They brought Jaime Lannister up the wooden steps of the execution platform in the grey light of morning, and he climbed them without being pushed. The chains at his wrists rang with every step. He had stopped looking at the crowd somewhere in the yard below. There was nothing in those thousand faces he had not already seen, and he found, to his faint surprise, that he did not wish to spend his last moments reading hatred.
Below the platform, Tyrion stood between two Vale guards, his small hands curled into fists at his sides. His mouth had gone dry. Every argument he had ever won with was spent, and he could do nothing but watch.
Michel Arryn rose from the high seat. For a moment he looked at the man kneeling on the boards, the golden hair, the straight back, the pride that would not bend even now. Then he turned to the man at his right.
"Robb." His voice carried no triumph. "Go. Take your father's revenge."
Robb stood slowly. His hands, which had shaken the night before in his mother's arms, were steady now, as though all the shaking had been drained from him in the dark and only the cold remained. He walked to the platform and climbed the steps, his boots loud on the wood, and the yard fell so quiet that Michel could hear a banner snapping against its pole somewhere along the wall.
Robb stopped before the kneeling man. The Kingslayer lifted his eyes.
"Anything to say, Kingslayer?"
Jaime looked at him a long moment. He looked at the boy's face, at the red rims of his eyes and the jaw clenched so hard the muscles stood out, and something passed behind his own green eyes. It was not fear, and it was not quite regret. Then it was gone. He said nothing. He lowered his gaze to the boards and waited.
Robb drew his sword. The blade caught the pale light as it rose. He held it there for the space of one breath, and Michel saw his cousin's lips move without sound, a name or a prayer. Then the steel came down in a single swift motion.
Jaime Lannister's head struck the platform and rolled. The golden hair fell across his face, and the body slumped slowly forward after it.
For a heartbeat the yard held its breath. Then the cheering broke, and it was enormous. Northern lords roared with fists raised and tears on their faces, Vale knights pounded their shields, and Riverlands men who had burned for months in their own ruined fields shouted themselves hoarse. The sound rolled up the castle walls and out across the river.
Robb did not hear it. He stood with the blade hanging at his side and stared at the red spreading slowly across the wood. He felt no joy and no relief, only a hollow, aching quiet where he had expected something to fill. He wiped the steel clean with a hand that did not tremble and walked back down the steps without looking at anyone.
Tyrion had not cheered. He had not moved at all. His eyes were fixed on the headless thing on the platform that had been his brother, the brother who had once carried him on his shoulders through the halls of Casterly Rock when no one else would look at him without flinching. His mouth worked silently, and then the tears came, hot and unashamed, running down his scarred face and falling onto the stones. A sound escaped him, small and broken, the cry of a man who had spent his life armored in wit and found that it protected him from nothing.
The guards beside him looked away. Even in that yard, even among men who had wanted this, not one of them could hold his gaze.
Michel watched the dwarf weep, and said nothing. He felt the weight of what he had ordered settle onto his shoulders, and he let it settle. A lord who gave such orders could not afford to pretend they cost him nothing. He turned back toward the lords still shouting in the yard, and when he spoke it was low and level.
"Come. We eat." He glanced toward the walls where the war still waited beyond them. "And then we decide what comes next."
---
**King's Landing**
Kevan Lannister rode through the gates of King's Landing at the head of five thousand Lannister soldiers, their crimson cloaks dark with the dust of a hard road. He had come south as the new Hand, burdened with a brother's orders and a family's fears, and he had counted the leagues the whole way and felt every one.
The news met him before he reached the Red Keep. It came from a stable boy at the gate, then a guard, then a serving woman crossing the inner yard, each telling it with the same strange, frightened lowering of the voice. Lord Stark was dead. Executed on the steps of the Sept of Baelor, by the king's own command.
Kevan stopped walking.
It struck him like lightning. For a moment the world seemed to narrow to a single bright, terrible point, and he stood in the middle of the yard with the sounds of the castle falling away around him. *Dead.* The one hostage who might have held the North's fury at bay, the one piece on the board that could still buy time and terms and a way out of this war, thrown away like a spoiled cup of wine.
He did not remember climbing the stairs. He remembered only the great doors of the council chamber, and his own hand pushing them open harder than courtesy allowed.
Joffrey sat upon the Iron Throne with the stag crown on his golden hair, looking exactly as a boy looks who has finally been given everything he wanted. Cersei stood near him. Petyr Baelish was at the table's edge with his faint, unreadable smile, and Varys and Pycelle sat among the council. All of them turned toward the sound of the doors.
"What are you doing in King's Landing?" Joffrey said before Kevan could speak, lounging back against the throne's twisted iron. "I did not summon you."
Kevan ignored him. He looked instead at the council, and his voice came out low and hard, stripped of every courtesy. "Who gave the order to kill Eddard Stark?"
No one answered at once. Pycelle studied his hands. Varys' face was a mask of mild concern. It was Littlefinger who finally spoke, with a small, regretful inclination of his head, as though the matter were merely unfortunate.
"His Grace gave that order, Lord Kevan."
Kevan turned slowly toward the throne. The boy was smiling at him. It was the smile of a child who has broken a priceless thing and expects to be praised for the noise it made.
"Why?" The word came out quiet, and far more dangerous than any shout. "You knew what he was. The only hostage we held that mattered, the only lever we had against the North. Why would you do this?"
"I am the king." Joffrey sat straighter, his voice climbing toward its usual shrillness. "He was a traitor. He stood in front of the whole city and called me a bastard." His lip curled. "All traitors will die. That is what a king does."
For a long moment Kevan could not speak. He had spent his life in the shadow of his brother's iron discipline, and he had never once seen it fail so completely as in the child who now wore its blood on his crown. When at last he found his voice, it shook, though not from fear.
"Do you know what you've done?" He took a step forward, and the nearest Kingsguard shifted but did not move. "Do you have any idea? Jaime and Tyrion are both in Michel Arryn's hands."
The chamber went utterly still.
Cersei's face changed. The color drained from it in slow stages, and one hand rose unconsciously to her throat. "Jaime?" Her voice cracked on the name. "What do you mean, Jaime is in Arryn's hands? What is Father doing? What is he *doing*?"
"He's doing what he can." Kevan turned toward her, and the weariness in his face was suddenly older than the anger. "The North has marched south, Cersei. Twenty thousand northern swords have joined the Riverlands, and the Vale is with them. Together they're bringing near sixty thousand men to bear against us." He drew a breath that seemed to cost him. "Sixty thousand, and we held the one thing that might have made them hesitate. We held Eddard Stark."
He swung his gaze back to the boy on the throne, and the silence that followed was heavier than any shout.
"And you killed our last bargaining chip."