Hearing Varys's grating laugh, Pycelle shrank his neck tremblingly, his body hunched, looking both regretful and afraid.
But Kal did not let him off, his gaze then shifting to Littlefinger standing beside him.
"And what does Lord Petyr Baelish think?"
"Your decision is most just, Ser Kal, I agree with your view."
Littlefinger was no fool; he feared that if he spoke too slowly, this bastard who now effectively controlled all of King's Landing would think he too was offending him.
Coming from a minor noble family, he deeply understood just how sensitive a bastard like Kal Stone would be to such matters.
After all, he had come this far in the same way.
Only, with his head lowered where no one could see, the corner of his mouth twitched, and in his eyes flashed a faint, untraceable depth.
Seeing he had gained yet another councillor's affirmation, Kal's gaze finally turned toward Grand Maester Pycelle. "Grand Maester?!"
"Cough, cough—Ser Kal, please understand an old man who has served 4 kings. At times I too am angry at my own sluggish mind."
"Especially in these days of war and the threat to life, I have not had a proper sleep for many nights." Pycelle put on the posture of yielding, as if only now realizing what he had just said.
His expression was sincere, his face weary.
Like an old man who had suffered torment and abuse, his mind already somewhat unclear.
Kal gave him a meaningful look but did not dwell further, only shook his head with a smile, letting the matter pass.
"You've been wronged, Grand Maester."
Having finished knocking down these two councillors who still could not see the situation clearly and tried to rely on their seniority and titles to jump before him, Kal's gaze at last settled on the man he had truly come looking for.
Since Kal had entered the throne hall, he had been watching everything with a calm gaze—neither boasting nor panicking.
Steady enough that he seemed like the true victor: Kevan Lannister.
Apart from his initial surprise at seeing Kal appear here, Kevan Lannister had afterward merely watched the performance of the few others in silence.
Now, seeing Kal Stone first wield blood and force, then use methods to firmly seize the scene, and now turning his gaze upon him—Kevan Lannister too followed Kal's eyes and met his stare.
Then he smiled faintly and spoke a sentence that caught people off guard.
"Ser Kal Stone, perhaps no one ever thought that the one to bring ruin upon the Lannisters would be a bastard who seemed so insignificant."
Though Kevan smiled, his tone, his eyes, and his expression all grew somewhat complicated after these words left his mouth.
Especially those eyes fixed on Kal—there was an inexplicable weariness, a heaviness of years.
As though time itself was flowing quickly through that sentence and that look.
And now everyone still alive and breathing in the throne hall, with his words falling, were all startled.
Then, without realizing, they turned shocked eyes toward Kal Stone.
Because with Kevan Lannister's reminder, they all realized that ever since Jon Arryn's sudden death, and then King Robert's choice to ride north—
It seemed that everything afterward had been tied to this bastard before them.
At every turning point, his shadow was there.
Though at first glance in all these shifting tides he seemed no more than an insignificant dot, a shadow.
He had no ties to the Lannisters, only that, as the King's bastard, the Queen disliked him.
That much everyone knew.
And beyond that, merely that the dwarf of House Lannister was his friend.
Yet this bastard, surviving only as a sellsword in King's Landing, on this journey seized the chance to rise, and became the key figure in the upheavals that followed across the Seven Kingdoms.
On that journey, through an accident, he was personally knighted by the King.
Then on the trip to Winterfell, he discovered the affair between the Queen and her own brother.
To speak plainly, here in the throne hall, apart from the wildlings just come down from the Mountains of the Moon, there was not a soul unaware of it.
But that was not the most crucial thing.
The most crucial, most fatal thing was that he personally saw the Queen and her brother plotting to murder the Lord of Winterfell's second son, and he saved that child.
And it was precisely under the circumstances of exposing their affair that—
Jaime Lannister, the Kingslayer, and Queen Cersei Lannister died.
The brother and sister in whom Tywin Lannister had placed his greatest hopes thus perished in the bitter cold of the North.
And this in turn provoked the grave political crisis that the kingdom's heir was not the King's trueborn son.
