The counting-house stood at the bottom of a crooked lane near the Mud Gate, where the stink of the river and the fish markets lay over everything like a wet cloak. It was a narrow building of old grey stone, three storeys high, with shuttered windows and a stout oak door bound in iron. By day it bought and sold salt, and wool, and Myrish lace. By night, it did other things.
It had been bought, four years ago, by a Braavosi merchant who did not exist, through a Pentoshi agent who did not exist, with gold that had come—after a long and winding journey through three banks and a brothel—out of the royal treasury of the Seven Kingdoms.
Alyn Baratheon had spent the better part of a year proving that.
Now he crouched in the shadow of a chandler's shop across the lane with a sword on his hip and his heart going like a war drum, and watched the counting-house door, and waited.
It had begun, as so many things did in the Red Keep, in his mother's solar.
He had gone to her a year ago with the little ledger from the hollow wooden stag, and laid it open on her table, and told her everything he had found and everything he suspected. Not all of how he had come to suspect it. Never that. But enough.
Cersei had listened without interrupting. She had turned the pages slowly, one by one, with the tip of one long white finger. And when she had reached the end she had closed the ledger and looked up at him with an expression he had never seen on her face before.
It was delight. Pure, cold, glittering delight, like sunlight on a blade.
"Petyr Baelish," she had said softly. "That smirking little clerk."
She had never liked him. Alyn had known that. She thought him a jumped-up nobody from a sheep-dung holdfast on the Fingers, grasping and oily and far too pleased with himself, and she resented every copper he borrowed from her father's coffers in the crown's name. But he had not known, until that moment, how much she had been waiting for someone to hand her a knife.
"You've done well," she said. "Better than well." She had reached across the table and touched his cheek, the way she had when he was small. "But this is smoke, sweetling. He'll talk his way out of every word of it."
"I know," Alyn had said. "That's why I came to you."
And his mother had smiled.
The stranger's story had not been kind to Cersei Lannister. It had made her a fool—clever enough to scheme, too proud to scheme well, forever mistaking cruelty for strength. And perhaps, in that world, with a husband who hated her and three children built on a lie and a brother she could not live with or without, that was what she had become.
But Alyn had grown up watching this Cersei, and he had come to understand something the story had not. His mother was the daughter of Tywin Lannister. She was the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. She had been born into more wealth than most kings, and she had spent fifteen years at court building a web of her own—quietly, patiently, one favour at a time. Clerks who owed her their posts. Knights who owed her their debts. Merchants who owed her their charters, bankers who owed her their introductions, a whole crowd of lesser lords and ladies who had at some point come to the queen with their hands out and gone away with them full. Say what you would about her schemes; she did not need to be clever to be dangerous. She only needed to ask.
And her son, it turned out, was very good at telling her what to ask for.
A Lannister cousin placed as a clerk in the treasury, who began copying ledgers. A banker in the Iron Bank's King's Landing house, whose daughter's betrothal the queen had arranged, who began to notice certain loans. A madam on the Street of Silk who had once been saved from ruin by a word from the queen, who began to notice certain girls—girls who arrived in the night on ships from Lys and Tyrosh with no names and no families, bought and sold like cattle, and who went on to fill the rooms of Petyr Baelish's houses. A captain of the gold cloaks with a gambling debt, who had been shown that his debt could vanish or become very large indeed, and who began, reluctantly, to talk.
And the letters.
Those had been the hardest, and the worst. Lysa Arryn wrote them to a man she had loved since girlhood, and she had not been careful. She had never needed to be. She was the wife of the Hand of the King and the sister of the Lady of Winterfell, and who would dare read her letters? But one of her maids had a brother in the gold cloaks, and the brother owed the queen a favour, and the maid had learned to make copies.
Alyn had read them all. Every word. He had read them sitting in his mother's solar with his face gone hot and his stomach twisting, and when he had finished, he had understood that the stranger's story had been right about a great many things, and that Jon Arryn—kind, grey, tired Jon Arryn, who had let a small boy sit in the corner of his solar and play with wooden knights—had been made a fool of in his own bed for years.
