POV- Randyll Tarly
The woman rode few yards ahead of him, and Randyll Tarly still had not decided what to make of her. She sat her horse better than most, not the way the noble ladies of Westeros sat theirs, all sidesaddle grace and careful hands, but square in the seat with her weight low and her sword arm loose at her side, and every mile of this miserable march she had ridden that way without once complaining of the rain or the mud or the stares that had settled into her somewhere from the Riverrun to now around the Gods Eye. Ser Brienne of Tarth. Knighted by the King's own hand, or so she had told him, with flat tone and as a matter-of-fact, when he had asked her.
He could not believe that this thing happened, a woman knight, not in the part of him that had grown to manhood knowing what a knight was and was not, what the vows meant and who could swear them and be trusted to mean it. A woman built like a plow-horse, homely as a mule, wearing armor because some King found it amusing to indulge her, that was the story he had expected, and he had gone into this march prepared to be unsurprised by it.
Then he had watched her put three of his own household knights on their backs in a single morning of sparring outside the camp, one after another, without so much as loosening the ties of her jerkin, and unsurprised was no longer a thing he could honestly claim to be.
Ser Hyle Hunt, had come at her first with a longsword and the easy confidence of a man twice fought in real battle, and she had put him down inside a dozen strokes that reminded Randyll, uncomfortably, of lack of better knights in his fold. Two more had gone after him with much the same result, and the last of the three had walked away from it rubbing his jaw and saying nothing at all, which from a man of his temperament was as loud an admission as Randyll had ever heard him make.
"You keep watching her," Mathias Rowan said, riding up on Randyll's off side with the loose attention of surroundings. "I begin to wonder if Lady Melessa ought to worry."
"I watch how she rides and fight. There's a difference, if your eyes are good enough to see it." Randyll snarled back, his friend had been making jokes and having fun since the win against the Starks and the Lannisters.
"My eyes are good enough to see you've stopped calling her an insult to the oath of the knight, which is more than I expected of you moons back." Mathias's smile had a needling edge to it, the kind Randyll had learned to tolerate over decades of campaigning beside the man, mostly because Mathias Rowan was rarely wrong about anything that mattered and never let a man forget it when he was right.
Randyll did not answer that directly, because there was no answer to it that did not require admitting something he was not yet ready to admit out loud, not even to a man he trusted as far as he trusted any lord living. He looked instead toward the middle of the column, where two men rode with their wrists bound in iron and a rope run between their saddles and the mounted guard flanking them close on either side.
Jaime Lannister sat his horse one-armed now, the stump of him wrapped thick in linen gone brown at the edges, his golden hair lank and unwashed and his famous face gone the color of tallow. He did not speak, in the days of marching within sight of the man, Randyll had not once heard him speak, which was its own kind of unsettling, coming from a man whose tongue had once been nearly as celebrated as his sword.
Black Walder Frey rode beside him, and where the Kingslayer had gone silent, Walder Frey had gone the other way entirely, muttering to himself in a low, constant undertone that put Randyll in annoyance, the man that would not stop his noise no matter how far it was carried from the fire. He had heard the man once, close enough to make out the words, cursing his great-grandfather's name and all of his family with as much venom as he spared for anyone else's, as though the old man's decision to turn cloak had been some personal betrayal visited on Walder alone rather than a scheme they had all profited from together, until the profit ran out.
"They'll hang the Frey, or burn if the King takes matter in his hand." Mathias said, following the line of Randyll's gaze. "No lord in the Seven Kingdoms will stand for aught else, not after that field. A man may turn his cloak once in an honest war and be forgiven it by someone, somewhere. He does not get to slaughter men who marched at his own shoulder that same morning and call it strategy."
"And the Kingslayer?" He asked, their own action though were far from better but they had chosen a man with dragon to back his strength not like choosing Lions or Wolf with nothing to back themselves up with and dreams to become King.
"That," Mathias said, "I expect is a question for the King, and no one else."
The King was nowhere in sight, and had not been for the better part of a se'nnight, which was a fact Randyll had turned over more than once in the long silences of this march. Aemon Targaryen had ridden north from the Trident within moments of Jaime Lannister's surrender, north and further north still, toward the Wall he had said with Meleys and no word left behind him beyond an order that the column should proceed to Harrenhal without waiting on his return.
