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Golden (ASOIAF Joffrey SI)
Thread starterDDragonman Start dateJun 3, 2026 Tags asoiaf game of thrones drama medieval fantasy self insert joffrey baratheon jon snow sansa stark kingdom building major character death
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#78
VARYS
The walls of the Red Keep knew everything. This was not poetry. The passages behind the stone were real and old and honeycombed the castle from the dragon towers to the cellar foundations, cut when the Targaryens first raised these walls and butchered the builders to keep their secrets quiet.
He had walked all of them in the dark, for fifteen years. He knew which stones gave underfoot and which were silent. He knew which listening holes looked clear into a room and which gave half a view and a good ear.
Varys no longer needed torches in truth.
Light made shadows. Shadows moved. A man who required light could be found. He pressed himself to the cool stone outside the room and put his eye to the slot.
Lord Tywin sat at the head of the table as he always did, imperial and immovable, more stone than man. The queen was to his left. His son to his right. Ser Kevan beside him, broad and plain and useful as a good wall, and across from them the prince, eating with the steady appetite of someone who had spent yesterday being a mystery knight and had gone to bed satisfied with himself.
Which, Varys thought, he had every right to be.
The queen was not satisfied however. Her expression gave away little, but Varys had been studying people since before he lost his manhood and Varys knew the queens tells. The subtle tightening at the lips, her eyes moving to her father and son and then away again when she thought neither was looking. She was not as practised at concealing things as she believed herself to be.
It was the kingslayer who broke the silence, because it was always Jaime who broke silences, lounging in his chair with one arm hooked over its back and a knife turning idly in his fingers. He had the gift of looking entirely at ease in any room, which Varys had long ago concluded was less a gift than a different kind of armour.
"The melee today," he started, with the easy smile that had charmed one half of the realm and irritated the other half. "You'll make quite the impression, nephew. The mystery knight takes the joust and then the prince goes on to take the melee — they'll be singing about you before the wine runs dry… if they already aren't."
"He will not be competing in the melee," the queen announced.
"I have no plans to," Said the prince, at the same moment.
A small silence.
Ser Jaime's smile widened a fraction, delighted, looking from sister to son. "Well. That was decided quickly."
"I only intended to enter if the joust went poorly," Joffrey continued, ignoring his uncle's amusement. "It didn't."
"It is fortunate," the queen said, and there was an edge beneath the silk of it now, the particular edge she got when she felt herself being managed, "that you have decided this, your grace, since evidently my own feelings on the matter of my son hurling himself among forty armed men carry no especial—"
"Cersei." Lord Tywin did not look up from his plate. He did not raise his voice. He never raised his voice; Varys had observed over many years that he had no need to, having long ago trained everyone around him to fall silent the moment he began. "The boy was knighted. By the king. Before the court, the commons, and half the lords of the realm. It was well done, and it was what the family required." The butcher of the Tarbecks and Reynes cut a piece of meat with unhurried precision. "Let it be."
The queen's mouth closed. Her jaw moved once, a small motion at the hinge, and was still. She reached for her wine instead, and the green eyes above the rim of the cup were doing a great deal of careful nothing.
Ser Kevan, who had the useful habit of speaking into the silences his brother left, said comfortably, "In any event, no one would have raised a hand against him. Half the crowd had worked out who was beneath the helm before his second bout. There would have been no honour for Joffrey to compete again now."
"It wasn't meant to be much of a secret," the prince said. He glanced at his mother, and something passed over his face that was not quite apology but lived in the same realm as it. "I thought Sansa would appreciate it, and I simply knew that certain objections would be raised beforehand. So I declined to raise them."
The queen set down her cup and smiled, sharper than Valyrian steel. "How considerate of you."
"I certainly thought so."
Ser Jaime laughed outright at that, a short bright sound, and even Ser Kevan's mouth twitched. Lord Tywin's expression did not change at all, which Varys had learned was the Lannister patriarch's version of a great many things, none of them legible from the outside.
The prince had a gift when it came to reading people. It was one of the things that kept unsettling him about the boy. His calculations were almost always correct.
They moved onto other business. The prince mentioned the city watch — the king had agreed to name him lord commander.
"High time," Ser Kevan said approvingly. "Those gold cloaks have wanted a firm hand since Manly Stokeworth died. Janos Slynt has let them go to seed."
"Janos Slynt," said Ser Jaime, "is a weasel. A butcher's son who would sell his own gold cloak if the offer were warm enough." He set his knife spinning on the table. "Have a care with that one, nephew."
"I intend to have more than care with him, Nuncle." the prince said mildly, and Ser Jaime grinned at his plate.
Then Lord Tywin spoke, and the spinning knife went still, because when Lord Tywin spoke his son had learned to stop fidgeting.
"The debt," Lord Tywin said. "I confess some curiosity, Joffrey. What was the purpose of the labour we have both expended on reducing the crown's debt, if the crown means to borrow against that reduction at the first opportunity?"
"It was meant to be fourteen days, did you know?" The king's son chuckled, though there was little humour in it. "I reduced it to four. My father wished to mark the betrothal and the new Hand, and that wish was not a hill I wished to die on."
He met his grandfather's eyes without difficulty, which Varys noted, because very few men were able to do so with the old lion. "And I would remind you, Grandfather, that you did not forgive those debts out of your love for me. We made a bargain. I have kept my end."
Lord Tywin regarded him for a long moment.
"So you have," he said. Something that was not quite approval and was certainly not disapproval passed behind the pale green eyes. "The fleet will be ready within the year. And the chain across the mouth of Lannisport, so that what the Greyjoys did once is not done twice."
"Good. Before you leave, I have a further counter measure to propose. " said the prince. "Any more skirmishes with the mysterious raiders?"
"A few." Lord Tywin noted. "They shall think twice before attempting another."
Varys was not surprised that their plans were succeeding, but that did not stop the flicker of annoyance he felt. Another fleet tied to the crown would be an issue.
