Chapter 224: Humiliation
Varys stood beside the throne with the quiet satisfaction of a man watching a play he'd already read the script for.
He had known what the Tyrells were coming to ask long before they'd set foot in the Red Keep. He hadn't mentioned it to Robert. He had wanted this moment — wanted to see how it played out with the full court watching, wanted to observe who moved where and why when the pieces landed.
If the Tyrells secured a marriage alliance with the Iron Throne, Aegon and the Golden Company would find the door to Westeros considerably narrower than they'd hoped.
"Lord Tyrell," Varys said, stepping forward with the practiced expression of a man trying to be helpful, "the realm is at war. Perhaps this particular discussion might be better suited to a quieter moment?"
"The succession and the king's marriage are matters of state that cannot wait on convenience," Mace said immediately, with the confidence of a man who had rehearsed this answer. He wasn't foolish enough to miss the window. An army of a hundred thousand had a way of opening doors that polite requests couldn't. If he waited until after the war was won, he'd be negotiating from gratitude rather than necessity — a far weaker position. "The wedding itself can wait for victory. The betrothal does not need to."
Robert had opened his mouth to find some way through this when a laugh broke across the throne room from the wrong direction entirely.
Everyone turned.
Oberyn Martell was leaning against one of the hall's great pillars with the ease of a man at a tavern rather than a royal audience, dark eyes bright with amusement.
"Lord Tyrell." His voice carried without effort. "I'd save the energy if I were you. Hasn't anyone told you? His Grace brought a winter rose back from the North. The queen's seat has already been spoken for."
"A Stark?" Mace's composure slipped just slightly. His confidence in making this approach had rested partly on the fact that House Stark had no daughters of eligible age — or so he'd understood.
"Not a Stark." Oberyn's smile sharpened. "The daughter of some minor lordling up north. Quite obscure, from what I understand." He let that land with visible pleasure. The Reach and Dorne had been grinding against each other for centuries, and Oberyn was not a man who passed up a clean opportunity. "Her brother is Ser Loras, as it happens. Standing right there."
The faces of the Reach lords went through several colors in quick succession.
Being passed over for a marriage alliance was one thing. Being passed over in favor of a minor northern house — a family nobody in this room had needed to know the name of until this moment — was something else entirely. It carried a particular sting that went well beyond simple rejection.
Every eye in the throne room moved to Robert.
"Your Grace." Mace Tyrell's voice had lost its earlier smoothness. "You told me you would grant my request. I ask that you clarify what Prince Oberyn has said." He shot a look at Oberyn that could have drawn blood.
It was that precise phrasing — you told me you would grant my request — that finished whatever patience Robert had been managing.
"I agreed before I knew what you intended to ask, my lord," Robert said. His tone wasn't cruel — he still needed these men and their swords — but the authority in it was absolute and left no room for negotiation. "What Prince Oberyn told you is not a rumor. I made a promise in the North, and that promise holds. A king's word is not subject to revision because circumstances have become inconvenient. The matter is closed."
A public refusal.
In front of the assembled lords of the Crownlands, the Stormlands, and the Reach — the most powerful gathering of noble houses beneath the Iron Throne — Robert Baratheon had declined the hand of the Tyrell heir in favor of a girl from a family that most of the men in this room had never heard of.
There was a history in that insult that ran deeper than the immediate moment. The Tyrells' power was real and substantial, but their lineage told a different story. When the Targaryens had come to Westeros on dragonback and the last King of the Reach had died on the Field of Fire, it hadn't been one of the Reach's ancient noble houses that inherited the wardenship. It had been the Tyrells — the stewards. The household managers of the old Gardener kings. Men who had surrendered Highgarden's gates rather than die defending them and been rewarded for that pragmatism with everything their dead masters had owned.
The old families of the Reach remembered. They always remembered.
To be refused in favor of a northern minor house, in front of those same old families, was almost surgical in the way it reopened that particular wound.
Mace Tyrell trembled. Later, men who'd been in the room would disagree about whether it was rage or humiliation or simply the physical effort of keeping himself from saying something that would make everything worse.
"I march a hundred thousand men to your cause, Robert Baratheon," he said, his voice stripped of any pretense of courtesy, "and this is your answer?"
He turned and walked out.
It was what happened next that completed the humiliation. Of all the Reach lords assembled behind him, only his two sons and the Redwyne cousins followed. Lord Tarly stayed. Lord Rowan stayed. Lord Hightower stayed. Every one of the great lords of the Reach who had their own interests and their own calculations remained exactly where they were.
The gap between Highgarden's wealth and its actual authority over its own vassals had never been more visible.
Astapor
"You want me to put the Dothraki through formation drills?" Lysio asked, with the careful tone of a man who had an objection he was choosing to express politely. "I'm not sure I follow the intent, my lord. They're not infantry fighters — that's not how they're built, and it's not how they think. Running them through Ghiscari footwork training seems like a waste of everyone's time."
Since Lord Fehmar's comments on the beach and the miracle of the distillation cauldron, Lysio had shifted his assessment of Ian considerably. He wasn't going to argue openly. But he wasn't going to pretend he had no questions either.
"I'm not training them to fight on foot," Ian said. "I'm training them to obey. Those are different things."
"Training obedience?"
"Organize them into squads of ten and companies of a hundred. Select squad leaders and company commanders from within their own ranks — let them see Dothraki leading Dothraki. Then run them through standard formation drills." Ian paused. "Tell them that whichever company achieves clean formation discipline first earns purified water — and the right to ride."
Lysio thought about the beach. Two thousand Dothraki, screaming a man's name because a horse had drunk from a trough.
"If riding is the reward," he said slowly, "I think you'll find considerably less resistance than you'd expect."
"That's the idea. Go organize it."
Lysio accepted the order and turned to leave, then stopped. "Your High Valyrian has gotten remarkable, my lord. I can barely believe you only began learning it when you arrived in Astapor."
"I've always picked up languages quickly," Ian said, with a smile that gave nothing away. You'd find it hard to believe I started six months ago.
He watched Lysio head toward the training ground and turned back to lean on the platform railing, looking out over the city.
The formation drilling wasn't actually his first choice for handling the Dothraki. It was his first choice given his budget, which was a different thing entirely.
He'd arrived in Astapor with just over a hundred thousand gold dragons. The Worm River operation had added fifty or sixty thousand more in seized valuables. The Temple of the Graces and several of the major Astapori families had been diplomatically encouraged to make donations totaling somewhere around seventy or eighty thousand light gold coins — Meereenese mintage, about a third the weight of a proper gold dragon, which meant roughly twenty-five thousand gold dragons equivalent in real terms.
All of it had been gone in two months.
The math on proper cavalry was brutal. A serious cavalryman needed a warhorse for battle, at minimum two remounts for campaign use, and ideally a packhorse for equipment. Just purchasing warhorses and remounts for the twenty-seven hundred Dothraki he'd already acquired would run to roughly forty thousand gold dragons — before weapons, before armor, before feed, before any of the ongoing costs of maintaining a mounted force in the field.
He didn't have forty thousand gold dragons. He didn't have close to forty thousand gold dragons.
Which meant the horses weren't going to be purchased. They were going to be acquired through other means. There were khalasars moving across the Dothraki Sea at any given time, most of them small, and a small khalaser had horses it wasn't using and a limited ability to defend them against a well-organized night raid.
Paying market price for twenty-seven hundred warhorses was something Ian couldn't afford.
Taking them from people who couldn't stop him was something else entirely.
(End of Chapter)
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