POV- Tyrion Lannister
He had gone to see Jaime before any of this began, in the grey hour before the hall doors opened. They had given his brother a proper chamber rather than a cell, small mercy that it was, a narrow room with a single barred window and a brazier kept lit against the Riverlands damp, and Jaime had been sitting up in the bed when Tyrion entered, his golden hair grown lank and unwashed, the stump of his sword arm bound in clean linen that someone, at least, had troubled to change regularly. He looked older, in few weeks that it had been, that was the thing that struck Tyrion hardest, more than the absent arm itself, the way days of captivity and one dragon king's action had put ten years onto a face that had never once, in Tyrion's whole life, looked anything but young.
"You've come to gloat, Tyrion." Jaime said, before Tyrion had crossed half the room, though there was no real heat in it, only the flat, tired voice.
"I've come to see whether you still had a face worth gloating at." Tyrion japed though his brother had no smile. "The reports were unclear on that point." Tyrion pulled the room's one chair close to the bed and sat. "How does it feel."
"Which part." Jaime's mouth twisted, not quite a smile. "The arm, or the part where I shamed myself on being the best swordsmen in the realm."
"Small comfort that you're alive then, but you never used it for much beyond swordplay and worse habits." Tyrion said.
"No," Jaime agreed, quiet now, looking down at the wrapped stump. "Just the sword, and the crown I swore to, and the sister I shouldn't have touched, and every fight I have won by simply being better with a blade than the man across from me. I feel like death would be better than not being the best swordsman there ever was."
Tyrion had no answer worth giving to that, and so he gave none, and the two of them sat together a while in the brazier's low red light saying nothing at all. He left before the bells rang for the council.
He had wanted his cup of wine brought in with him after that, and a flask besides for when the cup ran dry, but Tywin's eyes alone had been enough to keep both sitting outside the hall doors.
A council that decided the fate of the Seven Kingdoms deserved a clear head, Genna had said in her brother's approval, in flat tone, though Tyrion knew it was because she feared for her children's life who were Frey by their father's name.
He had wanted to point out that clear heads had done precious little for their family so far this year, what with a clear-headed war and a clear-headed siege and a clear-headed son currently missing a sword arm somewhere in this very castle, but he was a man with enough intelligence, and he knew, which battles were worth losing without a fight. So he sat sober, near the front of that vast and echoing hall, breathing air gone thick with too many bodies and too little open window, tallow smoke and old stone and the glares of several hundred lords on each other opposite of the carpet ends, and watched as Aemon enter the hall.
Somewhere by the other side of the carpet, a raven called words twice sitting on Lord Commander Mormont's shoulders and went silent moments later when the man handed him corn.
He found himself looking at Aemon more than he meant to. That was the boy, or had been once, before whatever happened to him and turned into that white hair and that terrible red gaze, and Tyrion found he had liked that boy before rather than what he had become now. Jon Snow, a bastard raised by an honest man in a cold kingdom, hidden from a war that would have killed him twice over for the crime of merely existing. There was something almost funny in it, the bastard that turned out to be the king.
Eddard Stark sat with the northern lords who had not been given cells for their trouble, and Tyrion, who made a small, unkind hobby of reading expression on other men's faces, thought that not just him but the Starks looked worse than half the Riverlords around them, worse even than men who had watched their own keeps burn to ash by Lannisters. Whatever had cost him that hollowness had cost him more than the war itself ever had, and Tyrion suspected he already knew the answer of it, a girl. There was always, in the end, a girl.
Aegon spoke first, some opening he had clearly rehearsed on the long ride here, all rightful blood and rightful crowns and the suffering the realm had endured under false kings. "I did not come to this council to beg for what is already mine by right of blood and birth," he said, his voice pitched to carry the length of the hall, young and certain in manner that only a man who had never yet lost anything irreplaceable could afford to sound. "I came because my aunt believed the realm deserved to see its rightful king face his rivals honestly, in the open, rather than have his claim settled by dragonfire alone. I thought a council called in good faith might return that courtesy."
Aemon let the words sit a moment before he answered. "Good faith," he said, "is a strange thing to ask of me from a man whose Golden Company invaded my kingdom. I called this council because a crown decided by dragonfire is a crown any lord in this hall might reasonably fear to kneel before. I did not call it to be lectured by, its for the realm to decide the rightful king with the allegiance of kingdoms of Westeros."
The words were harsh enough, Tyrion thought, but it was the talk of Aemon regarding the Golden Company that made him involuntary click his own tongue.
