The sun was barely up, and Alyn Baratheon was barely awake.
He came down the serpentine stair toward the baths with a towel over one shoulder and his eyes half closed, yawning so wide his jaw cracked. Ser Barristan had kept him in the yard until well past dark the night before, going over the same guard again and again until Alyn could have done it in his sleep—which, judging by the way his feet were finding the steps this morning, he very nearly was. His shoulders ached. His ribs ached. There was a bruise the size of a fist blooming on his left thigh where the old knight's practice blade had caught him, and every step reminded him of it.
At the turn of the stair, a soft figure in lavender silk stepped aside to let him pass.
"Good morning, Your Grace," said Lord Varys.
He was, as ever, perfectly turned out at an hour when no one else in the Red Keep was fit to be seen—plump and powdered and faintly scented, his hands tucked into his sleeves, his round smooth face creased into a smile of gentle, fond amusement. He bobbed his head in a small bow.
"Lord Varys." Alyn smothered another yawn. "You're up early."
"I seldom sleep, Your Grace. A failing of age, I'm told." The eunuch's smile deepened. "Though you look as though you've been up rather late yourself. Ser Barristan, I expect?"
"Ser Barristan," Alyn agreed ruefully.
"He is a hard master. The best ones always are." Varys bowed again. "I shan't keep you from your bath. The water in the lower baths is very fine this morning, I hear. Good day, Your Grace."
"Good day, my lord."
And the prince went on down the stair, rubbing his eyes, his great shoulders nearly brushing the walls on either side.
Varys stood very still on the landing and watched him go until the last sound of his footsteps had faded into the dark below.
Then he turned, and went up, softly, in his soft slippers, toward his chambers.
It was important, Varys had always believed, to take stock of one's affairs in the early morning, before the rest of the world woke up and began to complicate them.
He sat at his writing table with a cup of hot water and lemon at his elbow—he had not taken wine in thirty years; wine loosened tongues, and his was the one tongue in King's Landing that must never be loosened—and let his mind move over the board, piece by piece, the way another man might count his coins.
Pentos first. Always Pentos.
The dragon's children were well. Illyrio's latest letter had arrived three days before, written in the private cipher they had shared since they were both young and poor and hungry in the alleys of that city. The boy was as he had always been. The girl was growing.
Viserys Targaryen was a man grown, and a fool.
Varys did not think it with malice. He did not think anything with malice; malice clouded the mind. He simply noted it, as he might note the weather. The boy had been a frightened child when he fled Dragonstone, and a frightened child he remained, for all his swagger and his talk of dragon's blood and stolen thrones. He had his father's temper and his father's cruelty and none of his father's early brilliance. He beat his sister when he was angry and wept when he was drunk and spent Illyrio's money on whores and silks and Lyseni wine, and he told anyone who would listen that he was the rightful King of the Seven Kingdoms and would soon sail home at the head of a great host to take what was his.
He would not. Varys had known it for years. Viserys Targaryen could not command a kitchen, let alone a kingdom.
But he had a sister.
Daenerys Stormborn. She was quiet, Illyrio wrote. Timid. Frightened of her brother, and of the world, and of her own shadow. But she was growing, and in a year or two she would be of an age to wed. And there was a khal in the grass sea east of Pentos—a young one, very strong, with forty thousand screamers riding at his back—who had never lost a battle and who might, if the gifts were rich enough and the bride were beautiful enough, be persuaded to lend his horde to his new brother-in-law.
A Dothraki horde. Forty thousand horselords, crossing the narrow sea in Illyrio's ships. It was not an army to win a war with, not alone. The Dothraki had never crossed the poison water, and many of them would balk at it. But it was an army to begin a war with. And once the war was begun, other things would follow. Old loyalties. Old grievances. Houses that had never forgiven the Usurper. The Dornish, who had not forgotten Elia and her children. Lords who remembered where their bread had been buttered, once, under the dragons.
