On the first day home, Alyn Baratheon sat in his bath until the water went cold, and then rang for more hot water, and sat in it until that went cold too.
He had promised himself this. Lying on the deck of the King's Hammer somewhere off the coast of Dorne, with the stars wheeling overhead and his stomach rolling with the swell, he had made a solemn vow before the Seven and the old gods and the Drowned God too, for good measure: that when he got home, he would do absolutely nothing for an entire week. He would not train. He would not study. He would not scheme. He would lie in his own bed, in his own chambers, in his own perfectly motionless castle, and he would let the world come to him.
He kept that vow with a devotion that would have made the High Septon weep.
"Celia."
"Yes, Your Grace."
"Could you pass me that book?"
Celia looked at the book. Then she looked at the prince, who was lying in his bed with three pillows behind his back and a fur coverlet pulled up to his chest. Then she looked at the book again. It was on the table beside the bed. It was perhaps two feet from his hand.
"That book," she said.
"That one."
"The one you could reach if you leaned over."
"I'd have to lean over, Celia."
She passed him the book. Her mouth was twitching.
It went on like that. All week.
He rang for water when he was thirsty and for wine when he was bored of water. He rang for someone to close the curtains when the sun was in his eyes and for someone to open them again when it went behind a cloud. He rang for lemon cakes, and then for more lemon cakes, and then for a different kind of lemon cake because the first kind had been slightly too sweet. He rang for a servant to plump his pillows, and then to unplump one of them because it was now too plump. He rang for the brazier to be stoked and for the brazier to be damped and for a man to come and rub the knots out of his shoulders, which after a month of sleeping in a box on the sea were numerous and very stubborn. He rang for hot water, and hot towels, and fresh linen, and roasted chestnuts, and a particular history of the Conquest that he had left in the library three weeks before he sailed and now very much wanted to reread, even though he did not actually read it once it arrived.
He did not get up, except to visit the privy and the bath. He did not dress, except in a loose robe of black silk. He did not train, or study, or attend the small council, or so much as open the hidden ledger in the wooden stag.
He lay in his bed like a potato in a sack, and he rang the bell.
The maids thought it was the funniest thing they had ever seen.
They had known him all his life, most of them. They had known him as a quiet, serious little boy who thanked them for every cup they poured and remembered all their names. They had known him as a big, grave, dutiful youth who rose before dawn to train, and came back black and blue, and never once complained, and never asked for anything he could fetch for himself. They had never in their lives seen him like this—sprawled in his bed at noon with crumbs on his chest, ringing for someone to come and turn the page of his book.
By the third day, they were fighting over who got to answer the bell.
"Another pillow, is it, Your Grace?" said a red-cheeked kitchen girl named Bella, standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips. "Or would His Grace like me to breathe for him as well? Save him the trouble?"
"Just the pillow, thank you, Bella."
"Only I hear it's very tiring, breathing. All that in and out."
"Go away, Bella."
She went away, giggling, and he heard her laughing all the way down the stair, and then a chorus of other laughter answering her from below, and he pulled the coverlet over his head and grinned into the dark like a fool.
Celia was worse. Celia had raised him, more or less, and she had been waiting fourteen years for this.
"Shall I chew your food for you, Your Grace?" she asked on the fourth day, setting down a tray of roast capon. "Only you look very weak. All that lying about. I'd hate for you to strain your jaw."
"You're very cruel to me, Celia."
"I am very punctual," said Celia, exactly as she had said it every morning of his childhood. "And I'll tell you something else. When you were six, you tore your hand open on a nail in the stables, and you didn't cry, and you didn't call for anyone. You wrapped it in your own shirt and walked to the maester by yourself. Six years old." She sniffed. "And now you can't lift a book."
"I've been to the Iron Islands, Celia."
"So I hear. They broke you, did they?"
"Comprehensively."
She laughed, and smoothed his hair off his forehead, and for just a moment looked at him the way she had when he was very small. "Well. You've earned it, I suppose. Eat your capon."
His siblings visited every day, in a shrieking, giggling tide. Lyonel wanted to hear about the tuna, again, and then about the cook who thought he was a knight, again, and then wanted to wrestle, and was very disappointed when Alyn declined to get out of bed. Argella climbed onto the end of the bed and sat on his feet and informed him that she was going to sail to the Iron Islands herself one day and bite every ironborn she met. Cassana did not say much. She brought him a seashell she had found in the gardens, which she had decided was from the Iron Islands, and put it on the table beside his bed, and sat beside him for an hour reading her own little book, and did not ask him for anything at all.
