The knighting took place at dawn, because Robert Baratheon, for all his many and well-documented failings, understood the theatrics of martial honour better than any man alive.
The courtyard of the Sapphire Palace had been prepared overnight, its flagstones swept clean and its boundaries lined with the banners of every house in attendance, their colours snapping in the morning breeze like a tournament of fabric. The tiered seating that had served the Olympic Games remained in place, though the arena floor had been cleared of sand and sawdust and replaced with a carpet of blue and gold that spread from the dais to the far wall in a river of Tarth colours. The guests filled the seats in their hundreds, still slightly bleary from the previous evening's celebrations but sharpened by the knowledge that what they were about to witness was not merely a ceremony but a political statement.
Cersei sat in the royal box with Joffrey at her side and Jaime at her back, watching the preparations with the clinical attention she brought to all events that had the potential to rearrange the hierarchies she spent her life navigating. A knighting was not, in itself, unusual. Knights were made every day, in training yards and battlefields and the private chapels of lords who valued the tradition. But a knighting performed by the King himself, in front of the assembled nobility of the realm, after a tournament victory that had already become the most discussed event of the year, was something else entirely. It was an anointment. A declaration that Alexander Tarth had crossed from the realm of promising youth into the territory of recognised power.
Robert emerged from the palace in a doublet of black and gold that his squires had clearly worked hard to make him look presentable in, his warhammer hanging at his side in a gesture that was more symbolic than practical, since he had not wielded it in combat for years and probably could not lift it above his shoulder anymore without tearing something. But the warhammer was not the point. The point was the image: the Conqueror's heir, the Demon of the Trident, investing a new knight with the authority that flowed from the Iron Throne itself.
Alexander Tarth knelt on the blue carpet before the King, and Cersei studied the tableau with the practised eye of someone who understood that every detail of a public ceremony carried meaning.
He was dressed simply, by the standards of a lord who could have afforded considerably more elaborate attire. A doublet of deep sapphire blue, unadorned except for the Tarth sigil embroidered in silver thread at the breast. Dark trousers, polished boots, and the seven-linked chain of his Citadel studies, which he wore openly as a locket and without ostentation. His sword, the blade that had won the melee and defeated Ser Barristan Selmy the previous day, lay before him on the carpet, offered to the King in the traditional gesture of submission and service that the knighting ceremony required.
His expression was composed. Not nervous, not excited, not overwhelmed by the significance of the moment, but simply present, alert, watchful. The eyes that looked up at Robert were the same violet eyes that had met Cersei's across the gangplank two weeks ago, and they carried the same quality of controlled intensity that had unsettled her then and unsettled her now.
Robert drew his own sword, a ceremonial blade of Valyrian steel that he kept for exactly these occasions, and laid it on Alexander's right shoulder.
"Alexander of House Tarth," Robert said, and his voice carried the rumbling authority of a king who might have been many things, but who had never been insignificant. "Do you swear before the gods and these witnesses to be brave, to be just, to defend the weak, to obey your King, and to do all that knighthood requires?"
"I swear it, Your Grace."
The blade moved from the right shoulder to the left.
"Do you swear to be loyal to the realm, to protect the innocent, and to serve the cause of justice in all things?"
"I swear it."
"Then rise, Ser Alexander Tarth, and take your place among the knights of the Seven Kingdoms."
Alexander rose. The crowd applauded, the sound rolling through the courtyard like thunder, and Robert clasped the newly made knight's hand with the crushing enthusiasm that was his substitute for subtlety. Behind them, the banners cracked in the wind, and the morning light caught the silver thread on Alexander's doublet and made it flash, and for a moment, just a moment, the boy who had been building an island since he was eight years old looked like what the crowd believed him to be: a young hero, golden and promising, the kind of knight that songs would be written about.
Cersei watched and did not applaud.
She did not applaud because she saw what the crowd did not. She saw the calculation behind the composure. She saw the way Alexander's eyes moved across the crowd during the applause, cataloguing reactions, measuring responses, noting which lords clapped with genuine enthusiasm and which merely went through the motions. She saw the brief, almost imperceptible glance he exchanged with the small, dark-haired woman who stood at the edge of the courtyard in servant's clothing and who was, Cersei was beginning to suspect, something more significant than her position suggested. She saw the nod that passed between Alexander and Brienne, his enormous sister, a communication so quick and so private that it might have been a trick of the light.
And she saw, in the instant before the public face returned, the flash of something in those violet eyes that was not pride or gratitude or the simple pleasure of recognition, but something colder, harder, and infinitely more purposeful.
Satisfaction. The satisfaction of a man who had just added another tool to a collection that was already formidable.
