Chapter 56: The Tyrell Entry
The three lords who had ridden out to meet the Tyrells had not intended to make a day of it. The plan had been simple enough: formal greetings at the bridge, escort the party through the gate, hand them off to the castle stewards, and be done before the afternoon was gone.
The Tyrells had other ideas.
Whatever advance arrangements Mace's people had made in the city, they had been made quietly and executed all at once the moment the column crossed the King's Gate. Suddenly there were rose-garland arrangements on the lamp posts along the Street of Steel. Suddenly there were Highgarden men positioned at intervals along the processional route. Suddenly what should have been a routine entry into the city had become a production.
The commonfolk pressed against each other along the street's edges and craned their necks and whispered. Henry caught fragments of it as he rode past — who are all these people, are they staying, is the rose family moving in — and privately thought the questions were reasonable ones.
He dispatched a rider back to Watch headquarters and had two additional companies of gold cloaks brought up, half to ride at the column's head and push a path through the thickening crowd, half to form a cordon along the street and keep the press of bodies from becoming a problem. It was not enough to impose order on the spectacle. It was enough to prevent the spectacle from becoming a disaster.
Jon Snow rode just behind Henry's left shoulder, wearing the expression of a man composing a comprehensive internal grievance that he would never actually voice. He had grown up with a certain idea of what honorable men looked like, and it did not involve enameled armor set with semiprecious stones and a personal herald riding six horses ahead of you. The Reach knights were not dishonorable men — Jon probably knew that if he thought about it — but they were very decorative, and Jon Snow found decoration suspect on principle.
A small incident before the gate provided some relief. Ghost, whom Jon had brought along over Henry's mild objection, took sudden interest in the horses of three Highgarden knights near the column's front and expressed this interest by darting directly across their path. The horses' reactions were immediate and enthusiastic. Two knights went down in a clatter of silver plate, a third managed to stay mounted only by grabbing his horse's neck with both arms and abandoning any pretense of dignity, and the crowd along the street erupted into the kind of honest laughter that no herald can arrange in advance.
The Highgarden men were not seriously hurt. Their pride required some recovery time. Jon Snow's mood improved noticeably.
Garlan and Loras rode together just behind the gold cloak escort, both in full tournament plate. Garlan's double-rose device caught the light on his pauldrons — the personal arms of the second son, two blooms where the Tyrell sigil showed one. Loras wore the glazed floral armor the bards had apparently already written songs about, petals worked in white enamel on a green field, the whole thing more suited to a painter's subject than a fighting man, except that everyone who had seen Loras Tyrell fight knew better than to say so.
The two brothers carried the great green and gold banners themselves, which was either a statement of personal pride or a very well-staged piece of theater. Possibly both.
The fifty Highgarden knights behind them moved in two perfect columns, plate polished to a uniform silver-grey, hoofbeats and armor-clink the only sounds they made. It was impressively disciplined. Henry filed that away.
Then came the coin carts.
Several large wagons rolled along behind the knights, and Tyrell's people were scooping copper stars from them and flinging the coins in arching handfuls to both sides of the street. The sound of copper hitting cobblestone was followed immediately by the sound of several hundred people lunging for it simultaneously. The crowd's roar went up a full register. Children dove between adult legs. Old women showed surprising speed and commitment. Two men went down in a tangle near the baker's row and didn't appear to be fighting about it, exactly, but weren't quite not fighting either.
The gold cloaks held their line. Barely.
Mace Tyrell's carriage was the anchor of the whole display — a massive, slow-rolling statement in carved and gilded oak, every panel worked with intertwining roses, the gold leaf so thick it caught the sun like a mirror. Mace and his wife Lady Alerie sat at the carriage window and waved at the crowd in the patient, practiced way of people who had waved at crowds before and found it satisfying.
The crowd, having just received free money, waved back with genuine warmth. Henry supposed you could buy most things with coin if you were willing to scatter enough of it.
Margaery Tyrell rode alongside the carriage on a white horse whose mane had been braided with golden roses and green ribbon. She was younger than Henry had expected — perhaps fifteen, perhaps sixteen — with the kind of considered, composed beauty that suggests someone has been told since childhood that beauty is a resource and has taken the lesson seriously. Her brown hair was loose, her riding robe deep Tyrell green, her posture on the horse exactly correct. She smiled at the crowd the way her father waved — with practice and apparent ease.
Henry watched her and thought about the grain carts and the coin carts and the advance arrangements along the processional route and the timing of Mace's arrival just before the tournament, and the smile stayed on his face and didn't reach much further.
