Chapter 76: The Death of Robert
The message came at dawn.
Eddard had been at his desk in the Tower of the Hand, working through the morning's correspondence before the city fully woke, when Maester Luwin's replacement — a young man from the Citadel, still finding his feet in the Red Keep's rhythms — appeared in the doorway with the particular expression of someone delivering news they would prefer someone else to deliver.
He went immediately.
The King's bedchamber was quieter than Eddard expected.
He had been preparing himself for this room for months — building toward it in the way you build toward something you know is coming, bracing for the version of it that would be hardest. He had imagined it loud, somehow. Full of the noise that had always attended Robert — the servants, the laughter, the wine cups, the sheer physical presence of a man who had never learned to take up less space than he wanted.
The room was still. Morning light came through the curtains in long pale strips and fell across the bed, and in the bed was a man who bore the shape of Robert Baratheon but almost none of the substance.
The belly was gone. That was the first thing — the thing Eddard's eyes went to before he could redirect them, because the belly had been Robert's for so many years that its absence was like a missing wall. The face was sunken at the cheeks, yellow-tinged, the skin loose over bones that had grown prominent. His hands on the coverlet were the hands of someone much older than the man Eddard had known.
Pycelle stood near the window with his hands folded, doing the thing he did when he wanted to appear to be present without being involved.
Eddard crossed to the bed and sat in the chair beside it and took Robert's hand.
Robert's eyes opened.
"Ned." His voice had lost most of its volume, the way a fire loses heat when the wood runs out — the shape of it still recognizable, the force gone. "Took you long enough."
"I came as soon as the message arrived." Eddard kept his voice steady. He was doing the thing he had been doing for months — the deliberate work of treating Robert like Robert, not like a dying man, because Robert had never wanted to be treated like a dying man and Eddard saw no reason to stop honoring that now. "You look—"
"Don't." Robert's mouth moved in something that was trying to be his old smile. "Don't tell me I look fine, Ned. I know what I look like. I have a mirror and two eyes, and the mirror has been losing that argument for months."
Eddard said nothing.
"There." Robert tried to squeeze his hand and managed something. "That's better. Sit there and be honest with me. That's all I've ever wanted from you."
The morning light moved across the bed as the sun came up.
"Where's Joffrey?" Robert asked.
"At Iron Fist Keep still, I think. He went to Henry's wedding yesterday with his brother and sister." Eddard paused. "I've sent riders. He'll be back tonight."
"Tonight." Robert absorbed this. His expression shifted through something and came out the other side of it, quieter. "I'm not sure I'll last until tonight, Ned."
"Robert—"
"I coughed blood twice in the night. Pycelle gave me the Milk of the Poppy but it only goes so far." He turned his head slightly toward the window. "Just as well about Joffrey, maybe. The will's already signed and witnessed. Let him come back and find it done rather than — rather than watching it." He was quiet for a moment. "Give Henry my apologies. Bad luck, burying your king the morning after your wedding."
"You're not buried yet."
"Not yet." The ghost of the old laugh. "Not yet, Ned. But I can feel it coming the way you feel a storm coming — something in the air changes." He looked at Eddard directly. "I've been feeling it for weeks. I just kept not saying it because saying it makes it real."
Eddard held his hand and didn't say anything, because there was nothing to say and Robert had never needed him to fill silences, only to be present in them.
"Don't call the Queen," Robert said.
"Robert. She is your wife. The mother of your—"
"I know what she is." His voice had no heat in it — not anger, just the flat certainty of a man who has thought about something and reached a conclusion. "She'll come in here and perform grief at me and I'll have to spend the last hours I have watching a Lannister put on a show." He turned his head back toward Eddard. "When it's done, tell her. Not before."
Eddard pressed his lips together.
"The only thing I'm grateful to her for," Robert said, "is Joffrey, Myrcella, and Tommen. Three good children." Something moved through his face — genuine warmth, the uncomplicated kind that had always been easier for Robert than most people assumed. "None of them turned out like her, which I consider something close to a miracle. Joffrey watches out for the younger ones. Tommen and Myrcella — they're good-hearted. Patient. Kinder than they had any reason to be, given everything." He paused. "I wasn't the father I should have been. I know that. I showed up for the hunts and the feasts and left the rest to other people."
"They know you love them."
"Henry did more of the real work than I did," Robert said, without apparent bitterness — just the honesty of a man who has run out of reasons to be anything but honest. "Teaching Joffrey what he needed to know, keeping him close. I hunted. I drank. Henry educated my son." His jaw tightened slightly. "I should have done better."
"You did what you could."
"Don't." The old sharpness, brief and fading. "Don't say that. You're not a man who says that and means it." He looked at Eddard sidelong. "Stannis hates me because I gave him Dragonstone instead of Storm's End and never once explained why. He's been sitting on that island for twelve years nursing a grievance I could have headed off with one honest conversation." He stopped to breathe. "And Renly — Renly cares more for his clothes and his pleasures than he does for the family he's part of. Neither of them came. I'm dying and neither of my brothers came."
Eddard said nothing.
"Go on," Robert said. "Say it."
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were thinking it loud enough that I could hear it from here." Robert shifted against the pillows, wincing. "You think I should have given Dragonstone to Renly and Storm's End to Stannis."