Ser Barristan came on the second day, stood in the doorway, and looked at him for a long, silent moment.
"One week," said the Lord Commander at last.
"One week, ser."
"And then the yard. Before dawn."
"Yes, ser."
"You will be soft as butter, and I will have to break you in again."
"I know, ser."
Barristan regarded him a moment longer. Then, for the first time Alyn could remember, the old knight's mouth twitched at the corner.
"Enjoy your pillows, Your Grace," he said, and went away.
His father came and laughed at him. His mother came every day, twice a day, and did not laugh at him at all.
But that was a different matter.
Varys had heard the whole of it within a fortnight.
His birds on the Iron Islands were few, and far between, and slow. The ironborn did not care for strangers, and they cared less for strangers who asked questions. But Varys had been listening on those cold black rocks for twenty years, and he had a fisherman in Lordsport, and a servingwoman in the great hall of Pyke, and a priest's boy on the beaches at Pebbleton who could be persuaded to remember things for a copper. Between them, they had told him everything. The fleet in the harbour. The captains in the hall. The king with his hammer. The boy with his speech.
And then the Greyjoy whelp, standing up before the whole of the Iron Islands and daring them to kill him.
Varys had read the reports three times, by candlelight, alone in his chambers. Then he had set them down, and folded his soft white hands on the table, and sat very still for a long time.
He had expected one of two things. He had been quite certain of it. He had dropped his little whisper into the Red Keep—a rumour of a rumour, a knife meant for the regent, a black ship off Old Wyk—and he had sat back to watch what the prince would do with it.
He had thought the boy would go to his father, and that Robert would do what Robert always did. Call his banners, sail west, smash the islands flat, hang a few dozen captains, and come home roaring. More chaos. More grievance. Another rebellion seeded for five years hence, and the realm a little more bruised and a little more tired and a little more ready for a change. It would have suited Varys very well.
Or he had thought the boy would do nothing. Would hesitate, or miss the meaning of it, and let the regent die, and prove himself only clever after all—a lad with a quick mind and a strong arm, but no true player. That would have suited Varys too.
He had not thought of the third thing.
He had not thought of it because he had not known it existed. It had never once occurred to him—in twenty years of listening, of planning, of moving pieces across a board that spanned half the world—that you could take a hostage, and a rebellious people, and a pretender lurking in the dark, and turn all three into a wall. That you could hand the islands back their own heir and, in doing so, cut them in two. That you could make the law itself into a blade, and lay it across the throat of every man who might rise, and then stand back and let them decide for themselves whether they wanted to be the first to move.
It was not force. It was not cunning, exactly. It was something Varys did not have a word for.
It was building.
The boy had not destroyed anything. He had not burned or broken or killed. He had taken a crack in the realm—a crack Varys had been patiently widening for five years—and he had poured something into it, and it was setting hard as mortar.
And that was the thing that kept Varys awake, these past nights, staring at the ceiling of his chambers in the dark.
Varys needed cracks. He needed the realm divided and tired and resentful. He needed the great houses at each other's throats and the smallfolk muttering about bread prices and the lords counting their grievances like coins. He needed a realm that would look across the narrow sea at a silver-haired prince and think, anything would be better than this.
And the prince was not giving him cracks. The prince was mending them.
On the third morning after the king's return, Varys had been on the serpentine stair at dawn, as he so often was.
The prince had come down it. He had been in a loose black robe, with a towel over one shoulder, yawning, and looking softer and sleepier and more content than Varys had ever seen him. Bound for the baths, by the look of it.
Varys had stepped aside, as he always did, and bobbed his head.
"Good morning, Your Grace. Welcome home."
"Lord Varys." The prince had stopped on the step above him. He was so tall now that even from one step down, Varys had to tip his head back to see his face. And the prince had looked down at him, with those clear green Lannister eyes, and smiled.
"I hear the water in the lower baths is very fine this morning," he said.
And he went on down the stair.
Varys had stood on the landing for a very long time after the footsteps faded.
I hear the water in the lower baths is very fine this morning.
His own words. His own words, from a morning two moons ago, on this very stair, spoken to a yawning boy on his way to wash. A pleasantry. Nothing. The sort of thing anyone might say.
Was it a coincidence? It might be. It very well might. The boy was going to the baths. The water was, perhaps, very fine.
Or was it a message?
I know, it might have said. I know you sent it. I know you were watching. I know what you wanted me to do, and I did something else, and now I am telling you, in your own words, on your own stair, so that you will know I know.