It was all there. Bribery—of guards, of officials, of half the gold cloaks and a good number of the treasury clerks. Fraud. Money stolen from the crown, tens of thousands of dragons, borrowed from the Iron Bank at a high rate and funnelled back out through the Pentoshi agent into brothels and warehouses and ships. Blackmail—a dozen lords and knights and septons with secrets they would rather have kept. Girls bought from slavers across the narrow sea, in open defiance of the oldest laws of the realm. And adultery, with the wife of the Hand of the King.
It was enough to hang him ten times over. Enough, Alyn thought, that not even the silver tongue in Petyr Baelish's clever head could lick his way out of it.
He had not had to forge a single word.
He was glad of that. He was gladder than he had expected to be.
The meeting had been easy to learn of, once they knew where to look. Every new moon, Littlefinger met the Commander of the City Watch in the counting-house near the Mud Gate, and they divided the month's takings. Janos Slynt brought a strongbox of gold. Baelish brought a ledger. They drank a little wine and spoke of this and that, and at the end of the evening, Janos Slynt went home a good deal richer, and the gold cloaks under his command went on looking the other way.
Tonight was the new moon.
Alyn had timed it for this. He had told his father everything three days ago—laid the whole mountain of it on the table in the king's solar, ledger after ledger, letter after letter, with his mother standing silent at his shoulder. He had watched Robert Baratheon read. He had watched his face go from puzzlement to disbelief to something else. The ledgers had made him angry. The girls had made him angrier.
But it was the letters that did it.
Alyn had never seen his father like that before. Not at the tourney when he was four, not in the stories he told of the Trident and Pyke. Robert had read the first of Lysa's letters to Littlefinger in silence. And then the second. And then he had set the letters down very carefully on the table and stood up and put his fist through the oak panelling of the wall.
"Jon," he said. Just that. As though the name had been torn out of him.
Jon Arryn had raised him. Jon Arryn had fostered him at the Eyrie, taught him to ride and to fight and to be a lord, stood by him when he had nothing and crowned him when he had everything. Jon Arryn had been more a father to Robert Baratheon than his own father had ever had the chance to be.
And that man had been lied to and laughed at, for years, by a clerk the Hand himself had raised up from nothing.
"He sits at my council table," Robert had said. His voice was very quiet, which was far more frightening than when he shouted. "He sits at my table and pours Jon's wine and smiles at him. And all the while—" He had stopped. His hands were shaking. "I want him, Alyn. I want him and every man who's helped him. Tell me how."
So Alyn had told him.
The door of the counting-house opened a crack, and light spilled out.
Alyn went very still. Across the lane, in the black mouth of an alley, he saw a gleam of white steel shift and settle. Ser Barristan. Further down, by the corner where the lane met the river road, a cluster of shadows in the red and gold of Lannister household men. On the rooftops, archers. At the Mud Gate itself, a company of royal guardsmen in the black and gold of the king's household, who had quietly relieved the gold cloaks of their watch an hour ago and sent them home.
And behind him, in the dark doorway of the chandler's shop, something enormous shifted its weight, and Alyn heard the faint scrape of steel on stone as a great warhammer was lifted from the cobbles.
"Is that him?" his father breathed.
It was. A slender figure, neat in a dark cloak, with a pointed little beard and a lantern in one hand, stepping out into the lane. Behind him came a heavier, clumsier man, jowly and bald, with a heavy gold chain around his neck and a strongbox tucked under one arm.
And behind them, a dozen gold cloaks, swords at their hips, crowding out of the door into the lane.
That was new. Janos Slynt did not usually bring so many men to a counting. Alyn's heart lurched. Had someone talked? Had the madam, or the captain, or the maid—
Petyr Baelish stopped in the middle of the lane.
