Chapter 67: Secret Passages and Secret Talks
"They're so calm," Myrcella said, reaching out carefully and letting Nymeria sniff her hand before touching the grey fur. "I thought they'd be more — I don't know. Fierce."
"They can be." Arya watched Myrcella with the proprietary pride of someone being generous about something they love. "This is Nymeria. That one's Lady — she belongs to my sister." She glanced at the doorway where Tommen had stationed himself at what he had apparently decided was a safe distance. "You can come closer. She won't bite you."
"I know she won't bite me," Tommen said, in the tone of someone who is not entirely sure of this but doesn't want to admit it.
"They're so big," Myrcella said. Her hand moved through Nymeria's ruff, and Nymeria permitted it with the tolerant dignity of an animal that has decided this person is acceptable. "The biggest dog in the Red Keep doesn't come close."
"They're direwolves," Arya said. "They grow bigger than this. My brother Robb says their mother was as big as a horse."
"Won't they get sick in King's Landing?" Myrcella looked at Nymeria with genuine concern. The wolf was panting, her tongue out, her thick coat clearly built for considerably colder weather than the capital was providing. "They look so hot."
Arya frowned at Nymeria, thinking. "I could trim her fur. Help her stay cool."
"But what about the Reach?" Tommen had moved approximately one step closer to the doorway threshold, which appeared to be as far as he was willing to go. "It's even hotter than King's Landing. When you go to Highgarden—"
"Why would I go to Highgarden?" Arya looked at him blankly.
Myrcella's expression shifted into something careful. "Joffrey told us. He said you're betrothed to Willas Tyrell."
The silence that followed had a particular quality.
"Joffrey," Arya said slowly, "is lying."
"He wouldn't lie about something like—"
"He lies about everything." Arya turned to Sansa, who had been sitting quietly at the window with Lady's head in her lap, apparently hoping this conversation would resolve itself without requiring her participation. "Tell them. They're lying, aren't they?"
Sansa looked at her sister with an expression that was trying to be gentle and not quite getting there. "Arya. It's still several years away. I've spoken with Lady Margaery — she speaks very well of her brother. Willas is kind. He's learned. His injury doesn't—"
"His what?"
"His leg," Sansa said carefully. "He was unhorsed in a tourney when he was young. But he manages Highgarden, and he's well regarded, and he'll be Lord of Highgarden someday—"
"I'm not marrying a cripple." Arya said it with the flat, absolute certainty of someone who has just understood why every adult in her life has been looking at her with a particular expression for the past several days. Her father's careful avoidance of her eyes at dinner. Sansa's strange solicitousness. The way her mother had held her hands a beat too long when they said goodbye. "I'm not. I'm not going to Highgarden and I'm not marrying anyone and all of you lied to me—"
"Arya—"
She was already moving. Nymeria was up before Arya reached the door, falling into step beside her with the attentive readiness of an animal that has learned its person runs sometimes and has decided that when that happens, running is the correct response.
Tommen was still in the doorway. Arya went through the space beside him at speed and he pressed himself against the doorframe, and then she was in the corridor and running, Nymeria's paws loud on the stone behind her, the sound of Sansa calling her name fading as she turned the corner.
The Red Keep had not been designed with running direwolves in mind.
The guards Arya encountered in the Long Hall and on the stairs reacted with the alarm that men react with when a large grey animal comes around a corner at speed — shouting, grabbing for things, general disruption. Several of them gave chase, apparently operating under the theory that the Hand's daughter was being pursued by the wolf rather than accompanied by it, which was a misreading of the situation that Arya didn't have time to correct.
She went through a low window — the drop was manageable — crossed a courtyard she'd found on a previous unauthorized exploration, down a staircase that she was fairly sure most of the castle didn't know existed, through a passage that smelled of old stone and something older, and came down through a small window by dropping onto a ledge and then letting herself fall the rest of the way into the dark.
She landed on stone. The sound of her own landing echoed in a way that suggested space around her. The sound of pursuit above faded.
Arya sat down on the cold floor and put her arms around Nymeria and pressed her face into the thick fur of the wolf's neck and cried. Not loudly — she wasn't going to be loud about it — but the tears came anyway, because it was one thing to be angry and another thing entirely to be angry and alone in the dark, and she was both.
The cold of the stone came up through her dress. She held Nymeria tighter.
I'll count to a thousand, she thought, and then I'll find my way out and figure out how to get back to Winterfell. I'm not staying here. I'm not marrying anyone. I'll count to a thousand first.
She got to fourteen before her eyes adjusted enough to see what was in the room with her.
She sat back down very quickly.
A skull the size of a cart horse was looking at her from three feet away. The eye sockets were vast and empty and the jaw was open in a way that suggested it had opinions. The teeth, where they remained, were as long as her forearm.
Arya sat completely still with her eyes closed for what felt like a long time. Nymeria pressed against her leg, warm and solid, and did not appear to be alarmed, which was either reassuring or a sign that the wolf had not yet processed what was in the room.
The anticipated mauling did not arrive.
She opened her eyes.
It was a skull. Just a skull. Stone-cold, perfectly still, attached to nothing. She got up slowly, reached out, and touched the end of one of the massive teeth. Cold. Inert. Dead for a very long time.
She tapped it firmly, in the manner of someone establishing that they had not been frightened by something that turned out to be harmless, and turned around.
The wall she had been leaning against was not a wall.
