Chapter 57: The Fallen King
Eddard Stark was one of perhaps three people in the Red Keep who could walk into the King's bedchamber unannounced at any hour — provided the room didn't already smell of perfume and wine-sweat and the particular quality of bad decisions.
This morning it smelled only of wine and unwashed linen, which counted as a good morning.
Robert was in a loose sleep shirt and breeches, sitting at the table by the window with a cup already in hand. The shirt hung open at the chest. His belly had taken on a new quality recently — not just large, the way it had been getting for years, but swollen in a way that sat wrong, tight and round in a manner distinct from fat. His legs, visible below the breeches, were puffy at the ankle. His color was off. Eddard had been noting these things for weeks and naming them, privately, as what they probably were.
Robert poured a second cup and pushed it across the table without being asked.
Eddard sat down and took it and looked at the man who had once broken a line of Targaryen cavalry with nothing but a warhammer and the force of his own forward momentum, and who now looked like he was losing an argument with his own body.
"Robert," he said. "You need to see a maester. Not Pycelle. Someone who'll actually tell you what's happening."
"Seven hells." Robert wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, leaving a wine stain on his beard. "You barged in before I've finished my first cup to tell me I look terrible?"
"You look worse than last month."
"I've been eating less." Robert's voice had the hoarse, abraded quality of a man who had been drinking since the previous evening. "Half what I used to eat. You should've seen me six months ago."
"Let someone examine you."
"Pycelle already did." Robert set the cup down hard enough that wine sloshed over the rim. "Kidney trouble, he said. Fluid retention. Wanted to bleed me." He made a sound of profound contempt. "I've bled enough on battlefields for a dozen men. I'm not letting that old crow stick a knife in me in my own chambers."
Eddard let that sit for a moment. Then: "The Tyrells entered the city yesterday evening."
Robert's expression shifted — not toward alarm exactly, but toward the particular wariness of a man who recognizes a problem arriving.
"The procession stretched from the King's Gate to the Street of Steel," Eddard continued. "They scattered coin from the carts. The crowd turned out in force. It was better attended than most royal processions."
"Better attended than my coronation?" Robert picked up the cup again. "What are they after? The throne or my wine cellar?"
"A seat on the Small Council." Eddard met his eyes. "They didn't bring five hundred cartloads of grain and a military escort because they enjoy the ride from Highgarden. You created the Master of Laws position for Henry. Mace Tyrell has apparently decided that if new seats can be made, one should be made for him."
"No." Robert's fist hit the table. The wine jug tipped and rolled. "If Lord Highgarden wants a throne, he can bloody well fight me for it. He can have the Iron Throne and everything that comes with it — the debts, the ravens, the Small Council, all of it. See how he likes governing."
"Robert." Eddard's voice was steady. "The crown owes House Tyrell a great deal of gold. The treasury is in worse condition than it was last quarter. We are not in a position to refuse Mace Tyrell everything he wants and also ask him for more grain loans."
Robert stood up. He was still a big man — the frame was still there under everything that had happened to it — and when he moved he moved like someone who remembered being dangerous. He crossed the room and came back and crossed it again.
"Then let him manage the debts," he said, the words arriving faster now. "I'll make him Master of Coin. Let him deal with Littlefinger and the ledgers and the bloody interest payments. Let him try to squeeze gold out of every corner of the realm and see how popular he is afterwards."
"Robert—"
"And Tywin!" The volume went up. Robert spun and put his fist against the wall, not quite hard enough to hurt himself. "That man has been bleeding this throne since the day I put on the crown. Every appointment, every contract, every debt instrument — his hands are on all of it. Henry has an army expansion proposal sitting with the council right now. I want it moving. I want a royal army that doesn't need to go to Casterly Rock with a hat in hand every time it needs to pay its soldiers. I want Tywin's head on a spike above the—"
"The proposal was submitted four days ago," Eddard said. "These things take time. And a military campaign against the Lannisters would require resources we don't have, on top of a realm that still hasn't fully recovered from the Greyjoy Rebellion."
