Chapter 68: The Hand's Daughter's Observations
The search had been running for two hours before Henry deployed the sailors.
Most of the City Watch's land forces were on duty across King's Landing — the tourney crowds had not fully dispersed and the streets still needed minding. The Blackwater Bay Fleet's sailors were among the few available men not already committed, having spent the morning on deck drills at the harbor. When the report of Arya Stark's disappearance reached City Watch headquarters, Henry pulled them off the drills and sent them into the city in search parties, working outward from the Tower of the Hand in expanding rings.
He was still at his desk when the next complication arrived.
He went to the Red Keep himself, Jon at his shoulder, and got as far as the main entrance before Jaime Lannister stepped into his path.
The bruising along Jaime's jaw had faded to yellow — the late stage of the injury from the jammed helmet, where it looked worse than it felt. He had the particular expression of a man who has been waiting for an opportunity and has just found one.
"The Palace Guard has responsibility for searches within the Red Keep," Jaime said pleasantly. "The City Watch handles outside the walls. That's the established boundary, Lord Reyne."
"We're not bringing soldiers in," Jon said, before Henry could speak.
Jaime's eyes moved to Jon with the unhurried assessment of a man who has decided how much weight to give someone and arrived at a number. "Of course. Lord Henry and the Hand's bastard are welcome to enter." He smiled the way men smile when they want you to know the smile is deliberate. "Just leave the soldiers at the gate."
Henry looked at Jaime for a moment — at the yellow bruising, at the smile — and said nothing. He walked past him into the keep, Jon falling into step beside him.
Sansa was in the sitting room of the Tower of the Hand when they arrived, her eyes red, her hands folded tightly in her lap. She looked up when Jon came through the door, and something in her expression broke slightly with relief before she pulled it back under control.
Jon crossed the room and took her hands. "What happened? How long has she been gone?"
"Two hours at least." Sansa's voice was steady on the surface with effort visible underneath it. "Princess Myrcella and Prince Tommen came to visit. We were with the wolves." She stopped. "They mentioned the betrothal. To Willas Tyrell. I don't think anyone had told Arya directly yet and she—" She pressed her lips together. "She doesn't want to marry him. She thinks he's — she said she wouldn't marry a cripple and then she ran."
"Lord Stark wants to marry her to a cripple?" Jon's voice had sharpened.
"Mind your words, Jon," Henry said, without heat. "Willas Tyrell is heir to Highgarden."
Jon turned to look at him. "You knew about this match."
"Lady Arya's name is Stark," Henry said. "That comes with certain responsibilities, the same as yours comes with certain others." He paused. "And from everything I've heard of Willas Tyrell, the match is a good one. This was the King's arrangement, and Lord Eddard approved it."
Jon looked like he had more to say and was making the decision not to say it. Ghost, who had been sitting quietly at Jon's feet through this exchange, stood up abruptly and made a sound low in his chest — not quite a growl, more like something that had decided it was done waiting.
Jon looked down at him. "You know where she is?"
Ghost went to the stairs without looking back.
They followed him through parts of the Red Keep that Henry had not previously explored — or in some cases, had not previously known existed. Ghost moved with the unhesitating certainty of an animal following a trail rather than searching for one, through a corridor to a staircase to a passage that smelled of very old stone and cool air that came from somewhere below ground.
They ended up at a heavy iron gate set into a wall that Henry would not have identified as a door without the gate in front of it.
The gate was locked. Beyond it, darkness and the distant smell of something ancient.
"Arya." Jon's voice carried through the bars.
A pause.
"Jon?" The voice was small, coming from somewhere deeper in the dark. Relief audible in it, and under the relief, the specific tentative quality of someone who has been sitting alone in an unfamiliar place for long enough to start feeling uncertain about it.
"It's me. Are you all right?"
"I'm fine. I couldn't find the way back out. The door locked behind me somehow." A pause. "There are dragon skulls in here."
"Don't touch anything," Jon said.
"I already touched all of them," Arya said. "They're just bones. Very big bones."
Jon turned to Henry.
"Go find a Red Keep guard with a key," Henry said. "I'll stay with her."
Jon went. Henry sat down on the steps in front of the gate and looked through the bars at the darkness, from which, after a moment, Arya's face appeared — emerging from what appeared to be the open jaw of a dragon skull considerably larger than she was, Nymeria pressed against her side.
She looked at him with the cautious expression of someone who is not sure yet whether she is in trouble.
"How angry is everyone?" she asked.
"Concerned," Henry said. "Your father is still at his duties. He doesn't know yet."
Arya sat cross-legged on the other side of the bars, Nymeria's head in her lap. She was quiet for a moment, and Henry let the quiet sit.
"I wasn't — I didn't mean to get locked in. I just needed somewhere to go." She picked at the fur on Nymeria's neck. "Sansa said Father is marrying me to a cripple."
"His name is Willas Tyrell."
"I know his name."
"Do you know anything else about him?"
Arya's expression suggested she found this question somewhat beside the point. "No."
"My betrothed is Margaery Tyrell. Willas's sister." Henry leaned his back against the wall beside the gate. "She talks about him. Not in the way people talk about someone they feel obligated to speak well of — she genuinely likes him. That's usually a reliable sign."
