Chapter 77: Successor to the Throne?
Eddard held Robert's hand for a long time after the breathing stopped.
There was no particular reason to keep holding it. Robert was gone — he had felt the moment it happened, the subtle shift from sleep to something else, the quality of the stillness changing. But he kept his hand where it was and sat in the quiet room with the morning light moving across the bed, and allowed himself the time it took.
Eventually he stood.
He had straightened his cloak and was turning toward the door when he heard the footsteps — quick, purposeful, coming from the corridor. He turned.
Renly Baratheon stopped in the doorway.
He was dressed for travel, road dust still on his boots, which meant he had turned back before reaching Storm's End or had ridden hard through the night. His face was doing the complicated work of a man who is genuinely affected by something and is also, simultaneously, thinking about what happens next.
"Lord Eddard." He stepped into the room and looked at the bed, at Robert's face, still. He crossed to it and checked for breath with the matter-of-fact efficiency of someone confirming a fact rather than hoping to be wrong. "When?"
"This morning." Eddard watched him. "I thought you were gone."
"I heard his condition had worsened. I turned back." Renly straightened and looked at Eddard directly, and what was in his face now was neither grief nor performance — it was the focused clarity of a man who has been thinking about a specific problem for a long time and believes the moment to address it has arrived. "I have thirty household guards in King's Landing. Good men, well-armed. Give me an hour and I can have a hundred swords at the Red Keep gates."
Eddard looked at him.
"A hundred swords," he said. "For what purpose, Renly?"
"For what needs doing." Renly moved away from the bed, lowering his voice — not from grief, from caution. "Joffrey on the throne is bad for everyone, Lord Eddard. The Lannisters have had their hands in this court since the day Robert married Cersei, and the moment Joffrey begins his personal rule, those hands close around everything. The Regency Council won't survive it — Cersei will see to that. You'll be the first to go, then Henry, and then anyone else who might say no to her."
"Joffrey is the heir," Eddard said. "Robert named him."
"Robert named him without knowing what he was naming." Renly's jaw set. "I'm not asking you to break the law — I'm asking you to look at what's actually in front of you and act accordingly."
"Your brother's body is still warm," Eddard said, "and you're standing in his chamber telling me to help you take his son's throne."
"I'm telling you that a Lannister regency will undo everything Robert built," Renly said. "You know that. You've known it since you arrived in this city." He pressed forward, the words coming faster. "Hear me out. If I take the throne, Sansa becomes my queen. You remain Hand. Robb gets a council seat — you keep the North's voice at the table. The Tyrells are already with us — they won't object if Henry's life is spared and his council seat preserved." He paused. "And Dorne. They've been in contact with me for months. If I promise to hold the Lannisters to account — if I commit to genuine justice for what happened at the end of Robert's Rebellion — the Martells will back my claim."
"Genuine justice," Eddard repeated.
"Tywin Lannister put infants to the sword in the throne room," Renly said. "The Martells have been waiting twenty years. I'm not saying I'd hand them Cersei in chains — I'm saying I'd stop protecting the Lannisters from the consequences of what they did."
The room was very quiet.
"Renly." Eddard's voice was not raised. It was the voice he used when he meant something completely and wanted no ambiguity about it. "Your brother has been dead for less than an hour. I watched him die. I held his hand while he went." He looked at Robert's face on the pillow — still at last, the illness gone from it along with everything else. "Whatever Joffrey is or isn't, whatever the Lannisters are, whatever is coming — it does not begin in this room, today, with you and me deciding to set aside the succession because it's inconvenient."
Renly looked at him for a long moment.
"You're going to let them win," he said.
"I'm going to follow the law," Eddard said. "Which is not the same thing as letting anyone win."
Renly looked at Robert one more time. Then he turned and walked out without another word, his boots quick on the stone, already going somewhere else.
Eddard watched him go.
Ser Barristan was at his post outside the door.
"Ser Barristan." Eddard stopped beside him. "His Grace King Robert the First has passed. I need this kept quiet for the next few hours — no announcement until the council has convened. Can you hold that?"
Barristan looked through the open door at the bed. Something moved through his face that he did not try to manage — not the practiced neutrality of the Kingsguard at duty, but something more personal. He had served Robert since the Trident. He had watched him change, and had stayed anyway.
"I can hold it," he said.
"Send riders to Iron Fist Keep for Lord Henry. And to wherever Mace Tyrell is staying. And to wherever Joffrey—"
"Lord Reyne."
The voice came from the corridor behind him — soft, carrying, accented with the particular sibilance that Eddard had learned to associate with information he was not sure he wanted.
Varys stood at the corridor's end, his hands folded in his sleeves, his expression arranged into something that managed to be simultaneously concerned and composed.
"A word, Lord Eddard," he said. "In private, if you'll permit it. There are things you need to know before the council meets."
Eddard looked at him. He thought of every conversation he'd had with Varys over the past months — the careful half-information, the things said sideways, the persistent sense of a man who knew considerably more than he was sharing and was always choosing his moments.
"I'll manage the riders, Lord Eddard," Varys said smoothly, to Barristan. "No need to pull the Kingsguard from their posts."
Barristan nodded and returned to the door.
Eddard followed Varys.
They wound through the Red Keep's back passages — the routes that servants used, that couriers used, that people who didn't want to be observed used — until they reached a small room that Eddard had never had cause to enter. A table, two chairs, a single window looking onto an interior courtyard. No tapestries, no fire. A room designed to not be a room anyone would remember being in.
Varys set a book on the table.
It was large and heavy, its binding old, the kind of wear on it that came from a great deal of use rather than a great deal of time sitting on a shelf.