But he had seen the King's face in the moment before he rode, and there had been something in it that Randyll did not care to name even in the privacy of his own thoughts. Not fear, he did not think the boy who had burned two hosts and a mountain fortress of Vale in the same turning of the moon knew fear the way lesser men knew it. Something closer to dread, the stillness who already suspected a bad news and was only waiting to have it confirmed.
"Stark does not look well," Mathias said in low voice, drawing Randyll back out of his own thoughts. "Nor the Tully boy, for that matter. Look at them."
Randyll looked. Some way behind the Frey and the Kingslayer, unbound, unchained, riding under no guard closer than any other lord in that long column, Eddard Stark sat his horse like a man carrying a weight no saddle had been built to bear. He had not spoken above a dozen words to anyone since the Trident, by every account Randyll had gathered, and his face had the grey, hollowed look of a man who had stopped sleeping.
Beside him rode the boy the lords of North and Riverland still, by courtesy and old habit, called the King in the North, though Randyll suspected that title would not survive whatever waited for them all at Harrenhal. Robb Stark rode without his crown. He had left it, so the story went, in the mud of the field where he surrendered it, and no one had thought to fetch it back for him since.
"Stark lost his daughter and Robb his sister," Randyll said, and found the words came out plain than he had meant them to. "And the Hoster Tully lost his brother. Whatever else that field cost either of them, I expect that is the cost that keeps them from sleeping."
"You do not sound sorry for it."
"I am not in the habit of grieving for a girl who tried to poison her own brother's and cousin's meal to become a queen." Randyll had heard the tale from four separate mouths since the Eyrie fell, each telling it a little differently and every one of them agreeing on the basic of it, guest bread eaten, guest salt shared, and poison slipped into the meal meant for the King and her brothers. "A woman does that and finds herself paid back in kind, I call that the debt collected, not a tragedy."
"You'd have made a poor septon, Randyll my friend." Mathias said and he was holding his laugh, he could see that from the man's expression.
"I have never once pretended otherwise."
Brienne had said nothing through the whole of this exchange, which Randyll had noted before and noted again now, filing it away with the rest of what he was slowly learning about her. She rode with her jaw set and her eyes on the road, and when she did speak at last, her voice came out lower than he expected, roughened at the ends.
"She offered bread to her guests, and then put poison in a meal meant to kill the man who was her kin." Brienne's hands had drawn tight enough on the reins. "And it was not the King's meal alone, by what's told. Her own brothers was meant to drink from it. Her own brother. That is not some small, desperate wickedness, my lord. That is guest right broken and she marked herself for the grave in the same breath, and I have never once heard of a worse thing done by a highborn hand in all my life."
"You sound astonished by it," Randyll said, when he had found something to say, because in days riding beside her he had marked her for a woman slow to temper and slower still to show it, and this was neither.
"I am astonished by it." Brienne's voice did not rise, but it did not need to. "I have learnt of scared oaths and rights since before I could properly hold a sword, my lord, and I do not understand how a woman raised gentle, with a septa at her elbow and every courtesy a highborn girl could ask for, comes to think there is honor left over in her for poison. Guest right is broken easily enough by desperate men in a desperate hour. She had no such excuse for it. And kin-slaying besides, however a woman comes at it, is no desperation. It is a rot. I have no charity left over for what the wolves did to root it out."
Randyll said nothing to that beyond a short, considering silence, because he had expected, from a woman built the way she was and sworn the way she has, some quieter mercy spent on another woman's death, and had gotten instead something harder than his own judgment on the matter had managed to be, though he smiled inwardly at the knights high honor.
They rode a while after that without further talk of Sansa Stark, which suited Randyll well enough, because there was a colder thought sitting under the first one that he had not said aloud to either of his companions and did not intend to. A king who let direwolves loose upon the daughter of a lord who had just yielded his sword to him, guilty or not of every crime laid at her door, was a king teaching every other lord in this column precisely how far his mercy extended and precisely where it stopped. Randyll had spent years learning to read the men he served under before he decided how far to trust them. He was certain this one would go higher than any.
"There," Mathias said, some hours on, lifting his chin toward the horizon where the land had begun, at last, to rise. "I'd know that ruin anywhere. We fought a summer tourney here before."
