He had some idea how that would sound. He had some idea how he would have taken it, once, sitting on a sofa in another world, if a fourteen-year-old boy had told it to him.
So he told her about winter.
"This summer has lasted longer than any in living memory," he said. The maesters say long summers are followed by long winters. I've read the Citadel's records, my lady. The worst winters have lasted five years, six, more. Whole villages starved. Whole castles. In the Long Night, the histories say it lasted a generation." He met her gaze. "When this summer ends, it may end hard. And the Reach feeds the realm. If the Reach's granaries are empty when winter comes, then half the Seven Kingdoms will die. That's all. It seemed a wise thing to know."
Olenna Tyrell looked at him for a long moment. He could see her weighing it, sifting it, turning it over for the flaw.
"That's a great deal of thought for a boy of fourteen," she said at last. "About feeding people through a winter."
"I'll be king one day. Someone has to think about it."
"Mm." She took a sip of her tea. "It's been my experience, Your Grace, that when a man starts worrying about how to feed a great many people through a long, hard season, it's usually because he intends to march them somewhere."
There it was.
"You think I'm planning a war," said Alyn.
"I think you're the son of Robert Baratheon and the grandson of Tywin Lannister," said the Queen of Thorns, "and I think you put forty squires in the mud yesterday before you'd broken a sweat, and I think you worked out how to hang the master of coin before your voice had finished breaking. And now you want to know how long the Reach can feed an army." She smiled, sweetly, like a grandmother offering a sweet. "Dorne, perhaps? The Dornish have been an insult to the Iron Throne for three hundred years. Or somewhere further. The Free Cities. The Stepstones. There are Targaryens across the narrow sea, I hear. Young ones. A wise king might want to end that before it begins."
Alyn laughed. He could not help it. It was very nearly right, and very nearly wrong, and so perfectly her.
"I'm not planning to conquer Dorne, my lady."
"No? A pity. It would be very tidy."
"I'd like the realm to eat," he said. "When the snows come. That's all."
She did not believe him. He could see that quite plainly. She did not believe him, and she knew he knew she did not believe him, and neither of them was going to say so. And yet there was something else in her face as well—a curiosity, keen and bright as a blade, and the faint pleased look of a woman who has found a puzzle worth solving at last.
"Well," said Olenna, setting down her cup. "If you ever do decide to conquer something, Your Grace, I'd take it as a kindness if you'd let me know first. I'd hate to hear about it from Mace." She lifted a small silver bell from the table and rang it once. "And now I'm tired of you. I'm an old woman and I need my rest, and you've eaten all my cakes. Margaery!"
The door to the solar opened as though someone had been standing right behind it.
"Take the prince to see the gardens," said Olenna. "Show him the roses. Tell him how dreadful they are. He needs to hear it from someone who knows."
It was not a courtship. Alyn told himself that firmly as they went down the steps into the Queen's Garden. It was a walk. A walk between two young people of noble birth, in full view of half the Red Keep, of the sort that happened a dozen times a day. Nothing more.
Every window overlooking the garden had someone in it. He could feel them.
Margaery Tyrell took his arm at the foot of the steps. She did it without asking, lightly and naturally, as though they had walked together a hundred times, and looked up at him with wide brown eyes full of a sort of breathless, shining admiration that he had last seen on the faces of little girls watching the knights ride past.
"Your Grace," she said. "I've been dying to ask. The Umber boy—how did you ever move him? He looked like a castle."
He told her. She hung on every word. She gasped at the right moments and laughed at the right moments and asked exactly the right questions, the sort a girl might ask who had never held a sword and found the whole business terribly exciting. She thought the Smalljon sounded dreadful. She thought the Baratheon cousin sounded sly. She asked about the black ribbon, and when he told her it was Cassana's, she pressed a hand to her heart and said it was the sweetest thing she had ever heard, and that she simply must meet the little princesses, she had always wanted sisters.
She was, from first to last, a sweet, naive, well-bred girl, a little dazzled by the prince who had given her roses.
And Alyn could not tell—not for one single moment of it—how much was real.
That was what frightened him. Not the performance. He had grown up in the Red Keep; he knew performances when he saw them. His mother performed every day of her life. What frightened him was that he could not find the seams. He watched her face and listened to her voice and waited for the flicker, the moment where the mask slipped and he saw the clever old woman's granddaughter underneath, and it did not come. Her admiration looked real. Her laughter sounded real. And for all he knew, some of it was real, and that was the worst of all, because it meant there was no telling which part.
