The morning of Prince Alyn Baratheon's fourth name day came up blue and blazing, under a sky scrubbed so clean it looked lacquered. By noon, the whole of King's Landing seemed to have emptied itself onto the tourney grounds beyond the city walls.
Alyn could see all of it from his mother's lap.
He was far too big for her lap, and everyone said so. The septas said it with pinched mouths, and the nursemaids said it with aching backs. His uncle Renly was twelve and thought himself very grown, and he said it at every chance he got, with great delight. At four, Alyn stood as tall as most boys of six. He was built like a small keg of ale, broad in the shoulder and thick in the wrist, with a chest his father thumped proudly whenever he walked past.
"Look at the size of him!" Robert would boom to whichever lord happened to be closest. "Baratheon, root and branch. He'll be swinging a warhammer before he's ten!"
But Cersei had decided that today, in the royal stand, in front of half the lords of the realm, her son would sit on her lap. So he sat on her lap, and nobody said a word.
Below them, the field was a jewel box that someone had kicked over. Pavilions of every colour stood in crooked rows along the riverbank: crimson and gold, sea-green and silver, the saffron of the Reach, the deep blue of the Vale. Pennons snapped from every pole. Alyn found the Tyrell rose, the Redwyne grapes, the purple lightning of the Dondarrions, and a dozen smaller sigils he had spent hours memorising in the maesters' books with a devotion that alarmed his tutors. The air was thick with trampled grass, horse dung, roasting pork, spilled wine, and the sweat of ten thousand people pressed together in the sun. Down the middle of it all ran the tilt barrier, a long wooden spine freshly painted in Baratheon black and gold, where the knights would kill one another for his birthday.
Not literally, Alyn corrected himself. Blunted lances. Coronals. It's sport. Nobody's meant to die.
His father had won the melee that morning.
Jon Arryn had begged him not to ride in it. The old Hand had stood in the king's pavilion with his hands spread, looking pained. Your Grace, the realm cannot afford, Your Grace, the heir is watching. Robert had roared with laughter, clapped Lord Arryn on the shoulder hard enough to stagger him, and said the heir ought to see what his father could do.
So the heir had watched. Alyn had to admit it had been something to see.
Robert Baratheon at twenty-six was still the man the songs were written about. He was taller than almost anyone on the field, and his shoulders were a smith's shoulders. He wielded his great warhammer with the easy, terrible grace of a man who had once caved in a prince's chest at the Trident. He had waded through the melee like a bull through wheat, laughing the whole time, and knocked a knight of House Swann clean out of his saddle with a blow that rang like a sept bell. When it was over he had stood alone in the churned mud with his hammer on his shoulder, and the crowd's noise had shaken the stands.
He was sitting beside them now, still flushed and sweat-soaked, in a black jerkin unlaced to the chest. He was drinking steadily, but he was not yet drunk. His belly was flat. His jaw was sharp under the black beard. There was no hint yet of the swollen, wheezing wreck Alan remembered from a screen in another life.
That comes later, Alyn thought. After the Greyjoys. After he's won his last war and there's nothing left to do but eat and drink and be bored. He goes to seed like an unwatered garden.
He filed that away with everything else. It was a long file.
"Here." Robert leaned across, plucked a honeycake from a passing servant's tray, and dropped it into Alyn's hands. "Eat that, you great ox, you're wasting away." He grinned at Cersei over their son's head. "He's heavier than my hammer, woman, how are your knees holding up?"
"Better than your manners," said Cersei.
But there was the ghost of a smile at the corner of her mouth when she said it. Robert saw it and laughed, and for a moment the two of them simply looked at each other over Alyn's dark head, a king and a queen, like any husband and wife at a fair.
Alyn ate his honeycake and watched them, as he always did.
It had taken him years to understand his parents' marriage. It had taken even longer to understand what he had changed simply by not dying.
It wasn't a good marriage, and he would never mistake it for one. Robert still wandered. There were whispers of a serving girl here, a lady's maid there, a house on the Street of Silk that the king visited when he thought no one was counting. Cersei still knew. She had a way of going perfectly silent at supper that could frost a goblet at twenty paces. They kept separate bedchambers most nights. When Robert drank too deep, he still sometimes said a dead girl's name, and the next morning Cersei was always especially gracious and especially cold.
