Chapter 72: The King's Plea
The servants of the Tower of the Hand had been at work since before first light.
Trunks came down the stairs on the shoulders of household men, stacked in the yard beside the carriages with the organized efficiency of a household that had done this before — which the Stark household had, having traveled the entire length of the Kings Road to get here. Cloaks were bundled, books wrapped in oilcloth, the small accumulated possessions of several months in King's Landing sorted into what was worth transporting and what could be left.
The yard was full of purposeful noise when the gates opened and Robert Baratheon came through them.
He was on horseback, which he rarely was anymore — the effort of mounting had become something he tended to avoid unless the occasion required it. Two knights of the Kingsguard rode with him, and Ser Barristan walked his horse just behind. Robert's color was off in the particular way it had been off for months, the skin at his jaw loose, the bulk of him sitting differently in the saddle than it had even a year ago. But his eyes were alert and his voice, when he used it, still carried.
"Stop." He looked at the loaded trunks, the carriages, the servants frozen mid-task. "All of you — put it down. The King commands it."
The servants put things down and bowed.
"Where is Lord Stark?"
"In his chambers, Your Grace." Vayon Poole straightened from behind a wooden crate he'd been directing. "Packing his personal effects. Shall I inform him—"
"No." Robert dismounted with the careful deliberateness of a man who no longer trusts the movement to happen automatically, waved off Barristan's offered hand, and looked at the Tower stairs with the expression of a man who has made a decision and intends to see it through regardless of what his body has to say about it. "I'll go myself."
He started up the stairs.
The three Kingsguard followed at a respectful distance, close enough to catch him if necessary and far enough back to pretend they weren't thinking about it.
He was breathing harder than he would have liked by the time he reached the top floor — the stairs were long and the tower was tall and neither of those facts had changed since the last time he'd climbed them, but something else had. He stopped on the landing and let his breathing settle, one hand on the stone wall, and was grateful there was no one on the landing to see it.
The door at the top of the stairs opened.
Arya Stark came through it carrying a small wooden box, her attention on something inside it, and walked directly into the King of the Seven Kingdoms.
She stopped. The box left her hands. Clothes scattered across the landing in every direction — a small avalanche of crumpled linen and wool — and Arya stared at Robert and the Kingsguard behind him with the wide eyes of someone whose mind is moving very quickly through several possible interpretations of what she's looking at.
She arrived at one.
"Father! Sansa!" She spun and bolted back through the door, slamming it behind her. Her voice came through the wood clearly. "The King brought men! Run!"
Robert stared at the closed door.
"I'm not here to kill anyone," he said, to the door.
A pause. The door opened a crack and one grey eye appeared. "And you won't send men after us on the road? Honestly?"
"Damn it, girl." Robert looked at Barristan, who had the expression he wore when he was carefully not reacting to something. "Is this how Eddard talks about me? In front of his own children?"
"You're not sending anyone after us?" the eye said.
"No one is going anywhere," Robert said. "None of you are going back to Winterfell."
The door opened a little further. "Are you locking us up instead?"
"I am not—"
"You could just lock up Sansa. She's the difficult one. Though I'd miss her eventually, so not for too long."
"Arya." Eddard Stark's voice came from somewhere behind his daughter, with the quiet weight of a man who has been listening to this exchange and has decided it has gone on long enough.
The door opened fully.
Eddard looked at Robert — at the careful way he was standing, at the hand still resting against the wall — and said nothing for a moment. The silence between them had the quality of old friendship, which is that it doesn't require filling.
"You could have sent a raven," Eddard said.
"I could have." Robert looked at him. "I didn't want to."
He moved to the window at the end of the landing and stood there, getting his breathing the rest of the way under control, looking out at the yard below where the servants had resumed their careful inactivity around the half-loaded carriages.
"The Daenerys matter is settled," he said. "Varys has it in hand. You don't need to put your name to it and you don't need to be part of it. Let it be done and move on." He turned. "That's what I came to say."
Eddard's jaw set. "She's a girl, Robert. She's carrying a child. Whatever her name is—"
"Her name is the reason ten thousand Dothraki riders are currently eating their way across the Dothraki Sea," Robert said, and the patience in his voice was the patience of a man who has been having this argument in his head for a long time. "She married a Khal, Ned. The greatest Khal alive. She's not hiding in Pentos anymore asking merchant lords for table scraps — she's the Khaleesi of the largest khalasar in the world and she's carrying his heir. You think that's coincidence? You think that child in her belly is just a child?"
"It is just a child," Eddard said. "Until it isn't. And that won't be for twenty years."
"Twenty years." Robert looked out the window. "You know what I thought when Jon Arryn told me not to hunt them down after the war? I thought — twenty years. I'll be old and grey but I'll be alive and Joffrey will be grown and the realm will be settled and twenty years is long enough to deal with anything that comes." He looked back at Eddard. "That was fifteen years ago, Ned. Those twenty years go faster than you think."
Arya had materialized in the doorway again, drawn by the conversation the way she was drawn by anything that had the shape of a war story. "You could just beat them again. You beat them the first time."
