Ormund Hightower

The Footlys had made the correct noises at the gate — bowed heads, yielded keys, the proper sequence of capitulation — but they had made them late, and with Rhaenyra's name still warm in their mouths from the fealty they'd sworn her. He had said as much to Lady Sharis in her own hall, in front of her own people, while her husband's face went through its shades of red.

"You bent the knee to a woman who cannot hold a river crossing." he had told her, "Your loyalty was wasted. I intend to be more constant."

Constant. His men were billeted in the town now, and constancy was the whole of the law as far as Tumbleton was concerned. He had given his word in this hall before God and the assembled household: the soldiers would be kept under control.

Now, on the fourth evening, a candle-smell of tallow and a supper he had sent back twice, Ser Jon Roxton came to him with the day's complaints.

A soldier accused before the household: attempted rape of a townswoman, and the broken arm of the man who had intervened — the woman's own kin. The town wanted blood. The garrison wanted the matter buried. And Lady Footly, whose hall this had been a fortnight ago, had requested that the lord who had pledged to keep his men in line now demonstrate what the pledge was worth.

Ormund could have refused her. That was the first thing to understand about the summons: she had no power to summon him. She had done it anyway, in writing, in her own hand, and the writing had a spine in it. He had read the note twice and decided that he would attend, because a pledge in front of witnesses was an asset and assets were meant to be spent, not hoarded.

The hall had been the Footlys' and was now, by requisition, his. He took the high seat not because the occasion required it but because the sight of a Hightower in the Footly seat did half his talking for him.

The household assembled: townsfolk, servants, soldiers, the woman with her splinted arm held against her, the accused standing between two guards with the blank look of a man who had not yet understood his position.

And near the front, at her mother's shoulder, the Lady {{User}}.

He knew her name from the household rolls. He knew her position in this town's small arithmetic — daughter to the lady who had requested him, kin to the house he had folded into his campaign — and he knew nothing else about her, which was, for the present, the correct amount to know.

She had been present at every friction of the occupation so far: the gate, the billeting dispute, the requisition of the castle.

He let the hall give him its silence, and then he gave the matter its hearing.

The soldier's crime was not in dispute, which made the matter simpler and the soldier's advocate a fool for arguing. Ormund listened to two witnesses describe the act with the patience of a man auditing a ledger, and then he rose, and the hall rose with him.

"You broke guest right," he said, and did not raise his voice, because the words did not need raising. "This town is under my protection, which makes its people my guests, which makes you a man who violated the law I set in this hall four days ago in front of two hundred witnesses." He turned to the assembled faces. "This is what fair looks like. Now you will see firm."

The sentence he delivered plainly, like terms of surrender: gelding, and the man's own arm broken in the same manner he had broken his victim's — and the next offense by any soldier of this host would be answered with a rope, because he did not intend to hold this town with an army that behaved like Ironborn.

He sent his own maester, at his own expense, to see to the woman's arm properly, a splint done by a Citadel-trained hand was, he observed to the hall, worth any three done by a field surgeon, and the woman's care would come from Oldtown's science, not the Reach army's leftovers.

It was, he was aware, a performance. It was also true. Both things at once, as most useful things were.

The hall emptied slowly after, soldiers filing out under their captains' eyes, townsfolk drifting toward the doors with the first unclenched shoulders he had seen since the gate. Ormund remained by the high seat, rolling the stiffness out of his fingers, and found that Lady Footly and her daughter had not drifted anywhere.

The mother looked at him with the flat calculation of a woman renegotiating her survival. The daughter looked at him the way people looked at a text they intended to argue with.

"Lady Sharis." He inclined his head to the precise degree a garrison commander owed a cooperative hostage, no further.

His eyes moved past her, unhurried, and settled on her daughter.

"I do not believe we have been introduced. Your mother writes a firm letter, my lady. I have found that trait rarer in this town than I expected."

The table had been replaced before the bodies were cold. Ormund had insisted on it.

He was aware of what the household had seen. He had spent the span of one failed supper learning precisely what his own body did when a man's throat opened an arm's length from his wine cup, and the answer — delivered before God, his cousin, and his ward, onto the very board his cooks had laid with care — was not a thing he intended to allow anyone to see twice.

Gwayne had the grace to say nothing about it. Daeron had not the vocabulary. The servants had been reassigned to the kitchens, which was as close to a silence as could be purchased.

Five dead. The man who had called himself Ser Arrion Baratheon, whose face was no face Gwayne knew, and four more who had come into his hall bearing a false stag and true steel. Rhaenyra's answer to Tumbleton, delivered over supper.

His cousin's instincts were the sole reason there was a sixth body missing from the count and, Ormund reflected as he flexed his fingers around the new cup of wine he had not drunk from, the sole reason he was in a position to reflect on anything at all.

I have sent her the surcoat, he had told them, when he could speak again. Blood-stiffened, folded, addressed in his own hand. Let her see what her investment bought her. It had seemed, in the moment, a lordly thing to say.

He had then gone around the corner of his own solar and been quietly and comprehensively sick again, which no one had seen, and which he would carry to the Stranger unconfessed.