The lions turned their eyes to other matters. They spoke of the Vale — Bronze Yohn, the sickly Arryn boy, the lords who were wearying of Lysa Arryn's smothering management of her son. They spoke of the Tyrells.
"Margaery for Tommen is it?" Ser Jaime said, examining his fingernails. "The Knight of Flowers keeps his place at your side, and Highgarden will get what they want in time, just not the way they planned. It is tidy enough."
"That whore will not marry Tommen," Cersei objected. Her voice was perfectly level now, which with the queen was always more dangerous than heat. "Tommen is a child. The Tyrells will sink their claws into him before he is old enough to know what claws are, and that insipid girl will be whispering in his ear every night of their marriage."
"Then," said Lord Tywin, without inflection, "you had best see to it that your son is taught to recognise a claw when he feels one, and to value his own counsel above his wife's whispering. Other men have managed it." He did not look at his daughter as he said it, which made it worse rather than better. The queen's face went pale and still.
Ser Jaime glanced at his sister, and for a moment the lazy amusement was gone and something more careful sat in its place.
"We could arm the Tyrells' bannermen," Jaime offered, in a lighter tone, smoothing the moment over the way with ease that spoke of practice at this little game they played. "Some of the prouder Reach lords would dearly love an excuse to be seen as something other than Highgarden's purse."
"There is merit in it," Ser Kevan said, nodding slowly. He was the only one of them who ever simply agreed with a thing; Varys had always found him restful by comparison to the rest. "We hold leverage there already. Tarly's eldest son is here, though I doubt that'll move him much. Lady Desmera sits in the Stark girl's household. And the younger Redwyne twin wants the white cloak."
"Hobber," the prince said. "Yes. I'll see he gets a fair hearing for it."
"If you want to truly loosen the Tyrells' grip on the Reach," Lord Tywin said, "We must have the Hightowers. Oldtown is wealthier than Highgarden and prouder. Mace Tyrell has spent twenty years binding them to him with marriages. Unweave those threads, contest them, and Highgarden's web comes apart in your hands."
"In time," Prince Joffrey agreed, nodding. "The Tyrells are not enemies yet, Grandfather. Loras is a friend, and a good one. I would rather keep the Reach loyal than make it afraid. Fear is expensive, and it does not last."
Lord Tywin's expression suggested he found this a sentimental position. He did not say so. He said, instead: "The wedding."
A brief quiet.
"You are a knight now," Tywin Lannister went on. "There is no longer any reason to delay. It should be done soon. The sooner the Stark girl is your wife, the sooner the north is bound to this house by blood and not merely by words and promises. Words are wind, grandson."
"I will speak with Lord Stark," the prince said. His tone was courteous and entirely immovable, the same tone he had used about the melee, the same tone he used about everything he had already decided. "We will see."
Lord Tywin looked at his grandson for a moment with those green-gold eyes that had watched men make decisions for fifty years and found most of them wanting. Whatever he saw, he did not press it. He returned to his food.
Ser Jaime caught the prince's eye across the table and, very slightly, raised his cup — well held — and the prince's mouth curved by perhaps a hair before he looked away.
The conversation moved on to other things, and Varys settled back from the slot and considered what he had heard.
He moved back through the passages at his usual pace, hands folded, slippers silent on the stone.
The perfect prince.
He had been thinking it since the boy turned eleven and started attending council and asking the kind of questions that made old Pycelle shift in his chair. It had only grown more true since.
Joffrey Baratheon at fourteen was already a capable political mind. Unlike most, the boy appeared to have a genuine interest in the wellbeing of the people he governed.
He visited orphanages all around the city regularly. He prayed at the sept daily. He rode through Flea Bottom to sing and be seen and talk to the people.
He was, in short, the kind of king that the realm had not had since Jaehaerys the Old, and the kind of king that made Varys's work extraordinarily difficult.
A bad king was laughably easy. A bad king created instability, and instability created opportunity, and opportunity could be shaped.
Robert had been useful in ways Robert would never have understood — not malicious, not even stupid, simply uncaring. Their gracious king was a man who had spent his life in saddles, with an warhammer in hand and after at feast halls and never learned that the realm was a thing that required tending rather than merely possessing.
A good king was another matter entirely.
A good king made the people love the throne. A good king knit the great houses together, and gave the lords of the realm a reason to be loyal rather than merely a reason to be afraid, and loyalty was far harder to displace than fear, because fear had only one cause but loyalty had many.
Varys had spent a great deal of time on this problem. The answer he had arrived at was unpleasant but clear.
The boy would need to die.
Not now — the groundwork was not ready. But before the pieces were fully in place. Before the north was properly tied, before Tommen was grown and the Tyrell match was settled.
In the chaos that followed the boys sudden death — the grief, the instability, the suspicion — a young man with the right face and the right name and a well-trained army might find purchase where he otherwise could not.
The method could wait. Poison was reliable, but this prince was careful. Battle was uncertain but possible. There was time.
First the girl and her horselord.
The message had come from Ser Jorah three days past, the ink smudged from the long ride across the narrow sea: the Khaleesi is with child.
Varys had read it twice and burned it, as he burned all of them, and had been turning it over since. The exile's reports were always somewhat behind — a messenger from the Dothraki sea to Pentos to King's Landing took the time it took, and by the time the words reached him the world they described had already moved on.
But the substance would hold. A girl who was with child three weeks ago was with child still.
It was the lever he had been waiting for.
He would carry the news to the council. Robert would hear Targaryen heir and hundred thousand Dothraki and he would reach for hired blades, and the reaching would force the khal to look westward, and the looking would in time become a crossing, and the crossing would break the realm's attention at precisely the moment that the prince from the east needed it broken.
The unborn child made it certain.
Robert could ignore a beggar and his sister scratching at the edges of the world. He could not ignore the prospect of a dragon prince in the cradle.
Varys had hoped to cause further upset with Stannis, but with him unable to get his little birds onto the island, he could not see how that seed was developing.
Still — he had given Stannis what he needed. The truth of the children's parentage, delivered through channels the man was like to trust. Stannis was a man who acted on conviction. He had been certain Stannis would have moved by now.