It was a skull larger than the first. Considerably larger. If she jumped — and she tried — she couldn't reach the upper jaw. The eye sockets were large enough to crawl into. The bone had gone grey with age and the lamplight that came through cracks in the ceiling caught it in patches, giving it a texture like old maps.
She stepped back and looked at the room properly for the first time.
Dragon skulls. Nineteen of them, she counted, ranging from the massive one at her back to skulls no larger than a horse's — small by comparison, though a horse's skull was not a small thing. The Red Keep had been built over the Targaryen dragon yard. She had heard someone say that once, in passing. She had not fully processed what that meant until now.
She spent a few minutes going around the room touching each one. It seemed important to do it thoroughly.
The window she'd come in through was too high to reach from the floor on the way back up, and the iron door on the near side of the room was locked. Arya tried it twice, confirmed it was not going to cooperate, and went through the small door at the far end instead.
Beyond it was a passage of rough stone, very old, the kind of construction that predates the idea of making things smooth. Nymeria's claws clicked on the floor. The passage opened after thirty feet into a larger chamber, and in the center of the chamber was a well.
Arya approached it carefully.
It wasn't a water well — or if it had been once, it wasn't now. The shaft went down into darkness, and from the darkness came the sound of voices and the faint, wavering glow of a torch somewhere below.
She lay on her stomach and looked down over the edge.
Two men. She couldn't make out faces — the angle was wrong and the light was below them — but she could see one holding the torch and one standing in shadow, and she could hear them clearly enough.
"—he did find evidence of the bastard." The first voice was a man's, Westerosi-accented, the kind of voice that came from education and long practice at being careful. "But the Red Lion disrupted the search before it could go further. I doubt it will be pursued now."
"You must help him." The second voice had a distinct accent — not Westerosi, something from across the Narrow Sea. "The truth cannot stay buried indefinitely. If it does, we lose our window entirely."
"The book was burned as well — by the Red Lion's people, near as I can tell. He may know something of what it contained, but he has no obvious reason to act on it." A pause. "I'll locate another copy. The Citadel maintains records. I'll arrange for one to be sent."
"Later. I'm not ready."
"We don't have the luxury of later." The Westerosi voice had an edge of impatience in it now. "The Stag doesn't think — he never thinks — but someone around him does, and they've spent the last year binding half the realm into alliances. Tyrell to Reyne, Stark to Tully, Reyne to the Vale through the Royce boy. The pieces are moving and we're standing still."
"We need more time," the foreign voice said. There was a sound of labored breathing, as though he had been walking hard before this conversation. "The princess is with child. The Dothraki won't move until the son is born and old enough to be worth following."
"Your gods." The Westerosi voice was clipped. "I'm not a conjurer. The Lannister boys are fools — they tried to deal with the Stark boy quietly and made a mess of it. Now the She-Wolf is riding south with the Imp in chains, if my information is right. If we don't act, this conflict starts and ends quickly and the true king never gets his chance." A pause, and the sound of someone touching a wall — the dry scrape of fingers on old stone. "We need to separate them. Break the alliances before they solidify."
"Is there any possibility of bringing the Red Lion over? Or House Tyrell? They both have some history with the true cause."
A long pause. "The Red Lion is too deeply bound to the stag's bastard son. He's built a guard around him — second sons from the Crownlands, men from the Reach and the Vale being recruited now. If the bastard takes the throne, Henry Reyne is part of the foundation it stands on. He won't abandon that."
"And if the current king keeps dying?" the foreign voice said. "A Hand dies. A King dies. What if kings simply keep dying?"
"No." The refusal was immediate and hard. "If you want the true king to sit the throne securely after all of this, stop thinking that way. A king who takes his seat over a trail of murdered predecessors rules by terror and nothing else. That's not a reign. That's a countdown."
"Then we need supporters here. Native supporters. The true king cannot take the Iron Throne on Dothraki horses alone."
"I know that." The Westerosi voice had the sound of a man who has been thinking about this problem for years and is tired of having the same conversation about it from different angles. "Renly Baratheon is gathering men and is apparently in contact with Dorne. Stannis is at Dragonstone with a fleet and twelve thousand men and a grievance that goes back to the cradle. Neither is in my hand at the moment. The Wolf and the Lion are about to go to war, which will bleed both sides and open space — but only if it runs long enough." The sound of movement — footsteps on old stone. "I need more resources. Two hundred birds, at minimum, and the gold to maintain them."
"That many—"
"That many. We're done here."
Footsteps. Then the scrape of stone on stone — the sound of a door opening that had not been designed to look like a door — and then nothing but the distant echo of the torch moving away down whatever passage lay below.
Arya stayed flat against the stone for a long time after the voices stopped.
They had talked about killing the king.
They had talked about Joffrey — about the bastard king — and about her father going to war with the Lannisters, and about someone called the true king coming from across the sea with an army of — what had they said? Dothraki. The horselords from beyond the Narrow Sea. They had talked about Henry, about his guard, about breaking alliances.
They had talked about it all the way down at the bottom of a secret passage under the Red Keep as casually as men talk about the weather.
Arya got up. She put her hand on Nymeria's back.
She went back to the dragon skulls, because the dragon skulls were quiet and did not scheme against kings, and sat down with her back against the smallest of the large ones and tried to work out what she was supposed to do now.
She was fairly sure she was supposed to tell her father.
She was also fairly sure she had not heard enough to tell him anything useful.
She sat with the wolf and the old bones of dead dragons and listened to the silence of the deep keep, and thought.
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