Chapter 7: Part VII
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Disclaimer: I own nothing, just borrowing for a while.
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"All Westeros is divided into seven parts, but I united them with roads, bridges, canals and in the hearts of men"
Joffrey Augustus – 356 AL
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The Red Keep - King's Landing – 298 AL
Ever since he had been appointed to the Small Council as Master of Coin, Lord Petyr Baelish had made sure to always be the first to arrive for meetings and also be the last to leave. His industriousness had been noted by several other council members over the years, most recently by Lord Varys only minutes earlier during a typically barbed conversation between them in the throne room, but when he, Varys and Lord Renly had reached the council chamber they found Prince Joffrey already there scanning through some paperwork. "Ah, Lord Baelish" the boy greeted him, "if you have a few moments after the meeting can we discuss the accounting ledgers?" he requested. "I think you might need to dismiss some of your clerks."
"Have you uncovered some irregularities?" Varys asked sweetly, trying not to smirk at the look of discomfort which had momentarily flashed across Littlefinger's face.
"I'd prefer to give those concerned the benefit of the doubt and assume the errors I've found are down to incompetence rather than corruption, but yes" the heir to the throne confirmed.
Baelish somehow managed not to grimace. Allowing the whelp access to the records had seemed safe enough, they were deliberately made so convoluted as to deter anyone from ever trying to decipher them, but once again the rumours were being confirmed that the prince had been hiding a great intellect under a veil of apathy, shiftlessness and a life spent sadistically pulling the wings off flies for a lack of anything better to do. "If you show me what you think you've found I'll look into it personally" he promised, wondering which of his staff would be best to throw to the wolves, if only for the crime of doing what he told them.
Thinking of wolves Lord Stark arrived next, just ahead of Grand Maester Pycelle who himself barely made it into the chamber before the King.
"Bloody hell, are you still coming to these?" King Robert asked his son, surprised at finding him there. "When I said you could attend these blasted meetings I expected you to turn up once or twice then go back to playing with crossbows."
"Prince Joffrey has not failed to attend a single Small Council meeting since you granted him permission to do so Your Grace" Varys informed the King. "He has proven both attentive and astute" the Master of Whisperers added in commendation.
"You're wasting your bloody youth" King Robert told the boy flatly, "nobody ever said 'I wished I'd spent more time in meetings' on their death-bed" he advised his son.
"No, but I'll bet a few kings would have lived longer if they did" Lord Stark observed. Northern bluntness at its best.
King Robert snorted. "I pay you to handle the small stuff for me" he reminded the Hand, "but I'm still king enough to deal with the important matter like today's" he continued. "The whore is pregnant" he stated coldly.
"Whore?" Octavian asked, looking to the king quizzically.
"Daenerys Targaryen" Robert Baratheon explained. "Now we've got to deal with her" he growled.
Ned Stark already knew where this was going. Robert had talked of assassinating the girl previously when he visited Winterfell and that was before she was carrying the offspring of the most powerful Khal of the Dothraki. "You're speaking of murdering a child" he pointed out, dismayed by the notion.
"I warned you this would happen, back in the North" Robert reminded him. "I warned you but you didn't care to hear, well hear it now" he said. "I want them dead" he continued darkly, "mother and child both and that fool Viserys as well, is that plain enough for you?" he asked rhetorically. "I want them both dead" he ordered.
Stark kept his voice even. "You'll dishonour yourself forever if you do this" he cautioned.
"Honour?" Robert exclaimed, voice rising in volume. "I've got seven kingdoms to rule!" he declared. "One King, Seven Kingdoms. Do you think honour keeps them in line?" he asked. "Do you think its honour that's keeping the peace?" he continued. "It's fear" he stated. "Fear and blood."
"Then we're no better than the mad king" Stark replied, trying to get his friend to see sense.
Robert glared at him. "Careful Ned" he warned, "Careful now."
"You want to assassinate a girl because The Spider heard a rumour?" Stark queried with a doubtful tone, maintaining his calm despite Roberts building rage and nodding towards Varys.
"No rumour My Lord" Varys defended himself and his sources. "The princess is with child" he insisted.
"Based on whose information" Stark wanted to know.
"Ser Jorah Mormont" Varys told him. "He is serving as advisor to the Targaryens."
