The King came home on a day of wind and hard white sunlight, and all of King's Landing turned out to meet him.
Alyn heard him long before he saw him. The roar began somewhere down by the River Gate, a low distant surf of sound, and rolled up through the city street by street, growing as it came. Up the Hook, along the Street of Sisters, across the great square before the Sept of Baelor, the shouting built and built until it broke against the walls of the Red Keep like a storm tide. Bells were ringing in every sept in the city. Somewhere, someone was beating a drum.
He stood in the outer ward beside his mother, in a new doublet of black and gold that Celia had let out twice already, and waited. Behind them the nursemaids held the triplets—Lyonel crowing and bouncing at the noise, Argella scowling at it, Cassana silent with her face turned toward the gate. Around them, the whole court stood arrayed in its finery, lords and ladies and knights and septons, banners snapping overhead in the wind off the bay.
Then the gates opened, and his father rode through them.
He came at the head of his household knights on the same great black warhorse he had ridden out on, but he did not look like the same man. Four moons of war had burned him down to something harder. His face was brown with sun and wind, his beard grown long and wild, his black hair tangled to his shoulders. His plate was dented and scarred, scoured grey in places where the salt had eaten at the enamel. There was a fresh seam of scar tissue running pale through his left eyebrow that had not been there before.
And he was enormous. That was the thing Alyn could not stop seeing. Robert Baratheon rode through the gates of his own castle like a mountain on horseback—shoulders so broad they blocked the light behind him, arms thick as a smith's, a chest like a barrel of iron. When he swung down from the saddle, the horse visibly sighed with relief. When he hit the ground, Alyn half expected the flagstones to crack.
This is not the man the stranger knew, Alyn thought.
The stranger's Robert had been a ruin. A great wheezing hulk of a man who could no longer fit into his own armour, who drank from dawn to dusk and whored from dusk to dawn, whose belly strained his jerkin and whose face had gone red and puffy with wine. A man who, in one scene Alyn had never forgotten, sat drinking in a darkened room and admitted that he had been a better man once, that the crown had rotted him from the inside out. A man who would die gored by a boar, too drunk to hold his spear.
This man was not that. This man looked as though he could have picked up the boar and thrown it.
Robert strode across the ward, his armour clanking, the crowd of courtiers parting before him like wheat before a gale. He swept past the bowing lords without a glance. He went straight to his wife and put both his great hands on her waist and lifted her off her feet as though she weighed nothing at all, and kissed her soundly in front of the whole court.
Cersei made a sound of furious protest. But when he set her down again, her cheeks were flushed, and she did not step away.
Then Robert turned to his son.
"Seven hells," he said. "Look at you."
"Hello, Father."
"Hello, Father, he says. Like I've been gone an afternoon." Robert looked him up and down, grinning. "You've grown again. You have! Gods, boy, what are they feeding you? You're taller than half my squires."
"Four foot eleven," Alyn said. "Celia measured me."
"Four foot eleven. Ha!" Robert seized him under the arms—nine years old and nearly five feet tall, and heavy with it—and hoisted him straight up into the air as easily as he had lifted Cersei. The court gasped. Someone laughed. Alyn hung there for a moment, looking down at his father's delighted, sunburned face, and couldn't help it—he laughed too.
"There," Robert said, setting him down. "Still got it. Now where are the little ones? Where's my storm?"
The feast that night went on until the candles guttered.
The throne room had been hung with black and gold and strewn with fresh rushes. Trestle tables groaned beneath roast boar and swans in their plumage and whole wheels of cheese and bread shaped like krakens, their tentacles baked into loops and coils. Singers sang. Tumblers tumbled. The wine flowed like the Blackwater in spring. And at the high table, beneath the great iron chair with its thousand blades, the King of the Seven Kingdoms held court with a cup in one hand and a joint of meat in the other and told the story of how he had won his war.
Alyn sat at his right hand and listened, and grew colder and colder.
"—and there was Pyke," Robert was saying, "sat on its rocks like a drowned rat, with the sea chewing at it all round. Towers on islands, and rope bridges swinging in the wind between them. Swinging, I tell you. You'd not get me across one of those drunk. Well." He considered. "Drunker."
Laughter down the tables.
"We brought up the trebuchets, and we pounded that curtain wall for a fortnight. Stones the size of oxen. And all the while their archers on the walls are shooting at us—and one of the whoresons—" He set down his cup and thumped his chest, over the heart, with one huge fist. "Here."
Alyn went still.
