POV- Daenerys Targaryen
The place where her father was killed, she didn't like it one bit nor the killer living in it but she needed them. The pretender had gathered and conquered almost all of the realm and now all that remained were those that lived here.
Daenerys took note of the traitors who had rebelled against her family and of old allies who now sat in coalition with the traitors, watched the traitor wear crown that should have belonged to her family.
She sat now with her back straight against a chair too large for her and her hands folded on the table before her, and held her head high in the den of lions, she was the mother of dragons, and dragons don't fear lions and thorns.
Aegon sat at her side, one hand resting near hers on the table without quite touching it, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him through the inch of air between their fingers. Across from them sat, Lord Tywin Lannister with stillness that unsettled other men more than any show of temper ever could, and beside him, Lady Olenna Tyrell sat small and sharp-eyed in a chair heaped with cushions she had demanded the moment she entered the room, complaining about the hard surfaces against her bottom.
"You wished to speak of alliance, my lord," Daenerys began. "Let us speak of it honestly, then. You ask me to bind my house to yours through marriage and mutual oath, and I find I cannot do that without first speaking of what your house has done to mine."
Tywin's face did not so much as twitch at her words. "Your Grace is welcome to speak of anything she likes."
"Elia Martell was my brother's wife and my husband's mother, Rhaenys was my niece. She was three years old, my lord, and I am told she was found under her father's bed, and that whoever found her stabbed the princess half a hundred times." Daenerys kept her voice level, she wanted to leverage this situation to her benefit. "They were your bannermen, men of Westerland who did it. I have spent my whole life learning that House Targaryen ended by the blood spilled by Lannister hands, and now I am asked to sit at a table and call the man who calls himself my ally."
"It was not me who spilled that blood," Tywin said. "I sent men to end a war Aerys Targaryen's own madness had already lost for him, and I brought Robert Baratheon the peace he required to sit a throne the realm had already decided, by then, belonged to him rather than to your House. What Gregor Clegane and Amory Lorch did in that palace was not written into any order I gave, Your Grace, whatever songs the singers have chosen to make of it since." His emotionless green eyes did not leave hers. "I have never claimed to be a gentle man. I have never claimed my hands are clean. But I would ask you to remember that it was a Baratheon who sat easily on that same throne for more than a decade and sent number of assassins to finish what he, Stark and Lord Arryn started, and said Arryn and Stark served that Baratheon faithfully as his closest friend and his Hand both of them. Lord Jon Arryn for almost whole of Robert's reign and Stark then after Lord Arryn's death. Not to mention ambitions of Lord Stark who then proclaimed my grandson as a bastard to carve his path to throne. If you mean to hold every house in Westeros to the account you are holding mine to, Your Grace, you will find the ledger considerably longer than you expect."
Daenerys felt Aegon's hand come to rest, once Tywin finished, fully over hers as a kind of anchor but she did not look at him.
"That is a very tidy answer, my lord," she said.
"It is the true one." A ghost of wryness arrived at the corner of Tywin's mouth. "I have not called you here at this table to present my forgiveness, Your Grace. I came to offer my allegiance and throne to you against the pretender than threatens the peace of Westeros."
"So it took you a threat of dragon to come under the shadow of another one." Daenerys said in sharp barb to both of them.
It was Olenna who filled the silence that came after that, her voice dry, woman who had long ago stopped pretending patience was a virtue she possessed. "While Lord Tywin have gone long with his words, allow an old woman to offer you a rather simpler one, Your Grace. House Tyrell held Highgarden as stewards to House Gardener for a thousand years before your ancestor ever set a dragon down on this continent. When Aegon the Conqueror burned the last Gardener king on the Field of Fire, it was my husband's line he raised up in the ashes of it, not because we bent the knee out of fear alone, though I'll not pretend fear had no part in it, but because we understood, even then, what every clever house in this realm has understood since. The Seven Kingdoms bled when the Targaryen King forget who put them there as the Dance and Blackfyre Rebellion proved to the realm." She spread her wrinkled hands, a gesture of plain reasonableness. "We have kept faith with House Targaryen for three hundred years, Your Grace, through difficult kings and gentle ones both. I would remind you that the Tyrells sent its granddaughter to other side only when it seemed the dragons themselves were ash and legend."
"You backed a usurper," Daenerys said, though without much heat, because she found, against her own inclination, that she rather liked the old woman's bluntness.
"I backed the strongest roof over my grandchildren's heads until a truer one showed itself," Olenna said, entirely unbothered. "That is not treachery, Your Grace. That is simply how a house survives long enough to be useful to the King worth serving. Ask Lord Tywin how differently his own house has behaved, if you'd like an uglier version of the very same truth."