His father's eyes found him within the second of that single sound, the way they always did, as though Tywin Lannister possessed some private sense tuned only to his youngest son's failures of composure.
"Walk up there," Tywin said, low, not looking at him now, his gaze fixed forward on the dais the way it had been fixed for the better part of the argument of dragon boy kings, "and help the boy win, Tyrion."
Tyrion kept his face as still as he could manage, as he heard his words. "Why should I?"
"You have a certain cunning." Tywin's own expression did not so much as flicker. "And our family's survival depends on it."
"Why, thank you, Father, for your admiration of my talents." Tyrion let the words sit a moment before he added the rest. "But why should I?"
Tywin turned his head, finally, just enough to look at him directly. "What do you want."
Tyrion smiled. He had wanted one thing for as long as he could remember wanting anything at all. "I want Casterly Rock."
"Never." The word came out of Tywin without heat, without hesitation, without the smallest crack in his expressions. "I would sooner see it ruined than watch you turn my ancestral house into a whorehouse."
"Then you may get to watch it turn into Harrenhal soon." Tyrion said, and smiled wider, because there was a certain pleasure in offering a man the exact same ruin, that he was sitting in.
"You would burn your own family's seat to spite me."
"I would burn nothing, Father. I would simply decline to save it, and let this king do the burning on my behalf. I hear King Aemon is quite talented at it, you have heard of Eyrie I believe."
Tywin said nothing for a long moment, and in that silence Tyrion watched his father's mind galloping. "Help the boy win," Tywin said at last, "and you shall have Lannisport."
The smile faded off Tyrion's face at that, not because the offer insulted him, but because he understood, with the exact clarity his father's voice always carried when he had reached the true limit of his own bending, that Lannisport was the extend he could give. Push further and the offer would not sweeten. It would simply vanish, and Tywin Lannister would find some other tool for the work instead.
Lannisport, then. A port city instead of a rock and one of the major ports of the Seven Kingdoms and the largest settlement in the westerlands.
"Do try not to embarrass the name further than you have already embarrassed." Tywin added, as Tyrion rose.
He walked toward the dais and felt the weight of the hall's attention shift and settle onto him, a thousand pair of eyes and more finding him at once. He had counted the crowd earlier, out of boredom, Lords and ladies of every corner of Westeros packed into chairs along the hall's length and crowded three deep along the balconies by the sides, silk and mail and in their color all pressed shoulder to shoulder under Harrenhal's blackened rafters, waiting to see which king they would be told, by the end of this council, that they had always secretly believed in. He caught, in passing, the round shape of Varys's face near a side wall, watching him with the mild, professional interest.
He stopped a respectful distance from the dais steps, where two kings and one queen now turned the whole of their attention onto him.
"There is no need for a fight here," Tyrion said, pitching his voice to carry the way his father's did, "when a talk might solve it instead."
Aemon's eyes found him, and Tyrion remembered, from the last time he saw him in the gentler days, that they looked far less menacing in grey.
"That is why I called this council, Lord Tyrion." Aemon's voice carried no heat at all. "Or did you take it for mummery? Something in the style of the trial your sister staged for Eddard Stark, perhaps, where the Hand of the King was sent to prison for delivering King's verdict."
A ripple of low, offended noise went up from the Westerlands lords behind him, someone near the back muttering the word insolent loudly enough to carry, and Tyrion, even as he felt his own face need careful managing, thought, with a small private flicker of something close to admiration, that the boy had just dug himself a pit by naming Stark in front of this crowd rather than won a point.
"A trial is not mummery merely because you dislike its verdict, Your Grace, Lord Eddard tried to dethrone my nephew then for his own benefit then, so his punishment was justified." Tyrion said. "However you have no right to dictate the hall full of Lords and Ladies of Westeros by showcasing your dragons just because you called for the Great Council. I would ask what you actually intend by it, if not simply to our faces for some of your own private amusement."
He opened his mouth to press the advantage further, but he never got the chance for he was interrupted in gentler words than he thought from behind.
An Unsullied wheeled Prince Doran Martell forward from the front of the hall before Tyrion's tongue had spat its next sentence, the great chair's wheels rattling faintly over old stone, and Doran's soft voice slid in then.
"Amusement, Lord Lannister? I think not. Ask instead why your sister's court dismissed, and then tried to have murdered, a knight as gallant and as honorable as Ser Barristan Selmy, and see whether amusement is the word that comes to your own tongue."