His rebellion would have been short and pointless. Robert would never believe, not now his son was a knight. Tommen and Myrcella he might still be swayed on… but Joffrey? No.
It was the boys eyes as well as everything else.
Varys turned the corner toward his chambers.
The gold eyes were the problem. Not Baratheon blue, not Lannister green — gold, the bright specific gold of coin, that he had received from his grandsire. Who was to say that Tywin Lannister's seed was not just strong?
It did not matter, power resided where men believed it to. Stannis would have gained no support but it would have been a decent distraction.
Oh well, Varys would continue on.
He settled into his chair in his chambers and poured a cup of wine and thought, with the quiet satisfaction he had learned to allow himself in private, that when it was done, the realms would be all the better for it.
Varys settled in and got to work.
The knock at the door came after dark.
Prince Joffrey was alone.
Without his sword, Varys noted. But that was not a surprise, a knight would not need his sword for a meeting with fat, harmless Lord Varys.
"Your grace." He opened the door wider, and bid him come in, in a flutter of silk, his hands fluttering with him. "This is — well, this is an honour, and an unexpected one, which are always the best kind. Do come in, come in. Forgive the disorder, I so rarely receive guests, a man in my position must be careful about who sees the inside of his rooms, you understand. Wine? I have a Dornish red that a friend was kind enough to send, though between us I find it a touch sharp. Or there is hippocras, if your grace prefers something warmer on a cold night."
"Nothing, thank you." The prince seemed amused.
"As you say, as you say." Varys settled himself back into his chair with a small sigh, the sigh of a soft man arranging his soft body, and folded his powdered hands over his belly and beamed at the prince across the table with every appearance of delight. "What a day you gave us yesterday, my lord. The whole city is still speaking of it. The Knight of Favours! Oh, I confess I quite lost my composure when the helm came off, and I am not a man much given to losing his composure. Lady Sansa is the envy of the realm. There have been songs in the taverns, no doubt there will be many more. Your lord father was so proud I thought he might burst. A wonderful thing to see. Truly wonderful."
"You're kind to say so."
"Not kind, only truthful, which is a rarer thing and so people mistake it for kindness."
Joffrey looked about the room with more interest than was perhaps polite. "How did you find the melee today?"
"Oh, you must forgive me, my prince. I was not in attendance." Varys simpered. "Duty calls."
"You are forgiven, my lord. Thoros was in good form, no doubt you will soon have heard." The boys eyes seemed to almost glow in the candlelight. "In any case, I doubt you would have enjoyed it. I hear eunuchs have no taste for violence."
Varys gave a little self-deprecating laugh and wrung his hands together. "As you say, my prince. Now. To what do I owe the pleasure? A man does not visit poor Varys after dark to discuss the jousting, more's the pity."
"To business then," the prince said. "The city watch. The king has bid me to set it to rights."
"Ah." Varys's face arranged itself into solicitous attention. "Yes. A wise appointment, if I may say so, and overdue. The gold cloaks have wanted a firm hand for some years. How may a humble servant be of use?"
They spoke of it for some time. The prince asked which of the captains had taken whose coin, and Varys told him, because some truths were their own protection and there was no purpose in lying about a thing the prince would have independently within a few weeks.
The master of whispers gave the names with little apologetic asides — poor man, he has gambling debts, you understand, and I always thought him weak rather than wicked, but the result is much the same — and pressed his fingertips together, and shook his head sorrowfully at the state of the watch, and was, in every gesture and every breath, exactly what he had been for thirty years: a soft, frightened and harmless eunuch, who knew things and wished only to be useful.
The prince noted the answers with care, nodding here, asking for elaboration there. They spoke into the night, the candles burned.
"You have been most helpful, Lord Varys," the prince said at last, setting down his stylus. "I knew you would be."
"It is all I wish to be, my lord. Helpful. A small spider in a large web, doing what little good he can." Varys spread his hands modestly.
"I have a different question, though."
"Anything within my poor power, your grace."
"It's more of a riddle really," The Baratheon prince leaned back in his seat.
"Red, Black or White,
With Flames Bright,
Or Fyres Black,
A Dragon is still…"
Nothing in the room moved. But Varys felt, that the conversation had just walked through a door that had not been there a moment ago.
He held the prince's gaze.
Varys smiled. It was the smile he wore when he needed a moment, the soft uncertain smile, the one that said I am just a harmless eunuch and I don't quite follow. He was good at that smile. It had served him well for thirty years. Joffrey smiled as well.
"My prince," he giggled nervously, "I'm afraid I don't quite—"
"No, none of that now," the prince said. He was looking at Varys with those gold eyes, steady and entirely patient. "We have sat the kings council for years. Let us not lie to each other. We share blood don't we?"
The smile on Varys' lips thinned. He leapt up from his seat and pressed the spot on the wall. The boy did not move.
The door was small and low, set into the stone where stone appeared to be stone, and it swung open without sound, and from the dark passage behind it came the children.
Eight of them. The youngest was six. They moved into the room in the way they had been taught — quiet, eyes on him, arranged without needing to be arranged. They wore plain dark clothes. Their faces were pale and their eyes were dark and they waited.
"A Dragon is still a Dragon," Varys let the smile go and his voice dropped an octave, "Regardless of the colour of the scale or the flame." He folded his hands in his lap. "I am sorry, your grace. I bear you no ill will."
He meant it. He truly did.
"You are — and I say this as the most honest thing I have said in some years — the finest prince this realm has produced in living memory. Perhaps in longer than that." He paused. "But it seems you know too much. And the work is much too important and too far along to allow that." He looked at the children, saddened beyond measure. "See to the prince."
Two made to move and the others were still. When the two saw they were moving alone against a prince that was suddenly holding a dagger in his hands, still seated and looking far too comfortable, the birds stopped and reconsidered.
Varys frowned at them.
The girl at the front — the youngest, from Lys, whom he had brought across the Narrow Sea before she was old enough to understand why — was not looking at the prince. She was looking at him.