Varys did not know which it was. And for a man who had built his whole life on knowing, that was the most frightening thing in the world.
He let himself think it, that night. Only once. Only for a moment, in the safety of the dark.
Princes died.
They died all the time. Of fevers, and falls, and bad oysters, and boar-hunts. Of wounds taken in the yard that festered. Of tourney lances that failed to shatter. The boy trained every day with live steel. He rode, he hunted, he would soon joust. There were a hundred ways for a young man to die, and Varys knew every one of them, and knew men who could arrange most.
It would be so simple. And it would remove the most dangerous piece on the board—the only piece Varys could not read, could not predict, could not control.
He let himself follow it to the end. He made himself, as he always did.
And at the end of it, he saw Robert Baratheon.
He saw the Demon of the Trident standing over his son's body, and he saw what came after. Robert would not grieve quietly. Robert would burn. He would tear the realm apart looking for whoever had done it, and he would not care who he tore. He had smashed the Iron Islands twice for a lesser grievance. And Tywin Lannister would stand beside him, colder and more patient and infinitely more dangerous, with all the gold of Casterly Rock and all the swords it could buy. And the queen—the queen would go mad. Varys had watched Cersei Lannister with her son for fourteen years, and he had no doubt at all that she would drown the Seven Kingdoms in blood to avenge him.
Chaos, yes. More chaos than even Varys wanted. Chaos that might very well consume the whole board, and every piece on it, and the hand that moved them.
And there were still three more children. Three more black-haired heirs, and the eldest of them only six. They would not be the prince. But they would be enough to hold the throne, with Tywin Lannister standing behind them.
No. Not now. Not yet.
But Varys did not put the thought away entirely. He folded it up, very small, and tucked it into a corner of his mind, the way he tucked his hands into his sleeves.
The boy was a player. A true one, in his own right, with his own game and his own reasons, which Varys could not see. And a player like that, unwatched and unchecked, was the most dangerous thing in the world.
Varys would watch. He would watch very, very closely.
And if a day ever came when watching was not enough—
Well. He had always believed in being prepared.
Olenna Tyrell had stayed in King's Landing.
She had sailed into the Blackwater on Paxter's flagship for the sheer theatre of it—two hundred Redwyne galleys filling the bay, and a little old woman in black and green standing on the deck of the first one, where every lord on the walls could see her. She had enjoyed that enormously. And then, the moment the anchor dropped, she had been rowed ashore and installed herself back in her apartments in the Red Keep with a pot of tea and a footstool. She was far too old to go chasing krakens round the coast of Dorne in a wooden bucket, and far too sensible to want to.
Besides, there was a great deal to be done in the capital while the king and his son were away.
The reports had come in through Paxter's captains, and the ravens, and Lord Harlaw's very polite and very long letters to his king, and her own people in the fleet. She had read them all. And she had sat in her solar for an hour afterwards, with her tea going cold, and found that she was laughing.
Balls, she thought. The boy has balls.
He had walked into a hall full of ironborn reavers—men who would cut a greenlander's throat for his boots—and told them, plainly, to their faces, that he would burn every one of their villages to the waterline if they touched a hair of the Greyjoy boy's head. Not a hint. Not a courtly threat wrapped in silk. I will burn your villages. And then he had sat down and let the Greyjoy whelp do the rest.
And he had not drawn a sword. He had not spilled a drop of blood. He had split the Iron Islands in two with a speech and a boy and a law, and sailed home again, and now the whole of the islands was quietly eating itself while the Iron Throne sat back and watched.
Mace could not have done it. Mace could not have done it if she had written out every word for him and pinned it to his doublet. Her late husband could not have done it; Luthor had been a dear, sweet, simple man who rode off a cliff while hawking, and she had loved him, after a fashion, and she had never once in forty years of marriage seen him do anything half so bold.
That, she thought, is a man. Fourteen years old, and more of a man than my son will ever be.
Margaery would need someone like that. Margaery was the cleverest girl Olenna had ever raised, and the cleverest girl in the world would wither married to a fool. She needed a husband who would keep her sharp. Who would surprise her, and challenge her, and give her a game worth playing. Who would make her blush, gods help them all, in front of fifty thousand people.
Olenna had married her girls to stupid men all her life, because stupid men were easy and safe and could be steered. She had never thought she would want anything else for Margaery.
She found, sitting in her solar with her cold tea, that she wanted this.
There was only one thing in the way.
Cersei Lannister had been a perfect bitch for the entire two months her son was away.
