POV- Tyrion Lannister
The manacles had been made for grown men, and they had to wrap Tyrion's wrists in rags and twist the irons shut with a length of wire before they would hold him. The rags had been over him since the Hayford Castle. Now the iron bit straight into the bone with every jolt of the cart, and the cart jolted a great deal, because the road to Harrenhal had been chewed to mud by thousands of horses and then baked hard again by a week of sun.
The smell of place reached him then, that made his stomach turn. Then the cart came over a rise and the fields opened up on either side of the road, black from the walls to the woods, and he saw the horses.
"Gods," Lancel said, from the end of the bench.
There were hundreds of them. They lay in the ash where they had fallen, bloated, legs stuck out stiff, and the crows on them never bothered to lift when the cart went by. Further off, across the eastern field, long rows of burned-out pyres stood in lines like a planted orchard, black and smoking faintly. Tyrion did not need anyone to tell him what had burned on them.
"The Dothraki," Kevan said quietly. "Daenerys's Dothraki."
Tywin said nothing. He sat at the front of the cart with his back to the driver, straight as a lance, his chained hands resting on his knees as if he were waiting at a feast for the next course to be brought. His face had not changed once since the night at Hayford. Not when the Tyrell knights had come through the door of his solar with their swords drawn. Not when they had put the irons on him, and not when they had put him in the cart, and not in the days since. Tyrion had watched him the whole way and had not heard him speak a single word. Not to Kevan, not to the guards, not to him, which was at least nothing new.
"They burned their dead," Tyrion said. "How civilized, I had heard somewhere that Dothraki ate them."
No one laughed. He had not expected anyone to.
He found himself, as he had found himself a hundred times on that road, thinking about Aunt Genna. She had been one of the few aside from Jaime and Gerion Lannister at Casterly Rock who laughed at his japes when he was small. Not politely, the way the servants did, but loudly, with her whole belly. You're the one most like him, she had told him, years later, when he was grown and drunk and feeling sorry for himself. Tywin's never forgiven you for it. Tywin had taken it for an insult at the time, though it had made him quite happy.
She had climbed the stair to his father's solar at Hayford and wept and said she was sorry, and minutes later the Reach had come up the same stair behind her. Tyrion had been asleep two floors down. He had woken to boots and shouting and a Tyrell knight's sword on his neck, and the first face he had seen when they dragged him into the yard was Olenna Tyrell's, wrapped in a green cloak against the night air, watching him come out with the mild interest like a woman watching a cook carry a pig to the spit.
Two women, he thought. Two women and a letter from Gullet was all it needed to have House Lannister in a cart.
"Father," Lancel said. His voice cracked on it. "Father, what will they do?"
Kevan looked at his son for a long time before he answered. "I don't know, boy."
"They'll kill us. Won't they? They'll kill all of us."
"Not all of us," Tyrion said, and found he had no idea which of them he meant.
Tywin was looking straight ahead, at the black towers of Harrenhal leaning over the road. They brought the carts in through the main gate, under an outer door that had been burned black and patched with raw new timber. The gate passage stank of smoke and lamp oil. Men were scrubbing the stones with sand and lye, and they stopped to watch the carts go by. Tyrion saw one of them spit.
The outer ward was full of people. Northmen, river lords, men of the Vale in sky blue, Dornishmen in their light silks and painted shields, all standing back along the walls to watch the Lannisters come in. At the far end of the ward, between the Kingspyre and the Hall of a Hundred Hearths, the red dragon lay with her head curled and her eyes half closed. One of them opened as the carts rolled past, and rolled, and found Tyrion.
He made himself look away, at the lords.
He had a good memory for faces, it was one of the few gifts the gods had seen fit to give him, and he went down the line of them as he might have gone down a ledger. Lord Celtigar, sour as an unripe plum. Beric Dondarrion with his one eye. Tytos Blackwood. Lord Darry. Mooton of Maidenpool. Leyton Hightower, leaning on his stick, and his son. Oberyn Martell, whose smile when he saw Tywin in the cart was the most frightening thing Tyrion had seen in a month.
Two faces were missing.
There was no Randyll Tarly and Tyrion looked twice and thrice. Tarly should have been at the front of that crowd. And there was no Yohn Royce either, though Tyrion could see the bronze-armored household knights of Runestone among the Vale men, which meant their lord had gone somewhere without them.
Where would you send the two hardest men you had, Tyrion thought, the day the Lannisters came to you in chains?
He liked none of the answers he came up with.