"Resources." Robert said the word like it had personally insulted him. "Varys talks about resources. Littlefinger talks about resources. I'm surrounded by men who want me to manage things carefully and I'm watching this kingdom rot carefully." He stopped pacing. "I want action, Ned. Not parchment."
A knock at the door.
Robert's head came up.
"Who?"
"Father." Joffrey's voice, from the corridor. "It's me."
Something changed in Robert's posture — not softening, exactly, but the anger finding a different channel. "Come in, then."
Joffrey entered, and there was someone behind him: a man in a maester's collar, younger than Pycelle by thirty years, carrying a worn leather satchel. Joffrey's expression was doing the difficult work of being worried without letting his father see how worried.
"Lord Stark." He nodded to Eddard. Then, to Robert: "Father. This is Maester Wendell. He's been at Dragonstone the past four years — I met him when I visited with Ser Meryn. He's been trained in surgery and internal medicine both."
"I'm fine, Joffrey." Robert waved a large hand. "Whatever Pycelle told you—"
"Father." Joffrey crossed the room and put his hand on Robert's arm. The gesture was careful in the way of someone who has rehearsed it. "Please."
Robert looked at his son's face for a moment.
The silence stretched.
"Fine," Robert said, and sat back down in the chair.
Maester Wendell worked quietly and without hurry. He pressed his fingertips along Robert's abdomen, systematic and light, watching Robert's face for the wince that came when he reached certain points. He pressed the back of his hand against the swollen ankles. He drew back the lower eyelid to check the color beneath, examined the tongue, and spent a long time with an ear trumpet held to the abdomen, listening.
What he heard there made him still for a moment before he straightened up.
Robert watched him. "Well?"
Wendell looked at the floor. His Adam's apple moved.
"Your kidneys," he began.
Robert's eyes sharpened. "What about them."
"They're — compromised, yes. But that's not the primary concern." Wendell appeared to make a decision. "The liver, Your Grace. There is severe damage. The fluid in the abdomen — what we call ascites — is a consequence of the liver failing to process it. The organ is not functioning as it should." He stopped. "It has progressed significantly."
The room was completely silent.
"Define significantly," Robert said.
Wendell's voice dropped. "The fluid is compressing surrounding organs. The damage is not recent — this has been developing for some years. Without complete abstention from alcohol and substantial dietary change, beginning immediately—"
"Can it be cured?" Robert asked.
The question came out flat and quiet in a way that Eddard had not often heard from Robert.
Wendell was still looking at the floor. "My honest answer, Your Grace, is that I cannot cure it. The Grand Maester may have more knowledge than I do. But at this stage—" He stopped again. "At this stage I would be misleading you if I spoke of cures."
"Then speak of time," Robert said. "How long?"
Wendell didn't answer immediately.
"Optimistically," Robert prompted. His voice was very controlled now.
"With rest, with diet, with no further drinking—" Wendell raised his eyes for the first time. "Perhaps a year."
"And without those things."
Wendell looked at Joffrey, then back at the floor. "Two months. Perhaps three. I cannot say with certainty."
The room stayed silent for a long time.
Robert's eyes moved to the corner where his armor stood on its frame, the black steel and the antler-crowned helm. The warhammer beside it, a proper war weapon, not the decorative piece that hung in the throne room. He looked at those things for a while.
Then he reached for the cup.
He drank what remained in it slowly, set it down, picked it up again, and found it empty. He looked at it. Then he threw it hard against the stone floor. The gold bent and the cup bounced and skittered into the corner and was still.
The spreading wine looked dark as blood in the morning light.
Robert looked around the room — at Joffrey, at Eddard, at the maester — and when he spoke his voice had come back to something recognizable, the command register, the tone that had once steadied men before cavalry charges.
"No one speaks of this outside this room." His eyes settled on Wendell. "If you do, I'll have your tongue before I have your head. Do you understand me?"
"Yes, Your Grace." Wendell's voice was barely audible.
"Get out." Robert turned away from all of them, toward the window, toward the city below that he could not see clearly through the thick glass. "All of you. Leave me alone."
Joffrey hesitated at the door.
"Go," Robert said, without turning around.
They went.
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