"Punched right through my breastplate," Robert said, almost admiringly. "A bodkin, must've been. Steel as good as any in the realm, and that little iron needle went straight through it like it was parchment. I felt it go in. Like a wasp sting, it was, only the wasp was the size of a horse."
"Robert," said Jon Arryn quietly, from his left.
"What? It's a good story, Jon. Let me tell it." Robert grinned round at the hall. "It didn't go deep. Went in maybe a finger's width, caught on a rib. Pycelle's lot would've wanted me to go and lie down on my bed and moan for a week. But I looked down at that arrow sticking out of my chest, and I looked up at that wall, and I thought—these ironborn bastards." His grin faded. His voice dropped, and the whole hall seemed to lean in to hear it. "They say they pay the iron price. That's their boast. They take what they want with the sword, and they pay for nothing. Every man, woman and child on those rocks has grown fat on blood they spilled up and down our coasts. They burned Lannisport. They burned the fleet. They took whatever they wanted and paid for it in iron."
He picked up his cup again and drank, and when he set it down, his eyes were very bright.
"So I pulled the arrow out," said Robert Baratheon, "and I decided they could pay it too."
The wall came down two days later, he said. A section of the curtain, pounded to rubble, crumbling into the sea. And the moment it fell, the King was first into the breach.
Alyn had heard, in the stranger's story, that it had been other men who went first through the wall at Pyke. A red priest with a flaming sword, and a northern knight who would later sell men into slavery and flee the realm. He had heard that Robert had taken the castle and that Balon Greyjoy had knelt, bent the knee, sworn his fealty, and lived—had gone on living, for years, sulking on his rock, brooding on his lost crown, waiting for his chance to rise again.
That was not what happened here.
Robert told it with relish, pausing now and then to drink or to tear meat from the bone. How he had gone over the rubble with his hammer in both hands and his own blood soaking his tabard. How the ironborn had come at him in the breach, and how he had broken them. Broken shields and broken arms and broken heads, the hammer rising and falling like a smith's at the forge. He did not say killed. He said broke. The ironborn broke. The gate broke. The bridges broke under the weight of men fleeing across them, and the men broke on the rocks below.
"It was a slaughter," Robert said, and there was no shame in it at all, only a fierce, grim satisfaction. "They wanted to pay the iron price. They paid it."
They had fought their way across the bridges, tower to tower, in the rain. Kitchen keep. Great keep. Bloody keep. The ironborn fought for every foot of it, and every foot of it cost them. And at the last, at the very top of the last tower, in a hall with a great chair carved from black stone in the shape of a kraken, there had been Balon Greyjoy.
"He had an axe," Robert said. "I'll give him that. He didn't hide. He came at me with a longaxe and a face like a fish that'd been left out in the sun. Called me a usurper. Called me a fat drunk stag." He laughed, shortly. "I told him I'd been called worse by my wife."
Along the high table, Cersei's lips thinned. But she said nothing.
"I broke his arm," Robert said simply. "Then I broke his knee. Then I took up his own axe off the floor where he'd dropped it, and I took his head with it. And we put it on a spike over the gate of Pyke, where every ironborn sailing home from the sea would see it." He drank. "Let them look at it a while and think on the iron price."
The hall erupted. Men pounded the tables and roared and raised their cups. The singer at the foot of the dais was already scribbling on a scrap of parchment, no doubt composing The Fall of the Kraken for the next night's feast. Down the table, Stannis Baratheon's lean face was set like stone. Beside him, Renly was grinning and applauding. Jon Arryn had lowered his eyes to his plate.
And Alyn sat very still, his hands flat on the table to stop them shaking, and felt the world shift beneath him again.
Balon Greyjoy is dead.
It came out in pieces through the rest of the evening, in the gaps between the toasts and the songs.
The Iron Islands would be governed by a regent—Lord Rodrik Harlaw of Ten Towers, a bookish, grey, sober man, the brother of Balon's widow, who had joined the rebellion late and reluctantly and knelt early and gladly. Harlaw would hold Pyke and the islands in the king's peace until Balon's heir came of age.
And that heir was Theon.
Balon's two elder sons had died in the fighting—one at Seagard, one when the tower fell at Pyke. That left only the youngest, a boy of ten. Robert had declared him heir to the Seastone Chair, Lord of the Iron Islands in waiting, and then, in the same breath, taken him hostage.
But not to Winterfell.