Tyrion felt the heat come up under his collar before he could stop it, a hot, humiliated flush he had spent years learning to hide behind wine and jokes and whores and had never yet managed to banish entirely, because there was no clever answer to that accusation that did not begin with his own sister's and nephew's name and end somewhere considerably worse. Cersei had done that one entirely on her own, behind Tywin's back and beneath his notice until it was already done and already failed, and there was no way to say so now that would not sound like a man throwing his own blood to the wolves to save his own skin. He glanced, despite himself, toward where Cersei sat among the Westerlands lords, and found her face gone the shade of white and red.
He had been born without shame enough to let it show for long, whatever the provocation. He fixed his own face back into something approaching composure and opened his mouth again.
Doran did not let him use it.
"We are not here for your stories and your gibberish, Lord Lannister." The old prince's voice, for all that he sat wheeled in a chair with his gout-swollen feet bound in linen, carried to every corner of that vast hall without apparent effort, a trick that this man must have learnt to be heard without ever once needing to shout. "We are here for proof. Proof of the true king to be crowned, and the pretender to be dealt with." His heavy-lidded eyes slid sideways, unhurried, and came to rest on Tywin Lannister across the hall, and on the banners gathered thick behind him. "Along with their supporters, of course."
"You speak of proof yourself, Prince Doran," Tyrion said, "and yet where is yours, beyond the talk of your own claim?" He felt a handful of the Reach lords behind him bark short, ugly laughter at that, though whether at his wit or simply at Doran's expense he did not know.
Doran's brow rose at that, slow and deliberate, and Tyrion found himself conceding, somewhere in the back of his own skull, that whatever the man's legs had cost him, his tongue had lost nothing at all. "Proof, Lord Lannister? Let us set aside Ser Barristan for the moment, if you like. The man who cut down the last pretender of Maelys the Monstrous's with his own sword, the most loyal knight the realm has seen in years, knelt to this king of his own free will, unasked and unbought. Set that aside, and consider instead the houses that stand behind the King regardless. House Velaryon. House Celtigar. The lords of Cracklaw Point, and of Darry. And Dorne besides, every spear of it, which does not kneel to convenience, whatever else it might be accused of." He let that settle a moment before he finished. "We call him true."
Tyrion felt something in his chest ease, fractionally, the relief of a man watching his opponent walk directly toward a trap he had not even needed to dig himself.
"For all the lords you name in this King Aemon's support," he said, "why not Aegon? He holds the allegiance of House Lannister, and the whole of the Westerlands behind it. He holds the Tyrells, and the greater part of the Reach with them." He let his gaze sweep, deliberate, over Mace Tyrell's cluster of green and gold, and caught Olenna Tyrell's sharp old eyes watching him with an expression he could not entirely read. "Numbers alone prove nothing, my prince, save that men are practiced at choosing sides when a dragon is watching them do it. This is no proof at all."
Doran smiled.
It was a small smile, a smile that a man wore when he had spent the whole of a conversation walking another man exactly where he wanted him to stand, and Tyrion felt the first cold thread of understanding move through him a full heartbeat after Doran opened his mouth.
"Oh, but we do have proof, good Lannister lord. We have the High Septon of the Faith himself, and a parchments to go with him."
Doran raised one hand, unhurried, and gestured toward the side of the dais, and the doors there opened onto a small procession that made the whole vast hall lean forward as one body to see it properly.
The High Septon came first, tall and grey and dressed in the seven-colored robes of his office, a crystal the size of a fist hanging from a chain of gold and silver links at his throat, his face carrying none of the soft, self-satisfied comfort Tyrion had expected of a man who had spent his whole life eating well at the Faith's expense. Behind him walked an old man Tyrion did not know, stooped with age and carrying a leather satchel against his chest the way another man might carry a newborn child, his hands trembling faintly around the strap of it. Behind them both came a file of the Most Devout in their spotless white, and around the whole procession walked a guard whose cloaks bore, in equal and deliberate measure, the three-headed red dragon of House Targaryen and the tower with flames of House Hightower.
Tyrion looked at those two sigils marching together and understood, in the space of a single indrawn breath, precisely what made every other lord turn against them. Leyton Hightower had not turned his coat on rumor, or on fear of dragon. He had turned because someone had shown him proof, and the man who had not left his tower in years had gone and found it for himself, in the one place in Westeros where a document like that could still be resting, unburned, after two decades of a usurper's peace.
The High Septon came to a halt at the base of the dais, between the two kings, and bowed slightly.