"Children," the bright dragon said again, more firmly. "See to the prince."
The girl moved.
The pain came before he understood what was happening — cold and sharp between the ribs on his left side, the specific intelligence of something small in exactly the wrong place. He heard himself make a sound, a shriek more than a scream that pierced the silent room. Varys shoved the girl away and scrambled back.
She ran to the prince, and Joffrey crouched to pick her up with a naturalness that said he had done this before, that he had held children who had been through difficult things before, and she pressed her face against his shoulder and was shaking with silent tears.
Varys looked down at the handle of the knife. A fruit knife. She had used a fruit knife. Varys might have laughed if his side wasn't on fire.
Having understood he had made an error, Varys lunged for the hidden spot where he kept his crossbow.
Tiny hands were grabbing at him, trying to slow him. Every step caused fire to lance through his side. Varys heard the heavy footsteps of the prince and turned to—
To beg, to fight, to do something. He did not get the chance.
One moment the lysene Eunuch was turning, then he felt something smash into his powdered face and then there was blood in his mouth and his head was ringing.
When the eunuch came to his senses, he heard the prince speaking.
"—give the word," Cersei's bastard said. "You may join me when Littlefinger is in custody."
The Hound's voice, rough and rasping, responded. "You're sure about the sellsword, Joff?"
"He wants gold, Sandor." the prince said. "He'll get more gold from me than from a dead man. After Littlefinger is secured, we'll go through the names the eunuch has given and those I suspect. Find out who's been bought and who'll fight for him." He paused. "I shall take their heads. The innocent and loyal we'll take with us to comb through all his holdings. If we find nothing incriminating on his properties—"
"— If you say," the Hound laughed.
"Then Littlefinger can take a swim in the Blackwater Rush and we'll all forget this evening." The prince's voice was as even as if they were discussing the weather. "Go, now. Meet me at the barracks. Tell Ser Illyn to ready his sword for the morning."
The Hound went.
The room was quiet. Varys watched from the floor. The coldness was spreading outward from his side, methodical, unhurried, certain of its destination.
Varys struggled to turn, groaning as he did. He watched the prince cross to where the children stood in their small group, watching him in return. He watched the prince crouch and begin to speak to them — not the Common Tongue, but the bastard Valyrian of the Free Cities, haltingly, carefully, the accent imperfect but the words chosen with deliberate simplicity.
Varys could hear the words from where he lay dying.
Safe. The prince said safe. He said it clearly, looking at each of them. Free. He said that too.
He asked them questions in the Lysene dialect, it was the city most of them had been taken from, and waited while they answered him with whatever sounds they could make, their hands moving, their faces moving, and the prince watched their faces and nodded.
The girl was holding his hand.
One of the boys had begun to cry, the soundless shaking that was the only crying available to them, and the prince had shifted to put a hand on his shoulder, and the boy had gone still under it.
Varys thought of the sorcerer in Myr who had bought him as a slave and cut out his parts and burned them in a fire, and the voice that had answered from the flames, and the darkness that had followed. All because his mother was the daughter of a whore Aerion thought pretty.
He thought of what he had decided in that darkness — that the world was a mechanism and he would become part of the mechanism, that feeling was a luxury unavailable to a slave with no name and no blood and no future, that if he could not change what had been done to him he could become the kind of man who decided what was done to others.
He had been very young. He and Illyrio both.
They had been very young and very cold and they had decided certain things, and thirty years had passed, and the children whose tongues he had taken were standing in a room where a prince was asking them in their own language if they were all right.
I meant it, Vary's thought, without quite knowing what he meant. The cold was bone deep now.
The candles were burning very low.
The gold eyes found him from across the room. The prince looked at him for a moment, before he began to approach, dagger in hand. There was nothing in that look that was cruel or satisfied or triumphant. It was simply attentive. A small, final kindness.
He would have been a good king, Varys thought.
He was still thinking it when his flame went out.
Last edited: Jun 13, 2026
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DDragonman
DDragonman
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#95
JACELYN
They came for him just before the hour of ghosts.
Ser Jacelyn Bywater had been a soldier long enough to know the difference between the footsteps of men who meant you harm and the footsteps of men who had been sent to fetch you, and these were the second kind — orderly, unhurried, too many to be an arrest and too few to be a mob.
He had time to rise and pull on his tunic before the knock came, which told him something too. Men coming to kill you did not knock. Most of the time.
The men outside his door wore Lannister crimson and Baratheon gold, not the black ringmail of the Watch. These were part of the household men the crown had lent to the gold cloaks to keep order during the tourney — good soldiers, disciplined, the sort the Watch could badly use more of. Their captain, a broad Westerman with a scar through one eyebrow, inclined his head with rough courtesy.
"Ser Jacelyn. You're wanted at the barracks."
"By whom?"
"His grace, Prince Joffrey."
So, Jacelyn took his cloak from its peg and did not ask anything further, because asking would have been beneath the dignity he had left, and a man who had traded a hand for a knighthood had learned to guard the dignity that remained to him.
He went with them through the dark streets, past the shuttered stalls and the sleeping beggars and the gold cloaks on their watch posts who watched him pass and looked away, and he thought about what he had done that might require the attention of the crown prince at this hour, and could think of nothing.
That was the worst of it, walking through the dark. Not knowing.
The main hall of the barracks had been cleared. The trestle tables were pushed back against the walls, the benches stacked, and at the far end, where the duty officer's chair sat on its low dais, the prince was waiting.
Prince Joffrey sat and made the simple chair seem a throne. He wore a gold halfcape with the Baratheon crowned stag stitched throughout. To his right stood the Hound, the king's dog, his ruined face composed and his hand resting easy on his sword. To the prince's left stood a man Jacelyn would have known by sight if not by name — a freerider, a sellsword, lean and quiet with a broken-nosed face, the kind of man who turned up in the train of great men and did the things great men did not put their names to.
Lothor Brune. That was the name. He had a reputation as a capable blade and no reputation at all for anything else, which in a sellsword was very nearly a recommendation.
