"What in the seven hells is that man playing at?" Olenna murmured with a frown as she incomprehensively stared at Doran, who stood there calmly, looking very much unaffected by the chaos he had caused by his straightforward denial of the course of events, "Do you know where he is going with this boy?"
"I... don't," Robb replied with a distracted expression on his face, as the boy had only ever heard about this from Jon's point of view, and only roughly knew about how their capture of the Mountain and Lorch had been planned and what they had done afterward, but he had no idea of the statergy that this Dornish prince standing in the court had in his mind to defend this absurd claim of his.
"So Jon didn't tell you anything?" her voice asked in a low whisper.
"No, he didn—I mean of course, he did not," Robb replied hastily, catching himself at the last moment, "I do not think, that my brother even knows about what is happening here, after all, he has been out at the sea for so long," he replied as he cleared his throat and looked away, his smile looking just a little forced, 'Damn it! Why did my father never teach me how to deal with these cunning old crones?' he crused internally before the image of his honest father appeared in his mind, 'He probably doesn't know either,' he snorted internally.
"Is that so?" Olenna hummed as she leaned back with a nonchalant expression on her face, but her hawk-like eyes never left Robb's face, as if she were a predator watching a wolf cub stumbling out alone in the wild, waiting for her chance to strike.
'Stop messing with me, lady!' Robb screamed as he almost started sweating because of that unpleasant gaze on him, and swore to himself then and there that he would no longer respond to her, no matter what she asks from now on, 'And I don't care how rude it is,' he decided with a firm nod.
And these two were not the only ones who had been left bewildered by this strange path that Dornish prince was taking, in fact, any of the high noble present there who had their informants and had already learned about about the public humiliation and torture of the Lannister knights in Dorne, had their eyebrows raised in suprise as they discussed with their relatives or neighbors sitting beside them on how the Prince Doran would try to convince the King and his council.
"What kind of stupidity is this?!" Kevan finally retorted after being left speechless by Doran. The man had prepared a lot of counterarguments on all the ways that the Dornish man would respond to his accusation, but none of his considerations involved this childish, straightforward denial of events: "What kind of foolish excuse is this?!" he said harshly, not caring a bit that the one in front of him was a Lord Paramount, "Not even a child would believe your naive defense! You must have been really flustered and scared, to come up with such a weak justification," he snorted with a disdainful smirk on his face.
"In fact, it would have been much better if you had simply told us that you did not know about it, at least that way you could have saved yourself from embarrassment, but instead you stand there denying the reality when we all already know about the truth."
"Let me put it into simple words for you in case you forgot," he continued, not giving a single chance to the Dornish prince to butt in, "Your brother, Prince Oberyn Martell has been parading the two honourable knights from Westerlands through the streets of Dorne and torturing them for the amusement of his sick people every single day for the past week." he spoke slowly and loudly as if talking to someone who was particularly dull, drawing quite a few chuckles from the nobles of Westerlands, "So there is no prospect here for you deny these events no matter how hard you try, Prince Doran. Unless you think that all the nobles present here are imbeciles who couldn't tell left from right," that drew quite a frown from the crowd, as no one likes being called stupid.
"In fact, If you had been so scared of the consequences, of taking responsilbilty for this, then you really should not have let your mad brother roam free for all these years," Kevan persisted with a nasty smile, drawing many gasps from the crowd as this was just going too far, especially in public against a mighty Lord Paramount, but Kevan, no longer cared and spoke whatever came to his mind, "If you had just kept your idiotic brother on a leash from the start, then things never would have reached this point."
Obara's eyes were narrowed dangerously at that moment, as her grip on her spear tightened. The scowl on her face became deeper with every word coming out of that Lannister dog's mouth.
The woman didn't know exactly what she wanted to do at the moment, but she knew that she couldn't just stand there silently and listen to him call her father mad and an idiot again.
But in the next moment, a large hand suddenly grabbed her shoulder, and she instinctively snapped around to glare at the brute Areo, but the guard remained completely unmoved by her anger, and just simply stared down at her with those emotionless eyes, and that finally calmed her down.