Olenna did not use the word lightly. She had known a great many difficult women in her life—she had been one, and was proud of it—and she understood perfectly well that a queen had every right to be difficult when it suited her. But Cersei had not been difficult. Cersei had been impossible. She had snapped at her ladies and dismissed her servants and refused three invitations to tea, and on the one occasion Olenna had managed to corner her in the gardens, she had been so cold and so curt that Olenna had come away feeling faintly frostbitten.
It was the boy, of course. The queen was a lioness with her cub gone to sea, and she paced the Red Keep like a cage.
There had been only one exception.
Olenna had seen it twice. Once in the gardens, and once in the queen's own solar, where she had finally been granted a quarter hour's audience in the third week. The triplets had been there—the laughing boy, the scowling girl, the quiet one with the green eyes—tumbling about on the rug with their septa in despair. And whenever the queen looked at them, something in her face softened. The ice thawed. The lioness put away her claws. She laughed at the boy's antics and scolded the girl without heat and lifted the little quiet one into her lap without seeming to notice she was doing it, and for a few minutes at a time she was very nearly a pleasant woman.
Then the children went, and the ice came back.
Olenna had filed that away. She had a feeling it was going to matter.
And then the fleet had come home.
She had watched it from the walls. The whole court had. The black galleys sliding up the Blackwater, and the king's ship at their head, and the king and his son standing at her rail. And then the landing at the River Gate, and the procession up Aegon's High Hill, and the courtyard of the Red Keep thronged with lords and ladies and servants, all waiting to welcome them.
The triplets had gone for their father. Of course they had. They had broken free of their septa the moment the king came through the gate and hurled themselves at him like three small black-haired cannonballs, and Robert had roared with laughter and scooped all three of them up at once, one on each arm and the third clinging to his neck, and staggered about the courtyard with them shrieking.
And the queen had walked straight past him.
She did not stop. She barely turned her head. She gave her husband the briefest, coolest brush of a side-embrace as she passed—a touch of the hand on his arm, a tilt of the cheek, nothing more—and then she was past him and across the yard and in front of her son, and she had taken his face in both her hands.
Olenna had been close enough to see it. She had not been close enough to hear what the queen said. But she had seen the queen's face, looking up at that great tall boy who towered over her—and she had seen the boy's face, looking down, half amused and half embarrassed and wholly unable to escape.
And then, for the whole of the following week, the queen had hovered.
She had let him lie in his bed like a sack of turnips and ring for servants every quarter hour, and she had not said one word against it. Not one. She had gone to his chambers twice a day. She had sent to the kitchens for his favourite dishes. She had fussed over the weight he'd lost and the colour of his skin and the cough he did not have. She had—so Olenna's people told her—personally inspected the linen on his bed, and sent it back, and inspected it again. She had told Ser Barristan Selmy, the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, that if he so much as mentioned the training yard before her son was ready, she would have his white cloak for a tablecloth.
Ser Barristan, by all accounts, had not mentioned it.
Olenna sat back in her chair, and picked up her cold tea, and drank it anyway, and frowned.
There it is, she thought. There's the problem.
The king would say yes. She was nearly sure of it. Robert Baratheon thought his son could do no wrong, and he had laughed himself sick over the roses, and he would be delighted to give the boy whatever he wanted, so long as no one made him read anything to do it. And the Hand would say yes, because the Hand was tired and the Reach was rich. And Tywin Lannister would say yes, because Tywin Lannister had wanted the Reach bound to the Rock for thirty years.
It was one thing for Alyn and Margaery to be married with the king's blessing.
It was another thing entirely for Cersei Lannister to accept it.
The queen would not lose her son. Not to a girl. Not to the Tyrells. Not to anyone. She would smile and nod and give her blessing in the throne room, if the king commanded it, and then she would spend the rest of her life making Margaery Tyrell's very existence a misery. Olenna had seen it before, in a dozen great houses. A mother who loved her son that much did not give him up. She merely waited for the girl to make a mistake.
And Cersei Lannister was very, very good at waiting.
Olenna set down her cup.
The way to the boy was not through the king. It was not through the Hand, or the council, or the old lion in his golden tower in the west. It was through the queen.
And the way to the queen—she was nearly certain of it now—was through three small, loud, black-haired children who could make the ice in Cersei Lannister's face melt like snow in spring.
She rang her little silver bell.
"Find my granddaughter," she told the maid who came. "Tell her I'd like to speak with her about the little princesses."
The maid went. Olenna Tyrell sat back in her chair, and looked out the window at the towers of the Red Keep, and smiled her small, dry, thorny smile.
She had her work cut out for her. She knew that.
But she had always rather liked hard work.