Cersei Lannister had been told that Tarth was beautiful.
She had been told this by Renly, who could not be trusted because he found everything beautiful that was not King's Landing. She had been told this by Robert, who could not be trusted because his enthusiasm for any destination that offered feasting and fighting bore no relationship to its actual quality. She had been told this by her father's agents, who reported the island's growing wealth with the clinical detachment of men counting someone else's gold, and by the merchants of Lannisport, who spoke of Tarth's perfumes and whiskeys with the envious admiration of tradesmen who recognised superior product when they encountered it.
None of them had prepared her for the reality.
The island rose from the sea like a jewel set in sapphire, its coastline a series of dramatic cliffs and sheltered coves that caught the morning light and scattered it across the water in patterns that seemed almost deliberate, as though the landscape itself had been designed to impress. The harbour was larger than she had expected, its stone piers extending into deep water with the confident permanence of structures that had been built to last centuries, and it was crowded with ships, dozens and dozens of ships, more than she would have thought possible for an island lordship that her father's ledgers still classified as a minor regional house.
And above the harbour, climbing the terraced hillside in cascading tiers of pale stone and flowering gardens and the particular kind of understated elegance that whispered of wealth rather than shouting it, rose a town that had no business existing on an island in the Stormlands. It was clean. It was orderly. Its streets were paved and well-maintained, its buildings were constructed of cut stone rather than timber, and its people, whom Cersei could see moving about the docks and terraces with the purposeful energy of a population that had things to do and the means to do them, appeared prosperous and well-fed.
It was, Cersei thought with the particular displeasure of someone encountering excellence where she had expected mediocrity, rather impressive.
"Robert," she said, turning to find her husband, who was standing at the bow of the royal galley with his belly pressing against the rail and his mouth hanging open in the manner of a large fish that had just discovered something remarkable in the water. "Close your mouth. We are about to make a public entrance, and you look like a particularly astonished codfish."
Robert did not close his mouth. Instead, he turned to her with an expression of boyish delight that was, she had to admit, one of the few facial configurations he still wore that did not make her want to strike him.
"Look at this place, woman. Look at it. Renly told me they had done some building, but this... When I was here ten years ago, there was nothing. A fishing village and a castle on a cliff. Now look at it."
"I am looking at it."
"That wall. Do you see that wall? It goes around the entire bloody island. Selwyn's boy built that. A boy. Fifteen years old, and he built a wall that would make the Night's Watch weep with envy."
"The Night's Watch weeps at everything. It is not a particularly high standard."
Robert ignored her, as he usually did when she said things that were both accurate and unwelcome. He turned to Ser Barristan Selmy, who stood a respectful distance behind them in the white armour of the Kingsguard, and pointed at the approaching shore.
"Barristan. When was the last time you saw an island that well fortified?"
"I have never seen an island that well fortified, Your Grace."
"Neither have I. And I have seen a great many islands." Robert's enthusiasm was the genuine, uncomplicated kind that emerged when he encountered something that appealed to the part of him that was still a warrior rather than a king who had grown too fat for his armour. "This boy is something else. I can feel it. This is going to be a celebration to remember."
Cersei turned her attention back to the approaching shore and said nothing, because what she was feeling was not enthusiasm but calculation, and calculation, unlike enthusiasm, benefited from silence.
* * *
The welcoming party was arranged on the main pier with the precision of a military formation that had been disguised as hospitality.
Cersei noticed this because she had been trained by her father to notice exactly this kind of thing: the deliberate presentation of strength through the language of courtesy. The Tarth household guard, two hundred soldiers in blue and gold, were positioned along the pier in a formation that was technically a guard of honour but that also, not incidentally, controlled every approach to the harbour, the town, and the road to the castle above. Their armour was polished, their weapons were real, and their bearing was professional in a way that suggested training by someone who understood that ceremony and combat readiness were not mutually exclusive.
Behind the soldiers, a second formation caught her eye and held it. Women. Armoured women, roughly a hundred of them, standing in perfect ranks with swords at their hips and shields bearing a sigil she did not recognise: a tower and a crescent moon on a field of blue. They were tall, many of them, broad-shouldered and hard-faced, and they stood with the absolute stillness of soldiers who had been drilled until discipline was not an effort but a condition.