Rudely shaking the hand off her shoulder, Obara snorted and turned around, while slowly lowering her spear that had at some point risen a few inches from the ground.
'Fucker!' The girl cursed as she rotated her throbbing shoulder. The bastard hadn't held back in the slightest, but the pain was good as it brought her back to her senses of where she was standing at that moment, and she realised that even if she wanted to punish this rat, now wasn't the best time for it.
"While a bit rude and lacking in some manners, Lord Kevan is right about one thing," Doran suddenly started speaking in the same mild manner that he had carried since the start of this court, as if the words out of the Lannister Lord's mouth were simply air that he let's pass him by, "It would indeed be a bit brazen for someone to enter another Lord's territory, and then abduct their people out in the open, and a gross insult it would be to the King's law."
"So you agree—"
"But," Doran interrupted loudly and calmly, "That was not what had happened to the knights in question, you grace," Here, the Dornish prince completely ignored the blustering Lannister Brother, and turned to directly address the small counil and the King who were all looking at him intently, trying to guess where his words were heading, "As according to my brother's letter, which he had sent just a few days ago, explaining the nature of these events. It was Ser Gregor, who, along with his band of men, more commonly known among the smallfolks as the Mountain riders, entered the border of Dorne in the dead of the night, and then 'brazenly' abducted more than ten women from a Dornish village,"
"Among these, were Mothers, daughters, and even children as young as twelve and grandmother as old as sixty," he explained shaking his head with a disgusted look, which was mirrored on a lot of Lords, and nobles present in the room, though, whether it was revulsion at the act of abduction or if it was simply questioning the bad taste of these men, was anyone's guess, "And when the men, or boys, who were the relatives of these women tried to resist, these monsters killed them all, before putting the whole viallge to the light."
"What? Is this true?!"
"Who knows? But I am hearing this for the first time?"
"Who would have known that the honourable knights would be so cruel..."
"Really? Are you really asking that about the Mountain and his men? Have you heard no stories before, boy?
"Um, no,"
"Then, let me tell you..."
There was almost an instant rise of commotion in the audience after the reveal of this information, which they were all hearing for the first time.
But even though some people instinctively wanted to reject this absurd notion, they could not do it with complete certainty, as no matter how deep their informants had been inside Dorne, they had all heard about this incident only after the Red Viper sailed into the Sunspear and showed the public his two captives.
And the events before that were completely shrouded in a mist, which was a point of frustration and humiliation for those individuals who prided themselves on knowing everything there was to know about things happening in Westeros and around the world.
Doran only stopped for a few seconds to let them digest this information before he continued, "So, of course, my Brother, in his duty and anger, immediately took a small band of our soldiers, and set off to avenge the injustice and capture those, whom he and others had assumed at that moment were nothing more than unruly bandits. And these Lannister knights were so arrogant and complacent, or perhaps they were so used to getting a free run of the smallfolks in their homes, that they did not even try to run away after committing the act and continued their revelries well into the night,"
The subtle dig of his at the lax governance in Westerlands had not gone unnoticed, as many a lord sitting behind the Lannister section scowled while the Lord from other kingdoms tried to hide their smiles.
"And in the morning, when my Brother and his men stumbled upon these drunk Lannister miscreants, they were reasonably infuriated upon seeing the cruelties that these men had inflicted upon innocent smallfolks. So in their rage, they lost their sense of reason, as would be expected of any honourable man, and killed most of them with impunity,"
"T-These are all lies!!" Kevan replied with an inscensed expression, "Ser Gregor would have never entered Dorne, he couldn't. This is just another one of those stupid excuses that he came up with to evade responsibility, your grace. You should not—"
"Of course, they entered. We have plenty of eyewitnesses among the survivors who would swear to this before the king, and they would gladly describe all the atrocities that they had suffered at the hands of these monsters."
No one here doubted this claim, as it would indeed be very easy for a Lord like him, whose family had ruled in the same place for centuries, to muster up a few small folks who would come up here to testify for him, and as for whether they would tell the truth or not, well, that could never be verified.
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