But it wasn't a bad marriage either, and that was what fascinated him. Every so often they laughed together. Every so often Robert came to Cersei's chambers and was not turned away. They argued, sometimes savagely, but they argued the way two people do when they still expect the other to be there tomorrow.
And they agreed completely about one thing, which was him.
In the story he remembered, a black-haired boy had died of fever before his first name day. Alyn had come to understand, slowly, that the loss had been an axe blow. Whatever fragile thing had existed between Robert and Cersei had split on it and never grown back together. After that there had been nothing between them but the crown, the Lannister gold, and three golden children who belonged to someone else.
Here, the boy had lived. The marriage stood on a bridge made of a single plank, and he was the plank.
It was an uncomfortable thing to know about yourself at four.
He glanced sideways, as he did a hundred times a day, at the edge of the royal stand. Ser Jaime Lannister stood there in his white cloak, gleaming in the sun like something freshly minted, his face turned politely towards the lists. He never seemed to look at Cersei when anyone was watching. Alyn had learned that was exactly when you ought to worry.
In four years there had been no second child. There had been no brother and no sister, golden or black-haired. Cersei's belly had stayed flat and her court gowns stayed tight, and Alyn watched for any change the way sailors watch the sky. He did not know whether the silence was luck, or moon tea, or his mother being as careful as he had prayed she would be, or something else that he hadn't thought of yet and ought to be afraid of.
He didn't know, and he couldn't ask. What four-year-old asks his mother about her womb?
The heralds were calling the next tilt, but Alyn was only half listening, because his mind had drifted to its favourite pastime.
He was plotting.
He did it constantly, in the privacy of a skull no one could see into. At night he did it in bed while the nursemaid snored. At lessons he did it while Maester Pycelle droned about the lineages of the Reach. He did it in the godswood, in the bath, and at table while he chewed.
Power in Westeros, he had decided somewhere around his third name day, comes from three places: blood, swords, and gold.
He had the blood already. He was the trueborn heir of the stag and the grandson of the lion, and no one alive could question it.
Gold was his grandfather's department. Tywin Lannister had sent a gift for this name day: a small sword, perfectly made, far too large for him, with a note in a clerk's precise hand. For when you are ready. Alyn did not yet know whether that was affection or a threat. With Tywin it was probably both.
Swords were the problem. Swords followed men, not babies.
So I become a man worth following, he thought. Slowly. Carefully. Nobody trusts a clever child. They trust a bold one. Robert's son had to be bold, big, loud and brave. The cleverness could stay behind the eyes for now, where it belonged.
He ran through the pieces on the board, as he often did.
Jon Arryn. The Hand was honest, tired, and the closest thing the realm had to a spine. Alyn wanted him alive for as long as possible and, ideally, fond of his king's heir. That part was going well. Lord Arryn let him sit in the corner of the Hand's solar sometimes, pretending to play with wooden knights while the old man read reports aloud to himself. Alyn remembered every word.
Varys. He glanced across the stand. The eunuch sat among the lesser members of the court in lavender silk, round and powdered and smiling at nothing. Alyn had once caught Varys watching him with the fixed, pleasant attention of a man studying a puzzle box. Alyn had immediately stuck a finger up his nose. Varys had looked away. It remained, in Alyn’s opinion, one of his better moves.
Littlefinger. Somewhere in Gulltown, a clever young man with a mockingbird's instincts was counting customs duties and dreaming of more. Stay there, Alyn thought at him fervently. Count your little coins. Grow old in Gulltown. Never, ever come to court. When he was grown, he would find some way to make certain of it.
The Starks. Winterfell was a thousand leagues away. Lord Eddard was raising his children in the cold, and somewhere among them was a dark-haired bastard boy who wasn't a bastard at all. Alan wanted the Starks close, as friends, as allies, and perhaps one day by marriage. Yet, if anything he much rather preferred Margaery Tyrell to the yet to be born Sansa Stark. That was a thought for later.