"Mormont!" Stark replied dismissively. "You bring us the whispers of a traitor half a world away and call it fact?" he asked, smirking slightly.
"Jorah Mormont's a slaver not a traitor" Baelish pointed out. "Small difference I know to an honourable man" making what what was on the surface a complement to Stark's character somehow seem like a rebuke instead.
"He broke the law, betrayed his family, fled our land" Stark responded. "We commit murder on the word of this man?" he asked dismissively.
"And if he's right?" King Robert asked. "If she has a son?" he continued. "A Targaryen at the head of a Dothraki Army. What then?"
Stark dismissed the threat. "The Narrow Sea still runs between us" he reminded the Small Council. "I'll fear the Dothraki the day they teach their horses to run on water."
Octavian frowned. "Forgive me Lord Stark but the Narrow Sea is by definition 'narrow' is it not?" he asked rhetorically. "Moreover its Eastern shore is lined with towns and cities that hold great fleets of ships" he noted before adopting a thoughtful look. "In the time of myth and legend the Children of the Forest broke the Arm of Dorne to try and keep your own ancestors, the First Men, out of Westeros but they came nonetheless by ship and seized the land for themselves didn't they?" he began, Stark reluctantly having to nod in agreement. "Later the Andals arrived from Essos too, eventually wresting control of everything south of the neck from the First Men" Octavian continued, glad he had made himself so familiar with local history. "More recently still the Rhoyar people fleeing the Valyrian Freehold arrived on this continent and conquered Dorne" he carried on, "Sixty years ago Daemon III Blackfyre led an army across the Narrow Sea to invade Westeros during the Fourth Blackfyre Rebellion and more recently still, a mere generation ago during the War of the Ninepenny Kings, the fear of yet another invasion from Essos resulted in a Westerosi army being sent to the Stepstone Islands to secure them and curtail the threat" he pointed out. "Surely on the basis of all these precedents we are right to fear a possibility you so easily dismiss?" he suggested.
"See, even my son barely old enough to shave grasps the danger better than you" Robert interjected, surprised that the boy had put it so well too. "My own grandfather fell in battle on the Stepstones, died in my father's arms, I'll not allow another invasion across the Narrow Sea when my family gave their blood to stop the last one" he vowed.
"Even if they came we'd smash them" Stark responded, less certain in his tone than earlier however.
"We can field only a fraction of their mounted strength, and a hundred thousand light cavalry bowmen would run rings around our infantry" Octavian told him, personally recalling what the Parthians had done at the Battle of Charrhae to the Legions under Crassus. Those poor Legionaries shot down by arrows had been far more disciplined and better trained than the peasant levies of Westeros too, the latter would break and run much more easily.
Ned Stark frowned. "They don't even have siege engines, what could they do against our walls?"
"Nothing, but they can ride around pillaging the countryside and burning crops until the people inside those walls go hungry and start to think putting a fucking Targaryen back on the throne sounds like a good idea if it'll fill their bellies" King Robert replied sarcastically.
"They wouldn't even have to cause as much damage as they potentially could in order to bring down the Kingdoms" Octavian noted. "Food is going to be scarce and harvests small anyway for the next few years Lord Stark" he pointed out. "Winter is Coming" he added meaningfully.
Octavian leaned forward in his chair, fingers meshed on the table in front of him. "All we really know of the Dothraki is what we hear from the City-States of Essos" he said. The ferocity and military prowess of the barbarian horsemen might therefore be greatly exaggerated, but it's a fact that those City-States have walls around them as good as anything we do, if not better, and they still choose to buy the Dothraki off with tribute rather than fight them for the most part" he pointed out. "Another thing we know for certain is that Viserys is actually there with the Dothraki, he's seen the army of Khal Drogo up close and chose to cement an alliance with him by marrying his sister to the man" he said. "If a man looking for an army to conquer Westeros with marries his own flesh-and-blood to a man that has an army, you've got to assume he thinks it's the right army for the job after seeing them."
Stark was yet unconvinced. "Viserys is a fool" he responded. "You said so yourself only minutes ago" he reminded the king.
"He might not be Aegon the Conqueror reborn, hair colour or no, but the stupid fucker can probably still count" Robert replied with a snort.