"Your Graces." His voice was full of theater, the voice of a man performing an act for an audience. "My lords, my ladies, of every house gathered here. I did not come to Harrenhal to select a king. That is not the Faith's work, nor mine to claim, whatever some of you might wish it were, the Faith only crown the rightful whatever the realm decide. I came because a question has been put to the Seven that only the Seven's own records could rightly answer, and I would not have the Faith stand silent while a lie is allowed to wear a true king's crown, nor while a true king was called a liar for the crime of being born in secret."
Aegon's face, Tyrion noted, had gone very still. Behind him, a step back and to the left, Jon Connington's jaw had tightened until the muscle stood out along it like a drawn cord, and Tyrion, who had spent enough years watching men hide their fear behind their loyalty, thought the knight looked less like a man about to be proven wrong, than a man being told a thing he had already, privately, begun to suspect.
The High Septon turned, and the old man beside him stepped forward and opened the satchel with hands that trembled slightly, whether from age or from the weight of what he carried, and drew out a ledger bound in cracked leather, its pages yellowed and soft-edged.
"Every marriage under Faith of the Seven happens under guidance of Septon himself," the High Septon said, " it was septon Maynard who witnessed the most important event that we discuss here, and on the word of Lord Leyton Hightower, who had reason to believe a certain page in a certain year might answer a question the whole realm is gathered here for."
He opened the ledger himself, turning brittle pages with a care that made the whole hall hold its breath along with him, each page giving off a small sound, and stopped on a page he had plainly marked before ever entering that room, a strip of faded ribbon left between it.
"Here." He turned the book outward, though no one beyond the first few rows could have read it from that distance, and it did not matter, because every eye in the hall was fixed on his face rather than the page itself. "The marriage of Rhaegar of House Targaryen, Prince of Dragonstone, to Lyanna of House Stark, blessed and witnessed in the sight of the Seven, in High Septon Maynard's own hand, in the year 283 after Aegon's Conquest. Witnessed by Princess Elia Targaryen born Marrtell, Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, Ser Oswell Whent, and Ser Gerold Hightower, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard." He paused, and Tyrion watched the words land on Tywin's face like a physical blow. "And below their names, words marked by Maynard's own quill as the marriage between Prince Rhaegar and Princess Elia Targaryen born Martell was annulled, as is required for second marriage to happen. The consent of Elia of House Martell, first and lawful wife to Prince Rhaegar, freely given and recorded before witnesses."
The hall did not gasp so much as exhale, all at once, several hundred people releasing a breath they had not known they were holding. Somewhere behind Tyrion a Reach lord swore under his breath, low and disbelieving, and near the front Alannys Harlaw's flat salt-country face turned to anger.
"This is forgery," Tywin said, and his voice, when it finally came, was not as level as Tyrion had ever heard it. "A page may be written at any hour, by any hand willing to be paid for the writing."
"It may be so Lord Tywin," the old man by High Septon's side began then, his expression mild as milk, "And gladly would I grant you the point, my lord Tywin, were that be some stranger's writing I had only ever read about. I am surprised none of you recognized me from that time, for I am High Septon Maynard himself, retired from Great Sept of Baelor years ago." He let his name sit there a moment, plain and unadorned. His pale, tired eyes then moved across the hall. "I held this collar the night I blessed that marriage with my own hands, in a place not far from here, while Princess Lyanna wept in joy. I do not forge my own memory, my lord, whatever else this council chooses to believe of me, and I am sure there is a second person who can testify more. Lord Stark?"
Every head in that vast hall turned as one, and Tyrion turned with them, and found Eddard Stark already on his feet, his face gone the color of ash, and haunted. A look Tyrion had marked on him at the start of this council now, in this one unbearable moment, into something closer to grief.
"I can," Ned Stark said, and his voice, roughened by disuse and by whatever this whole endless year had cost him, still carried to every corner of that silent hall. "I have carried that truth for fifteen years, my lords, at the cost of my honor in every mouth that ever called me a man who fathered a bastard on some woman I would not name. I am glad, more than I can rightly say, to finally set the weight of it down in front of witnesses enough that no man in this hall may call it a lie again."
"And who held this second copy, Lord Stark?" Doran asked, gently.
"Howland Reed, of Greywater Watch," Ned said. "Who stood at the tower in Dorne with me when my sister died, and who has kept that promise longer and better than I ever asked him to."