"Ned offered to take him," Robert said, waving a leg of goose. "Good old Ned. Said the boy could be raised with his own. But Stannis—" A glance down the table at his brother, not unkind. "Stannis did the real fighting at Fair Isle, didn't he? Broke their fleet. Won me the sea. And all he's got for it is Dragonstone and a sore jaw from grinding his teeth. So I said, you take the Greyjoy boy, Stannis. You raise him. Teach him what it is to be a loyal man of the realm." He barked a laugh. "If anyone can teach a kraken to kneel, it's you."
Stannis inclined his head a fraction, with the air of a man accepting a heavy and not entirely welcome burden. "He will learn his duty, Your Grace."
"I don't doubt it! Seven hells, the poor little bastard. He'll learn his duty or die of boredom trying."
More laughter. Alyn did not join in.
Theon Greyjoy would not be raised at Winterfell.
He would not grow up beside Robb Stark, half-brother and half-hostage, envious and loved and resentful. He would not ride south to war with the Young Wolf, or sail home to his father's islands, or turn his cloak and take Winterfell and put two farm boys' heads on spikes. He would not be flayed and broken and remade into something that answered to the name of Reek. Whatever became of him now, on a grim black island under Stannis's cold eye, it would not be that.
And with Balon dead—
The stranger's story had been full of Balon. Balon the proud, the bitter, the patient. Balon who had waited on his rock for ten years and then, the moment the realm tore itself apart, had crowned himself again and sent his longships up the coast of the North while its lord was away at war. Balon who had refused Robb Stark's alliance and stabbed him in the back instead. Balon who had died, in the end, falling from one of those swinging bridges—or pushed from it, by a brother who had come home from the far seas smelling of blood and sorcery.
That brother, Alyn thought, and felt the hairs on his arms rise.
Balon had brothers. One was a drowned priest. One was a hard, loyal ox of a man who had commanded the Iron Fleet until Stannis sank it. And one was a pirate and a reaver who sailed the far seas beyond any map, and who, in the story, had come home at last to murder his king and seize his throne.
That man was out there now. Somewhere. And the Seastone Chair he had coveted was sitting empty, held in trust for a boy of ten who was a hostage on Dragonstone, guarded by a bookish old lord who had never been a fighter.
Alyn did not know what the Crow's Eye would do with that. He did not like any of the answers he could imagine.
He could not sleep that night. He lay in his bed and stared up at the canopy and did the sums again, as he had done so many times before.
The stranger's story had turned on a handful of great hinges. The Greyjoy rebellion was one. It had swung, and it had swung wrong—or right, or at least differently—and Balon Greyjoy was a head on a spike and the Iron Islands were in the hands of a regent and a hostage.
What were the others?
There had been Jon Arryn's death. Poisoned. The Tears of Lys, poured into his wine by his own wife, Lysa, at the whispered urging of the man she had loved since girlhood. A man who had been a boy called Littlefinger, and who had wanted nothing more in the world than to see the realm burn so he could climb the ashes.
There had been his father's death. A boar in the Kingswood, a drunk king with a broken spear, and a cousin who kept filling his wineskin with strongwine because the queen had told him to.
And then there had been the war, and the war had been everything.
Alyn turned on his side and looked at the dark. That second hinge, at least, was looking rusty. He had watched his father today—not only at the feast, but in the morning, in the yard, before the procession had even properly dispersed. Robert had wandered out there still in his salt-stained leathers, a cup of wine in his hand, and found Alyn at his practice with Ser Aron. He had stood there watching for a while. And then he had set down the cup, and taken up a practice hammer, and stepped into the ring.
For an hour, they had fought. Robert had not held back as much as he probably should have, and Alyn had been knocked down more times than he could count, and every time he got up, his father had grinned wider. Again, he kept saying. Again. Keep your feet under you. Don't back away from me, boy, you're a Baratheon, walk into it. Again. When it was done, Alyn had been black and blue from shoulder to hip, and Robert had been sweating and breathing hard and laughing, and he had put his arm round Alyn's shoulders and said, Tomorrow. Same time. I want to see that guard of yours tightened up.
It had not been the first time. Before the war, he'd come to the yard at least twice a week. After four moons of fighting, it seemed he could not get enough of it. He liked it. He liked teaching and he liked watching and he liked the way people gasped when his son, at nine years old, put a squire of fourteen on his back in the dust.
In the stranger's story, the Greyjoy rebellion had been Robert's last war, and after it, with nothing left to fight, he had rotted. Drink and food and boredom and women and the slow, grinding misery of a crown he had never wanted.
Here, he had something to fight for. Something to shape. A son he could make into a warrior, and did not intend to stop making into one any time soon.