Jacelyn crossed the hall, his boots loud in the emptiness, and knelt before the dais on his good knee.
"Your grace." Jacelyn said softly. The words echoed through the hall.
"Ser Jacelyn Bywater." The prince's voice was pleasant and unhurried. The prince did not seem angered yet he had not bid Jacelyn to rise so he stayed as he was.
He felt the gold eyes move over him, over the iron hand where his right hand had been. Men's eyes always moved to the iron hand and then politely away from it. The prince's did not look away. "Pyke," he said softly, almost apologetic. "You lost the hand at Pyke."
"I did, your grace." Jacelyn could feel the rain on his skin again and the axe cleaving through his hand, biting past skin to muscle and smashing through the bone underneath.
"Storming the breach. My father knighted you for it on the field." Prince Joffrey's voice brought him back. "They tell me you are honest. They tell me you are rigid, and proud, and that the men do not love you." A pause. "The men who told me that are not men whose love I would want. I take it as a recommendation."
Jacelyn bowed his head further and said nothing. He did not know what this was yet, and when a man did not know something it was did best to say little.
"The king has named me Lord Commander of the City Watch," the prince continued, unperturbed. "I mean to set the Watch in order, and I mean to begin tonight." He leaned forward slightly. "So I will ask you a question, ser, and I want you to answer it plainly, because everything that happens after depends on it. Are you the king's man?"
"I am, your grace." Jacelyn heard his own voice come out hard and certain, because on this at least there was no uncertainty in him at all. "I have been the king's man since before you were born. I gave my hand for him at Pyke and I would give the other if he asked it. There is no truer thing about me than that."
The prince looked at him. The moment seemed to stretch on and on.
"I believe you," he said, eventually. Jacelyn remembered to breathe. "And if you are the king's man, then you are mine as well. The king has put the Watch in my keeping. To serve the Watch faithfully is to serve me, and to serve me is to serve the king. Do you see it?"
Jacelyn nodded. "I do, your grace."
"Then rise, Ser Jacelyn." The prince sat back. "We have a great deal to do before morning."
It came out of him more easily than he had expected.
He had been carrying it for some years now, the knowledge of what the Watch had become, and it had begun to weigh him down.
Janos Slynt was at the top of it, fat and smiling and selling everything that was not nailed to the floor, and beneath Slynt a whole rotten architecture of captains who took coin to look the other way and sergeants who took coin to assign the easy posts and gold cloaks who took coin to forget what they had seen.
He had gone to Slynt with it. More than once he had laid it out plainly, names and dates and sums, and Slynt had thanked him and said the matter would be looked into, and nothing had ever been looked into, and Jacelyn had understood at last that the rot did not stop below Slynt because Slynt was the rot.
He told the prince all of it.
The prince listened the way Jacelyn had never been listened to in all the years of trying — completely, without interruption, a small piece of paper before him on which he made occasional marks.
The Lord commander asked a question here and there, and the questions were good ones, the questions of a man who already understood the shape of the thing and was only confirming the details. Sometimes he nodded at a name as though he had heard it before. Jacelyn did not ask from where.
When Jacelyn finished, the prince looked at the Hound. "It matches."
"Most of it, Aye." the Hound rasped. "He's left out the ones taking coin to keep his own gate quiet, but a man doesn't see his own arse without a glass."
The prince almost smiled. "Bring Slynt."
They brought Janos Slynt in his nightclothes, with his chain of office thrown hastily over them, and the former Commander of the City Watch took one look at the prince on the dais and the Hound beside him and the sellsword and the cleared hall, and Jacelyn watched the colour drain out of the man's jowly face like wine out of a cracked cup.
"Your grace," Slynt began, voice cracking. "I— this is— what is the meaning of—"
"Lord Janos." The prince's tone was very mild. "The king has relieved you of command and given the watch to me. I wished to discuss the state of the gold cloaks with you, while it is fresh in everyone's mind." A pause. "I would advise you to be truthful, my good man. I already know a great deal, and I will know the rest before the sun is up, and the only thing your answers can change tonight is whether I think well of you or ill, and if I take your head."
Slynt's eyes went to the Hound, and the Hound smiled at him, which was not a comforting thing to have done to you, and Slynt began to talk.
He sang with the particular desperation of a coward who decided that the truth was only thing left that might save him.
Harbour masters who had taken coin from Lord Baelish to look the other way at certain cargoes. Toll collectors who passed certain wagons without inspection for a cut of what the wagons carried. Half the captaincies in the Watch bought rather than earned, the going rate paid up the chain to Slynt himself, and from Slynt — Jacelyn watched this part land, watched the prince's face not change at all — a portion onward to Lord Petyr Baelish, who had arranged Slynt's own elevation and was owed for it.
"Littlefinger you say." the prince was playing with his dagger.
"He— yes, your grace, Lord Baelish, he— I only did as—"
The Hound hit him. It was not a hard blow, by the Hound's standards; Slynt simply folded up and lay still on the floor of the barracks, breathing, which Jacelyn supposed was a mercy of sorts.
"Ser Jacelyn," the prince said, as though nothing had happened. "I need names from you now, the other direction. Men in the Watch you would trust at your back. Men who cannot be bought. They will serve as captains tonight, alongside mine own men. Can you give me that list?"
"I can, your grace." He could. He had been keeping it in his head for years, the short list of men who had never come to him with their palms out, the men the corrupt ones sneered at the way they sneered at Jacelyn himself. "There are not as many as I would like."
"There never are," the prince said gravely. "Give me what you have."
By the hour of the owl, the whole of the Watch had been roused and assembled in the great yard of the barracks by the Gate of the Gods and beyond. What seemed like thousands of them in their black ringmail and gold cloaks, bleary and confused and afraid in the torchlight.
Jacelyn watched the prince's men move through them with quiet efficiency, drawing certain men aside — the names from Slynt's confession, the names from Jacelyn's own knowledge, the names from wherever else the prince had gotten his information — until the assembled Watch had been sorted into two uneven groups without most of them quite understanding that they had been sorted.