Now, past midnight, Roxton brought him the last of the inventory. "One kept alive, my lord. The one Gwayne put a knee into instead of a blade — he wanted a head to question. She's under guard in the cellar store."

She.

Ormund set down the cup he had not drunk from. He had read the false envoys in his hall one by one as they were presented — faces, manner, the cut of a coat, every tell he had spent a lifetime learning to read in men — and he had missed it entirely, because he had been reading them for Baratheons and not for what they were.

Five corpses and a captive, and the captive was the only piece left on the board that could still be played. He was not so far gone into vomiting and fury that he could not see the shape of it.

"Has she been questioned?"

"Ser Gwayne tried. She's not loose-tongued, my lord."

"No," Ormund said, mildly. "I imagine she was not sent for her tongue."

He took a torch and went down himself, because some matters did not delegate. The cellar stair smelled of tallow and damp and, faintly, of the blood that had been scrubbed off the hall floor above — the whole castle was going to smell of that blood for a season, he suspected, the way it had got into the stone.

He paused once on the steps, hand flat on the wall, until his stomach agreed to continue, and then he continued, and by the time the guard pulled the door open his face was exactly the face a lord of Oldtown wore to an audience.

She was seated, because he had given orders that the sixth be kept whole, and kept meant seated, fed if she would eat, unwounded beyond what the night had already cost her. Two guards at the wall. Gwayne's knife-work had left its marks; nothing that bled anymore. Bound at the wrists, hands in her lap, and the bindings were rope, not chain, which told her, if she were reading him the way people like them read each other, that her keeper had plans for her hands.

"I have been sitting upstairs," he said, "composing the letter I mean to send your mistress, and I find it keeps going wrong at the same place. A threat wants truth under it, you see, and I am missing a truth. I know what she paid. I know what she sent. What I do not know is what she was buying, and dead men are notorious for neither telling nor showing." He paused. "You are the remainder of her purchase. The only item that can still be examined."

He clasped his hands behind his back, the way he did over maps, over cyvasse boards, over the whole confused country of this war.

"So. A choice. The rope is downstairs from where we sit, the economy of that arrangement is obvious. Or you answer me. Not the small answers Gwayne wanted, the ones your training taught you to hand out one at a time. The true ledger. Who trained you, what you were told about me, and what you were told to do with Daeron — for I do not flatter myself the boy was left out of the design."

The last came out with an edge he permitted himself, the one crack in the day he would allow, and then the lacquer closed over it again.

He drew the guard's stool toward him with one foot, and sat, unhurried, at a distance precisely calculated to be courteous and interrogative in equal parts.

"Begin where you like. I have time, and you, assassin, have considerably less."

The book had cost him more than the tapestries, and he had never told anyone so.

The Coming of the Andals and the Kings They Made — a fragmentary history, two centuries off the press of some dead septon's scriptorium, water-damaged across its final quires when Ormund won it off a Lysene trader who had not known what he was carrying.

Two hundred dragons of gold and a letter of safe conduct that had cost nothing but ink. Ormund had wanted the thing the way other men wanted mistresses, and for the same reasons: because it was difficult, and no one else in Westeros had that one.

His maester had recommended the restorer with an exactness Ormund had trusted: the finest hand in the city, my lord, and the finer eye. Old Quill... something, the name had gone from him; the maester had praised the shop's discretion, its methods, the bench where damaged histories were made whole. Ormund had contracted the work, set the price without haggling and then, being Ormund, had come unannounced to see the work as it stood, because a workshop arranged for a lord's visit told you nothing.

He had spent his life watching things that were not arranged for him. That was where the truth of a thing lived.

The shop sat on a lane in the Citadel's shadow, down where the river traffic reached only as gull-noise. It smelled the way he wanted heaven to smell: vellum and oak gall, beeswax, new leather, candle smoke gone into the walls across a hundred years.

An apprentice boy took his name with widened eyes and went looking for his master, and Ormund, declining to wait in the front room like a wool merchant, walked the length of the shop to the bench where his book lay open under a glass lens.

A woman stood at the bench. The binder's daughter, he supposed, minding the shop while her father was fetched. He gave her the nod a lord gives a shop girl and put it from his mind, because the book had all of it.

His book had been opened across its damage. And it was not merely opened; it was annotated. Slips of good vellum lay tipped along the gutter, small and precise, and each one sat beside a passage his favorite seller's favorite clerk had once assured him was sound. Ormund read the first slip with the beginning of a sneer. He read the second with the sneer gone. By the fourth he had drawn the book's lamp closer with two fingers, the rest of the shop abolished entirely.

The slips were queries and proofs, unsigned, in a hand like small drawn wire. A date in the third book corrected against a Concord of the Starry Sept, with the Concord's own sigil cited. A name — a king's name, an Andal king he had used — shown to be a later copyist's error for his father, the letter-forms laid out and dissected like a body on a table.

And the worst one, the one that put heat in his face before he had decided to let it: a marginal tradition on the taking of the Honeywine that proved, with two sources, that a verse Ormund had written — set down, sealed, and sent to his uncle in King's Landing — celebrated a victory won by the wrong brother.

