Chapter 126: Hour of the Wolf — Part 1
ULF
Carpenters had worked through the night, and the great hall still smelled of raw pine under the older smells of tallow and wet wool. The Iron Throne loomed untouched at its head. Everything below it had been rebuilt into a tribunal. Tables for the accused and their accusers. Benches along both walls for the lords who would judge. In the middle, a cleared space, the floor scrubbed pale, where a man would stand to answer for what he'd done.
Stark presided from a plain wooden chair. He'd been offered the throne twice and refused twice. Ice leaned against the chair's back, unsheathed but at rest. Justice was in the room. It hadn't been wielded yet.
Ulf took the gallery rail on the eastern side, stone cold under his forearms, Helaena at his shoulder, Cole a pace behind with his helm under his arm. Below, a Northern clerk with ink on three fingers read out the rules Stark had set down himself. Cases would alternate. A man of the queen's party, then a man of the king's, so neither side could say it had been tried first or hardest. No lord might speak for an accused unless the court called him as a witness. No plea would be heard outside this hall. Six men today. Three Black, three Green.
Cole's breath went out through his nose. "Ser Gyles Broome kept forty people alive through the Rosby winter. Someone ought to say so before they call him up."
"Say it as a witness or don't say it."
"I told Stark twice. He wrote it down, then asked if I'd say the same for a Black man who'd done it. I would." Cole's jaw worked. "He said he'd hold me to that."
The herald called Ser Gareth Staunton first.
Staunton had commanded Rhaenyra's garrison at Duskendale. The testimony took less than an hour because there was little in it. He'd followed his orders and done nothing worse than the ordinary horrors of a war. Twice he put his own men between a mob and the fishmongers' quarter, and when the battle was lost he surrendered rather than burn the town.
"You served a false queen, but you served honorably," he said at last. "Your lands are forfeit. Your life is yours. Swear loyalty to King Jaehaerys and you may leave this hall a free man."
Staunton swore on the scrubbed stone, his voice cracking on the boy's name. The crowd murmured. Not approval and not anger. Surprise. They'd come expecting executions and were handed something else, and hadn't decided yet what to do with it.
The second case was harder. Lord Alton Florent had fought for the Greens, which made him one of theirs, and he'd ordered twelve prisoners put to death after a battle in the Reach, men who came out under a flag of truce. His own captain testified against him. The man's voice shook the whole time and his words didn't. "He gave the order, my lord. I argued against it. He said the prisoners were traitors who didn't deserve the king's mercy."
Florent claimed the prisoners had been armed, the truce flag a ruse. Three witnesses said otherwise, and a septon out of Bitterbridge described the ground afterward in terms plain enough that a woman in the gallery had to be helped to the door.
"You murdered men who had laid down their arms," Stark said. His voice was flat, the Northern cadence stripping the words of any heat. "War is war. But murder is murder. The Wall awaits those who wish to take the black. Do you?"
Florent's face had gone the color of candle wax and his hands wouldn't hold still, but he nodded. "I do, my lord."
"Then you will live. In service to the realm, rather than in defiance of it."
They brought up Ser Denys Rykker after the midday bells. He'd captained a hundred men for the queen's party, and in the war's third month he burned the village of Loamhurst to its foundations, forty-one houses and a mill.
He didn't deny it. That was what made the benches lean forward.
"I burned it," he said. Gray at the temples, fifty at least. "I'll not pretend a fire lit itself. Loamhurst was feeding a column of two thousand marching on Rosby. My orders were to deny them the grain. I had sixty men, four hours, and no wagons." He stopped. "I turned the people out first. All of them. I counted them on the road myself."
"Did you count them again at Rosby?" Stark asked.
"No, my lord."
"Nine of them died on that road before the month was out. Cold and hunger. Their names were read into this court this morning." The quill hadn't stopped moving. "You didn't kill them with your hand. Did you know they would die?"
Rykker was quiet long enough that a bench creaked behind Ulf. "I knew winter was coming and I put four hundred people on a road with what they could carry," he said. "I told myself they'd reach Rosby. I stopped telling myself that a while ago."
The hall split. Half wanted him let go, half wanted him hanged, and both halves said so until the clerk struck the floor with his staff.
Stark set the quill down. "You were given a lawful order and you obeyed it. That spares your neck. You chose fire when you might have chosen a dozen slower things, you sent not one cart after them, and nine are dead." He looked up. "Your lands and titles are forfeit. Half their yield goes to Loamhurst for as long as Loamhurst stands. You will take the black. If any man here believes I've judged a queen's man rather than the man who lit the fire, let him stand and say so."
Nobody stood. Cole's grip on his helm eased.
"I expected to hang," Rykker said.
"You expected the war to do your judging," Stark said. "The war's finished. I'm doing it."
The rest of the day ran the same channel. Ser Gyles Broome was pardoned and commended aloud, his name entered into the court's record as an example of honor in wartime, and Cole never moved a muscle, though Ulf heard him let his breath go. A Black lord who'd ordered prisoners tortured for a fortnight lost his titles and was sent to the Night's Watch. A Green soldier who'd looted a sept was ordered to make restitution to the Faith, not in gold, which he didn't have, but in labor, hauling stone until the sept he'd desecrated stood again.
By dusk it was plain to the meanest wit under that roof. Stark wasn't judging banners. He was judging what men had done beneath them.
"He's fair," Helaena said. "Fairer than anyone expected." Then, without turning her head, "The mill wheel at Loamhurst turned all day and ground nothing. I heard it while he spoke."
"He's laying groundwork," Ulf said. "Every fair verdict makes his judgment more legitimate. When he gets to the harder cases, when he gets to me, the realm will trust his decision."
"Are you worried about his judgment?"
"About the trial by combat? No. About what he'll ask before he grants it?" Ulf met her eyes. "Yes. He's been watching me since he arrived. Measuring. Deciding what kind of man commands two dragons. And I don't think he's finished deciding yet."
He ran the questions through in Stark's cadence while the hall emptied. What were your orders. Who gave them. Did you know. For half of what he'd done there'd been no lawful order at all, only his own hand and his own reasons. Rykker's reasons had been better than most. He'd walked in this morning half expecting some quiet courtesy later, a hearing held small, a verdict softened between friends. He let that go on the stairs down from the gallery. Stark had built this so it had no soft place in it anywhere.
Below, the clerk nailed a fresh sheet to the doors while men were still filing out, and they turned back and read it over each other's shoulders, and the noise changed. Tomorrow's docket, in Stark's own hand. One name at the top.
Rhaenyra Targaryen.
Stark lifted Ice off the back of the chair, slung it across his shoulders, and went out the same door they'd taken the condemned through.