The prince sat before them on the mounting block. He did not raise his voice much. He did not need to. There is a quality some men have that makes a yard go quiet, and Jacelyn had met it in perhaps three men in his life, and the boy on the block had it more completely than any of them.
"I am Joffrey Baratheon, you know me." The prince started. "His grace —the king— has given me command of the Watch. And so from tonight, you answer to me."
Silence.
"Most of you are honest," the prince said. "You took the cloak because it was steady work and a roof and the chance to do some good in a hard city, and you have done your duty as well as you were allowed to, under men who did not let you do it well enough. I know who you are. You have nothing to fear from me. You have, in fact, a great deal to gain, because a Watch that is run honestly is a Watch a man can be proud to serve in, and I intend to give you lot that."
He let it sit a moment, turning his golden gaze over the gathered, meeting eyes one by one.
"Some of you are not honest." His voice did not harden, which was somehow worse than if it had. "Some of you have been stealing. From the people, from your honest brothers who covered the posts you bought your way out of, from my father, from me. The worst of you are already being separated out, and the worst of the worst will see the inside of the black cells before morning. But I want every man here to understand the rule, from tonight, plainly, so that no man may say he did not know it."
He looked across them, this great gathering of men cloaked in gold.
"When you took the gold cloak, you swore to be the king's men. A man who steals from the crown he swore to serve is not the king's man. And if he is not the king's man, having sworn to be — then I put it to you that he is not much of a man at all." A pause. "So. Any man I find stealing, from this night forward, I will geld. And then I will send him to the Wall." The faintest edge of something cold crept into his voice. "I am told they have need of men, but I'm sure eunuchs shall do well enough. You do not need balls to hold a spear, and I am sure the wildlings will not care what you keep in your breeches."
No one laughed. No one breathed.
"If you serve honestly, you will be treated honestly, and better than you have been," the prince said. "You serve me false, and you will wish you had taken the black with everything still attached. That is the whole of it. Captains will give you your orders."
Then he gave them their work for the night — the searching of Lord Baelish's holdings, every property the man owned in the city, his brothels and his counting-houses and his warehouses by the river. No one is to be harmed, the prince said, and said it twice, not the whores, not the servants, not the customers if you find any with their breeches down. You take what papers and coin and goods you find, you take them carefully, and you let the people be unless they raise a hand against you. We are not thieves and we are not brutes. We are the king's men, and tonight, for once, we are going to behave like it.
And he set them loose.
Jacelyn watched the gold cloaks pour into the dark city with a sense of disorientation he could not entirely name. He had spent years watching this institution rot from the inside while the man at the top of it grew fat, and in the space of a single night a boy of fourteen had taken it by the scruff of the neck and shaken it awake.
As the men dispersed, Jacelyn noted that the prince's own household soldiers had been distributed through every group, four and five to a company, watching. Watching the gold cloaks as much as watching for trouble. Making certain the orders were followed.
Smart, Jacelyn thought, with grudging admiration. He does not trust them yet. He is right not to. Trust is earned, and they have not earned it, and he knows the difference.
"Ser Jacelyn, come." the prince said. "You're with me."
They worked through the rest of the night.
Lord Baelish, it emerged, kept extraordinary records. This surprised Jacelyn, who had assumed a man so deep in corruption would have been careful to leave no trail, but the prince did not seem surprised at all.
"He couldn't help it," Prince Joffrey told him, paging through a ledger by candlelight in a counting-house above one of the brothels. "Men like him love their own cleverness too much to leave it unrecorded. Somewhere in here is everything. He kept it because he wanted to be able to admire it."
And it was there. Not plainly — Baelish was much too careful for plainly — but in the patterns, in the discrepancies between what the books said the crown earned and what the crown actually received, in the second set of figures that tracked alongside the first like a shadow. The prince read like the maesters read text, quickly and completely, marking the places he wanted to return to.
There were other things. Letters in cipher that the prince set aside in a growing stack. Bills of sale. And one ledger that Jacelyn could make nothing of at all — a record of regular shipments coming in from Lys, listed as cargo, paid for in substantial sums.
"Lace," Jacelyn read, frowning. "From Lys. A standing order, every few months, for years." He looked up. "That makes no sense, your grace. Lys is many things, but it is not known for its lace. Why would a man in King's Landing be paying good gold for Lysene lace, and so much of it?"
The Hound made a sound that might have been a laugh.
"You're a good soldier, Ironhand," Brune said. "But you're thick as a castle wall."
Jacelyn still did not understand. The hound growled. "They're slaves, you fool."
Jacelyn looked down at the ledger. At the regular entries, the careful sums, the years of them.
He had seen a great deal in his life. He had stormed the breach at Pyke and lost his hand to an ironman's axe and watched men die in every way men died. He thought he had no innocence left to lose.
He found he had been wrong.
"Children," he said.
"And women," the prince added quietly. He took the ledger from Jacelyn's iron hand, gently, and added it to the stack he was keeping. His face, in the candlelight, had gone to that cold and deliberate place that Jacelyn had glimpsed once or twice already tonight, the place beneath the pleasant manner. "Keep that one safe, Ser Jacelyn. We shall need that come the morrow."
"Aye, your grace."
He did not ask what it was needed for. He was beginning to learn that the prince told you what you needed to know when you needed to know it, and not before, and that this was not unkindness but a kind of care. Joffrey knew that knowledge was its own kind of weight and did not load a man with more of it than the man could carry.
The small council met at dawn. Jacelyn had not expected to be in the room, and would not have been, except that the prince wanted the man who had found the ledgers present to speak to them, and so he stood against the wall behind the prince's chair with the evidence of the night's work stacked on the table, and watched the most powerful men in the realm arrive one by one and take their seats.
The king came last and worst, grey-faced and squinting against the morning light, nursing a hangover that had clearly survived the night and meant to see out the morning. He dropped into his chair at the head of the table and glared around it. "This had better be worth dragging me from my bed at this ungodly—" His eyes found Lord Tywin, and then Lord Mace Tyrell, both seated at the council table though neither held a council seat. "What are they doing here?"