She was a great deal like his mother, he thought. The same instinct for what a room wanted from her. The same gift for being looked at. The same ease in her own skin, as though the whole world were a stage built especially for her.
But where Cersei wanted every room to adore her, Margaery wanted every room to trust her. And that was a far more dangerous thing to want, and a far cleverer one.
His mother, for all her power, had always been her own first priority. Everything she did circled back, sooner or later, to Cersei. He did not think Margaery Tyrell's world circled around herself at all. He thought it circled around her house.
They reached the end of the path, where a stone bench stood beneath a trellis of climbing roses, and Margaery stopped and looked up at the blooms and wrinkled her nose.
"Grandmother's right," she said. "They really are dreadful."
"They're the Queen's roses."
"Then the Queen should find a better gardener." And she turned to him, and for just an instant, the wide-eyed girl was gone. What looked out of her face instead was cool and amused and faintly, fondly exasperated—and so exactly like her grandmother that Alyn almost took a step back.
"You needn't look at me like that, Your Grace," said Margaery Tyrell. "As if I were a riddle you had to solve before supper. Grandmother does it enough for everyone."
And then she smiled—the sweet, shining, breathless smile again—and took his arm, and began to talk about the little princesses as though nothing had happened at all.
Alyn walked her back to the Tyrell apartments with his mind racing faster than it had in the melee, and thought: Seven hells. There are two of them.
His mother was not pleased.
He had expected that. He found her in her solar in the late afternoon, sitting by the window with a letter in her lap that she was not reading, and the moment he came in, she looked up at him with the particular stillness that meant a storm was waiting just behind her eyes.
"You might have told me," said Cersei.
"I know."
"You might have told your mother, before you walked across the tourney grounds and handed that girl a bunch of weeds in front of the entire realm. I had to hear it from Robert. Robert. He was laughing so hard he nearly fell off the stand." Her mouth tightened. "Do you know what it is to learn a thing like that from Robert?"
"I'm sorry, Mother. Truly." He crossed the room and sat on the stool at her feet, as he had when he was small—though now, even sitting, his head was nearly level with hers. "Father was going to give me the Stark girl. You know he was. I had to do something before he did."
"And the Stark girl was so terrible?"
"She's a child."
"She's a sweet girl. And Ned Stark's daughter."
"She's a child," Alyn said again, and his mother looked at him strangely, and did not argue.
"And the Tyrell girl isn't?" she said instead. Sharper now. "That old crone's been sniffing around this court for a moon, Alyn. Taking tea with me, asking her questions, smiling that dried-up little smile. She thinks she can put her granddaughter on the throne and pull the strings from Highgarden. She thinks—"
"She thinks she's going to use me," said Alyn. "I know. Let her think it."
Cersei stopped. She looked at him. And slowly, very slowly, the storm behind her eyes began to change into something else.
"You want the Reach," she said.
"I want the Reach's grain, and the Reach's swords, and the Reach's gold. And I want the old woman on our side, not against us. She's the cleverest person in the Seven Kingdoms, Mother. Excepting you."
It was flattery, and they both knew it. But his mother's lips twitched all the same.
"And the girl?" she said. "Do you like her?"
Alyn opened his mouth to answer, and did not know what he was going to say.
And the door opened.
Tywin Lannister did not knock. He never had. He had never in his life seen the purpose of announcing himself; it gave the people inside time to arrange their faces.
He had ridden from Casterly Rock in a few weeks, which was two fewer than it ought to take and a great deal faster than a man of his years had any business riding. He had not stopped at the Tower of the Hand, or at the king's solar, or at the chambers that had been prepared for him in Maegor's Holdfast. He had handed his horse to a groom in the outer ward, brushed the dust from his cloak, and come directly here, because his daughter's letters had become increasingly strange over the past year, and Kevan's had become stranger still, and he had finally decided he would see the thing with his own eyes.
His daughter rose at once, her face going smooth and careful, the way it always did when he entered a room. "Father. We didn't expect—"
"No," said Tywin. "I don't imagine you did."
Then the boy stood up from the stool at her feet, and Tywin forgot, for a moment, what else he had been going to say.
He had last seen his grandson five years ago, when he had come to the capital to discuss with the king the small matter of the Lannister fleet burning at its moorings. The boy had been nine then. Big for his age—very big—and quiet, with his mother's eyes and his father's hair, and a disconcerting habit of watching people when they spoke as though he were memorising them. Tywin had thought him promising, in the way one thinks a colt promising. He had not thought much more than that.
The boy was not a boy anymore.