And then, beside the steps of the Kingspyre, in a robe of soft grey wool that made him look like a well-fed pigeon, Tyrion saw Varys.
The eunuch was talking to Maester Cressen with his head bent and his hands folded inside his sleeves. He looked up as the carts went by, and his eyes met Tyrion's for the space of a heartbeat, and he smiled the small apologetic smile Tyrion had seen him give a hundred times across the small council table. Then he went back to talking to the maester.
Of course, Tyrion thought. Of course you're here. You'd have been here a day before the rest of us, with clean past and a list of everyone who'd ever sneezed in Tywin's presence. You were Aerys's man and Robert's and Aegon's. Why not his?
The cart stopped.
They kept them in a storeroom under the Wailing Tower, the four of them together, with straw on the floor and a single high window that let in a shaft of grey light and the smell of the ward. Cersei and the children had been taken somewhere else. Tyrion had seen Cersei's cart go toward the Widow's Tower with a dozen guards around it, and he had seen her face, and he had been glad of the distance.
Jaime was not with them either. Tyrion had asked a guard about that, and the guard had told him to shut his mouth.
The king came down in the evening, the door opened and the old knight Selmy came in first in his white cloak, and then the big woman with the stitch mark on her face, and then Aemon Targaryen. He did not look at Tyrion first. He looked at Tywin.
Tywin looked back at him.
They stayed like that for a long time, the young king in the doorway and the old lion on the straw with his chained hands on his knees, and neither one of them said anything, and Tyrion found that he was holding his breath.
Then Aemon turned his head.
"Lord Tyrion."
"Your Grace." Tyrion got to his feet. It took some doing in the chains. "Forgive me if I don't bow. I'm told it's hard to tell when I do."
The king's face stayed as it was. "You've been looking for someone."
"Have I?"
"In the ward. You looked at every face twice."
So he had been watching. Tyrion filed that away. "Lord Tarly," he said. "And Lord Royce. I'd have thought you'd want them here to see this."
"They're riding west and east."
Tyrion felt his stomach go cold.
"Lord Tarly with eight thousand men and Lord Royce with four," Aemon said. "The Westerland lords who stood behind your father at the Great Council will bend the knee, and give up their heirs as hostages, or they won't have keeps left to give up. Lefford. Marbrand. Brax. Crakehall. Lydden. Every house that walked out of that hall in crimson. Lords of Vale too would face the same, they sided with Petyr Baelish and tried to usurp the rightful King with treachery and deceit and thus would pay for such."
"And Casterly Rock?"
"Would surrender and Lannisters would be stripped of it." The king's voice did not change.
Tyrion thought of the Rock. The Lion's Mouth, the sea below, the gold mines running down into the dark. His father's hall. He had hated it his whole life and he found, now, that the thought of Randyll Tarly's men riding up to its gate made him want to be sick.
"You've thought of everything," he said.
"No. I've had help." Aemon looked at him a moment longer. "You've thought of a few things too, my lord. It was your idea wasn't it Lord Tywin, Kevan? The Faceless Men."
Tyrion went very still. Behind him on the straw, Kevan let out a breath. Tywin did not move at all.
"The assassin himself told me of your commission," Aemon said. "Few days ago." He turned toward the door. "I don't hold the thought against you, my lord. Men think all sorts of things, to save their family, throne and place. I'm only telling you this because think my lords of what you will face when I act to save what belongs to me."
He went out. The old knight and the big woman went after him, and the door shut, and the bar dropped into place on the other side.
Lancel was weeping quietly in the corner. Kevan put his arm around him.
Tyrion sat down on the straw. After a while he looked at his father. "Well," he said. "Say something."
Tywin said nothing.
They brought them up to the Hall of a Hundred Hearths at noon the next day.
It was full. They had set out benches, and every bench was packed, and the lords who could not find a seat stood along the walls under the black stone. The king sat at the far end on a plain chair raised up on the dais, with Selmy at his shoulder and the woman with the stitched face beside him, and the red-masked woman standing a little apart in the shadows. Oberyn Martell stood behind his brother Doran who was carried in on a litter and set at the front.
The Lannisters were brought in down the length of the hall in a line, in their chains, and every head turned to watch them pass.
Jaime was already there.
Tyrion saw him and nearly stumbled. His brother stood at the foot of the dais between two guards, thinner than Tyrion had ever seen him, his golden hair gone dull and long and his beard grown out ragged, but straight-backed still, and when he saw Tyrion his mouth twisted into something that was almost his old smile.