And if Viserys proved too great a fool even for that—
Varys sipped his hot water.
There was always the other boy.
He was a few years older than the prince. He was being raised in the Free Cities, far from any eyes that might know him, by a disgraced lord who loved his supposed father beyond all reason and would have died for him a thousand times over. He was clever, and kind, and brave, and he had been taught from his cradle to be a king—not a mad one like Aerys, not a weak one like his supposed uncle, but a good one. A just one. The kind of king the realm had not had in a hundred years.
He had silver hair and purple eyes, and everyone who met him believed he was Aegon Targaryen, son of Prince Rhaegar and Elia of Dorne, miraculously saved from the Mountain's sword in the sack of King's Landing.
He was not. Varys knew precisely whose son he was, and it was not Rhaegar's. But that hardly mattered. Very few things were ever true. What mattered was what people believed—and people would believe in a lost prince returned, if he were handsome enough and good enough and the story were told well enough. And Varys was very good at telling stories.
So: two dragons. Viserys, the fool, to go first, to raise the Dothraki and draw the eyes. And Aegon, the secret, the true heir that never was, to wait in the shadows until the fool had made his mess—and then step out of them.
If Viserys went badly, Viserys would die. It would not be difficult. Men like Viserys died all the time, of their own tempers and their own follies, and no one ever wondered why. And the boy who called himself Aegon would take up his banner, and his sister's horde, and his claim, and sail for Westeros with the whole of the realm's grievances at his back.
It was a good plan. It was the work of twenty years. Varys had spent a great deal of himself on it.
He had spent, if he were honest, everything.
The prince was a problem.
He had not always been a problem. When the boy was born, Varys had marked him down as a small inconvenience—an heir for the Usurper, yes, but heirs were fragile things, and this one had very nearly died in his first year of a fever. And Varys had not been sorry to see the fever. Nor had he been especially sorry to see it break. A boy was a boy. There would be a great many years before he was anything else.
Then the boy had grown up.
Varys did not like to be surprised. He had built a life on never being surprised, on hearing everything before anyone else heard it and knowing everything before anyone else knew. His little birds sang to him from every corner of the Red Keep and every alley of King's Landing, from the kitchens and the stables and the brothels and the septs. There was no whisper spoken in this city that did not, sooner or later, reach his ears.
And yet the prince had surprised him. Over and over again.
The boy had found out Petyr Baelish.
Varys had known about Petyr Baelish for years. Of course he had. He had known about the brothels, and the gold cloaks, and the Pentoshi agent—which had amused him, since the Pentoshi agent had once been one of Illyrio's men. He had known about the girls from Lys. He had even known about the letters. He had known all of it, and he had done nothing, because Littlefinger was useful. A man who bled the treasury and bribed the watch and whispered in the Hand's wife's ear was a man sowing chaos, and chaos was the soil in which all Varys's own seeds would one day grow.
He had let Littlefinger build his little web. He had watched it, and made sure it was never quite strong enough to threaten his own.
And then the prince had torn it down.
Not the queen. Varys had known that from the first. The queen had been the hand, but the boy had been the head. And what troubled Varys—what had troubled him every night since he watched Petyr Baelish kick and strangle at the end of a rope above the King's Gate—was that he did not know how.
His little birds had found no one. No informant feeding the prince secrets. No spy of his own. No coin changing hands in the dark. The boy had not heard about Littlefinger's schemes, the way Varys heard about everything. He had simply known—where to look, what to look for, which threads to pull. He had known about the tunnel beneath the counting-house. He had known about Lysa Arryn's letters before anyone had copied a single one. He had known things that Varys himself had only learned through twenty years of patient, careful listening.
Varys did not believe in magic. Or rather, he believed in it very much, and hated it with every fibre of what remained of him, which was not at all the same thing. He had been cut by a sorcerer once, as a boy in Myr, and had heard a voice answer from the flames when his parts were burned. He had spent every day since trying to stamp out the thing that had done that to him.