Aegon spoke for the first time then, his voice carrying a calm Daenerys suspected he had learned from watching Jon Connington manage a hundred rooms of hostile men across a decade of exile. "What is it you propose, then, Lady Olenna? Beyond the old loyalty that you have just proven to us."
"Blood, Your Grace. The only currency that has ever truly bound one great house to another." Olenna's eyes flicked, deliberate, to Daenerys's still-flat belly and away again, quick enough to be almost polite about it. "When the gods bless your marriage with a son, as I am certain they will in good time, let him be promised to my own great-granddaughter, Joffrey's own daughter by my granddaughter Margaery. Half Lannister blood and half Tyrell in the girl already, and if you add half dragon to it in the next generation, you will have bound every rich and poweful great house south of the Neck into a single line."
"A generous offer, Lady Olenna," Aegon said, before Daenerys could speak, his tone giving away nothing of what he actually thought of it. "And one I expect you'd have made whether we welcomed it or not, given how little it costs you to make it now and how much it may be worth to your line later."
"I am an old woman, Your Grace, not a fool. I make the offers that cost me nothing and might yet buy me everything. It is how my house has survived every king this realm has crowned since your own namesake burned his way onto that throne." Olenna's smile did not reach her eyes. "You may call it generous if it pleases you. I call it prudent but please understand that it's men of Tyrell and Lannister together with Reach and Westerland that stand with you then against men and Kingdoms of pretender."
Daenerys opened her mouth to answer, some sharp thing rising in her about being asked to barter a child not yet conceived for the political comfort of men who had murdered her family, but never got the chance to say it.
The roar came through the shuttered windows, a sound that took the breath out of the room before anyone in it had time to react properly, deep enough that Daenerys felt it in the soles of her feet through the stone floor before her ears had finished registering sound at all.
Viserion.
She was on her feet and at the window the very second, throwing the shutters wide with both hands, and the air that came in smelled of salt and gutter. Far above the towers of the Red Keep, cream and gold scales catching what little sun broke through the clouds, Viserion beat his wings in a long, climbing arc, away from the Dragonpit, away from her, flying inland of Westeros, and did not once look back toward the window where she stood.
"He has never flown from me unbidden," she said, to no one in to the room. "Not once, not since his birth."
Jorah had come to stand at her shoulder, quiet the way he always was in a room full of lords, though she had felt his eyes on her the whole of the meeting, patient and watchful and asking nothing in return. He leaned close enough now that his voice would not carry past the two of them.
"Your Grace. Whatever's called him, it seems suspicious. He should not have flown away from his mother without cause." His jaw was tight. "Let the council wait. Go to him."
She turned back to the table, and found Tywin watching her with an expression she could not fully read, something that might have been curiosity, more unsettlingly, have been calculation, a man cataloguing a fact he had not previously known.
"My lords, my lady," Daenerys said, and heard her own voice come out steadier than she felt. "We will finish this discussion another day. Forgive me."
She did not wait for their leave to go.
***
POV- Ser Jon Connington
He fell into step behind Aegon without needing to be asked, the way he had fallen behind him since the boy was six years old and small enough to carry on one arm through the back streets of a dozen Essosi cities, and neither of them said anything until they were well clear of the council chamber and the small crowd of guards.
"You mean to follow her to the Dragonpit," Jon said, when they'd cleared the outer yard.
"For now I wish to reach a certain tavern in Flea Bottom." Aegon's voice was pitched low in a whisper, the tone he used when he wanted no one to know anything. "Varys sent word an hour before the council began. He has news he did not dare to bring within a hundred feet of Tywin Lannister's ears."
Jon did not ask how the boy had received that word without Jon himself noticing it delivered. There were things about Aegon's education under Illyrio's roof that Jon had never fully approved of and had long since stopped trying to unlearn in him.
The tavern, when they reached it by way of two alleys Jon would not have found on his own in a hundred years of looking, was the kind of place that survived in cities like this one precisely because it looked like nothing worth remembering, low-beamed and smoke-stained, the sort of hole a man walked past a thousand times without his eyes ever quite settling on it. A serving girl who was not, Jon suspected within a heartbeat of seeing her move, actually a serving girl at all, led them through a curtained doorway into a back room where a very plump, bald man in very plain robes rose from a stool and folded himself, with more grace than his bulk had any right to possess, down onto one knee.