"Little brother," Jaime said. His voice was hoarse, as if he had not used it in days. Then his eyes went past Tyrion, to their father. "Has he..."
"Not a word," Tyrion said. "Not since Hayford."
Jaime looked at Tywin for a long moment. Tywin looked at the dais.
They put Tyrion next to him. Tywin and Kevan and Lancel beside them. Then Cersei, from a door at the side, walking between two Dornish spearmen with her head up and her face like a sheet of ice. Then the children came. Joffrey first, in a crimson doublet someone had let him keep, his face blotched and furious. Then Myrcella, very pale, holding Tommen's hand. Tommen was crying silently, as he always did when he afraid.
Tyrion looked at Tommen and looked away.
The Tyrells sat on a bench near the front, not in chains. Mace, red-faced and sweating in his green and gold. Olenna beside him, small and wrapped in her cloak, her hands folded on her cane. And Genna, at the far end of the bench, with her eyes on the floor.
She did not look up once.
Before the king could speak, Varys rose.
He came forward from the side of the hall where he had been sitting among the lesser lords, his steps whispering on the stones, and stopped at the foot of the dais a few paces from Jaime, and bowed so low his forehead nearly touched his knees.
"Your Grace," he said. His voice was soft and sweet and carried to every corner of the hall. "Forgive me. I would not trouble you on such a day. But I think it only right that the lords here should know where I have stood, and where I mean to stand."
"Go on," said Aemon.
"I have served the Iron Throne for twenty years, Your Grace. I served your grandfather. I know every rat-hole in the Red Keep and every whisper in every tavern from Oldtown to White Harbor. I have little birds in every city of the Free Cities." Varys spread his soft white hands. "It was I who convinced Lady Olenna to capture Lord Tywin's after his plans on Harrenhal. Without that, she might never have had the courage to act. I ask nothing but the chance to serve you as I served the kings before you. A seat at your council, Your Grace, and my birds at your command."
Tyrion watched Olenna's face at that. It stayed still, but something in the set of her mouth told him that Varys had not acted as much as he had said it now.
The king let the silence stretch.
"You served my grandfather," he said at last. "You were in the throne room when he burned Rickard Stark. You served Robert, who toasted on Queen Elia's death, my brother and sister's death and called them dragonspawn. And you and Illyrio Mopatis put a boy in Jon Connington's arms and told him he was Rhaegar's son, and sent him across the sea to die for it." Aemon leaned forward slightly. "He died at the Gullet, Lord Varys. I killed him myself. He was screaming that he was Rhaegar's son when I did it."
Varys said nothing. His hands had gone still in his sleeves.
"You don't serve kings," Aemon said. "You serve power, you serve your own selfish reasons and nothing else. I'd rather not have people like you in front of my eyes forget about the court."
"Your Grace..."
"No. You'll have no place in my rule, Lord Varys. You may sail for Essos tomorrow on the first ship out of Maidenpool. If I hear a single bird of yours sings in King's Landing after that, Meleys will come looking for the nest."
For a moment, Tyrion thought, the eunuch's face showed something. Then it smoothed again, soft and powdered and regretful, and Varys bowed once more and walked back down the length of the hall with his silent steps, and did not sit down again but went out by the far doors.
Twenty years, Tyrion thought. Twenty years and three kings, and undone by a boy who doesn't want anything.
Aemon turned his eyes to the Lannisters. "Tywin Lannister."
Tywin looked up at him.
"You sacked King's Landing after its gates were opened to you in good faith. You sent Gregor Clegane and Amory Lorch into the Red Keep, and they murdered my brother Aegon in his cradle and my sister Rhaenys under her father's bed, and raped and murdered Elia of Dorne, and you wrapped their bodies in your own crimson cloaks and laid them at Robert's feet." The king's voice was very level. "And when you lost a war at Harrenhal, you hired ten thousand Dothraki to come here and cut the throats of men who were guests under my roof, and you did not send a single man of your own, so no one could say a Lannister had done it. Three hundred and twelve men died on these walls because of it."
Oberyn Martell had not moved from his place behind Doran, but his eyes had not left Tywin's face since the Lannisters came in.
"For these crimes," Aemon said, "you will die."
Tywin said nothing. His eyes stayed on the king.
"Kevan Lannister. You carried your brother's gold to the House of Black and White, and asked them for my death. You did what he told you, every time he told you, for forty years. You'll die with him."
Kevan bowed his head.
"Joffrey Waters."
