POV- Tyrion Lannister
No one dared to breathe loud. It was the strangest thing Tyrion had ever felt in a room full of people, with several hundred souls packed shoulder to shoulder under Harrenhal's blackened rafters and not one of them so much as shifting his weight for fear of being the sound that broke it. The torches along the walls had burned low enough by now that the smoke of them hung visible in the air above the crowd. Aegon stood on the dais with his mouth shut and his color gone, and Tyrion understood, with the same clarity that had carried him through every disaster his family had ever handed him, that he had just axed himself on the foot by questioning the Faith, the faith who had troubled the Kings more than any.
Somewhere behind him a chair creaked. Somewhere above him the vast hollow of the hall carried a single cough into an echo that seemed to last far too long. Tyrion looked once at his father's face and found nothing there at all, which frightened him rather more than fury would have.
Someone had to move first, and it was not going to be a Targaryen.
"Prince Doran." Tyrion heard his own voice before he had entirely decided to use it, pitched to carry across the hall. "Are you truly going to choose the so-called son of Lyanna Stark over your own sister's child?"
It was not a good question. He knew that even as he asked it, knew the past of the late Princess with the Lannisters but he had to do something before Aegon destroy's everything with his rashness.
Doran Martell's eyes narrowed, and for the first time since Tyrion had watched the man wheeled into this hall, something cruel moved behind that heavy-lidded patient eyes of the man.
"The same sister," Doran said, and his voice had lost the mild, unhurried softness it had carried through the whole procession of the long morning, "whom your father ordered killed the moment the sack of that city put her within his reach. The same sister who was cleaved open by the man who raped her, a man many times her size, a sister whose son's head was smashed open by throwing him on the wall while her daughter was run through beneath the bed she had hidden in, and whose own body was used first and broken after, stabbed half a hundred times." His heavy breath fell that sounded in the hall after his words, and Tyrion felt many turning their gaze towards him. "Do not speak to me of my sister's child, Lord Lannister, as though you have some claim upon her memory that I do not."
Tyrion felt the blood leave his own face.
"My sister would not have chosen one child over another," Doran went on, quieter now. "But even were this boy truly hers, he is not of Dorne, whatever name his mother gave him at birth. A man who brings a foreign army to burn his own mother's home is no Dornishman, however red the blood in his veins. King Aemon is as much of Dorne as he is of the North. A child born beneath Dornish sun, in a tower where his mother died giving him life and where three of his father's own Kingsguard died defending that birth, and the only man in this hall who has already spent his own sword arm avenging my sister and her son and daughter."
A murmur went through the northern lords at that, and Tyrion, three heartbeats behind the rest of the hall as he so often was in matters that did not touch whores or wine, understood only when he saw his father's jaw tighten and the Kevan's words in whisper to calm his brother. The Trident, Gregor Clegane's head torn from his shoulders on that riverbank, the boy who would become a king doing it with a Valyrian blade and his own bare, furious hands, years before any man in this hall had known the boy was anything but a bastard. Tyrion looked at Doran's face and understood that the old prince had known that fact for a very long while, and had been saving it, until the exact moment it would do the most damage.
"Then with votes it shall be decided," Tyrion said, because there was nothing else left in his hand worth playing, and a vote was at least a thing House Lannister still had numbers enough to balance, many lords would likely want a favor or two from the Lannisters.
"No, Lord Lannister." Doran's soft voice cut across him before he had finished the sentence. "Before any vote is cast, you will show this council proof that the boy your father backs is truly born of Prince Rhaegar and Princess Elia, and not merely a face that you have brought to fool the Lord and Ladies and Knight of Seven Kingdoms."
The hall's attention swung toward Aegon like Arbor Gold in the market for free, and Tyrion watched the boy's throat bob under harsh gaze of many.
"He rides a dragon." Daenerys's voice came sharp and hot across the silence. "That is not the proof of some hedge knight's bastard, Prince Doran. Dragons do not suffer false blood upon their backs."