"I think," Eddard said carefully, "that Stannis needed to understand why he was given what he was given. Dragonstone commands the bay. The fleet operates out of it. It's a strategic seat, not a punishment. If you'd told him that—"
"I was furious with him," Robert said. "He let the Targaryen children get away. And then he had the gall to press me about Storm's End while I was still angry about that." He exhaled slowly. "You're right. I handled it badly. I was too angry to explain and too proud to go back and fix it afterward." He was quiet for a moment. "When I'm gone — apologize to him for me. Tell him I should have said it plainly from the start."
"I will."
"Don't call me Your Majesty."
"I wasn't going to."
"Good." Robert's hand tightened briefly on Eddard's, the strength in it a shadow of what it had been. "Ned. You damned stubborn, righteous, impossible man." The old tone, the affectionate exasperation of fifty years. "I should have let you have the throne. You'd have made a better king than I ever was."
"I would have made a terrible king," Eddard said. "I never wanted it and I would have been miserable in it and everyone around me would have known it."
"That's true," Robert said. "But you'd have been a just one. There's a difference." He looked at the ceiling. "How do you think it'll be written? Fifty years from now, when some maester is writing the history — what does it say about Robert Baratheon?"
Eddard looked at him.
"Honestly," Robert said. "I'm dying. Be honest with me."
"It will say," Eddard said, after a moment, "that he won a war that most men thought couldn't be won. That he was the finest warrior of his generation and a commander who knew how to turn a battle when it mattered." He paused. "It will also say that he was a worse king than he was a soldier, and that he knew it, and that the knowing of it was something he carried badly."
Robert was quiet.
"It will say," Eddard continued, "that he was a good friend. That the man who had his loyalty, had it entirely, without reservation, for his whole life." He held Robert's gaze. "That is not nothing, Robert. That is not a small thing to have said of you."
Robert looked at him for a long moment with the eyes of a man who has been given something unexpected.
"The two best things I ever did," Robert said finally, "were keeping Joffrey away from Cersei long enough for Henry to make something of him — and dragging you to King's Landing, even though you hated me for it." He tried the smile again, and this time it came closer to the real one. "You'll look after them. Joffrey, Tommen, Myrcella. You'll look after them the way you looked after everything — without being asked, without being thanked, because it's right."
"I'll look after them," Eddard said. "I promise you."
Robert held his gaze for a long moment — the way a man looks at something he is trying to keep, knowing he can't keep it.
"Pycelle," he said, raising his voice as much as he could manage.
Pycelle materialized from near the window with the practiced readiness of a man who had been waiting for this.
"Your Majesty."
"My king is in pain," Robert said, "and he would like to die without hurting. Milk of the Poppy — a full cup. Don't be stingy about it."
Pycelle prepared the cup with the efficiency that appeared when ceremony was no longer required. He brought it to the bedside and Robert took it with both hands and drank it the way he'd drunk wine his whole life — fully, without hesitation, committing to the thing once he'd decided to do it.
He handed the cup back and lay against the pillows and looked at the light coming through the curtains.
"I'll have a long dream," he said.
"You will," Eddard said.
"Good." His breathing had already begun to slow and deepen, the lines in his face releasing one by one, the medicine finding its way through him. "I'll find Lyanna. Tell her — tell her it took me longer than it should have." The old voice, fainter now, the humor still in it even here. "You buried her in Winterfell, Ned. That's a long way to walk."
"My gods will light your way," Eddard said. His voice was not entirely steady. He did not try to make it steady. "I promise you that."
"Good." The word came out soft, almost gone already. "That's good, Ned."
His eyes had closed.
His hand, still in Eddard's, had gone loose.
"Ned." Barely a sound — the shape of a word more than the word itself, something between waking and wherever the Milk of the Poppy took you. "Still there?"
"I'm here," Eddard said. He did not let go of his hand. "I'm right here, Robert."
"I had the strangest dream," Robert murmured, from somewhere far away. "I dreamed I was dying..."
The light moved across the bed.
Eddard sat with him and held his hand and did not move, and after a while the breathing slowed to the point where you had to watch carefully to see it, and then there was a long pause, and then there was no pause because there was nothing left to pause between.
The King was dead.
Eddard sat in the quiet room with the morning light on the bed and the hand in his that had stopped being a hand and was now only something he was still holding, and allowed himself, in private, with no one watching, to grieve for the boy he had grown up with in the Eyrie — reckless and loud and alive, alive in a way that most people never managed to be — and for the man that boy had become, and for everything between them that had been real.
After a while he stood up.
He straightened his cloak. He smoothed the coverlet with one hand. He looked at Robert's face — still at last, the lines of illness gone, something underneath them that was not peaceful exactly but was at least finished — and then he turned to Pycelle.
"Send for Lord Commander Selmy," he said. His voice was the Hand's voice — level, precise, already moving. "Send for the steward. And send riders to Iron Fist Keep. Tell Lord Henry — " He paused for just a moment. "Tell Lord Henry that the King is dead, and that the Regency Council must convene before nightfall."
He walked to the door.
In the corridor outside, Jory Cassel straightened from where he'd been standing guard and looked at his lord's face and understood without being told.
"My lord," he said quietly.
Eddard walked past him toward the stairs, and the Red Keep continued around them - servants moving, guards at their posts, the city outside going about its morning - indifferent for the moment to what had just ended in the room at the top of the tower.
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