Chapter 52: The Mist Before Stark's Eyes
Eddard Stark had not slept well since arriving in King's Landing.
This was not entirely unusual — he had never been a man who slept easily in unfamiliar places, and the Red Keep was about as unfamiliar as places got, a building that had absorbed the ambitions and scheming of centuries until the very walls seemed to hum with it. But the insomnia had a specific texture now. It was the insomnia of a man who has learned too much and cannot find the thread that ties it together into something actionable.
He knew what the Lannisters had done to the currency. He knew what Jon Arryn had likely discovered in the weeks before his death. He knew that Bran had seen something from a tower window and been thrown from it and poisoned in his sickbed, and that the people responsible were the same people whose faces he looked at across the Small Council table.
What he did not know was how to move without destroying everything he was trying to protect.
The position Robert had created for Henry — Master of Defense — was new enough to the council that nobody was entirely certain what it entailed, which Henry appeared to find satisfactory. He attended the Small Council meetings that Eddard now convened with near-daily regularity, sat at the table, listened, offered assessments when asked, and kept his own counsel otherwise.
Eddard found his presence useful in the way that a fixed point is useful when everything else is moving — Henry said what he thought, which was not always comfortable, but was reliable in a way that most of what was said in the Chamber of the Small Council was not.
Renly attended the meetings with the ease of a young man who had been sitting at that table long enough to have opinions about where everyone else should sit. Varys attended and said things that were simultaneously informative and somehow insufficient. Baelish attended and said things that were accurate in their components and misleading in their totality, which Henry had warned Eddard about and which Eddard was now verifying through experience.
Grand Maester Pycelle attended and appeared to be in agreement with whoever had spoken most recently.
Eddard had started treating the Chamber of the Small Council like an office, which was not traditional but was necessary given how much ground there was to cover. He was aware that his colleagues found this exhausting. He found their reluctance to work exhausting. They had arrived at a stalemate on that particular point.
The letter arrived on a Tuesday, which was not significant except that Tuesdays had been particularly busy and Eddard was tired in the specific way of a man who had attended two council meetings and a judicial hearing and was being handed something else.
A child had delivered it — not a raven, not a messenger, a child, pressed coin in hand, who had given it to one of Eddard's guards at the Tower of the Hand gate and disappeared into the crowd before anyone thought to ask where it came from. The wax seal bore the crowned stag of House Baratheon.
Stannis.
The letter was short and characteristically direct, which was the only kind of letter Stannis Baratheon wrote. It told Eddard to visit a particular blacksmith on the Street of Steel if he wanted to understand why Jon Arryn had died. It gave no other context, which was either because Stannis considered the context self-evident or because Stannis had decided that Eddard needed to see whatever was there for himself rather than being told about it.
Eddard burned the letter, thought about it for two days, and then went.
He regretted the cloak almost immediately.
The intention had been discretion. The execution was complicated by Walder.
Walder was one of Eddard's household guard, the son of a man who had served House Stark for thirty years before taking a wound at Pyke that had taken his mind along with his health. He was large in the way that occasionally happened when nature decided to make a point — close to seven feet tall, built proportionally, the kind of physical presence that made people on the street step aside before they had consciously registered why.
He wore a cloak that had been made for him specifically because no standard cloak covered him, and he carried Ice across his back because Eddard had asked him to, and the sword's length added another dimension to his silhouette.
They rode up the Street of Steel.
The Street of Steel was a working street — smiths and their apprentices, customers, merchants, the smell of hot iron and coal smoke that clung to the stones regardless of wind direction. It was the kind of street where people minded their business because everyone's business was visible and nobody had the energy for other people's.
Eddard and Walder attracted attention from the first turning. By the halfway point, they had been noticed by everyone on the block. A Gold Cloak patrol stopped them, studied them, and recognized Eddard when he revealed his badge, which resolved the official concern but did nothing for the unofficial attention.
By the time they reached the top of the hill, discretion was a theoretical concept rather than an operational reality.
The smithy at the top of the Street of Steel was not what Eddard had expected from the word smithy.
It was a proper building — timber-framed, lime-plastered walls, a roof high enough to suggest the space inside was built for serious work rather than cramped production. The doors were ebony and weirwood, heavy and well-made, carved with a hunting scene that had genuine craft in it. On either side of the entrance stood stone figures in red armor, detailed enough that the armorer who had made them had either worked from life or from very precise description.
Eddard looked at the figures for a moment. The red armor was distinctive.
Inside, a maid appeared immediately and offered to seat him, reading his status from Walder's presence if not from his cloak. Eddard asked for the master of the shop. She went, returned, and was followed by a balding man with a well-kept grey beard and the bearing of someone who has been good at his craft for long enough that he no longer needs to advertise it.
"My lord." The man's eyes moved to Eddard's cloak, to the badge half-visible at his collar, to Walder, and assembled a conclusion. "Welcome to my shop. Tobho Mott, master smith. Are you looking for arms for the tourney? I outfit most of the great houses in the city — you've come to the right place."