"What are those?" Joffrey asked, his voice carrying the particular whine that indicated his opinion of something had been formed before his brain had finished processing it. He was standing behind her, golden-haired and sharp-featured and as beautiful as his father had once been and as unpleasant as his father had never managed to be. "Women with swords? Has this island lost its mind?"
"Those are the Maiden Guardians," Jaime said, from his position at Cersei's other shoulder. He was watching the female soldiers with the professional interest of a man who assessed military capability the way other men assessed horseflesh. "Brienne of Tarth's personal guard. Recruited, trained, and commanded by the eldest Tarth child. I have heard reports. They are not ceremonial."
"They are women."
"They are soldiers, Your Grace. The distinction is relevant."
Joffrey opened his mouth to say something that would almost certainly have been regrettable, but the moment was interrupted by the arrival of the receiving party at the head of the gangplank.
Lord Selwyn Tarth was a large man, tall and broad-shouldered, with the weathered look of an island lord who spent more time outdoors than most of his peers. He moved with the careful dignity of a man who understood protocol and respected it without being imprisoned by it. Behind him stood a woman who could only be his daughter: taller than her father, broader, armoured in blue steel, her face plain and strong and utterly unafraid. She looked, Cersei thought with reluctant honesty, exactly like someone who commanded an army.
And beside Brienne, slightly behind her in the arrangement of precedence, stood the person Cersei had actually come to evaluate.
Alexander Tarth was fifteen years old, and he was not what she had expected.
She had expected a prodigy, which was to say, she had expected a child who had been over-praised for qualities that would prove ordinary once removed from the provincial context that had amplified them. She had seen such children before, the precocious sons of ambitious fathers, trotted out at feasts and councils to perform their cleverness like trained birds, impressive at first glance and tedious upon closer inspection.
Alexander Tarth was not that.
He was tall for his age, lean and composed, dressed in a doublet of deep sapphire that was elegant without being ostentatious. His hair was the dark ash-blonde that rumour had described, almost black in most lights, and it framed a face that was angular and watchful and considerably more mature than his years should have produced. But it was his eyes that arrested her attention and held it, because his eyes were wrong. Not wrong in the sense of defective, but wrong in the sense of unexpected, out of place, belonging to a different story than the one she had been told.
They were violet. Dark violet-purple, vivid against his pale skin, unmistakably Valyrian in a way that no amount of Stormlands lineage could have produced. They were the eyes of Old Valyria, of dragonlords and sorcerers and the bloodlines that had ruled the world before the Doom.
And when those eyes met hers, across the space of the gangplank and the crowd and the bright morning air, Cersei felt something she had not expected to feel.
Recognition. Not of the boy himself, whom she had never met. But of the quality behind the eyes. The watchfulness, the calculation, the absolute, unwavering control that came from knowing exactly how dangerous the world was and having decided, with cold deliberation, to be dangerous in return.
It was the quality she saw in her father's eyes. The quality she had spent her entire life trying to cultivate in her own.
This boy was not a prodigy. He was a player. And he had been playing for a very long time.
"Your Grace," Alexander said, bowing with the precise depth that protocol required and not a fraction deeper. His voice was calm, measured, pleasant in a way that offered warmth without promising it. "Welcome to Tarth. We are honoured beyond measure by your presence, and by the presence of Prince Joffrey, whose nameday celebrations we have spent the better part of a year preparing. I hope the island will prove worthy of the occasion."
Robert clasped the boy's hand with the over-enthusiastic grip of a man who evaluated people by the firmness of their handshakes and found this one satisfactory. "The island has already proved worthy. I have not seen fortifications like these outside of Storm's End. Your father must be enormously proud."
"My father is a man of great patience, Your Grace. He has had to be, given the number of my projects he has been asked to fund."
Robert laughed, the genuine, barrel-chested sound that was one of his few remaining attractive qualities. "I like this boy, Cersei. He has wit. More wit than half my small council combined."
"Half your small council sets a rather low bar, my love."
Alexander's eyes shifted to hers, and she saw the flicker of assessment in them, the rapid, invisible calculation of someone who was mapping a new opponent's capabilities in real time. He smiled, a slight, controlled expression that acknowledged her comment without ceding ground.
"The Queen is perceptive," he said. "We shall have to ensure our hospitality is equally sharp."
Cersei did not return the smile. But she noted, in the private ledger she maintained behind her carefully arranged expression, that this boy was going to require considerably more attention than she had anticipated.
* * *