Locking up the house
The Red Cove | Westeros
(150 leagues from the site of King's Landing)
Ornela pauses inside the gate just long enough to slap her ash-gray stallion affectionately and hand him off to the stableboy. She reaches Dany's side with a few long strides of her lean, whiplike frame just as Tryion falls in on the other, huffing and stumbling under a stack of scrolls.
Relative poverty compared to his previous wealth and something to do with himself suits Tyrion Lannister.
"Seven hells," Dany chuckles, swiping the box of quills and signet rings off the top.
"Thank you, your grace."
"Shame to break your nose if you tripped," she replies.
"Yes, I just had it how I liked it, after all. I was considering another scar, just to keep things interesting."
Ornela huffs.
"Small man is like kid goat. Stubborn. Gets in everything."
"He'll take that as a compliment," Dany warns her.
"He already has."
Tyrion drinks still, but nothing like before. It will kill him no faster than old age now. She limited it sharply merely by sneaking all but the most ghastly wine into her private stash. Taste won out over need. She sent servants to throw cold water on him and change his sheets while the worst of it passed. Samwell Tarly was re-legitimized and relieved of his maester's chastity vow -- if not the work -- a fortnight later in thanks for the idea.
He whores still, and perhaps an ordinary queen might find it more offensive. It isn't as if Dany hadn't made her own meek requests during his various forays only to have eerily pale wildling and dark Summer Islanders show up in her own chambers. It isn't as if Dany hadn't had three black-haired girls in her bed two days before her wedding to Sansa before she lost her mind from worry.
He writes and he reads, mostly and he talks more than five men do. With sobriety and access to a wet cunt two or four hours of the day rather than ten or twelve, he is the sort of advisor that can win a peace. Ten times less flattering and fifty times harder than winning a war. He misses almost nothing in dealing with her visitors, he settles squabbles of inheritance by remembering some empty castle on a road he saw once as a boy. Dany rules in a land she barely knows the shape of on a map and deals with nobles who lack many of the treacherous tools of the Mereenese but have half a dozen other, often worse sorts of humiliation than slavery they can inflict.
He uses what he jokes is his 'low view of the world' to see patterns in the noblemen who had ignored or mocked him even when he was the son of a lord. They are predictable, he assures her. Dany less so, though he's kind enough to inform her of her own ruts and grooves in thinking before habits get her men killed.
If this man had been Hand of the King when she invaded, rather than an exile, Dany is not sure that she could have taken Westeros with anything but the cruelest use of her dragons.
Dany sweeps through her office doors as soon as Grey Worm opens them for her. Tryion toddles behind her and Ornela pauses. Dany catches her wrist before her little lamb can pull back.
"Stay."
"I cannot read," she reminds Dany.
"Well," Missandei adds without looking up. "Yet. And she will."
Tyrion huffs.
"Can you think? Speak? Have you spent more time in a Khalasar than anyone else here?"
"I...yes."
"Good. Because that's among the business today." He nods to a chair. "Go sit, please."
He did not add 'your grace' but he was not curt with Orry and he looked only at her while soothing her rather than looking to Dany for help.
Which suggests that Tryion knows. Probably along with everyone in earshot of the bedroom three nights past. He nods to the half a dozen chairs scattered at one end of the carved war table taken from Dragonstone. The end that represents the far north and where Dany, Sansa, and some mix of their family use in council meetings. Bran is beside the cluster in his wheeled chair and Arya is perched, hawklike and odd, in another. The more she ages into her looks the more she shows the blood of the First Men, lean limbed and iron-sinewed. The closer she is to being a woman grown, the more Arya resembles a hunting bird at the same time. Her nose fits her face and her messy black hair seems more at ease but mostly because her cheekbones cut a sharper profile and her jawline is hard and proud.
Not only is Arya not a lady but she seems not to even know how to operate a chair.
They have a word for it in pleasure houses in Yunkai, women who cannot sit properly and they're more often customers than whores but Dany is not eager to suggest it about Arya with her overprotective sister right beside Arya. Unable to admit such a possibility and liable to deny Dany's bed for three moons if she implied such a thing. At any rate, that woman, if she exists or if Arya is merely pining, is an islander somewhere on Arya's expeditions west of Westeros. Far away from the business at hand.
Sansa is in the middle and they rarely sit at the same ones twice. Any ambassador who wished to deduce the loyalties and love affairs of that end of the table by who sits where will be hard put to do so.
Ayra's idea, that time.
Thus is her council seated. A dragon-riding madwoman, an assassin, a whoring dwarf, three horse-riding barbarians, a eunuch spymaster, a eunuch general, a buttery-bodied bookworm, a boy who thinks he's a raven, a pirate and for variety, a noble-born Westerosi lady.
"What is the business at hand?" Sansa asks before any of the usual introductions can be made.
"Ravens, firstly. Easily dealt with are marriage proposals. For the queen. For you."
He pats the tallest stack, then one shorter, but not egregiously so.
