The room was windowless, buried deep enough within the Red Keep's older foundations that no sound from above reached it at all, lit only by a pair of guttering candles that threw long, uneven shadows across the bare stone walls. Four maids huddled together near the room's center, pale and trembling, their eyes darting between the four knights who stood arrayed around them in a loose, silent circle.
Ser Robert Stone watched them a moment before stepping forward, close enough to be clearly seen in the candlelight, his hands held loosely open at his sides, a posture meant to reassure rather than threaten.
"No harm will come to any of you," he said, his voice pitched low, deliberately calm. "We only want information. Answer honestly, and you'll walk out of this room exactly as you walked in."
The maids exchanged frightened glances among themselves before the nearest of them, a thin, dark-haired girl barely past her tenth-and-sixth year, spoke in a trembling rush. "We'll tell you anything, ser, anything at all, only please—"
"Good." Robert let the single word settle a moment before continuing. "I want to know if any of you have noticed anything strange between Ser Jaime Lannister and Lady Cersei Lannister."
The maids stiffened as one, and the same dark-haired girl shook her head quickly, too quickly. "We've noticed nothing, ser, nothing at all, please, let us go, we don't know anything—"
"I mean," Robert said, pressing gently but deliberately, "if any of you have noticed them doing things siblings oughtn't do together. Especially a woman who might one day become queen of this realm."
He kept his own tone carefully neutral as he said it, though the implication beneath the words was plain enough, and he watched it land across all four faces at once. The color drained from each of them in turn, and before Robert could say another word, all four maids dropped to their knees upon the cold stone floor, voices rising together in a frantic, overlapping chorus of denial.
"We don't know anything, ser, please, we swear it—"
"Please, we've done nothing, we've seen nothing—"
"Don't hurt us, please, we beg you—"
Robert lowered himself to one knee as well, bringing himself level with them, and raised a hand toward the knights standing behind him, a small, deliberate gesture. The four men stepped back at once, putting several paces of distance between themselves and the kneeling maids, and Robert reached out, gently, to cup the chin of the nearest girl, tilting her tear-streaked face up toward his own.
"Your lives are not in danger," he said, quiet and steady. "We work for the King. We are trying to help him, nothing more. Tell me," he continued, softening his voice further, "has the King not done a great deal for the common people of this realm?"
The girl blinked, confusion briefly cutting through her terror. "You... you truly work for the King?"
"I do."
She hesitated, then nodded slowly. "He has, ser. The standing army. The sewers being mended. My own father works at the new distillery near the river, better coin than he's ever earned in his life." Something in her voice steadied, just slightly, as she spoke.
"Then you understand," Robert said, "that the King needs your help now. Any information you can offer would be greatly valued. And valued information is rewarded, in gold as much as gratitude."
The four maids exchanged glances again, different now, the raw terror of a moment before easing into something more uncertain, more considering. Slowly, one by one, their trembling quieted.
It was the dark-haired girl who spoke first. "I've seen them look at each other, ser. Gazes that linger too long. Longer than brother and sister ought to share, I always thought, though I never dared say so to anyone."
Another maid, older, nodded quickly beside her. "I've seen the same. More than once."
A third, quieter until now, added her own voice, hesitant. "I've seen them holding hands, ser. And once, embracing, in a corridor they must have believed empty. They let go quickly when they heard my footsteps."
The first two maids, emboldened now, began speaking over one another, listing instance after instance, glances exchanged across crowded halls, smiles that seemed to carry something warmer than courtesy, moments that, described individually, amounted to little more than the ordinary closeness of siblings raised together, however each maid insisted, in her own words, that something more had always sat beneath it.
Robert listened to all of it without interruption, his expression carefully neutral, though inwardly he recognized plainly enough that none of what he was hearing amounted to anything he could carry back to the King as proof of what Damon suspected. Lingering glances. Held hands. A single embrace in an empty corridor. Such things, laid before a Small Council or a court of lords, would convince no one of anything beyond ordinary sibling affection, however suggestively the maids themselves chose to frame it.
It was the fourth maid, the one who had said nothing at all through the entire exchange, who finally drew Robert's full attention. She looked up at him, her eyes sharp despite the fear still plainly written across the rest of her face, and asked again, quietly, "You truly work for the King?"