"A crannogman's word, and a lord's memory of it, offered fifteen years after the fact." Aegon's voice cut across the hall before the silence could properly settle, sharper now than it had been at the start of the council. "Convenient, that this crannogman is not here to be questioned himself. Convenient, that the only two men who might contradict this tale are the two men most rewarded by it being believed."
Yet his words had not even settled when answer came back to Aegon's face.
"My lords." Howland Reed's voice did not carry the way the High Septon's had, or Doran's, or Aemon's. It was a low northern burr, an unhurried voice, a voice that had never once in its life been raised to command a room, and perhaps for that very reason the whole vast hall leaned in to catch it rather than the other way about. "I am no High Lord like every one of you present here, only a man Lord Eddard Stark and Lady Lyanna Stark once called friend. I was their when a woman whom I considered my own sister died in the Tower. I did not come to Harrenhal to be believed, but only because my King asked me to. Men have called me a liar before this and lived comfortably enough afterward, and I am too old now to much care whether a thousand strangers think well of me. I came only so that no man in this hall could say, when this council was finished, that he was never given the chance to see the truth of it for himself."
He opened the satchel, and drew from it a single folded parchment, softened and browned with fifteen years of careful keeping, and held it out not to Aegon, and not to Aemon, but to the High Septon himself.
"I took this from Lyanna Stark's own chamber the day she died in that tower. I have carried it for fifteen years under a false king's peace, and I confess to this hall now, gladly, that I am glad beyond telling to finally set it down."
The High Septon took the parchment and passed it to the Old Septon as the old man unfolded it, and held it a long moment against the light before he looked up.
"This is my own hand a second time over, and I would know it in the dark by touch alone. The seal pressed into the wax is the private seal I carried as a High Septon of the great Sept of Baelor, the one I used only for matters too delicate and important. I need no novice's memory to tell me that it's forgery." He turned the parchment outward, though as before it did not matter that no one beyond the front rows could read it, because every eye in that hall was fixed on him rather than the page. "The witnessed names are the same three I read you from the Starry Sept's own ledger not a quarter hour past. Ser Arthur Dayne. Ser Oswell Whent. Ser Gerold Hightower. And Elia Martell's consent below them."
The hall went perfectly silent, and Tyrion, standing very still at the base of the dais, watched Randyll Tarly lean toward Mathias Rowan and say something short and satisfied behind his hand, watched Baelor Hightower's mouth twitch, watched even Stannis Baratheon give an expression of satisfaction. He looked once toward his own father, and saw an expression on Tywin Lannister's face he had never once, in years, seen there before.
It was, Tyrion thought, exactly the moment a wiser man than Aegon Targaryen would have chosen to yield, gracefully, and begin instead the much longer work of surviving what came after.
"Men swearing to the same tale, out of love for one another and for a dead woman both, are not proof." Aegon's voice cut through that vast silence before it could properly settle into judgment, and Tyrion felt the whole hall's held breath. "A crannogman who owes House Stark its fealty, conveniently has the one document in Westeros that could not otherwise be checked against anything, taken from a chamber no living soul but they themselves ever saw." His eyes found Aemon's and held there, and his voice, when it came again, had dropped low enough that half the hall had to lean forward to catch it at all. "It is still a lie. It was a lie when I heard of this Aemon's birth, and it is a lie now, dressed in older parchment and better witnesses. I will not be set aside when a usurper crowns himself on the strength of two documents and a game of fools."
Aemon did not answer him at once. He stood a moment simply looking at Aegon, with his red eyes, someone who had expected exactly this.
"Then answer me only this, Aegon, and I will trouble this council with no more." His voice was quiet, quieter than Aegon's had been, and carried farther for it, the way Ned Stark's had carried. "Do you say Ser Arthur Dayne lied, when he signed it with his own hand, on the parchment? Do you say Ser Oswell Whent lied beside him? Do you say Ser Gerold Hightower, the White Bull, who commanded the Kingsguard, lied too? Are you saying that the High Septon of the Seven here is lying as well? Three knights sworn under the Seven, anointed with the Seven's holy oil, who broke no other vow that any man in this hall has ever once heard spoken against them, in all the years before or after. Say it plainly, if that is truly what you believe of them. Tell this council, in your own voice, that three anointed knights of the Kingsguard forswore their gods and their honor both to help raise a pretender, and let every lord and lady gathered here judge for themselves what manner of king it is who calls the Sword of the Morning and knight of House Whent, House Hightower and Hight Septon a liar to keep a crown for himself."
Fuck!!!!, was all Tyrion could think hearing Aemon's word and seeing Tywin's face.
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