Somewhere beyond Harrenhal's walls, close enough that Tyrion felt it in the soles of his own boots before he heard it, a roar tore through the air and rattled the ancient glass in the high windows above them, and Daenerys flinched despite herself, one hand flying briefly to her knight and then she caught herself and stood straight again.
"As do I, princess." Aemon had not raised his voice at all. "But it was your own Lannister lord who asked for proof, and a dragon is not a parchment, nor a ledger any man can open before this council and read aloud. It seems now that it is you who refuses to offer what was asked of him."
Daenerys's mouth opened, and closed, and Tyrion watched something flicker across that famous violet gaze that looked, for one unguarded instant, less like a queen's fury and more like a woman realizing, mid-sentence, that the ground beneath her had already shifted.
Aegon said nothing at all. Tyrion had watched the boy through the whole of that morning's earlier exchanges find some sharp, rehearsed answer for nearly everything thrown at him, but he had no answer now, none, and the silence stretching out around him had begun to look less like royal composure. Beside him, Jon Connington's face had gone pale as if walking toward a headsman's block of his own choosing.
It was Jon Connington who filled the silence, and he did it by stepping out from behind his king's shoulder, which Tyrion had not once, in the whole of that long procession, seen the man do.
"I would like to offer proof of my own, if this council will hear it." His voice carried the flat, careful evenness. Beside him Aegon's head turned, and Tyrion saw the boy's face do something complicated and fast, hope and confusion both.
"Prince Aegon was given into my keeping as a small child, by Magister Illyrio Mopatis and by Lord Varys, who told me he had been smuggled out of King's Landing before the sack. I was never given a reason why his mother and his sister were left behind while he alone was carried to safety, and in all the years I raised him, I never once received an answer for it that satisfied me." Connington did not look at Aegon while he said it. "For fifteen years I searched that boy's face for his father's. I knew Prince Rhaegar. I loved him, more than I have ever said aloud to any man living, and I have spent every year since his death hunting for some echo of him in the child I was given to raise in his name. I never found it." He turned, finally, and looked instead at Aemon, at the white hair and the terrible red eyes and the long, solemn Stark cast beneath them that Tyrion himself had noticed and thought nothing of, three separate times that morning, before this exact instant. "I see it standing here. His coloring, his bearing. The way he holds his own silence, which was the very thing Rhaegar did best of any man I ever knew. There is your true king, my lords. Aemon Targaryen, First of His Name, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men."
Daenerys had gone entirely white, whiter even than she had been when the dragon's roar had shaken her a moment before, and Tyrion watched her reach for Aegon's arm before she had seemingly decided to do it, the gesture of a woman who had crossed a world to stand beside this boy and could not, even now, quite make herself let go of him first. Her lips moved without sound, some denial she did not finish speaking, and her eyes went to Jon Connington with a look that was equal parts fury and something closer to pleading, as though she still believed a man might unsay a thing simply because a queen wished hard enough for it.
"Jon." Aegon's voice cracked on the single syllable, not with anger yet, not entirely, but some raw hurt underneath it. "Don't. Don't you dare do this to me."
Connington did not stop. Perhaps he could not have, by then. "I am sorry, Your Grace. I have carried this doubt behind my teeth for years, out of love for a dead man and fear of what the truth would cost the living, and I will not carry it one moment longer in front of a hall that has a right to hear it."
Whatever was left of Aegon's composure went out of him all at once, and what replaced it was not grief at all.
"How dare you, Connington." The words came out low and then rose, cracking upward at the end into something closer to a boy's voice than a king's. "I would not have this bastard sit a throne my father died for, not while I still have a sword in my hand to say otherwise."
Steel rang free of its scabbard, bright and sudden in the torchlight, and for one entire heartbeat Tyrion did not believe what his own eyes were telling him, that the boy had actually drawn a blade inside a hall of a thousand witnesses gathered under guest right by the new gods and the old gods both. Jon Connington's face went the color of ash. Aegon closed the distance on the dais in three long strides, sword already rising, and Tyrion, rooted uselessly where he stood, had time only to think that he was about to watch a king die in front of him and thought this would be for the best. Aemon's death would save Aegon his crown and he would get his Lannisport in the end.