He was taller than Tywin. That was the first thing. Tywin was not a short man, and he had not had to look up at anyone in some years, save the king. He had to look up at this one. The prince stood well over six feet, broad in the shoulder and deep in the chest, built on the same massive lines as his father, with the first dark shadow of a beard along a jaw that was going to be very strong. He wore a plain black doublet that strained across the shoulders. He held himself easily, the way a man does who has never once in his life had to wonder whether he was the largest person in the room.
And his eyes were green. Lannister green, pale and clear as seaglass. Joanna's green.
They met Tywin's gaze without flinching.
That was the second thing. Tywin was accustomed to being flinched from. Lords flinched from him. Kings had flinched from him. His own children flinched—Cersei with her careful face, Jaime with his mockery, the dwarf with his wine. This boy looked at him steadily, courteously, with the faint, attentive interest of someone meeting a man he had heard a great deal about and was making up his own mind.
"Grandfather," said the prince, and bowed. It was exactly the right depth. "Welcome to King's Landing."
Tywin inclined his head. "Your Grace."
He had been thinking about the future of House Lannister for twenty years, and he had not liked any of it.
He was not a young man. He knew that better than anyone. He had given his life to the Rock—had taken a house his feckless father had made into a laughingstock and rebuilt it into the greatest power in the Seven Kingdoms, stone by stone and gold by gold. And he had known for a very long time that when he died, all of it would be left to people who did not deserve it.
His daughter was a fool. He did not say so, because it was not useful, but he had known it since she was a girl. She had his pride and none of his patience, his appetite for power and none of his understanding of it. She thought ruthlessness was the same as strength and cunning the same as intelligence, and she had never once, in thirty-odd years, looked more than two moves ahead.
His son was worse. His son had been the finest young knight in the realm, the heir to Casterly Rock, the golden hope of House Lannister—and he had thrown it all away at fifteen for a white cloak, and then stained that cloak with a king's blood, and ever since had drifted about the Red Keep playing at heroes and mocking everything his father had built. Jaime would never hold the Rock. Jaime would never hold anything. He had made very sure of that.
And the third—
Tywin did not think about the third, as a rule. The dwarf. The misshapen, drunken, whoring creature that had clawed its way out of his wife and killed her in the doing of it, and had spent every day since making a mockery of the name he bore. Tywin would see the Rock fall into the sea before he let that have it.
So: a daughter who was a fool, a son who was a jest, and a monster he did not acknowledge. And after them, nothing. Kevan's sons were dutiful and dull. The rest of the Lannister cousins were a rabble of mediocrities. He had built the greatest house in the Seven Kingdoms, and he had known for twenty years that when he died, it would begin to crumble.
And then his daughter had borne a son.
He had not dared hope, at first. Babes died. Princes died. And when the boy had lived, Tywin had watched him from afar, through Cersei's letters and Kevan's, with the cold, patient attention he gave to any investment, waiting to see what it would become.
It had become this.
He knew about Baelish. Cersei's letters had been triumphant and Kevan's had been baffled, and between the two of them, Tywin had pieced it together. His daughter had pulled the threads, yes. But she had not found them. She had never found anything in her life. The boy had found them, and brought them to her, and shown her which ones to pull and in what order. He had taken a woman with more pride than sense and made her into a precise instrument, and struck with it once, and killed a man who had been bleeding the crown dry for years under everyone's noses. He had done it without forging a word. He had done it so cleanly that half the court still believed it had been the king's doing.
And yesterday, Tywin heard at a stop from merchants, word of the tourney. Forty squires in the mud. And a bunch of golden roses laid at the feet of the Tyrell girl, before the whole realm, before that withered old harridan Olenna had finished laying her plans.
Tywin had read the report twice. Then he had called for his horse.
"Sit," he said now, and took the chair by the hearth for himself. Cersei sat. The boy sat, back on his stool, which put his head at about the height of Tywin's own. "You gave roses to the Tyrell girl."
"I did, Grandfather."
"Without consulting your mother. Or your father. Or me."
"Yes."
"Why?"
The boy did not hesitate, and he did not apologise, and he did not look to his mother for rescue. "Because my father meant to give me to the Stark girl, and a Stark match gives us nothing we don't already have. Lord Stark is already loyal. The North is already ours. The Reach is the richest land in the realm, with the most swords and the most grain, and the Tyrells have been sniffing after a crown for three hundred years. Better to bind them to it than leave them sniffing." A slight pause. "And the crown owes a great deal of money to Casterly Rock, Grandfather. I thought you might like it to have another source of income."