He did not think the prince was a sorcerer. He did not think anything of the kind. The boy was simply clever, very clever, and observant, and perhaps a little lucky, and Varys was giving him far too much credit.
Probably.
But probably had never been good enough for Varys. That was why he was still alive.
He had watched the boy for a month now, since the business with Baelish. Watched him more closely than he had ever watched anyone.
The boy was courteous. He knew the names of servants, and remembered them, and thanked them, which made them love him, which made them talk to him—which, Varys noted, meant they might one day talk to him before they talked to Varys. The boy was patient. He had Robert's strength without Robert's temper, and his mother's pride without her vanity. The smallfolk adored him. The knights respected him. Barristan Selmy, who had been cold as a stone to every prince since Rhaegar, had taken him as a squire.
And the boy had outplayed Olenna Tyrell. In front of the whole realm. With a bunch of flowers.
Varys had enjoyed that more than he cared to admit. He had enjoyed it so much, in fact, that he had gone to his chambers afterwards and sat quite still for a quarter hour, simply marvelling at it, the way a jeweller marvels at a perfect stone.
And then there had been the lemon cakes.
His birds had not heard everything—Olenna Tyrell was far too clever to let anyone within earshot of that terrace. But they had heard enough. The prince had spoken of granaries. Of winter. Of feeding the realm through a long cold season that no one else seemed to think was coming. Olenna had thought he was planning a conquest.
Varys did not think so. He had listened to his birds repeat the prince's words, and something in them had sat oddly with him. The boy had not sounded like a conqueror counting his supplies. He had sounded like a man who had seen something terrible coming down the road, and was trying to build a wall before it arrived.
Varys did not know what that thing was. He did not like not knowing.
He set down his cup and folded his soft white hands on the table and made himself look at the thing squarely, as he always tried to do.
The prince would make a great king.
There. He had thought it. It was true. Varys had served two kings now—the mad one and the one with the hammer. He had seen what the Iron Throne did to men. He had seen what men did to the realm, sitting on it. And he had never, not once in his life, seen a boy of fourteen who looked as though he might actually be worthy of it.
This one might be. Clever, strong, patient, just. Loved by the people and feared by the lords. He would make a far better king than Viserys Targaryen, who would make a terrible one. He might even, if Varys were being honest, make a better king than the boy in the Free Cities who called himself Aegon.
And it did not matter.
It did not matter, because Varys had not given up everything—his parts, his name, his youth, his whole life—so that the realm could be ruled by whatever happened to be born into the right bed. He had not spent twenty years in the dark, listening, whispering, planning, pulling strings across half the world, only to set it all aside because a boy showed promise.
Promise. The realm had seen promise before. Rhaegar had shown promise, and crowned the wrong woman, and got a hundred thousand men killed for it. Robert had shown promise, and it had won him a crown he never wanted and a realm he had never learned to rule. Promise was cheap. Promise faded. Promise died of fevers and boar-hunts and poisoned cups.
What the realm needed was not a promising king. What the realm needed was a king who had been made—shaped, from the cradle, by someone who knew what a king ought to be, and who would not let him stray. A king who had been raised to serve the realm, rather than a realm raised to serve him.
A king, in short, whom Varys had made himself.
That was the difference. That was always the difference. Alyn Baratheon was a very fine piece. But he was not Varys's piece. And Varys did not intend to spend the last years of his life watching someone else's piece rule the board.
He would decide what was best for the realm. He always had. That was the burden he had taken up, long ago, in a dark room in Myr, with the smell of burning in his nose. No one else was going to carry it.
There was a soft knock at the door.
"Come," said Varys.
It opened, and a small boy slipped in. He was perhaps nine or ten, thin and dark-haired and silent, in the plain grey tunic of a servant of the Red Keep. He did not bow. He did not speak. He simply crossed the room, and laid a tightly rolled scroll on the table at Varys's elbow, and slipped out again, as quietly as he had come.