Aemon did not move. It was a woman, almost the size of Sandor Clegane who moved, faster than Tyrion had ever seen a person that size move, her own great length of steel clearing its scabbard with a sound like tearing cloth and meeting Aegon's downswing with a ringing crack that Tyrion felt in his small deformed bones. She turned the strike aside and stepped into the boy's guard in the same motion, driving her shoulder into his and sending him stumbling two full steps backward, sword arm jarred wide, before he even understood he had been stopped.
She was already closing the distance again rather than giving any of it back, her jaw set, her eyes fixed on Aegon like a woman who meant to finish what her first stroke had only begun, and Tyrion thought for one dizzy instant that this hall was about to become a battlefield in truth. Then Aemon's hand settled, unhurried, on her shoulder.
"It's all right, Ser Brienne." His voice carried to every corner of the silent hall without once rising to meet it. He stepped forward himself, past the woman, until he stood close enough to Aegon that Tyrion could see the boy's chest heaving beneath his black silk, and around them seven white cloaks came alive at once, seven blades clearing their scabbards in a single ragged, ugly chorus of steel. Aemon looked at none of them.
"You drew a naked blade in a hall where a Great Council sits in session, Prince Aegon." His tone had not changed at all, from the calmness he had carried since arriving. "You have broken guest right older than any of the laws and oaths, in front of every lord and lady of the Seven Kingdoms gathered to witness it. You will leave this hall now, on your own feet, or by the old gods and the new, I promise you will not leave with your head on your neck."
Aegon's chest rose and fell, rose and fell, the sword still trembling faintly in his grip, and for one long moment Tyrion thought the boy might simply be too far gone in his own fury to hear the sense in it. Then Daenerys was there, her hand closing over his sword arm, murmuring something too low for the hall to catch, and slowly, as if every inch of it cost him something, Aegon let the blade drop to point at the floor rather than at a king's throat.
Doran Martell's chair creaked as the Unsullied wheeled him forward.
"This Great Council is finished." He said it plainly. "I want every lord of every great house, lordly house, masterly house, and knightly house of the Seven Kingdoms to choose, here and now, in this hall, which king they means to serve. Those who choose Aegon Targaryen may leave with him this hour. Those who choose King Aemon will remain exactly where they are."
Aegon stood rigid on the dais, Daenerys's hand still at his arm, her own glare fixed somewhere between fury and calculation and said while gnashing her teeth. "The Iron throne is my birthright."
"No it is not Princess Daenerys, Prince Aegon." His red eyes did not leave Aegon's face. "But it is war now, the way of words ended when Aegon drew his sword. I will have the Iron Throne, whether by right of birth as the truer claim, or by conquest if that is what you leave me with. You should leave this hall while you are still permitted to leave it walking."
Aegon said nothing more. He turned, Daenerys turning with him, her spine straight enough to look like pride rather than what Tyrion suspected it actually was, and the two of them walked the long carpet back the way they had come, seven white cloaks falling into step around them.
Jon Connington did not follow. He stood exactly where he had stood since he had first stepped out from behind his king's shoulder, and Tyrion watched Aegon look back at him once, halfway to the doors, a boy's look rather than a king's, asking some question neither of them seemed to have the words left to answer aloud. Connington did not move to close the distance, and after a long, unbearable moment Aegon turned his face forward again and let the doors carry him out without him.
The doors had not yet finished closing behind them when Tywin Lannister rose to his feet.
"House Lannister, and the Westerlands entire, stand behind King Aegon as the rightful ruler of the Seven Kingdoms." His voice carried the same iron-flat certainty it always carried, as though the past hours had cost him nothing at all to sit through, though Tyrion, who had spent years learning to read the smallest cracks in that granite, saw the muscle working once, hard, along his father's jaw before it stilled.