The Greyjoys. That thought made his small stomach tighten. It would be this year or the next, he was nearly certain. Balon Greyjoy would crown himself on Pyke. The Lannister fleet would burn at its moorings. Robert would go to war again, and he would come home with another victory and the first softening around his middle. Alyn could not stop it. A four-year-old could not walk into the small council and announce that the ironborn were about to rebel.
But a four-year-old could have a dream, he thought. A very vivid dream. With krakens in it, and fire in the harbour at Lannisport. The septons are always saying the gods speak through children...
He turned the idea over carefully, like a coin of uncertain value.
On the field, trumpets blared. The crowd roared. Two knights wheeled their horses at opposite ends of the lists.
Alyn paid them almost no attention. One was young and slim, in enamelled blue armour with a Stormlands sigil on his shield. Alan couldn't quite place it; perhaps Wylde, or Errol. His father's own bannermen. The other was very large, in plain grey plate, on a massive grey destrier. Alyn’s eyes slid over him, because Alyn was busy wondering how many prophetic dreams a prince could have before someone decided he was mad, or a Targaryen.
The horses thundered down the lists. Both lances cracked and splintered. The crowd bellowed its approval.
Fostering, Alyn thought. Could I be fostered? Cersei would never allow it. Unless Robert insisted, and Robert might, for Winterfell. He'd love to send me to Ned...
The second pass. Both lances shattered again in bright showers of painted wood. The young knight in blue swayed in his saddle and kept his seat, and the stands cheered him for it.
Companions, Alyn thought. Sons of great houses, raised with me at court. Squires who become knights who become my knights. Robert had Ned and Jon Arryn. Who do I have? No one yet. I need to start collecting people.
The third pass.
The horses came together at full gallop, and the sound was wrong.
It wasn't the dry, festive crack of a lance breaking. It was deeper and duller, like an axe going into green wood. Alyn’s head snapped up.
The big knight's lance had not shattered.
It had gone in low, beneath the young knight's shield, where the plate of his breastplate met the fauld at his waist. For one frozen instant the two men were joined by it like a spit through a roast. Then the young knight was lifted clean out of his saddle. He was carried backwards over his horse's rump, and the lance finally snapped with a sound like a bone breaking. He fell.
He hit the ground in a clatter of blue steel. He rolled once, and then he was still.
A foot and a half of splintered ash stood up out of his body. It was painted in bright Baratheon black and gold.
His horse ran on, riderless, down the length of the lists with its stirrups flapping, and nobody moved to catch it.
The silence was the worst part. Ten thousand people went quiet all at once, as though someone had put a hand over the mouth of the world. In that silence, Alyn heard a woman in the lower stands begin to scream. He heard a pennon cracking in the wind. And he heard, very clearly, a thin whistling sound coming from the man on the ground, which stopped.
Squires were running. A maester was running, his grey robes flapping. Someone had torn the young knight's helm off, and his face was pale and smooth, a face that should have been laughing about this in a tavern tonight. His eyes were open, and they were looking at nothing.
Cersei's hand came down over Alyn's eyes a heartbeat too late.
He had seen death on screens a thousand times, in another life. He had watched heads roll and weddings turn red and thought he understood, with the comfortable distance of a man on a sofa. He had understood nothing. Nothing on any screen had prepared him for how ordinary it was. There had been three passes and a crack like an axe, and a boy who had been alive was gone, all in less time than it took to eat a honeycake.
Beside him, his father was on his feet. Alan felt the whole stand shake as he rose. Robert's cup had fallen, and wine was spreading across the boards like something else.
Through the gaps between his mother's fingers, Alyn looked down the lists at the victor.
The big knight had brought his destrier round at the far end and sat there, looking back at what he had done. He did not dismount. He did not raise a hand in salute or bow to the royal stand. He simply reached up and pulled off his helm. The face beneath was broad and flat and brutal. He looked bored.
Then a squire ran up to take his shield, and the sunlight caught its face: three black dogs on a field of yellow.
Alyn knew that shield, and he knew what it meant. He knew which lord that man served, and whose grandson was sitting in the royal stand.
On his mother's lap, in the sudden cold of a blazing afternoon, the heir to the Seven Kingdoms began to shake.