Joffrey jerked in his chains. "Don't you say my name like that. I'm the king. I'm the rightful king, my father was Robert Baratheon, you're a bastard, you're nothing but Ned Stark's bastard, my mother says..."
"You sat a throne that was never yours," Aemon said, over him, without raising his voice, "and you raised armies against this crown. You will die."
Joffrey began to scream. It was not words. Two of the guards took him by the arms, and he kicked at them and screamed, and Cersei made a sound beside Tyrion that he would remember for the rest of his life. She did not move. She stood with her face like ice and made that sound.
The guards dragged Joffrey to the side of the hall and held him there, still screaming, until he ran out of breath.
"Jaime Lannister," Aemon said. "Tyrion Lannister, Lancel Lannister. You will take the black and serve on the Wall for the rest of your lives."
Jaime laughed, softly. Tyrion did not. The Wall, he thought. I've been to the Wall, I pissed off the top of it once.
"Myrcella Waters will remain a ward of the crown," Aemon said. "She'll be raised at court, and no harm will come to her. Tommen Waters will go to the Citadel at Oldtown, and take a chain, and serve the realm as a maester."
Tommen looked up at the dais through his tears, not understanding. Myrcella had not let go of his hand.
Cersei's name was not spoken.
Tyrion waited for it. Everyone in the hall waited for it. Aemon looked at her once, for a long moment, and then looked away, and left it unsaid. Tyrion could not tell whether that was mercy or something worse. Neither, he thought, did Cersei.
Then the king turned to the Tyrell bench. Mace Tyrell half rose, beaming. Olenna put a hand on his arm, and he sat back down.
Go on, Tyrion thought. He could not help it. Go on. They sold my father for a pardon. Let's see what you think a pardon's worth.
"House Tyrell," Aemon said.
"Your Grace," said Mace, warmly. "If I may, before you begin, I want to say that House Tyrell has always..."
"House Tyrell put a crown on Renly Baratheon's before they took it away and put it on Joffrey." Aemon said. "And married its daughter to him, and when Joffrey's war went badly it found Aegon, and when Aegon's war went badly it found me." He looked at Olenna. "You delivered the Lannisters to me, my lady. I don't doubt it. But you delivered them because you lost. If Daenerys had won at the Gullet, you would have delivered me."
Olenna Tyrell offered no argument. That, Tyrion thought, was the most telling thing of all.
"House Tyrell is stripped of the lordship of Highgarden," Aemon said. "Of the titles of Lord Paramount of the Mander, Defender of the Marches, High Marshal of the Reach, and Warden of the South. All of them. You'll hold Standfast, and its meager lands, and nothing else."
The hall went silent. Then a murmur went up from the benches, low and spreading, the sound of a thousand lords doing sums. Mace Tyrell's face had gone from red to white to something like grey.
"Every marriage of a Tyrell, man or woman, will be made by the crown," Aemon went on, "for the next five generations. No Tyrell weds without the king's leave and the king's choice. And if any Tyrell raises a sword against this crown again, for any cause, under any banner, House Tyrell will cease to exist. As House Tully has."
"Your Grace," Mace said. His voice came out high. "Your Grace, we gave you the Lannisters. We gave you everything, we..."
"Mace Tyrell," said Aemon. "You'll take the black."
For a moment Mace only stared at him, his mouth open, like a fish on a dock. Then he turned to his mother.
Olenna Tyrell had not looked away from the king. Her hands were still folded on the head of her cane, and her face was as small and wrinkled and calm as it had been in the yard at Hayford. But she had gone pale under the wrinkles, and when she spoke, it was not to Aemon.
"Sit down, Mace," she said. "You'll only make it worse."
Mace sat down.
Tyrion looked at her. He wanted to feel glad. He had wanted it all the way from Hayford, every mile of that road with the iron in his wrists. He found that he did, a little.
The Queen of Thorns had already destroyed her father's house the Redwyne's in the Gullet, sold his father to buy her house's safety, and paid in full, and been handed back a castle the size of a sheepfold and a son in black. She had been clever enough to see which way the wind was blowing. She had not thought to ask whether it would stop at the Lannisters.
At the end of the bench, Genna had finally lifted her head. She was looking across the hall at Tywin.
Tywin did not look back at her. He had turned his face to the dais, to the young king with the red eyes and the burned arm, and he was looking at him the way he had looked at very few men in his life. Tyrion could not name the look. He had seen his father give it to Robert once, and to Aerys, long ago, when Tyrion was small and had not known what it meant.
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