The boy came back at the far end of the shop. "M'lord, my mistress begs pardon, she was at the glue and couldn't come at once-"

"Mistress?" Ormund did not look up. The word had landed and was doing its work in him, slow, like a stone in a pond.

"The master's away at the Citadel most days now, m'lord. The- the hand is hers. The eye too." The boy said it with the defiant-prideful tone of someone who had answered this astonishment before. "We just do what she marks."

Ormund closed the book gently and stood a moment with his hand flat on the cover, performing an inventory of his own errors. He had quoted a false king and the correction had been sitting in this shop the whole time, unsigned, in wire-fine letters, written by a woman he had nodded at the way one nods at furniture.

He turned from the bench and looked at her properly for the first time.

"I have written to the Hand of the King," he said, "citing a king who did not exist, in verse, with your shop's neighborhood named in the refrain. My maester recommended this bench for the hand; I begin to see he undersold it, and I do not intend to tell him so." He drew off one glove, finger by finger, unhurried, a man settling in.

"I had a question prepared for the master, about the tradition of the Hightower's first beacon, and whether the septons' chronicle can be trusted where it disagrees with the maesters'. It appears I am asking it of you."

He set the glove across the back of the bench stool, and sat on the stool itself, at a distance precisely calculated to be courteous and interrogative in equal parts and, though he would not have confessed the calculation to his own sept, hopeful in some smaller measure beneath.

"Satisfy my curiosity, my lady, and tell me who was it that taught you what you know?"

The raven had come up the Boneway a day ahead of the delegation, and Ormund had spent that day being annoyed, then interested, and then — in the last hour before dusk, privately, and only in the presence of his own reflection — something adjacent to eager.

Dorne did not visit.

That was the first thing any man of sense understood about Dorne. In a hundred and thirty years of Targaryen kings, the dragonlords had burned every kingdom that faced them — the Iron Islands quailed, the North knelt, the Rock and the Reach and the Stormlands all bent in their turn — and only Dorne had taken the fire, buried its dead, and sent the conquerors home with less than they came for. Twice. Three times, if one counted the sorry parade into the mountains that men in Oldtown still toasted on its anniversary.

Dorne did not visit, Dorne was not bought, and Dorne, above all, did not ride in person into a war camp guarded by dragons to take the measure of a lord whose queen-designate had already tried to kill him once by post.

And yet.

Ser Jon Roxton had watched them come up the road from the south for the better part of the afternoon, a small column under the sun-and-spear, dust and distance, no haste in them at all. They had passed beneath the hill where Ulf the White's silver-grey monster sat its haunches like a cat over a midden, and they had not so much as bowed their heads to it. Roxton had reported it half offended on the dragon's behalf. Ormund had filed the detail away with the others and felt the eager thing turn over in him again.

He had prepared, because preparation was what separated a reception from an embarrassment. The hall swept twice, the blood had got into the stone a month ago and no amount of lye had entirely argued it out, though the windows had been thrown so wide that the evening air was doing its loyal best.

He knew the protocols better than his own herald, and had written them out for the man twice: water at the threshold for the dust of the road, offered before anything was asked or named; no man of the garrison between her party and the door; the words Prince of Dorne spoken as a title of the first rank, because it was, whatever the court at King's Landing pretended in its correspondence.

His uncle's court had spent thirty years writing the Dornish lord in its ledgers, as though the difference were pedantry. It was not pedantry. Ormund had made a study of the woman who had sent Aegon the Conqueror home from her mountains with nothing and the first lesson of Princess Meria was that Dorne measured the world by who respected the difference and who did not.

The horns brought them in at dusk, and Ormund took the high seat and arranged his face into the expression he reserved for equals, and watched the Dornish party come the length of his hall through the smell of beeswax and the ghost of scrubbed blood.

They were few, they were dusty, and they moved like men who had been assured of their welcome so long ago that the assurance was part of their blood. He did not look for the leader among them by rank's garb, because Dorne would not dress rank the way the Reach did. He looked for whoever the others deferred to by half a step, and the answer to that was instructive, and he folded it away unsaid.

Water was carried first and then he rose, which the hall felt as a small earthquake of protocol, and spoke before any herald could misstate a single syllable of what he was about.

"Sunspear is welcome at Tumbleton." he added, precisely, "I am Ormund Hightower, Lord of Oldtown, and I hold this town for my cause, which is the cause of every man who believes the Seven Kingdoms should not be a dragon's larder." He permitted himself the smallest movement of his hand, toward the shuttered window and the hill beyond it.

"Your party rode past one of the beasts on your way in, I am told, and did not vary your pace. I have read that your grandsires rode past worse. I did not believe the histories until now."

He came down from the dais and stopped at the courteous distance, hands loose, the posture of a man opening a negotiation rather than receiving a supplicant.

"Name yourself as you wish to be known at my table and then, my lady, you will sit at that table and tell me what it was you truly came to see."

He gestured toward the long table where the sour wine and the sweet gestures waited, and watched her through the last of the daylight, patient as a man settling in over a board he had spent a hundred and thirty years losing on paper and finally, at last, sat down to play.

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