The rear of the column was infantry — a few hundred Reach soldiers escorting the remaining wagons, the rest having already made camp in the fields outside the city. The Dragon Gate's spare barracks and training yard had been allocated for the knights who were entering the walls. Mace and his immediate family would be housed in the Red Keep itself, guests of the crown.
Eddard Stark walked into the Tower of the Hand feeling significantly older than he had that morning.
The Tyrells had, predictably, wanted to see the King the moment they were settled. The King's guards had, equally predictably, turned them away at the door with a message that His Grace was unwell and receiving no visitors. Eddard had been standing nearby for this exchange and had watched Mace Tyrell's smile not quite waver and not quite hold.
He climbed to his solar and pressed two fingers against his right temple.
The Tyrells had not brought five hundred cartloads of grain and a full processional display to watch jousting. They had brought it because there was something they wanted. The question was whether Robert, once sober, would give it to them — and the answer to that question depended almost entirely on what mood Robert woke up in, which was not a foundation Eddard found reassuring.
Was there going to be a new seat on the Small Council? Was that what this was? And if Robert created one, would he have the wit to see what he was trading for the grain?
Eddard had been the Hand for two months and had argued with Robert about money four separate times and won exactly none of those arguments. He was not optimistic about his odds tomorrow.
The door to the dining hall was already lit and noisy.
Jon Snow had followed Henry back to the Reyne manse instead, as he had done every evening since they arrived in the city.
He had made this policy clear on the first day, in the direct way he made most things clear: the Tower of the Hand was Lord Stark's residence, and Jon's presence there was not appropriate. Henry had not pressed the point.
Harwin, who was trailing a half-step behind Eddard, walked directly into the door frame of the dining hall. The sound it produced was the particular resonant crack of a large man's skull meeting ancient oak at a determined pace.
"Seven hells," Harwin said, with feeling.
He had done this eleven times since arriving in King's Landing. The door frame was built for a shorter era of men and showed no signs of adjusting.
Jory Cassel was on his feet before the sound had finished echoing. "My lord." He caught the ghost of a smile before he managed to suppress it.
Eddard waved a hand. "Sit down, eat. Don't worry about me."
Harwin rubbed his forehead and found an empty spot at the guards' table with the resignation of a man who has accepted that some opponents cannot be defeated through skill or effort. Eddard moved toward the family table.
Sansa and Arya were both there, a septa between them performing the ongoing and apparently futile labor of teaching Arya table manners. Two direwolves occupied the space under the table, Grey Wind and Lady, waiting with the professional patience of animals who had learned that stillness near a dining table was eventually rewarded.
Sansa looked up the moment she heard her father's step. Lady immediately lost her undivided attention.
"Father! Prince Joffrey sent a note — he's hosting a feast before the tournament and wants me to come. He says there'll be knights from everywhere in the realm competing, and it's all in honor of you being Hand." Her eyes were bright with it. "Will you let me go?"
Arya didn't wait to be asked. "I want to see the fighting. I heard Henry's competing. Is he going to win?"
"Joffrey says Ser Henry's going to win the whole thing," Sansa said, with the authority of a girl who considers a prince a reliable source.
"There's a Knight of Flowers too," Arya announced. "I saw him come in. He had flower armor."
"Ser Loras. Knight of Flowers," Sansa corrected, with the satisfaction of someone deploying recently acquired knowledge.
"You should both refer to Lord Reyes by his proper title," the septa said, in the tone of a woman who has said this before and expects to say it again.
Eddard's expression had been moving toward a smile and then moved away from it again as his mind reached the tournament budget. Ninety thousand gold dragons for the champion's purse alone. He had sat with Robert for an hour two days ago arguing about it — Robert drunk, cheerful, and completely immovable — and had come away with nothing except a vague promise that future tournaments might, possibly, if circumstances permitted, be held slightly less expensively.
"Father." Sansa tugged at his sleeve. "Arya wants to go too."
"I want to watch people get hit," Arya clarified helpfully, and underscored the point by reaching up and pulling at Eddard's beard with both hands.
The septa opened her mouth.
"There's no call to—" she began.
"All right," Eddard said. "You can both go."
The cheer from both of them was simultaneous and loud enough to startle Grey Wind. They were on their feet and moving toward the door to plan their clothes before the echo had faded, the direwolves scrambling after them with tails going.
Eddard watched them go. The weight behind his eyes was still there, the list of problems still waiting — Mace Tyrell and his grain carts and his ambitions, Robert and his spending and his avoidance, the small council and its various agendas pressing in from all sides.
But the sound of his daughters arguing happily about which gown to wear carried through the tower wall, and he sat down at the table and picked up his fork, and allowed himself the meal.
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