"He is very good," Tyrion said, appearing at her elbow with the silent efficiency of someone who had learned early that small people could go places that larger ones could not. He had been watching from the lower galleries, where the lesser nobility and the wealthier merchants had gathered, and his expression suggested that he had seen many of the same things Cersei had.
"He is very dangerous," Cersei corrected.
"Those are not mutually exclusive qualities. In fact, in my experience, the most dangerous people are usually the best at what they do. It is the competent ones you have to worry about. The incompetent ones destroy themselves." Tyrion paused. "He is also, I should mention, fifteen years old. Which means he has approximately fifty years of remaining potential, assuming he does not get himself killed, which seems unlikely given the level of preparation I have observed during my time on this island."
"You are not helping."
"I rarely do. It is one of my defining characteristics." He looked up at her with those mismatched eyes that always made her uncomfortable, not because they were different colours but because they saw too clearly. "We are leaving this morning for Castle Morne, I understand. The procession."
"Yes. The wedding of the Tarth sister. Another spectacle, no doubt, designed to demonstrate the inexhaustible hospitality of House Tarth."
"The roads are supposed to be remarkable."
"Roads are roads."
"Not these roads. I have been asking questions. The road between Evenfall and Morne is the most advanced piece of civil engineering in Westeros. Paved with volcanic cement, graded for drainage, wide enough for two carts to pass abreast, and lined with lights that glow in the darkness without flame. If even half of what I have been told is accurate, the journey will be unlike anything either of us has experienced."
"Glowing lights. On a road. On an island." Cersei's scepticism was genuine, though it was tinged with the particular irritation that came from suspecting that the reality would be even more impressive than the description. "I suppose he invented those as well."
"Apparently so. Dragonglass infused with some alchemical process that produces a sustained luminescence. The technique is proprietary, naturally. Everything on this island is proprietary. Alexander Tarth does not merely build things, Cersei. He builds monopolies on the methods used to build things, which is considerably more valuable."
Cersei said nothing. The knighting ceremony was concluding, the crowd dispersing toward the harbour where the processional column was being assembled for the journey across the island. She watched Alexander receive congratulations from a succession of lords and ladies, each one treated with the same careful, calibrated warmth that was his trademark, and thought about what Tyrion had said.
Monopolies on methods. Not just wealth, but the exclusive means of creating wealth. Not just a wall, but the sole source of the cement that made the wall possible. Not just perfumes, but the proprietary processes that made the perfumes distinctive. Not just a trade network, but the commercial infrastructure that made the network invaluable.
It was, she had to admit, rather brilliant.
And it was going to make him extraordinarily difficult to undermine.
Outside in the courtyard, the post-knighting celebrations were already underway. Robert had produced a cask of Arbor gold from somewhere and was sharing it with a circle of lords who seemed delighted to drink the King's wine and listen to his increasingly embellished accounts of his own martial youth. Alexander was surrounded by well-wishers, accepting their congratulations with the same measured warmth he brought to every social interaction, each response precisely calibrated to the status and significance of the person offering it. Cersei noted that he spent exactly the right amount of time with each lord, never enough to suggest favouritism, never too little to cause offence, managing the crowd the way a conductor manages an orchestra, each instrument receiving its moment of attention.
She also noted that Margaery Tyrell had positioned herself at the edge of Alexander's circle, close enough to be seen with him but not so close as to imply presumption. The girl was wearing a gown of ivory and gold that happened, purely by coincidence, to complement Alexander's sapphire blue in a way that made them look like a matched set. It was the kind of detail that might have been accidental if Margaery Tyrell had ever done anything accidentally in her life.
Samwell Tarly was hovering nearby as well, his round face flushed with pride for his friend, clutching a leather-bound notebook in which he appeared to be recording observations with the scholarly enthusiasm that Alexander's fostering had evidently encouraged rather than suppressed. He was a different creature from the trembling boy that reports had described arriving at Highgarden years ago. Still heavy, still soft-faced, but there was a confidence in his posture that suggested someone had finally told him he was worth something, and he had decided to believe it.
The transformation of one bullied boy into a functional, productive scholar was, Cersei reflected, exactly the kind of quiet achievement that made Alexander Tarth so difficult to categorise. He was not merely ambitious. He was constructive. He did not merely accumulate power. He cultivated people, growing them like the crops on his terraced hillsides, patiently and deliberately, transforming raw material into something considerably more valuable than what he started with.
It was, in many ways, the opposite of how House Lannister operated. Her family used people. Alexander Tarth built them.
She was not yet certain which approach was more effective. But she was beginning to suspect that, in the long term, building was more durable than using, and that the loyalties Alexander created through investment and kindness would prove harder to break than the ones her family maintained through gold and fear.
* * *