He lifted his lantern, very slightly, and looked around him. Not quickly. Not frightened. Just thoughtful, the way a man looks at a board when he suspects his opponent has made a move he cannot quite see. His eyes moved over the dark windows. The black mouths of the alleys. The rooftops. The chandler's shop.
And then he smiled.
"Ah," said Littlefinger, softly. "Well. I suppose it had to be tonight, didn't it."
He dropped the lantern and ran.
It was not a fight. Alyn would think about that later, a great deal. He had imagined it so many times—a desperate chase through the stews of Flea Bottom, a running battle on the rooftops, Littlefinger slipping away through some secret passage and turning up a year later in Braavos with a new name and a new fortune. He had imagined drawing his sword and crossing it with a gold cloak's blade in the dark. He had imagined, in his worst moments, being too slow, and watching the mockingbird fly.
It was nothing like that. It was a slaughter.
The gold cloaks drew their swords. They had no choice. Every man of them had taken Littlefinger's coin, and every man of them knew what the king did to traitors, and they could not surrender, and so they fought. They turned in the narrow lane, a dozen men, back to back, and raised their blades—
—and the Demon of the Trident came out of the dark.
Alyn had heard the stories all his life. He had watched his father in the yard, in the melee, in a hundred tourneys. None of it had prepared him for this. Robert Baratheon came down the lane like a landslide, bareheaded, black-bearded, roaring, with his great hammer swinging in both hands, and the first gold cloak who raised a sword to meet him simply came apart. The hammer took him in the chest and lifted him off his feet and flung him across the lane into a wall, and he did not get up. The second man lost his arm at the shoulder, sword and all, and screamed. The third tried to run and the hammer caught him in the back.
"Traitors!" his father bellowed. The sound filled the lane and rolled off the stones and set dogs howling all across the Mud Gate. "Thieves! Whoresons! You'd rob me? You'd sell girls in my city? You'd make a fool of Jon Arryn? JON ARRYN?"
The Lannister men came in behind him from the corner, and the royal guardsmen from the gate, and arrows hissed down from the rooftops, and Ser Barristan came out of his alley with his sword drawn and moved through the gold cloaks like a scythe through wheat, quiet and precise and utterly without mercy. And a hidden knight covered in a brown old cloak came from nowhere at all, a flash of white and gold in the dark, laughing, his blade flickering like a snake's tongue. Two more men fell before Alyn knew it.
It lasted less time than it takes to tell. When it was over, the lane was full of bodies and the cobbles ran red into the gutters, and the gold cloaks of Janos Slynt's household were a dozen dead men and two dying.
Alyn stood in the doorway of the chandler's shop with his sword in his hand, and nobody had come near him.
He had not moved. He realised that, dully. Barristan had placed him there, in the shadow, at the back, with two Lannister guardsmen to either side of him. He had told Alyn it was so he could see the whole field. Alyn saw now that it had been so he could see the whole field and never set foot on it.
He was fourteen years old. He stood five feet and eleven inches tall, a head taller than some of the gold cloaks lying dead in the lane. He had trained every day for years, had put knights on their backs in the yard and squires in the infirmary. He had been ready—ready—for his first real fight.
And his father and the finest knights in the Seven Kingdoms had done it all for him, before he could so much as draw breath.
Janos Slynt had not run far. He had tried, clutching his strongbox like a drowning man clutching a spar, and a Lannister guardsman had tripped him with a spear shaft and he had gone down in the gutter, and when they hauled him up, he had soiled himself and was weeping.
Littlefinger they found in the cellar.
He had got further than any of them, which did not surprise Alyn in the least. There had been a trapdoor under the counting-house, and a tunnel beneath it, running down toward the river. There had been a boat waiting at the end of it. But Alyn had known about the tunnel for three moons, and when Petyr Baelish reached the end of it, breathless, his fine cloak torn and his neat little beard awry, he had found Ser Jaime Lannister sitting in the boat, idly trailing his fingers in the water.
"Leaving so soon, Lord Baelish?" Jaime had said. "And here I thought we were having such a pleasant evening."