Afterward Lord Stannis Baratheon of Dragonstone seized the chance to fan the flames, presenting solid proof that established the Lannister family's disloyalty to the realm and their growing grip on the Iron Throne.
The years of the Lannisters' plotting in the West against the Iron Throne were thus exposed, placed naked on the table, and sparked a war that engulfed the Seven Kingdoms.
And still, all thought it was just accident, no one placed the bastard who had triggered it all in their hearts.
His status and position meant he was only a minor figure.
At that time everyone's eyes were fixed only on the wars to come and the continent-wide upheaval about to break over the land.
Every faction was scheming within it, seeking a share for themselves. Yet just when no one believed the Lannisters could survive such a situation, Tywin Lannister, by several strokes of high strategy and a stance of discarding everything to stake it all, forcibly revived the situation before him.
Though one could not say the Lannisters had thus turned decline into victory, at the very least Tywin had won a sliver of life for House Lannister in such a desperate pass.
But precisely as the future seemed to all in the Seven Kingdoms to be slipping into an unfathomable state—
This bastard whom people did not favor, who in this ever-shifting game had served only as an unremarkable butterfly—
Not only rose with the tide himself, soaring high and breaking through his class, but also, as all sides in this sudden upheaval were preparing to change their stance anew and rub their palms to see if they might seize even greater profit—
It was still this young man.
Still this unremarkable bastard.
He returned from the Vale, and he—who by the trend of things should have been nothing but a negligible scrap at the margins—
With a mere 2,000 ragtag men, in only a few hours, broke through King's Landing, which the Lannisters had set upon the scales to balance their own position.
He thus overturned the counterweight most crucial to the Lannisters.
So absurdly, by his strength alone, he swept away the Lannister family's last hope and returned everything to where it ought to be.
The instant these words left Kevan Lannister's mouth, everyone present came to their senses.
Looking at this bastard who seemed only somewhat deep of mind and strong in personal might, they all realized that the young man before them could indeed be called the chief culprit who buried the Lannisters—one of the Seven Kingdoms' highest nobles, a thousand-year house of profound foundation.
Kal Stone, the true destroyer of the Lannisters.
Yet, as for Kevan's accusations, Kal would not acknowledge them.
He waved his hand, signaling to Bronn and Timett that they need not be so tense.
The two withdrew the weapons pressed against Kevan Lannister's neck, grudgingly stepping aside, their eyes then fixing on Littlefinger and Pycelle, those two court ministers.
Faced with their burning gazes, Master of Coin Petyr Baelish and Grand Maester Pycelle both felt a chill at their necks.
Carefully swallowing a mouthful of saliva, they quietly shifted their steps closer to Varys.
Seeing his two colleagues draw near, the eunuch showed no displeasure, instead smiling warmly and nodding slightly to them.
Ignoring their little interaction, Kal fixed his gaze on Kevan Lannister.
"Ser Kevan thinks all of this was because of me?" Kal said, the corner of his mouth lifting slightly. "If that is so, forgive me, I will not admit it."
He stepped up before Kevan Lannister, lowering his head to look down into the green eyes of this stern-faced, golden-haired man.
A strange, oppressive aura radiated from him.
"Kal Stone, whether it is or not is not for you to accept or deny. Believe me, the maesters will record this moment in detail in their chronicles."
Faced with Kal's denial and his oppressive gaze, Kevan Lannister did not show the slightest fear, instead meeting Kal's eyes head-on.
He even had the mood to make a small joke.
"They will even study you in detail."
"Your tastes, the things you have done, the noblewomen you've slept with, your mistresses, and then compile every detail into archives."
Hearing this unfunny jest, and seeing Kevan's calmness under pressure, Kal lightly shook his head.
"No, Ser Kevan, you misunderstand. I am not denying that the fall of the Lannisters has much to do with me."
Seeing that Kevan Lannister's spirit could not be pressed down, Kal could not be bothered to play childish staring games.
"What I mean is— the Lannisters reaching this point is your own doing!"
He withdrew his gaze, turned his head to the Iron Throne at the far end of the hall, and continued forward, brushing past Kevan Lannister.
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