"Like you did with Joffrey Waters, my lord." Stannis Baratheon's voice cut through the hall from where he sat, grim and unmoving as he had been through the whole of the council, and Tyrion felt his stomach drop straight through the floor of that ancient hall. A ripple of low, shocked sound moved through the lords nearest enough to have heard it clearly, and Tyrion, glancing despite himself toward where Cersei sat white-faced among the Westerlands banners, understood that whatever truth lay behind those two words, it had just been spoken aloud in front of a thousand witnesses who would carry it out of this hall by nightfall regardless of whether any man here ever confirmed it further.
His father's eyes found Stannis across the width of the hall, and held there, and said nothing at all.
Tywin turned without another word and walked toward the doors, and the whole solid mass of crimson and gold around him rose and followed in his wake like iron filings dragged after a lodestone, Kevan at his shoulder, Cersei trailing pale and furious behind, Jaime absent from among them for lack of hand and his shame. His aunt Genna rose more slowly than the rest, and paused long enough at the end of her own bench to look back once toward the northern lords, toward where a Frey prisoner's fate had just become a great deal less certain than it had been before, before she gathered her skirts and followed her brother out without a word to anyone.
Tyrion did not rise. He sat very still in his chair and watched his own family walk out of a hall he had just spent the better part of the procession trying to keep them from losing entirely, and found he could not, for the life of him, decide whether he ought to follow them or not.
He stayed sitting. No one seemed to notice, or if they did, no one troubled to say so.
Mace Tyrell rose next, heavily, looking for one confused moment as though he expected his mother to rise with him. Olenna did not move at all, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes fixed forward with an expression Tyrion could not read at that distance and suspected he would not have enjoyed reading up close either. "Highgarden stands with Aegon," Mace announced, a shade too loud, the words of a man trying to convince the room of a thing he had not yet finished convincing himself of, and he walked out with perhaps half the green-and-gold banners that had entered that hall behind him that morning, the rest remaining seated.
It was Alannys Harlaw who did not rise at all, though half the Iron Islands men around her had already begun to shift uneasily in their seats, unsure which way their own lady meant to lead them.
"My son," she began, in her accented voice, which had carried so easily through the whole of that morning's earlier arguments, cracked now on the second word. "My daughter-"
"Raided and pillaged the North, my lady." Aemon's voice came down across hers before she could finish, not unkind exactly but final, that left no room for the sentence to continue in the direction she had meant it to go. "Your son and daughter led raiders through Stony Shore and the Fever River both. Their men struck the Night's Watch, and struck lordlings who had done them no harm beyond existing on land your husband coveted. They will receive what is due them."
"And what is that, Your Grace?" Alannys asked, and Tyrion, watching her, saw real fear there now, a mother's fear, and around her the northern lords' faces had gone hard and unforgiving. He knew whatever mercy this king had left in him tonight, it would not come cheaply to anyone carrying banner of kraken.
"Theon Greyjoy will lose his head. So will Lady Asha." Aemon's tone did not soften at all in the saying of it. "There will be no mercy shown that was not shown first to the smallfolk of Stony Shore and Fever River, who received none at all."
"Please." Alannys was on her feet now, and the word came out of her cracked and desperate in a way Tyrion had not thought. "Please, Your Grace. Not my daughter. Not her."
The hall had gone very quiet again, several hundred people who had spent the last hours watching King to be decided now watched, instead, a mother beg.
Aemon studied her a long moment, red eyes unhurried, and when he spoke again something in his voice had shifted, not warmth exactly, but a willingness Tyrion had not expected from the same man who had just promised a boy king he would not leave a hall alive.
"Very well. Not your daughter. We will discuss her fate at a later date, and not before this council." His gaze moved past her then, out across what remained of the hall, the northern lords and the river lords and the scattered houses of the realm. "There is much else still to discuss before that."
Alannys sank back into her seat slowly, one hand pressed flat against her own chest as though she meant to hold something inside it by force, and around her the Iron Islands men who had not yet decided which way to lean seemed, for the first time that morning, to settle.
"But first it's North we would discuss about." Aemon said and all of them flinched and Tyrion seeing the glare of direwolf understood that it was his time to leave.
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