If Sana's pride is wounded by her smaller stack, it is drowned by the rage of the animal within. Calling her beloved a wolf or speaking of her having a wolf's bite is no mere figure of speech. It's as true about Starks as it is calling a Targaryen a dragon. The anger is no less quick or easier to tie back down. Given the fame of the line, unbroken and unchallenged from before even Valyria to Sansa's own lifetime, it's hard to know what is confidence, what is arrogance and what is the keen drive of in the first Stark to have to retake Winterfell. No way to tell what what as in the blood was in nursemaid's rhymes and lessons on mother's knee.
"Seven hells," Sansa snarls. "Did you lie when you said you wrote them?"
Tyrion's mouth tilts in a sad, halfway smile.
"Every one. Many sent gifts, in fact. These lords wouldn't believe it if they snuck into your bedchambers and saw it, my queens."
"Perhaps we need smarter lords?" Dany jokes.
"We need less," Ornela grumbles. "One of four. Have khalasar."
Tryion chuckles. Then he shakes his quill in Ornela's direction.
"That is why she's here."
If Vayrs had been about to speak the complaint on his lips, he swallows it.
"Honesty. Our lords would drop like flies if they needed to defend themselves as often with their own wits and arms as Dothraki do, I've no doubt. Lines are all well and good. Usually, the man who founded the place and named it for himself managed it for a reason, after all. Starks show us how the blood carries the will and honor that raised the chieftain into a king in the first place. I'm loath to admit but the first Lannisters were cheats and fast-talkers when they weren't killers and I'm no better."
"It's when a bloodline goes on too long and shows nothing more than who bore what son that concerns me. If it's only a word, with no skills, sense or strength to back it, the word lord is a dangerous thing. In plenty, a few generations can pass without ruin but not in times like these. The wars and the lost crop gives us few luxuries and fewer chances for mistakes. Even with the winter breaking nearly before it starts every raven from the granaries suggests that hunger is at our heels, my ladies and lords."
"Surely you're not proposing trial by combat to retain titles, Lord Hand?" Varys inquires. "Gods, you're not suggesting an execution? Over an unacknowledged marriage?"
Ayra has been twirling a metal rod between her fingers rather than a knife -- Grey Worm insisted she leave the knives in her rooms -- and this perks her up.
"I suggested a vote," Sam Tarly reminds them all. "Choosing, as the Iron Islanders do."
Yara laughs.
"I assure you our Kingsmoots are not so pretty as mainlanders think. At our best, perhaps but not lately. It's usually more a choice of who's second strongest if I'm honest. Choosing to shit on so that the other one doesn't cut your throat."
She wraps her big hand around the throat of the Dornish tart on her lap and squeezes playfully, making the doomed thing shivering her silks. Yara at once spiked Dany's curiosity in the charms her own sex and convinced her that whoever she chose could not be Yara or anyone quite like the hulking stallion of a queen. Unquestions monarch of an island that normally uses women like breeding stock.
"Not that," Tyrion agrees. "The Kingsmoots arose over nearly as long a time as the Iron Islands themselves. Rip the familiar away from people too fast and you have cornered beasts. Beasts bite the hand that feeds them, sometimes for no reason."
"Something gentler. Settled between nobles, as things usually are. Perhaps a tax," Dany suggests.
"No. A change in tax. Lords pay the taxes and my quill," she says with a tap.
"Chooses the rates. Pick lords who have no business with each other usually, have them visit each other at festivals. Inquire after the affairs of house and lands socially. Varys, I want your little birds to fill in the gaps. We'll invite problems to visit and explain themselves. If not rectified, I increase the taxes until such time as their reports on grain, farms, and the septons blessing babes who live to see their name-days get better."
"They can choose to make use of the lands, servants, and inheritances they have to pay them in the promise of lower taxes to come as a reward. Lower taxes in years when they've learned how to make more in the first place."
"Or they'll take it from the peasants, like always," Varys reminds her. "Hire raiders. Rape women to make more babies. We might be punishing the wrong folk."
"The worst will, yes. And your birds will tell us as much."
Arya quits playing with the rod.
"Oh. Give them a last chance, not to lose it?"
Dany nods.
"And if I attaint them and they don't step down surely someone like you can deal with it. Even if they fancy themselves a match for Grey Worm's Unsullied and Orry's riders, the threat of Drogon will keep them from rank stupidity."
Varys blows out a long breath.
"It can work but to work right, it has to be both visible and invisible so that we can prove the cause but they can't catch the knife coming for their back. There would need to be books kept. Ledgers. So that one lord could not claim we had murdered his cousin for no reason. Witnesses for the books, perhaps judges hired from the Iron Bank. Writs to strip titles. Scapegoats, if it came to murder. Nothing quite like it has ever happened."
"Well, my dear spider, the dead never walked until our lifetime. Dragons never flew over a city and didn't raze it to ash until our lifetime."
He smiles.
"True."
"It is so ordered," Dany tells MIssandei.
Dany puts her head in her hands.
"Someday, if we get through one of these without something that rips up ten centuries of tradition, I'll be amazed."
Sansa smiles, lifting her blue eyes to catch Dany's violet ones.