He won't go to seed like that, Alyn thought. Not while I'm in the yard. Maybe not entirely even without me—he'll drink, he'll feast, he'll get heavier as he gets older, every man does. But he won't become that. Not the man who couldn't fit into his own armour. Not the man who couldn't hold a spear against a boar.
The boar was a long way off anyway. And he meant to be standing beside his father on that hunt, if it ever came, with his own spear in his hand.
That left Jon Arryn.
That was the one, Alyn thought. That was the first real thing he could do.
He had spent years watching and waiting and learning, holding his knowledge close, doing nothing that might draw the wrong eyes. And there had been good reasons for that. He had been a child, then. He still was, if he was honest. And most of what he had known had been coming apart in his hands like wet paper.
But Jon Arryn's death did not depend on golden children. It did not depend on the Greyjoys, or on his father's waistline, or on anything he had already changed. It depended on one man. One small, clever, smiling man who had wanted, since boyhood, to be more than he was allowed to be.
Petyr Baelish.
He was still in Gulltown. Alyn had made sure of that—or rather, had kept a careful ear open whenever the Hand's accounts were read aloud in the solar. Master of customs. A little lordling from a little holdfast on the Fingers, who had taken over the customs of a middling port and made them sing. Tripled the revenues, some said, in a handful of years. Jon Arryn spoke of him approvingly, as a clever young man who knew the value of a copper, a friend of his wife's from her girlhood at Riverrun.
In the stranger's story, the Hand had brought that clever young man to court. Made him master of coin. Gave him a seat on the small council and the keys to the treasury, where he had borrowed and borrowed and borrowed until the crown owed the Lannisters and the Iron Bank more than it could ever repay. Where he had built his web of brothels and spies and debts. Where he had whispered in Lysa Arryn's ear until she poured poison into her husband's cup.
Why had he done it? Because Jon Arryn had been looking into the parentage of the queen's children. That was the lever. Littlefinger had seen what was coming and decided to set the fire himself, and point it at the Starks and the Lannisters both.
And there were no golden children now. Jon Arryn had nothing to look into.
Did that mean the Hand was safe?
Alyn did not believe it for a moment. He had watched the story. Men like Petyr Baelish did not need a particular reason. They needed chaos, and if there was none to be had, they made some. The lever might change. The hand pulling on it would not.
So.
He had years. Years before Littlefinger would be in any position to do anything. Years to watch him, to learn what he was doing and whom he was doing it with, to find the threads of his web and follow them one by one back to the spider.
It would be simple, in a way, to have him killed. Alyn was the heir to the Iron Throne. He had—or would soon have—the ear of a king who loved him, a grandfather with more gold than the gods, and, in due course, knights of his own. One day it would only take a word. A cutpurse in an alley. A fall down a stair. A fever that came from nowhere.
And then what?
He would have killed a man who, as far as anyone in this world could see, had done nothing. No crime. No treason. No proof. Only a nine-year-old's word that he would, someday. That was not justice; that was murder. And even if he did not care about the justice of it—which he did, he found, more than he expected—it was a terrible move in the game. Men would ask why. Someone would always ask why. And if the heir to the throne was a boy who had men killed on a whim, then every lord in the realm would learn to fear him, and fear was a poor foundation to build a kingdom on.
No. That was not how the game was played. Not if you wanted to win it and keep what you had won.
He would watch Littlefinger. He would find his schemes and drag them into the light. He would make sure Jon Arryn was never alone with a cup of wine that Lysa had poured. He would, if it came to it, find some way to be sure that the Tears of Lys never touched the Hand's lips.
And if all else failed—if every other road closed—then there was always the knife in the dark.
But that would be the last resort. Not the first.
He must have slept eventually, because he woke to Celia's voice and the rattle of the curtains, and to the sound of his father bellowing somewhere below in the yard for his son and a practice hammer.
He broke his fast quickly and went down, and on the way, passing the door of the Hand's solar, he heard Jon Arryn's dry, tired voice through the half-open door, speaking to someone—a steward, perhaps, or a clerk.
"—the war has cost us dearly," the Hand was saying. "The treasury is near empty. We shall need to borrow, and borrow well, and I confess I do not have the head for it. Pycelle knows nothing of coin. Renly less." A pause. A rustle of paper. "But there is a young man in Gulltown, a friend of my lady wife's from her youth—clever, very clever with numbers. He has done wonders with the customs there. I have been thinking I might bring him to court."
Alyn stopped in the passage.
"His name," said Jon Arryn, "is Petyr Baelish."