Robert looked at her. Despite everything, something in his face relaxed slightly. "The Dothraki don't fight like Rhaegar fought," he said, with the unexpected patience he sometimes showed with children when he wasn't performing kingship. "They don't meet you on a battlefield and trade charges. They go around you. They go to the villages — every village, every farm, every hamlet between here and the horizon. They burn, and they kill, and they take. And they move fast enough that by the time your army gets to where they were, they're already somewhere else." He shook his head. "The only way to fight the Dothraki is from behind walls, and you can't protect everything behind walls."
He reached out and ruffled her hair, which she tolerated with the expression of someone who finds it beneath her dignity but has decided not to say so.
"How long do you think the lords of the Seven Kingdoms tolerate a king who can't protect his smallfolk?" he said, to Eddard.
"That's not a reason to murder a pregnant girl," Eddard said.
"No," Robert said. "It's not. I know that." He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the stairs. "I know what I'm doing, Ned. I've known since the vote. I'm just asking you not to make me defend it to your face."
Eddard looked at him for a long moment. "Henry had a fight with you too."
"That boy." Robert's expression shifted into something complicated. "He stood there and recited his own oath at me. Used it as an argument against my judgment." He shook his head, though there was something in it that wasn't entirely displeasure. "Sharper tongue than yours and he knows exactly where to put it."
"He meant no harm by it."
"Of course he didn't." Robert moved away from the window. "He's spent his entire life building something from nothing. He takes honor seriously because it's one of the few things he's had since the beginning. I understand that." He paused. "That doesn't mean he gets to question a council vote in front of the entire Small Council and face no consequence for it."
"You sent him away," Eddard said.
"I sent him home to cool down. There's a difference." Robert looked at him steadily. "My will hasn't changed. He comes back when he's ready. His seat on the Regency Council stands."
"You sent away the two men most likely to tell you no," Eddard said quietly.
The observation sat between them.
Robert didn't answer it. He reached into his cloak instead and produced something that caught the morning light — silver, in the shape of a hand, the badge that Eddard had left on the council table the previous morning.
"You left this behind," Robert said. "I brought it myself."
Eddard looked at it. "Pycelle gave me that badge when I first arrived."
"And I'm giving it back." Robert's hand stayed extended. The dried blood from the coughing fit was still on his fingers, dark against the silver. He hadn't cleaned it off, which might have been an oversight and might not have been. "Ned. Don't make me ask."
"Robert." Eddard looked at his old friend's face — at the illness in it, at the stubbornness that had always been there underneath everything else, at the man he'd known since they were boys fostered together in the Eyrie a lifetime ago. "I was going to take my daughters home."
"Stay." The word came out of Robert with the simplicity of a man who has put away the king's voice and is just talking. "Help me."
The coughing took him before Eddard could answer. It came hard and fast, the kind that bends a man forward — Robert pressed his fist against his mouth and Eddard stepped forward and put a hand on his back and held him through it. When Robert straightened, Eddard's hand was still there.
The blood on Robert's knuckles was fresh.
"I can hold on a while yet," Robert said. His voice had gone rough. He looked at the badge in his other hand and pressed it into Eddard's palm — the blood-smeared silver going from one hand to the other. "We grew up together, Ned. We went to war together. Don't let me die in this city alone."
Eddard's throat worked.
He looked down at the badge in his palm. At the blood on it.
He pinned it back onto his chest.
"I'm sorry, Robert," he said. "For yesterday."
"It's I who should be sorry." Robert straightened his back by degrees, the way he did everything these days — by increments, paying for it as he went. "I pulled you away from Catelyn, away from your children, away from the home you've spent your whole life building. Dragged you down here to clean up a mess I've been making for fifteen years." His mouth twisted into something that was almost the old smile. "And you came. You always come when I ask."
"That's what annoys me about you," Eddard said, and there was something in his voice that was trying to be dry and not entirely succeeding. "When we were young I could knock you down when you were being an idiot. Now you're the King and I have to stand there and take it."
"Believe me," Robert said, "that's not the worst part of it." He laughed, and the laugh turned into coughing, and Eddard kept his hand on his back through that too.
When it passed, Robert hooked his arm around Eddard's shoulders — the familiar grip, the weight of it, the same arm that had pulled him to his feet on a dozen battlefields — and looked at him sidelong.
"If you dare leave for Winterfell," he said, "I'll ride up there myself and drag you back. Don't think I won't."
"You'd never make it past the Neck," Eddard said.
"Then I'd drag you back from the Neck." Robert tightened his grip. "Don't test me, old friend."
From the doorway, Sansa appeared with the bright, barely-contained relief of someone who had been listening from the other side of the door and had just heard what she needed to hear. "We don't have to go back? We're staying?"
"You're staying," Robert told her. "Go find Joffrey."
She was down the stairs before he'd finished the sentence, skirts gathered in both hands.
Arya watched her go. "She was behind that door the whole time."
"So were you," Eddard said.
Arya considered whether to deny this and decided against it. She looked at Robert. "Is Jon really at Iron Fist Keep?"
"He went with Henry," Robert said. "Iron Fist Keep is two days' ride south. You can visit whenever your father lets you off the leash."
Arya looked at Eddard with an expression that was already calculating.
"No," Eddard said.
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