"In the spring, I think. It will happen on a nice spring day, that meeting."
"We could hold these twice a moon in the spring months," Arya suggests, taking a mouthful out of a pear fruit she produced from somewhere on her person.
"Better odds," she adds with a full mouth.
-----
"If there's nothing else," Dany sighs. "My queen and I have an announcement. We will be going away, perhaps a moon, perhaps longer. Drogon will accompany me as will half of the eggs in the vault. Tyrion, if he agrees. I will spare you secrets you cannot benefit from but it is for the good of the kingdom and the Stark line."
Tyrion is just standing there like a bag filled with straw.
About time I surprised him for a change.
"Grey Worm. Keep order in the kingdom. Bran and Yara, rule and sit over disputes. Arya, keep the estate up. You've a good way with the servants, I've noticed. Admirable trait. Also, keep that odd cutthroat of Tyrion's out of the city. If he comes again for imagined debts, you have my blessing to gut him and put him in the harbor."
"Oh gods," he groans. "He didn't. Tell me he didn't. I swear, I paid Bronn eight years ago."
"I believe you. But not for your sister's promises to kill you," Dany reminds him. "Lannisters and debts and all that."
"Bronn snuck in again three nights ago," Grey Worm huffs. "Broke three of my men's hands."
Dany looks around.
"Some of the people at this table leave, some remain. Drogon vanishes from the sky. Unsullied drill as always, bloodriders range and horses graze, as always. Flags fly and men march and crops grow and with the Seven's blessing the world simply goes on until we return and no one takes liberties to attack. If we can do that, we prove our notion that we can rule Westeros without further bloodshed."
"And if they do attack?" Varys asks. "I wish I could say it was long odds but it's not."
"Then this city will hold and when I return I will be ready for bloodshed. We prove a different notion."
She stands and leaves, having learned from one meeting with Olenna Tyrell the value of presenting crisp words and leaving them the back of her head rather than a chance to reply.
Tyrion scrambles along behind Dany and Orlena like a puppy worried he'll be left behind. Sansa catches up too, having to carry her longer dress. She looks like she wants to pick him up by the scruff of his neck and turn him around.
"Not that every activity in the royal bedchambers should ever be mine to know," he huffs. "But Seven Hells! What is this?"
"Mind your thoughts, if not your words," Dany reminds him.
"Think carefully of my wife's good intentions and speak twice as carefully," Sansa hisses. "Remember that she's good and does things for a reason."
He points down the stairs towards the council chamber.
"They need you!"
"They need leadership, not me. A service. One which I currently provide. No creature lives forever. Not even a dragon does, so far as we know."
He sighs.
"Testing. You're testing them to see if they can live when you've passed."
Dany smiles.
"Or if I want to relax for a winter. Or if I take sick for three moons, or anything of the sort. Mostly, I'm taking my wife to someone who can try to help me put a baby in her."
"Oh gods, not a witch. If you're seeking a witch's help, lie to me I beg it. My sister had the worst luck with woods witches."
"As did I," Dany hisses. "Not a witch. Not as such."
Dany pulls a key from her bodice to match the one Sansa has and puts it in the lock. Both turned, they can push open the door to their chambers.
"Come along," Sansa chortles. "Temptations await."
"You know my weaknesses," he whines. "And since the women involved aren't the offer nor the wine you snuck away...it's a mystery."
Dany dips her head in a nod.
"How very perceptive, Lord Hand."
He follows.
Dany collected strange artifacts over the years, some at her marriage to Khal Drogo, some she found glinting in the dirt in places only the eyes of someone on dragonback would catch the shine.
"Watch," Ornela orders.
She approaches a rough-carved mirror made of blue glass that had been in some Dothraki cache and that Dany stumbled over on patrol near Mereen. It was a decoration until Ornela threw a grape at it one day and it never returned.
Ornela lilts and cries out in an old Dosh Khaleen chant and knocks at four different points on the mirror. The glass hisses and gathers lightning to it like smoke.
"Follow, if you dare..." Sansa teases, stepping through.
"FUCK!" he shouts, waddling around to look behind the mirror.
He runs his hand along the back and comes away with only dust.
"Where did she go?"
"He'll catch on. I'll stay in case he wants to be let out," Dany tells Ornela.
She grabs Orry hand and pulls her close, kissing her before she can speak a goodbye that won't a goodbye anyway. Might as well confirm Tryions suspicions, to take a least some mercy on the man.
"Is a baby your purpose here?" he asks, his stubby arms folded.
"In large part. Beyond that games and drinking. We've made some friends, speaking to that mirror late at night. Others like me and Sansa. One invited us to come drink and eat, game and carouse. It may take a moon or two, as it usually does, to get a child."
"Is there a reason I should accompany you in this madness? One you can admit to?"
Dany shrugs.
"Wonders no maester laid eyes on. Wines and brandy of sorts no man ever drunk. I am told their daughter has a harem unlike any that has ever walked the earth."
Tyrion grins.
"Not always so different, are we?" he jokes.
"Aside from your fear of heights, no."