Arya looked skeptical.
"I heard you like riding," Henry said.
"Mother says it's not ladylike. She lets me ride sometimes but not as much as I want." A pause. "She rode all the way from King's Landing to Winterfell, though, so I don't see why it's different for me."
"Willas Tyrell breeds horses. He has the best string in the Seven Kingdoms, most people say. He knows horses the way a good maester knows medicine — from genuine interest, not just because it's his job." Henry looked at the ceiling of the passage. "I imagine he'd have no objection to his wife riding."
Arya's skepticism had not entirely left, but something in it had shifted. "How do you know all this?"
"Margaery. She talks about him the way you'd talk about a friend, not a brother you're supposed to love. He raises hawks as well. Trains hounds. Hunts when his leg allows it."
"If he's so capable, why can't he fix his leg?"
"He was injured in a tourney when he was young," Henry said. "He was a strong jouster before it. The man who unhorsed him was Oberyn Martell — the Red Viper of Dorne. One of the most dangerous fighters in the Seven Kingdoms."
Arya had been looking at the floor. She looked up. "Why did he do it?"
"Tournament accidents happen. Not always by intent." Henry paused. "The point is that Willas Tyrell wasn't born the way he is now. He was a warrior, and an accident took that from him, and he built a different life from what remained. There are worse qualities in a person than knowing how to do that."
Arya turned this over. Her expression had the focused, slightly reluctant quality of someone revising an opinion they'd rather keep.
"He reads," Henry added. "Extensively. History, natural philosophy, the Valyrian chronicles — Margaery says he's read almost everything in Highgarden's library and has been writing to the Citadel for more."
"I don't like reading. My head hurts after ten minutes with a book."
"Do you like being told stories?"
Arya looked at him. "Yes."
"Then you'll like Willas Tyrell. Everything you'd want from a book, he can just tell you. Including things your septa would never put in the lessons." Henry paused. "The stories from before the Conquest. The real ones, not the cleaned-up versions. The history of the Free Cities. What the Valyrian Freehold actually was before the Doom took it."
Something had genuinely shifted in Arya's expression now. The resistance was still there, but it had become more specific — less about the marriage in principle, more about the particular grievance underneath it.
"Everyone just kept it from me," she said. Her voice had gone quieter. "Father knew, and Sansa knew, and no one told me. I was the last one."
"They were waiting until you were older," Henry said. "It was clumsily handled and you had a right to be angry." He paused. "You've been angry. You've made your point. Now perhaps you can let your father explain it to you himself instead of making him search the whole castle first."
Arya looked at the floor for a moment.
Then she looked up. "I heard something down there," she said. "While I was in the room with the skulls. There's a well — not a real well, a dry shaft — and there were two men below it. Talking."
Henry's attention sharpened. He kept his face neutral. "What did they say?"
"A lot of things I didn't understand. Something about the wolf and the yellow lion going to war. Something about a princess being with child and an army that wouldn't move until the baby was born." She frowned, visibly working to remember. "They talked about the Red Lion — I think they meant you. They said you were tied to the — they said something about a bastard taking the throne. Joffrey's bastard brother?" She looked at Henry. "They meant Jon, didn't they."
Henry said nothing.
"And they talked about killing the King," Arya said. "One of them suggested it. The other one said no."
"Which one suggested it?"
"The one with the strange accent. From across the Narrow Sea, I think — like Syrio." She paused. "The other one was Westerosi. He said it would be a bad idea. That a king who comes to power over dead predecessors couldn't hold the throne."
"Could you see either of them?"
"No. I was looking down from above and they had a torch below them. I could hear but not see." She thought for a moment. "The Westerosi one knew about Moat Cailin. He mentioned the Night's Watch. He knew about your guard — he called it a Prince's Guard, around Joffrey's bastard brother."
The shape of it was clear enough. Henry filed it away and kept his face neutral.
"You need to tell your father," he said. "Everything you heard, as exactly as you can remember it. Don't tell anyone else first — come straight to Lord Eddard when we get you out of here."
"What does it mean?"
"I don't know yet," Henry said, which was partially true. "But your father needs to hear it before anyone else does. Can you do that?"
Arya looked at him steadily. She had the directness of a child who hasn't yet learned to be indirect, which in this context was an asset.
"Yes," she said.
Footsteps on the stairs above — Jon returning with a Red Keep steward and a ring of keys, the steward managing to look simultaneously relieved and aggrieved about being needed for this particular task.
Henry stood up and moved aside to let the man work the lock.
The gate swung open. Nymeria came through first, pressed her nose briefly against Henry's hand in what might have been acknowledgment, and then moved to find Jon. Arya followed, brushed the stone dust off her dress in a perfunctory way that suggested she was aware the gesture was insufficient, and looked up at Henry.
"You're not going to tell Father I was down here first?" she asked.
"You're going to tell him yourself," Henry said. "Everything. Starting with the conversation you overheard."
Arya considered this, then nodded with the particular decisiveness of someone who has decided that honesty, in this specific instance, is the better strategy.
Jon put his arm around her shoulders and she let him, which was its own kind of measure of how the afternoon had gone.
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