The solar was quiet at that hour, lit only by a handful of candles burning low against the dark, and Ser Robert Stone stood before the King's writing table, straight-backed, unhurried, hands loosely clasped behind him in the manner Ser Harold had drilled into every man who'd ever served beneath him. He was younger than Harold, leaner, a bastard of some minor western house whose name he never spoke and no one thought to ask after, chosen personally to serve as the King's hands and feet in Kingslanding while Harold's own duties kept him bound to Harrenhal and its growing host.
Damon sat with a single unlit taper turning slowly between two fingers, his mind elsewhere entirely, working through a silence that had begun to trouble him more than he'd expected it to.
It had been two years now since the letter from Pyke, the one Damon himself had read and burned, the one that had told him plainly enough that Lord Quellon's grip on the Iron Islands was slipping. He had expected more since then. Another letter, perhaps, phrased differently, testing whether the first had truly gone unanswered by accident or design. A quiet approach through some other channel entirely, a merchant, a Pentoshi trader, some indirect whisper reaching Varys' ears if not the Crown's own rookery. Something. Instead, silence, stretching longer with each passing month.
He did not know, and would not learn for some while yet, that Quellon had tried a great deal harder than that silence suggested.
He did not know that a ship had left Pyke's harbor two years ago, quiet and unannounced even to most of Quellon's own household, carrying Rodrik Harlaw himself and a letter meant for no hand but the King's, and that the ship had simply never arrived, swallowed by some combination of storm or blade or treachery that no one left alive on either shore could yet account for. He did not know that Quellon, growing increasingly desperate in the months since, had sent ten further letters by raven, each one vanishing before it ever came close enough to Kingslanding for any hand loyal to the Crown to intercept it, let alone read it. Balon's reach, it seemed, extended a great deal further than anyone in this solar, or any solar in Westeros, had yet accounted for, stretching not merely across the islands themselves but across the waters and skies between them and the mainland, silencing every attempt Quellon made to call for help long before it could ever trouble the King's own conscience.
Damon knew none of it, and even if he knew of Balon's greater influence, he wouldn't care, as in his eyes Balon was but a means to an end, a piece on the table still playing his part even if he was improvising some small parts.
He set the unlit taper down and turned his attention fully back to the man standing before him.
"How many men do we have at Casterly Rock?" he asked.
Robert answered without hesitation. "Fifty, Your Grace. Most work as blacksmiths or city guardsmen in Lannisport itself. None inside the castle walls proper. Casterly Rock keeps its own household close, and Lord Tywin's absence hasn't loosened that much."
Damon nodded slowly, unsurprised. "Are they trustworthy?"
"Ser Harold chose every one of them himself before he left for Harrenhal, Your Grace. He wouldn't have sent a man west he didn't trust with his own life, let alone yours." Robert's voice carried no doubt in it at all.
That was all Damon needed to hear.
"Pen a letter to our people there," he said. "Tell them that in the coming days, or the coming week, whenever the opportunity presents itself, they are to get close to the maids, the cooks, any smallfolk who work within Casterly Rock's walls, and learn what they can about Lady Cersei's relationship with her brother Ser Jaime. Anything strange. Unusual sounds from rooms when the two of them are alone together. Touches that linger longer than a brother and sister's ought to. Glances held too long, or too often. Anything at all that seems out of place to a servant who's spent years watching that family and knows its ordinary rhythms well enough to notice when something breaks from them."
Robert's expression did not change, though something in his eyes sharpened, understanding settling in quietly behind them.
"You're to do the same here, in the Red Keep," Damon continued. "Quietly, carefully. Anyone who knows anything, whether they realize the weight of what they know or not, is to be secured. Those from Casterly Rock are to be brought here to Kingslanding, quietly, and held until my return from the Iron Islands."
For a long moment, Robert said nothing at all, and Damon watched him work through the full shape of what had just been asked of him, watched the understanding settle fully into place behind his eyes. Then, without a word, Robert lowered himself to one knee.
"It will be done, Your Grace. Quietly, and thoroughly. You have my word."
"Rise." Damon's voice remained even, unhurried. "You're dismissed."
Robert rose, bowed once, and left the solar without another word, the door closing softly behind him, and Damon sat alone in the candlelight, turning the matter over the way he turned over everything, from every side, before he allowed himself to settle on any single conclusion.