"This concerns them, your grace," the prince said. "Lord Baelish has borrowed heavily from both. They have an interest in what we have found."
"What you've found." Lord Stark was watching the prince with the careful attention Jacelyn had seen the Hand turn on a great many things in the short time he had been in the city. "Found how? Found when?"
"Tonight." The prince nodded to Lothor Brune, who went to the door. "It will be easier to show you."
They brought in Lord Petyr Baelish.
Jacelyn had seen the man about the Red Keep — small, neat, quick-smiling, always seeming to know something the rest of the room did not. The man Lothor Brune brought in was a poorer version of that one. His fine clothes were rumpled, there was a bruise purpling along one cheekbone, and he held his right hand against his chest in a way that told Jacelyn at least two of the fingers were broken. But the eyes were still moving, still calculating, still looking for the angle. Men like Baelish did not stop looking for the angle until they were dead, and sometimes, Jacelyn suspected, not even then.
"This is an outrage," Baelish said, and his voice was steady, which Jacelyn had to grant him. "Your grace — your grace —" he said to the king "—I have been seized in the night, beaten, my property ransacked, by gold cloaks acting on the authority of — of a boy who —"
"The Lord Commander of the City Watch," the prince said. "By the king's own appointment. Acting on the king's authority, which is mine to act on in this matter." He looked at the king. "Is that not so, Father?"
The king was frowning in confusion but grunted his assent anyway.
Then the prince laid it out.
He did it as Jacelyn had watched him do everything that night — completely, in order, without heat. The skimmed revenues. The two sets of books. The bought captaincies and the bribed harbour masters. The bills and the ciphers. He laid each piece on the table as he came to it, and Lord Baelish denied each one, smoothly at first and then less smoothly, and Jacelyn watched the denials lose their footing as the pile of evidence grew, until Baelish was no longer denying so much as objecting — to the manner of it, to the authority, to the bruises on his face —having run out of ways to deny the thing itself.
Lord Renly seemed more and more amused as the denial went on.
"All those dragons," Lord Tyrell was muttering to himself. He looked as if some thief in the night had come and stolen food off of his plate. Which in this case Jacelyn supposed was accurate.
"Why," Lord Stark said. He had been silent through most of it, watching. "Why were you looking into Lord Baelish at all? What set you on this?"
Something in Lords Starks grey eyes gave away that he already had an inkling as to why.
"Jon Arryn," Joffrey announced softly after a time.
The room changed. Jacelyn felt it without entirely understanding it — a stillness that came over the older men, the king and the Hand and the Lannister patriarch, the particular stillness of men hearing a name they had not expected to hear.
"Lord Arryn was kind to me," the prince said. "He let me sit this council. He taught me a great deal. In his last months — before the illness took him — he came to me with concerns. He did not share all of them. He was a careful man. But he told me he believed someone was stealing from the crown on a large scale, and he told me he meant to find out who, and he told me—" the prince looked at littlefinger. The man flinched. "—that he did not entirely trust Lord Baelish. That Baelish and Lady Lysa were closer than was proper. That he thought something passed between them that a husband should not have to wonder about. That a father should never have to worry about."
Lord Mace Tyrell gasped, looking astonished. The princes words traveled through the room, causing a different reaction on each face. The accusation in his words clear.
"That is a filthy lie." Baelish said. But the smoothness was gone now entirely, and there was something tight and frightened underneath.
Lothor Brune spoke for the first time, from his place by the door. His voice was flat and incurious, a soldier reporting a fact. "Was it not you who put it about that you'd had both the Tully girls? Bedded the both of them at Riverrun when they were green?" He tilted his head. "Heard that boast in three taverns before I had fully crossed the city. I wonder how a story of such a nature would even start if not from you, my lord."
Baelish's mouth opened and closed. No words came.
"You killed him." Lord Stark's voice was very low and very cold, and Jacelyn understood suddenly that whatever the Hand had suspected, he had needed to hear the rest before he let himself believe it. "Jon Arryn. You killed him."
The king came up out of his hangover like a bear coming out of a cave. "What?"
"I believed it might be so," the prince said, before the room could come apart. "It is why I began my investigation. It is why I asked my father for the command of the Watch — I needed men I could trust, and a reason to move that would not warn the guilty." He looked at the king. "Jon Arryn was uncertain of something at the end, Father. Something to do with the succession. He asked me to find the truth of it, before he died, and I have been trying to honour that since."
"Where is Varys?" Pycelle's voice, ponderous and uneasy. The old maester had gone very grey. "The master of whisperers should — surely, surely the Spider would have known of this. How is it that the master of whisperers knew nothing, and in one night, a boy of—" He caught himself, "—his grace learned what the master of whisperers in all his years did not?"
It was a fair question, and a clever one, and Jacelyn saw several heads turn at it. He saw Lord Tywin's eyes narrow a fraction.
"Because they were working together," the prince said. He said it gently, almost regretfully, and let it land.
"I believe Jon Arryn was poisoned," the prince went on. "You said it possible, but not likely Grand Maester."
"His death— well it was natural as any— I don't believe—"
"It was you who warned me of poisons, Grand Maester. There is one it could have been. You know it. The tears of Lys. A slow poison, easy to mistake for an illness of the gut in an old man. We found half a vial of it in Lord Baelish's chambers tonight — kept, I would imagine, against future need." He nodded to the small clear vial sitting among the evidence on the table, which the prince himself had found tucked behind a false stone in the counting-house wall.
"I have never seen that vial a day in my—" Brune slapped the little man to shut him up. Baelish fell to the ground and groaned. He spat some blood on the fine myrish carpet.
"Lord Varys procured it." The prince was saying, "He has long had a use for Lord Baelish, and Lord Baelish for him. Baelish moved the coin. Varys moved the children."
"Children," the king said. His voice had gone dangerous. "What children?"
"Slaves, your grace. From the free cities. Brought across the Narrow Sea and given to Varys, who took their tongues and made them his little birds, the eyes and ears he has used to know everything that happens in this city for twenty years." The prince's voice was steady. "There are countless in the city as we speak. I see them at every orphanage."