Randyll followed his gaze, and felt something in his own chest go tight at the sight of it, the way it always did when a man looked on something built for purposes larger than the men who now made use of it.
Harrenhal rose out of the flat riverland plains. Five towers, and no two of them the same height, and the dragonfire from three hundred years ago had run down their stone like wax down a candle and hardened there for all the centuries since, leaving the whole vast pile looking more like a candle than like something that had once been a castle. Even from this distance, even half-blind with a day's ride still behind his eyes, Randyll could feel the vastness of the place pressing against him, and could understand, in some wordless part of himself, why every household that had ever held it had come, sooner or later, to a bad end.
The banners came into view before the gate did. House Darry's blazon, a black plowman on brown, thin ranks of it flying from what looked to be a hastily repaired section of the outer wall, and beside it, the flock of ravens on scarlet surrounding a dead weirwood of House Blackwood, both already encamped in good order along the approach.
And beyond them, drawn up in ranks so precise they might have been carved from the same stone as the castle behind them, stood Unsullied that Randyll had never seen.
"Seven save us," Mathias muttered, and did not finish the thought.
It was then that a party broke off from the gate ahead and came riding down to meet the column, and Randyll's breath caught, because there among them, mounted easy and unhurried on a horse too fine for a soldier's purse, rode the King himself.
He had returned from the Wall, then, and returned before them, which meant he had ridden harder and further in less time than any sane commander would have asked of men and horses both. He looked no worse for it that Randyll could see from this distance, white hair loose beneath a plain steel circlet, that red gaze finding the column and sweeping down its length with the unhurried thoroughness taking a full accounting before he spoke a single word. Ser Barristan Selmy rode at his right hand, and Lord Adrian Celtigar at his left, and something in the easy, settled way the three of them sat their horses together told Randyll more about the coming of King's court after the war is over than any of the rumor could have told him.
"Lord Randyll Tarly." The King's voice carried without effort, pitched to reach the column and no further, a trick Randyll recognized because he had spent years learning to do it himself on a hundred drill fields. "Lord Mathias Rowan, Ser Baelor Hightower, Ser Brienne of Tarth. Come with us, if you would."
Randyll felt the eyes of the column shift toward the four of them, and felt, beneath the plain courtesy of the words, exactly what they meant. A small council took shape in moments like this one, in a handful of names spoken aloud before witnesses, in who was called forward and who was left to ride on with the rest.
Mathias, ever the man to ask the question Randyll would have let pass unspoken, put his horse forward half a length. "And the prisoners, Your Grace? The lords of the North and the Riverlands, and the two in chains besides. What's to be done with them?"
"You may leave them with us." The voice that answered was not the King's. An officer of the Unsullied had come forward at some unseen signal, spear grounded, his Common Tongue coming in accent. "We will see them settled within the walls, my lord. Housed, and fed, and watched. No harm will come to any lord who offers none in turn."
Randyll looked to the King without quite meaning to, some old habit of seeking confirmation from the highest power in an unfamiliar room, and the King gave him a single unhurried nod, the kind a man gave when he meant it to be trusted and knew his own reputation would carry the weight of it. That was answer enough.
The column split there, at the base of Harrenhal's outer wall, the greater part of it turned aside under Unsullied escort toward whatever quarter of the castle had been given over to housing lords who had, until a few days past, been the King's enemies. Randyll watched Eddard Stark ride past without lifting his eyes from the road, and watched Robb Stark beside him do much the same, and felt, despite everything he had said to Mathias not two hours before, something that was almost pity move through him.
The four of them who had been called rode on through the gate itself, and into a different section of Harrenhal than the one Randyll had expected from the ruin of its outer walls.
Banners lined the inner road on both sides, more of them than he had troubled to count, and he found his eye caught first by the seahorse of House Velaryon, silver on sea green, and then by the sun-and-spear of House Martell beside it, orange and gold both, and further on that the crowned stag black on a golden field of Baratheon. Past those, smaller banners he knew by reputation more than sight, the sword-and-falling-star of House Dayne, the towers and towers of lesser Dornish houses whose names he could not have sworn to on the spot but whose presence here, so far from their own red sands, told him more than any of it needed to about how completely the game had turned since the War in Stormland.