Two years, now, of walks through the Red Keep's gardens with Cersei Lannister. Two years of dinners that had grown, slowly and by careful degrees, from politically necessary courtesies into something that lingered rather longer than strict necessity ever demanded. She was sharp, ambitious, beautiful in the way every man in the Seven Kingdoms already knew her to be, and in two years of careful observation, Damon had found no trace yet of the woman he remembered from the life he'd once lived before this one, no glimpse of the cruelty, the desperation, the slow unraveling he recalled so clearly from a story that no longer belonged entirely to this world's future, not since his own arrival in it had already begun bending events away from whatever path they might once have followed.
But he had learned, across two lifetimes now, never to mistake the absence of confirmation for the absence of truth. What he remembered of her brother, of the two of them together, was not so easily dismissed simply because two years of court propriety had shown him nothing plainly incriminating. Court propriety concealed a great many things far better than it revealed them.
Whatever Robert's people uncovered, in the weeks while Damon dealt with the Iron Islands, would tell him what he needed to know. If it confirmed nothing, if Cersei proved, in this life, entirely unlike the woman from the story he remembered, then perhaps she remained exactly the candidate Tywin so plainly hoped her to be, exactly the bride the realm expected him to choose. And if it confirmed what he suspected, then Damon would need to decide, finally, whether the very last of his chances to travel back in time was worth spending on securing a truer bride of dragon blood, plucked from somewhere further back in his family's long and tangled history, rather than settling for whatever this world currently offered him.
He had not yet decided which outcome he hoped Robert's people would find.
He was still turning the question over when a knock sounded at the door, sharp and hesitant in a way that didn't match the confident rhythm of any of his usual visitors.
"Enter," Damon said.
The door opened, and Damon felt a flicker of genuine surprise, rare enough now that he noticed it plainly the moment it rose in him, as his brother Viserys stepped into the solar and stood before him, alone, unannounced, at an hour when the boy ought to have long since retired to his own chambers.
Neither of them spoke at first. Viserys stood very still, his hands loosely fisted at his sides, his violet eyes fixed on Damon's with an intensity that seemed to hold something back just barely, some current running beneath the surface of his composure that he had not quite mastered the way he believed he had. Damon simply watched him in turn, waiting, the way he waited for every room to reveal itself before he offered anything of his own.
The silence stretched, longer than such silences usually stretched between them, long enough that it began to feel less like patience and more like the held breath before something is finally said aloud.
"Brother," Viserys said at last, and his voice, though carefully measured, carried an undertone that betrayed the effort it took to keep it that way. "The Iron Islands cause so much trouble because they've never been ruled properly. The Greyjoys have proven themselves unfit for the trust the realm placed in them. Unloyal, when it mattered most." He drew a slow breath, and something in his eyes sharpened, brightened, in a way that made the careful stillness of his expression seem thinner than it had a moment before. "But the Iron Islands are too important, too dangerous to leave in careless hands again. Too large a piece of the realm to simply hand to whichever lord happens to be standing nearby when the fighting ends."
He took a single step closer, and his voice dropped, quieter, more urgent.
"Why not give them to your own blood, brother? The blood of the dragon. I would not disappoint you. I swear it. Give me the Iron Islands, and I will make them yours in truth, loyal in a way the Greyjoys never managed across a hundred years of trying."
The words hung in the candlelit room, and beneath them, plain and barely restrained, something close to obsession moved behind Viserys' eyes, a hunger that had clearly been building far longer than tonight, dressed up in reasonable-sounding words but unmistakable all the same to a man who had spent two years learning to read exactly this kind of desperate, glittering want in the eyes of lesser men across a hundred council meetings and a hundred quiet audiences.
Damon looked at his brother for a long moment, genuine surprise still settling somewhere behind his carefully composed expression, and then, slowly, that surprise hardened into something far more serious, far colder.
For the briefest instant, sharp and unbidden, the thought crossed his mind entirely on its own, quiet and clinical in a way that startled even him with how easily it arrived. How simple it would be. How final. A single command, quietly given, and this particular question, this particular danger standing before him in his own solar at this late hour, would trouble him no further.
The thought was gone as quickly as it had come, buried beneath the same iron discipline that governed everything else about him, and Damon's expression settled back into something unreadable, watchful, giving his brother nothing at all to read in return.
"Sit down, Viserys," he said finally, quiet and even.