Tywin Lannister looked at his grandson for a long moment.
"You made a commitment," he said, "on behalf of the Iron Throne. At fourteen."
"No, Grandfather. I made a gift. Commitments are made by kings and councils. I only made it very difficult for anyone to make a different one."
Across the room, Cersei made a small sound that might have been a laugh.
Tywin did not laugh. He had not laughed in a very long time. But something shifted in his chest, some old, cold, iron thing that had been lying still for twenty years, and he recognised it, after a moment, for what it was.
Hope.
He thinks, Tywin thought. He thinks like a Lannister. Not like his mother—she has the pride but not the patience. Not like his father—Robert has never thought past the end of his own hammer. He thinks like me. Three moves ahead. Four. He looks at the board and sees the whole of it.
And he has Robert's size, and Robert's strength, and whatever it is in Robert that makes men follow him into the breach. The smallfolk love him already. The knights respect him. Barristan Selmy, who has served five kings and bowed to none of them, speaks of him the way he speaks of Arthur Dayne.
He has everything. Everything I have and everything I lack.
And he is going to sit the Iron Throne.
Tywin had wanted a Lannister on that throne since before the boy's mother was born. He had wanted it enough to offer Cersei to Rhaegar Targaryen, and to swallow the insult when Aerys refused. He had wanted it enough to sack a city. And now, at last, there it was, sitting on a stool at his daughter's feet, green-eyed and black-haired and taller than he was.
It was not quite a Lannister. It would never be quite a Lannister. It would carry the stag on its banner and the Baratheon name to its grave.
But it would think like one. And it would remember whose blood it carried. Tywin would see to that.
The door burst open.
Tywin turned his head, his hand halfway to the hilt of the sword he had not worn in twenty years, and three small figures tumbled into the solar in a heap of black hair and silk and outraged septa.
"—told you, you can't go in there, Her Grace is—oh, Seven save us, my lord, my lord, I'm so sorry—"
The biggest of the three, a sturdy black-haired boy of six, took one look at the stranger in the chair and burst out laughing, for no reason Tywin could see at all. The second, a black-haired girl with a face like a thundercloud, looked Tywin up and down with blazing blue eyes, planted her feet, and said "No," very firmly, as though he had asked her something. And the third, the smallest, slipped around the others without a sound and came to stand beside the prince, one small hand resting on his knee.
She looked at Tywin.
She did not laugh, and she did not glare. She simply looked, steadily and silently, the way a cat looks at a stranger it has not yet decided about. Her hair was black as her brother's. Her eyes were green.
Joanna's green. His own green.
"Father," said Cersei, with the particular strained brightness of a woman whose children have just made a scene in front of her father, "these are Lyonel, Argella, and Cassana. Children, this is your grandfather. Lord Tywin."
"No," said Argella again, for emphasis.
Lyonel laughed so hard he fell over.
Cassana went on looking at him.
And Tywin Lannister, Lord of Casterly Rock, Warden of the West, Shield of Lannisport, who had broken the Reynes and the Tarbecks and sacked a capital and been obeyed without question for thirty years—Tywin Lannister looked back at three small, black-haired, wholly undisciplined children, and did the sums.
The boy, loud, laughing, fearless. A second son. A second son, who would inherit nothing from his father but a name and a sword. A second son who, if the name were to change—if a certain great lord in the west, lacking a worthy heir of his own, were to take the boy in hand, raise him at Casterly Rock, and give him the lion instead of the stag—
The first girl, stubborn as stone, who said no to the Lord of Casterly Rock without so much as blinking. There was not a lord in Westeros who would not tremble to have her for a wife. And that could be used.
The second girl, silent and watchful, with his wife's eyes. He could not yet tell what she would be. But she had looked at him for a full minute without flinching, and he had known grown knights who could not do that.
Four of them. Four heirs of the stag and the lion, and not a fool among them that he could see.
For twenty years, Tywin Lannister had looked at the future of his house and seen it crumbling into the sea. Now, sitting in his daughter's solar with three small children staring at him and a grandson taller than he was sitting quietly at his side, he looked again—and for the first time in longer than he could remember, he did not see ruin.
He saw a dynasty.
"Well," he said, and his daughter looked at him in astonishment, because it was very nearly warm. "Well. Sit down, all of you. I have been riding for weeks, and I find I would like to know my grandchildren."
Argella Baratheon crossed her arms and said "No."
And Tywin Lannister, to the utter disbelief of everyone in the room, very nearly smiled.