"Gods be good." The warden of the south muttered in disgust.
The kings son continued. "Lord Baelish supplied them, through his shipping, hidden in his books. In exchange, Varys kept Lord Baelish's secrets, and shared what his birds heard, and procured what Baelish needed when Baelish needed it. They have been useful to one another for a very long time I reckon."
"And where," said Lord Tywin, who had not spoken until now, "is the eunuch?"
"Gone."
"Gone!?" Roared king Robert. His brother Renly was wincing in pain from the noise, he had not spoken a word and his earlier amusement was gone.
Jacelyn felt his future kings eyes on him, he cleared his throat and spoke.
"His chambers were empty when we reached them, my lords. The bed not slept in. There is a — there are passages, behind the walls, more than we knew. He has likely fled into them or out of the city entirely once he knew we were coming." He hesitated, then went on, because the prince had told him to tell them all of it. "We found letters in his chambers. In cipher, most of them, but some of the prince's people have begun to read them. Correspondence with a man in Pentos. A cheesemonger, Illyrio Mopatis. They speak of —" he glanced at the prince, who nodded "— of aiding the Targaryen boy. Viserys. His invasion."
The room erupted.
It was the king, mostly — Robert Baratheon on his feet, roaring, the hangover burned away entirely by a fury that Jacelyn could feel from across the room, demands and curses tumbling over one another, Targaryens and traitors and I'll have his head, I'll have his filthy stones in a box.
Lord Stark trying to bring order. Pycelle making small distressed sounds. Lord Baelish had risen to his feet, his face bloodied with some of his littlefingers broken and held against his chest. Jacelyn watched him decide that there was nothing left to lose, that he was likely about to die a most painful death and watched the smoothness come back into his face one last time.
Here it comes, Jacelyn thought, The clever man's last clever thing.
"The slaves were for the king," Baelish whispered.
The room froze.
"What did you say," said Robert Baratheon stiffly.
Baelish smiled. It was a terrible smile, the smile of a man who has decided to take someone down into the dark with him. "Your whores, your grace. Your appetites. Did you imagine they were cheap? Did you imagine the gold for them grew on the trees in the godswood?" His voice was rising now, reckless, a dam broken. "Everything I took, I took to pay for the realm you could not be bothered to govern and the pleasures you could not be bothered to economise. The Lysene girls you are so fond of — where did you think they —"
The king crossed the room faster than a man his size had any right to move.
Jacelyn did not see exactly what happened, because it happened very fast and the king's bulk was in the way, but he heard it — a wet heavy sound, and then another, and then Lord Petyr Baelish was on the floor of the council chamber and he was not getting up, and the king stood over him breathing like a forge bellows with blood on his hands.
Lord Mace Tyrell had gone from red to a sort of greyish white and was staring and blinking at the body almost in confusion.
Lord Tywin Lannister looked at the corpse of the master of coin with no expression whatsoever, the way another man might look at spilled wine — a thing to be cleaned, an inconvenience, already in the past.
Lord Renly groaned something that sounded suspiciously like, "gods dammit Robert."
Then Grand Maester Pycelle, into the ringing silence, said in his most ponderous and careful voice, "How dreadful. It would seem Lord Baelish, in his agitation, has fallen. These old stairs in the Tower of the Hand are treacherous. I have warned the staff a dozen times." He folded his liver spotted hands. Infinitely sad, infinitely weary. "A tragic accident."
Jacelyn looked at the old man, and then at the body, which was nowhere near any stairs, and understood that he had just watched something be decided.
"A tragic accident," Lord Tywin agreed, in a voice that closed the matter. "It will be given out as such. There is no profit in the realm knowing the master of coin was a thief, a poisoner, and a traitor, nor in knowing the manner of his death. Let him fall down some stairs."
Lord Redwyne, who had been reading the ledgers, was pinching the bridge of his nose, looking most pained at the turn of events. Lord Mace opened his mouth, looked at Tywin Lannister, closed it and looked away. No one disagreed.
"And Lysa?" Lord Stark's voice was rough. He was looking at the body of the man who had killed his wife's good-brother, his own old friend's killer, and Jacelyn could not read what was in his face. "If this is true — if she was part of it — if the boy—"
"We summon her to court," said Lord Tywin. "To answer questions about her husband's death, as is only natural for a grieving widow whose lord was a Hand of the King. If she comes, we will learn what she knows." A pause. "If she refuses — if she hides behind the Eyrie's walls and will not come — then we will know what her refusal tells us."
"She will refuse," the prince assured. "She is frightened, and guilty, and she has a sickly son she will not leave and will not risk. She will not come."
"Then the lords of the Vale must need be told," Tywin Lannister said, "what manner of woman holds their wardenship and shelters in their mountain. The Royces are well placed for it. Let them carry the word back — quietly — that Jon Arryn did not die of a fever, and that the woman in the Eyrie had a hand in it." He looked at the prince, and something passed between them that Jacelyn did not have the context to read. "The Vale will see to its own, in time, if it is given the truth to act on. It always has."
Robert Baratheon had sat back down. He was staring at his bloody hands as though they belonged to someone else. The fury had gone out of him and left something older and greyer in its place, and Jacelyn, watching, thought he looked for a moment like exactly what he was — a tired old man who had outlived the best of himself, sitting in a room full of younger and colder men who had already moved on to the next thing while he was still looking at the blood.
The prince rose. He went to his father's side and put a hand on the king's shoulder, and said something too quiet for the room to hear, and the king nodded slowly and did not look up.
Jacelyn looked at the prince — fourteen years old, newly knighted, who had taken the Watch in a single night, who had laid out a master of coin's treason like a maester reading a text, and now stood with a hand on his father's shoulder and a dead traitor on the floor and the whole grey morning ahead of him.
It was unnerving and comforting at the same time. He realised the realm was in safe hands.
Jacelyn gathered up the ledgers, held them carefully in his iron hand and waited to be told