"Your Grace," Varys said. "Forgive an old spider his crooked knees. They serve you no less faithfully for the creak in them."
"Get up, Lord Varys." Aegon's voice had gone warmer than it had been moments ago, though Jon noted, because it was his business to notice such things, that the boy did not offer his hand to help the man rise. "What news is worth dragging a king through Flea Bottom to hear it?"
"Several pieces, Your Grace, and I fear none of them are the sort a man wants delivered while in attendance with Tywin in the Red Keep or any near of Baelish's whores in the better markets." Varys settled himself back onto the stool, hands folded into his sleeves. "Euron Greyjoy is dead, burned on a battlefield near Starfall, along with a Valyrian steel armor he seemed to believe would make him a god among men. It turned him ash instead."
Jon felt the small, cold satisfaction of that land behind his ribs and said nothing, because Euron Greyjoy had never been a man worth mourning, his presence was something he did not wanted near the Queen.
"Ser Gerold Dayne is dead as well," Varys went on, "at the same battle, by the same hand. And thousands of Golden Company swords which were sent with him into the Dornish land are scattered or dead. The Ironborn fleet that sailed with them fared no better."
Aegon went very still. "Dorne."
"Dorne, Your Grace." Varys's face carried nothing, only the careful, professional regret of a man delivering bad news well. "House Martell did not welcome Ser Gerold's arrival nor did Lord Adric Dayne. They called for aid against our own, and aid came, and it finished our men."
"He was meant to bring Dorne to us." Aegon's voice had lost its warmth entirely now, gone thin and tight, always right before the boy did something Jon then spent a fortnight managing the consequences of. "Dorne is my mother's house, Lord Varys. My uncle sits the Sun Spear and the Water Garden as we speak. Why would they kneel to the pretender and not me?"
"I have a belief, your Grace, that Prince Doran might have felt indebted after pretenders action to save Prince Oberyn. Ser Gerold and Euron made his own arrangements, and sold them to your queen's cause as though they were yours to begin with, and I fear the distinction was lost on House Martell in the moment when your army marched against a House of their own." Varys then continued looking at him and Aegon. "He wished to make himself the new Prince of Dorne with marriage to Princess Arianne, or her head on a spike if marriage proved unwilling. He used your name to gather men for his own ambition, and now your name wears the cost of it."
Jon watched the color drain slowly from Aegon's face. The kingdom of his dead mother had turned against him before he had ever set foot in it, and a man wearing his own banner had done the turning, though he had warned him against this at that moment. Golden Company was not held in better position amongst the lords of Westeros, no matter above the neck or below the Dornish marches or in between them.
"Tell me," Aegon said, very quietly, "everything"
Varys told it plainly, without embellishment, the way Jon had always known the man could when it suited him, an ambush from the mountain pass called Morne's Gap, archers on the high ground, a night march through terrain no sane commander would have risked, and at the heart of it a young man with white hair and red eyes who had killed Gerold Dayne in single combat before the whole of both hosts and then the scarlet red dragon that arrived and burned Euron Greyjoy to nothing at all.
"Aemon Targaryen," Varys said. "Son of Rhaegar and Lyanna Stark, or so he claims, and so, it seems, an increasing number of very Lords and Ladies of Westeros have come to believe. He holds the Vale in all but name, Stannis Baratheon has, as I believe sworn fealty to him, after the boy broke Renly's siege of Storm's End with three thousand men against fifteen and a Reach army that turned its own banners mid-battle rather than fight him. House Tarly, House Rowan, House Hightower and House Ashford, all of them fought under his banners that day, Your Grace, not the ones anyone expected them to be wearing."
"Hightower too." Jon spoke suddenly, remembering old Lord Commander of Kingsguard and then suddenly asked as if recalling something. "Ser Barristan Selmy. Where does the Bold stand in all this?"
Varys's face shifted, the smallest hesitation, a man deciding how much weight a piece of information deserved before he set it down. "Kneeling, Ser Jon Connington to Aemon. Has been for moons now, by my reckoning, and rode with him from Dragonstone to Vale and into the Riverlands not few days past."
The room did not change, the tavern did not grow colder, nothing in the physical fact of the world shifted at all, and yet Jon Connington felt the ground move beneath him regardless, careful certainty he had built his whole exile on top of shifting a fraction of an inch to one side.