Dorne had not marched for this Aegon, by every account that had reached him. Dorne had marched here instead, and that fact alone was worth more, Randyll suspected, than every sword in the column behind him.
Beside him, he became aware, gradually, that Brienne had gone rigid in her saddle, her big hands tight enough on the reins. He opened his mouth to ask what troubled her, some blunt question about whether the ride had worn on her more than she cared to admit, and the King spoke before he could give the question voice, without turning his head, as though he had felt the change in her.
"You needn't worry, Ser Brienne. Your father is here, and in good health. You may go to him first, if you wish it, before any of this."
The color that came up in her face then was not the color of a woman ashamed, but something near enough to it that Randyll had to work to keep the surprise from his own expression. Brienne of Tarth, who had put three of his household knights in the mud without breaking a sweat, sat there red to the roots of her pale yellow hair like a maiden caught out in some small, foolish hope she had not meant anyone else to see.
"I would see him later, Your Grace," she said, low, and did not look at any of them as she said it. "There will be time enough, once the council's business is done."
The King said nothing further on the matter, though Randyll thought he caught, for the briefest of moments, something almost gentle pass across the young face, gone again before he could be certain he had seen it at all.
They rode on in a silence that felt, to Randyll, less awkward than considering, each of them turning over some private accounting of what waited ahead. The castle proper rose before them at last, and here the scars of dragonfire ran deepest, whole sections of wall gone strange. Whatever else could be said of Black Harren, the man had built it to be remembered, and dragonfire notwithstanding, he had managed it.
They dismounted in an outer yard already thick with grooms and squires and the controlled chaos of a great household receiving guests it had not fully prepared to house, and were led on foot the rest of the way, through a hall wide enough to seat five hundred at table and dim enough, even at midday, that torches burned in brackets along its length. Unsullied stood at intervals along the walls, unmoving, and Randyll found himself measuring the distance between one and the next out of habit, before he caught himself doing it and made himself stop.
The solar they were brought to at last was smaller than the hall by a wide measure, though no less well guarded, two Unsullied posted either side of the door and more within, spears grounded, faces hidden behind the helm that gave back nothing of the men beneath it.
Prince Doran Martell sat nearest the hearth in a wheeled chair, his gout-swollen feet wrapped and resting on a cushioned stool, his heavy-lidded eyes moving over the four of them with, unhurried attention of a man who had spent a lifetime learning that most battles were won before anyone drew a sword. Beside him, leaning against the mantel with the loose, dangerous grace, a man who could not quite make himself sit still in any room for long, stood a leaner, darker version of the same blood, a thin mustache and thinner smile and eyes that had already, in the space of a single glance, priced every man in the doorway and found something amusing in it. The Red Viper, Randyll thought, and felt the old caution any sane man felt in a room with Oberyn Martell in it.
Past them, in a seat sat an old man Randyll had heard of his whole life and never once expected to see beyond the walls of Oldtown, watching the room with eyes that missed nothing despite their age. Lord Leyton Hightower did not leave Oldtown. That fact had been so settled a truth of the realm for so long that Randyll had to look twice to be certain his own eyes were not deceiving him.
Near the table's end, a stouter, steadier man sat with his hands folded before him and the silver seahorse of his house stitched plain across the breast of a sea-green doublet. Lord Monford Velaryon, Randyll had heard, had been among the very first lords of Westeros to bend the knee to this King, after him. That told Randyll plainly enough which of the lords present had earned the King's trust across months.
And there, apart from the rest, near a window that let in what thin grey light the day still offered, stood Stannis Baratheon, grim and joyless and standing very straight.
And then Randyll's breath caught for the second time that hour, and this time he did not bother hiding it for a woman unlike any he had set eyes on in years of living, stood near King's chair by the table''s head.
She was not young, not truly, though something in the smoothness of her skin argued otherwise at first glance, and her beauty had a quality to it. Her eyes were what held him longest. One dark blue and the other bright green and they seemed to catch and hold whatever light touched it, and the two together looked out at him with an attention that felt, absurdly, like being weighed by something.
"My lords." The King had crossed to stand near the head of the table while Randyll's attention had been elsewhere, and now he gestured, unhurried, toward the empty seats still waiting. "Please, sit, so that we may begin the first council."
Randyll Tarly took his seat, and found his hands, steady through years of war, were not entirely steady now.
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