Varys picked up the scroll and turned it over in his fingers. It was small, no longer than his hand, sealed with a blob of plain grey wax with no mark on it at all. The kind of scroll that could be carried in a boot, or a sleeve, or a hollow in the heel of a shoe. The kind of scroll that came across the sea in the bottom of a fishing boat and changed hands six times before it reached him.
He broke the seal and unrolled it.
The writing was cramped and small, in one of his own ciphers. He read it once quickly and then again slowly, turning the words over in his mind as he went, putting them back into their proper order.
Lordsport. A fortnight past.
The drowned men are preaching again. The Damphair walks the shingle at Pebbleton and tells the fisherfolk that the Drowned God is angry. That the Seastone Chair sits empty while a kraken's son is kept on a leash on the Usurper's rock. That the Reader is a greenlander in iron's clothing, who takes his orders from King's Landing and bends his knee to the stag.
Captains have been seen gathering at Ten Towers and at Pyke. Quietly, at night. Not the great lords. The small ones. The ones who lost sons at the breach, and brothers, and ships, and have been drinking on it for five years.
There are whispers of a knife for the Reader. Soon. Before the autumn storms. A thing done quickly, in the dark, so that it cannot be undone.
And a ship has been seen off Old Wyk, three times in a month, never putting into harbour. Black-hulled. Red-sailed. No one will say her name. But the old men make the sign of the Drowned God when she passes, and one of them told my bird that her master has a smiling eye.
Varys read it three times. Then he rolled it up very carefully, and held it over the candle on his table, and watched it burn.
The Crow's Eye. Home from the far seas.
He sat back in his chair and let himself consider it.
If the Regent died, the Iron Islands would rise again. Not immediately—the ironborn were stubborn, but they were not fools, and they had not forgotten Robert Baratheon's hammer, or the head on the spike above the gate at Pyke. But the Seastone Chair would be empty, and its heir a hostage on Dragonstone, and in that emptiness a great many hungry men would begin to circle. And one of them had a smiling eye and a black ship with red sails and a reputation, even among the ironborn, for things that were whispered rather than spoken.
A second rebellion. Another war. More chaos, sown in the west, while the east was still being tilled.
It would be very useful to him. Of course it would. Chaos was always useful.
But that was not what made Varys smile.
What made him smile was the thought that had followed it, quick and bright and delightful as a coin found in a gutter. The thought that this was not information he was obliged to bring, today, to the small council. That he might bring it tomorrow, or next week, or when it had grown a little riper. That he might, instead, let just a whisper of it—a very small whisper, a rumour of a rumour—drift into certain ears in the Red Keep. Young ears. Big ears, attached to a very large head that had been, not a quarter hour ago, yawning its way down the stair to the baths.
And then he might sit back, and watch, and see what those ears did with it.
Would the boy hear it at all? If he did, would he know what it meant? Would he go to his father, and let the Demon of the Trident smash the islands flat a second time? Would he go to his grandfather, who had lost a fleet to the ironborn and not forgiven it? Would he go to Stannis, who had the Greyjoy heir under his roof? Would he do something clever that no one had thought of—something that told Varys, at last, precisely where the boy's knowledge came from, and where it ended?
Or would he do nothing, and let the Regent die, and prove himself only a clever lad after all?
Varys found that he very much wanted to know.
He stood, and smoothed his silks, and tucked his soft white hands back into his sleeves. Outside the window, the sun was climbing over the towers of the Red Keep, and the city below was waking in all its noise and stink and glory. Somewhere beneath him, in the steaming dark of the lower baths, a boy who might one day be a great king was soaking his bruises and yawning and thinking, no doubt, about swords.
Let us see, thought Varys, what you are truly made of, Your Grace.
And he went down to breakfast, humming.