Maester Pycelle nodded. "I bear this girl no ill-will" he said, "but should the Dothraki invade how many innocents would die?" he asked. "How many towns will burn? Is it not wiser, kinder even that she should die now so that tens of thousands might live?" he asked.
"Hundreds of thousands at least would be a more accurate estimate given how low our food reserves are in winter anyway" Octavian corrected him, "even without a horde of unwashed barbarians laying waste to the countryside" he added, not that personal hygiene in Westeros was much to boast about either as far as he was concerned. They didn't bathe nearly enough here, even the nobility.
Varys decided to take a more conciliatory approach. "I understand your misgivings My Lord, truly I do" he addressed The Hand. "It is a terrible thing we must consider, a vile thing, yet we who presume to rule must sometimes do vile things for the good of the realm."
"For the good of the people" Octavian said earnestly. So earnestly that Varys wondered in shock if the boy actually might mean it.
Stark looked the King in the eyes. "I've followed you into war, twice" he stated, "without doubts, without second thoughts, but this path you're on now is too hard to follow" he told him.
"You're my Hand" Robert replied. "You do my bidding or I'll find another Hand that will" he told his oldest friend firmly.
"Then good luck to him" Stark replied, unmoved.
Octavian coughed, he didn't like where this was going. As a man who wasn't incompetent, self-serving and corrupt Eddard Stark was too rare a thing in this city to be lost so easily. "Before you make a final decision Lord Stark please ask yourself this question" he requested, "if you had to choose between your honour and the lives of your children which would you choose?"
The Warden of the North turned away from Robert and glowered at the boy. "Are you threatening my children?" he snarled.
Octavian blinked. "No of course not" he responded quickly. "It was a hypothetical question" he explained. "What I was going to say was that if you were prepared to sacrifice your honour for the sake of your children would it be truly honourable to be prepared to let the children of another man die for it?" he asked. "Countless children of countless men in this case."
"No" Stark replied, "I mean yes…" he subsequently said before closing his mouth and really thinking about it.
"Bloody hell boy, I think you've got him!" King Robert exclaimed, clapping Octavian on the back hard enough for it to hurt.
Octavian ignored the blow although he detested being touched like that even in good humour. "No, he got himself" he disagreed with the king. "I just helped him work it through faster" he continued then sighed. "Lord Stark, a man of honour has to wrestle with his conscience on occasion, whether he wins or loses the bout matters less than the fact he has to fight in the first place" he continued. "The mere existence of the fight within him is proof of a good man, a man that remains at heart a good man even when forced to do a bad thing for a greater good."
"Once you start to compromise your honour you're lost" Stark countered, although the damn boy had certainly made him think.
"Only this joust" Octavian replied, "the next time your honour tilts your lance at a problem that can be expediently solved by an unpleasant deed who knows what champion will out?" he asked rhetorically before turning to the king. "Father, in the light of your long years of friendship with Lord Stark can I ask you grant him some time to weigh his conscience against the possible outcome of us not doing this deed in his mind?" he requested sincerely.
Robert Baratheon thought about it. "Fine, but you've only got until tomorrow" he told his old friend. It wasn't like he had anyone else he trusted to wear the Hand's brooch of office in any case, he just wanted Ned to see the big picture on this particular problem.
"If it helps, imagine what misdeeds your replacement might be willing to countenance" Octavian suggested to Ned Stark. "There's no telling what us devious, unscrupulous southerners might get up to unrestricted by ethics without you here to keep us in line" he joked.
Stark rubbed his neck. "That's the first bloody thing you've said I agree with completely" he replied, not expecting to get any sleep that night.
Notes:
Note from the author:
Octavian will know of the Battle of Charrae and perhaps overrate the power of a horse-archer army as a result. Westeros had been successfully invaded from Essos by sea several times though, first by the First Men, then the Andals then the Rhoynar so using the Narrow Sea as an argument that Westeros had nothing to fear isn't as strong as Stark might like to think. Indeed more recently in living memory another invasion took place during the Fourth Blackfyre Rebellion and subsequent fear of yet another one occuring led to Westeros intervening during the War of the Ninepenny Kings.
Eddard Stark did sacrifice his honour to save his children and he knows he loves them enough to do so. He's not enough of a hypocrite for an argument using that as an approach not to at least make him think.