Something in the particular steadiness of the question, the way she held his gaze rather than looking away from it, told Robert plainly enough that this woman knew something the other three did not.
He turned fully toward her and signaled the knights with a small, quick gesture. "Take the others to the room prepared for them," he said. "Gently."
The knights stepped forward and helped the three maids to their feet, guiding them, not unkindly, toward the door, their relieved, hurried footsteps fading as the heavy door swung shut behind them, leaving Robert alone in the candlelight with the fourth maid.
"I do work for the King," he said again, quiet and direct. "And I believe you have something to tell me the others don't."
The maid was silent a long moment, her hands twisting together in her lap, before she finally began to speak, her voice low and careful, as though even now, alone in this hidden room, she feared the words carrying further than they should.
"I know not the full extent of what passes between them," she said. "But I have seen Ser Jaime enter Lady Cersei's chambers every other night or so, late, when I make my final rounds before retiring myself. And my friend, one of the other maids, has told me more than once that she's seen him leaving that same room in the mornings, his clothes disheveled, his hair in disarray. The mornings she described to me always matched the nights I had seen him go in. I never told her what I'd witnessed myself. I let her believe, when she asked me once what I thought of it, that he must simply be returning from early morning sword practice." She paused, swallowing. "But my own curiosity got the better of me, eventually. One night I waited near the door after I saw him enter, and I listened." Her voice dropped further still. "I heard what sounded like moaning, ser. More than once."
Robert's eyes sharpened immediately, every trace of his earlier gentle patience giving way to focused, careful attention. "When was this? The last time you noticed him entering her chambers, and the night you listened at the door?"
The maid thought a moment, counting silently. "Six moons past, ser. That was both the last time I noticed it happening at all, and the night I finally listened. It hasn't happened since, not that I've seen."
Robert held her gaze a moment longer, weighing the answer, before he finally inclined his head. "You've done well. You'll be greatly rewarded for this, I promise you." He hesitated, then added, "You'll need to remain somewhere safe and out of sight until the King returns from the Iron Islands. He'll want to hear this from you directly, in his own presence. Once he has, your reward will be considerable."
The maid nodded, some of the fear finally draining from her expression, replaced by cautious relief, and Robert called the last knight back into the room to lead her gently away.
Alone in the candlelit chamber, Robert allowed himself a long, tired breath.
This made the fourth batch of maids he and his men had brought quietly into these hidden rooms over the past several weeks, each group questioned, each group secured afterward regardless of what they'd revealed, simply because there was no way to release them again without risking that one loose word, one careless mention over supper or in some crowded hallway, might unravel the entire quiet effort before the King ever returned to hear what had been found. It was a costly, cumbersome way to gather information, and Robert knew it, knew too that it could not continue much longer. Four batches of maids quietly vanished from their usual duties; four batches of replacements brought in to fill the gaps left behind them had already begun drawing exactly the kind of curious attention he and the King both had hoped to avoid. Servants noticed when familiar faces disappeared. Servants talked, however quietly, however carefully, and quiet, careful talk had a way of growing louder the longer it went unanswered.
He would need to stop, for now. Whatever else remained to be learned within the Red Keep's own walls, it would have to wait, or be gathered more carefully, more slowly, than the method he'd been using these past weeks allowed.
And for all of it, all four batches, all the fear and careful questioning and gold promised in the King's name, he had gathered only a single account worth truly reporting, a single night, six months gone now, of sounds overheard through a closed door. It was something. It was not, Robert knew, nearly enough on its own to prove what the King suspected, let alone enough to shape whatever the King intended to do with such proof once it existed.
He was increasingly certain, turning the matter over as he climbed the narrow stairs back toward the Red Keep's upper halls, that whatever had passed between Damon and Cersei these past two years, however warmly the court had come to assume the King's intentions toward her, marriage was no longer among them. That much, Robert suspected, the King had likely already decided before ever giving this order.
But deciding against a bride was one matter. Making certain the blame for that decision landed squarely upon House Lannister's own shoulders, rather than appearing as some arbitrary royal change of heart, required considerably more than a single overheard sound from six months past.
He could only hope, as he made his way back toward his own chambers through the quiet, sleeping corridors of the Red Keep, that the men he'd placed at Casterly Rock were having better fortune than he had.