Eddard unfastened his cloak enough to show the Hand's brooch.
The effect was immediate. A chair materialized. An order was shouted at the maid regarding the quality of wine being offered and its inadequacy for present company. Tobho Mott arranged himself into the posture of a man providing full attention.
"Lord Hand. This is an honor." He meant it, or most of it. "Whatever you need — armor, swords, anything — my shop exists to serve."
"I'm looking for someone," Eddard said, not sitting. He moved along the wall, examining the weapons displayed there. The work was genuinely excellent — he could see that without being an armorer. The balance on a displayed longsword was right even hanging on its peg. "Jon Arryn came here. And Lord Stannis, I'm told. They were looking for someone as well."
Tobho Mott's professional warmth adjusted slightly. Not withdrawn — adjusted, the way a man adjusts his footing when the ground shifts under him.
"That's right, my lord. Though I was sorry not to be of more service to either of them." He rubbed his hands together in the way of a man handling a topic carefully. "They were asking about an apprentice of mine. Gendry."
"I'd like to speak with him," Eddard said.
"That's the difficulty, my lord." Tobho's expression managed to convey genuine regret without revealing what exactly he regretted. "You've come a day late. He's not here anymore."
"Where is he?"
"The Gold Cloaks came for him." Tobho chose his words with the care of a man who has learned that how you say a thing matters as much as what you say. "The Commander was expanding his forces and sent men to recruit. Gendry was called up — it's a good position for a boy with his background, honest work, reliable wages. The Commander thought well enough of him to come personally."
"The Commander," Eddard said.
"Lord Henry Reyes. The people here call him the Red Commander — the armor, my lord." Tobho gestured vaguely toward the stone figures flanking his entrance. "I maintain that armor, actually. Have for years. The work is remarkable — old Valyrian construction, runes worked into the metal that no one else in King's Landing has the skill to touch. I'm honored he trusts this shop with it."
Eddard turned from the weapons and looked at Tobho directly. "You know Lord Reyne well."
"Well enough to be grateful, my lord." Something opened up in Tobho's face — not performance, but the expression of a man who has an honest opinion and has found someone willing to hear it. "You want to know what King's Landing was like before he took the Watch? Gangs running the lower city openly, the Gold Cloaks taking their cut. Flea Bottom was a plague waiting to spread every summer — too many people, no sanitation, nowhere for the poor to go except into more poverty." He straightened.
"He cleaned it out. Not gently, but he cleaned it. The gang leaders ended up at the city gates — the visible way. The vagrants in Flea Bottom went north to clear farmland, got grain the first year, five years of tax exemption to get started. The corrupt officers from the Watch went to the Wall."
"Some on the Small Council find the arrangement irregular," Eddard said, watching him.
"Then they're wrong." Tobho said it with the flatness of a man who has stopped being diplomatic about something he feels strongly about. Then he caught himself and amended: "With respect, my lord. It's just that — you ask anyone on this street. Anyone in the city who actually lives here rather than inside Red Keep walls.
They'll tell you. Life here is better than it was. That's not nothing." He paused. "There's one matter I'd ask you to consider, though, if you're going to be taking stock of things."
"Speak."
"Thoros of Myr." Tobho's expression changed, moving from civic gratitude into something more specifically aggrieved. "A red priest. He buys swords from me to perform his tricks — the flaming sword business, the R'hllor ceremonies. Good steel, ruined in the fire." He shook his head with the pain of a craftsman watching his work misused.
"He's been around the Commander for years. I don't begrudge a man his associations, but that one is a corrupting influence. If someone were looking to take action against someone in the Commander's circle—" He left it there, pointed.
Eddard thought of Thoros — a man he had known since Robert's court, a Myrish priest who had mostly been drunk at feasts and occasionally impressive at tourneys. He was not sure what corrupting influence Thoros was supposed to be exercising that hadn't been evident for fifteen years already.
"Lord Reyne is Master of Defense of the Seven Kingdoms," Eddard said, carefully. "I'm not aware of any action being considered against him or his associates."
Tobho visibly relaxed. "Good. That's good, my lord. I just — he's done right by this city. I'd hate to see politics interfere with that."
"I appreciate your candor," Eddard said.
He pulled his cloak back into place and turned toward the door. The stone knights in red armor watched him leave.
He walked back down the Street of Steel with Walder at his shoulder and the attention of everyone they passed, turning over what he had learned and what he hadn't.
Gendry. An apprentice that Jon Arryn and Stannis had come to find specifically, in a specific shop on the Street of Steel, for a specific reason that Stannis had not put in writing.
Henry had gotten there first. Or Henry had simply been doing what he was doing — expanding the Watch, recruiting from the trades. And had either found what Arryn and Stannis were looking for, or found it without knowing what it was.
Or had known exactly what it was.
Eddard reached the bottom of the hill and turned back toward the Red Keep.
He had come to King's Landing thinking he understood the shape of the problem. Every day since, the shape had turned out to be larger and more complicated than the day before.
He was beginning to think that was not coincidence.
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