Barristan Selmy would not kneel to pretender. Jon had known the man only a little, years ago, when they both served the Targaryens. He was close to Rhaegar while the Bold was Kingsguard and thus bound to the King, but he had known him well enough to know that much, the same way every knight in the Seven Kingdoms knew it. Barristan the Bold had ridden against the Blackfyre pretenders in his youth and cut down Maelys the Monstrous's himself on the Stepstones, had spent decades of his service protecting the crown against its enemies like the Darklyn, and had never once, in all that service, mistaken a false dragon for a true one.
"He is an old man who has knelt to whoever sat on the throne and offered him the cloak," Aegon said, too fast, before Jon had asked him anything at all. "Aerys, then Robert, then Joffrey, now this. He'll bend to whoever frightens him most. That is not proof of anything, Lord Varys, save that Selmy has always known which way the wind was blowing before other men felt it move."
It was not, he knew deep inside, it was an entirely foolish thing to say. It was also, Jon thought, watching the boy's jaw work after he'd said it, not an answer given by a man who believed it.
Jon looked at Aegon, standing pale and furious in the low light of that back room, the boy he had carried through Free Cities and taught to hold a sword and told, every single night for years, the same unbroken story of who he was and what blood ran in him.
He said nothing of it, not yet, because there was no room in a spymaster's back parlor to say a thing like that aloud, but he felt it there all the same, small and cold question, waiting for a quieter hour to be examined properly.
Varys was still speaking, something about Velaryon's sailing and Storms End emptying. Jon heard perhaps half of it. The rest of him was still standing in the wreck of a certainty he had carried, unquestioned, for years, wondering for the first time in all that time, whether the boy standing beside him in this room was truly the prince Jon had raised him to be, or something else entirely, dressed so carefully in that same shape by Illyrio Mopatis and Varys that even Jon himself had stopped being able to tell the similarity between this Aegon and the boy's father and his friend Rhaegar.
***
POV- Third Person
Maester Pycelle came into Tywin Lannister's solar at a pace that did not suit a man of his years, breathless, and found the Hand of the King seated at his desk with Tyrion across from him, a cup of wine untouched at his elbow.
"My lord." Pycelle's voice cracked on the word, whether from the running or from what he carried, it was hard to say. "A raven has come from Dragonstone. It bears the Targaryen sigil."
Tywin's face did not move at all. He set down the quill he had been holding with unhurried precision, and looked at the old maester for a long moment before he spoke. "Read it."
Tyrion had gone still in his chair, wine forgotten, his mismatched eyes fixed on Pycelle with an intensity that belied the lazy sprawl he'd affected a moment before.
Pycelle broke the seal with fingers that trembled only slightly, and read, his voice finding its steadiness only by the second line. "My lord Hand. King Aemon Targaryen, first of his name, calls a Great Council, to be held at Harrenhal before the turn of the next moon, that the lords of the Seven Kingdoms might gather and settle, the true succession of the Iron Throne. All great houses are summoned, that none may say after that the realm's peace was decided by fewer voices than it deserved."
The room held its silence a moment longer than silence generally lasted in that solar. "Well," Tyrion said, and there was no humor in it at all, "he does know his history."
Tywin said nothing for a long while, turning the words of the parchment over behind eyes that gave away nothing of the working, and when he finally spoke it was not to Pycelle or to his son but to the window, to the grey sky beyond it.
"The last Great Council settled a succession that whole realm had bled itself half to death arguing over, and every lord who attended it went home able to tell his grandchildren he had a voice in the choosing." A Great Council could not be ignored without cost, and could not be answered with swords without greater cost still, and the boy calling it understood the game better than anyone. "He does not mean to win this by dragonfire alone," Tywin said. "He means to win it by making every house in Westeros complicit in the choosing, so that no one who bends the knee after can call it conquest but peaceful coronation and it removes stain of war from his hands."
"That and he already had loyalty of many Kingdoms and their Paramounts." Tyrion commented on his father's word.
Tywin nodded at Tyrion's word and was already reaching for a fresh sheet of parchment. "Get me the maps of Harrenhal's approaches, Pycelle."
Far to the south, in the white towers of Oldtown, an old maester climbed the long spiral stair to Lord Leyton Hightower's chambers with the same message folded twice in his hand, and found the reclusive lord already standing at his window as though some part of him had known, before the raven ever arrived.
In the Water Gardens of Sunspear, where fountains still ran cool over sun-warmed stone despite everything the realm beyond Dorne's borders had lately done to disturb that peace, Prince Doran Martell read the same words twice through, his gouty hands steady on the parchment and he smiled bright upon finishing the letter.
The same black wings would reach every house in Westeros worth the name, from the Arbor's warm shores to the ice-locked halls in the North, and in a hundred solars and towers and gardens across the width of the realm.
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