"The Lineages and Histories of the Great Houses of the Seven Kingdoms," Varys said, "by Grand Maester Malleon. The Citadel's own copy. I retrieved it myself."
Eddard looked at it and then at Varys. "If you have something to say, say it."
"Lord Jon Arryn died for what's in this book," Varys said. "He found the truth in it, and the Lannisters silenced him for it."
The anger that had been sitting in Eddard all morning — compressed down, managed, kept out of the way of the things that needed doing — came up fast. He had Jon Arryn's face in his head, the man who had fostered him and Robert, the closest thing either of them had had to a father in those years, and the thought of him poisoned in his own chambers while his killers attended his deathbed—
He had Varys by the collar before he'd decided to move.
Varys did not resist. He raised both hands — a small, deliberate gesture — and waited with the patience of a man who has anticipated this.
"The truth," Eddard said.
"Is in the book, my lord. Let me show you."
Eddard released him.
Varys smoothed his robes with the unhurried dignity of a man who does not hold being grabbed against people and opened the book to a page he had clearly marked in advance. He turned it toward Eddard and pointed.
The entry was for House Baratheon. Eddard read the listed names — Robert's father Steffon, black hair. Robert's grandfather Ormund, black hair. The names running back through generations, the same notation repeated entry after entry. Black hair. Black hair. Black hair.
"The Baratheon line breeds true," Varys said quietly. "It always has. As far back as the records go. Black hair, every generation, without exception." He paused. "Jon Arryn visited every one of King Robert's known bastards. Ser Jorah Mormont visited them alongside him, in the early days before Mormont fled the realm. Every bastard of Robert's body — every single one — had black hair."
Eddard looked up from the book.
"Joffrey has golden hair," Varys said. "As does Myrcella. As does Tommen."
The silence in the small room had a particular quality.
"You're saying," Eddard said, "that Cersei's children are not Robert's."
"I am saying what the book says, and what Jon Arryn discovered, and what Stannis Baratheon confirmed before he retreated to Dragonstone rather than remain in a city where speaking the truth aloud was apparently fatal." Varys folded his hands. "The father of Cersei's children is Jaime Lannister. Jon Arryn found the evidence. He was poisoned before he could act on it. Stannis sent you a letter — you may recall receiving it — warning you that the succession was not what it appeared."
Eddard thought of the letter. The careful, clipped Stannis prose, the accusation that he had read and set aside as Stannis being Stannis, finding offense where none was intended.
"The bastard guard Henry established around Joffrey," Varys continued, his voice dropping further. "I have investigated carefully. Of the boys brought forward as Robert's natural sons — only one identity is certain. Gendry, the smith's apprentice from Flea Bottom. The others—" He paused with the timing of a man who has rehearsed this. "Were selected by Lord Henry. And the copy of Malleon's Lineages that was kept in the Red Keep's library was burned. By Lord Henry's people."
Eddard stared at him.
"Why are you only telling me this now?" His voice was very controlled.
"Because speaking this truth in King's Landing is how a man disappears," Varys said plainly. "I am not a man who disappears easily, but I am also not a man who takes unnecessary risks. I needed to be certain of you, my lord — certain that you were someone who would use this information correctly rather than someone who would use it to their own advantage or dismiss it out of loyalty." He hesitated, and the hesitation looked genuine. "I sent you toward Gendry months ago. A message in Lord Stannis's name, pointing you to the boy. It arrived too late to matter. I should have moved sooner."
Eddard looked at the book. At the column of black-haired Baratheons running back to the founding of the house.
"You should have come to me the day I arrived in this city," he said.
"Yes," Varys said, simply. "I should have."
The admission sat between them.
Eddard closed the book.
He stood with his hands flat on the table for a long moment, looking at nothing, letting the shape of it assemble itself — Jon Arryn dead, Stannis in exile on Dragonstone nursing a truth he'd been unable to speak, three golden-haired children on the thrones of a black-haired dynasty, and Henry Reyne—
Henry, who had brought six boys to Joffrey's guard. Henry, who had burned the book. Henry, who had spent a year making himself indispensable to a prince who was not a prince.
Perhaps he grew fond of the boy. The thought arrived unbidden. Perhaps he made a weapon of him. Perhaps he simply didn't want to watch the realm burn for a truth that couldn't be unlearned.
He didn't know. He couldn't know, standing here, without asking. And Henry was two days' ride away at Iron Fist Keep.
"Seal the news of Robert's death," Eddard said. "I'll speak to Ser Barristan. No announcements until I've had time to think clearly." He straightened. "Take me to the bastards. Every one you can locate in the city. I want to see them myself."
"Tonight?"
"Today." Eddard picked up the book. "And send a raven to Dragonstone. In my name, not yours. Stannis needs to know his brother is dead, and I need to know what he knows."
Varys nodded.
"What will you do," Varys asked carefully, "if it's confirmed?"
Eddard looked at him with the expression he wore when a question had an obvious answer that he intended to honor regardless of the cost.
"If Joffrey and the others are not Robert's blood," he said, "then they hold no legal claim to the throne. They would be stripped of their titles. The succession passes to Stannis as Robert's eldest surviving brother." He paused. "And Henry Reyne—" He stopped. Started again. "Henry will be brought before a council. He will answer for what he knew and when he knew it and what he chose to do with that knowledge." He was quiet for a moment. "If he knowingly concealed the truth of the succession — if he built his position on a false foundation and let a kingdom be deceived — then he will take the black. Whatever else he is, whatever he's built, whatever he's owed — the law does not stop for sentiment."
Varys looked at him with something that might have been respect and might have been pity and was possibly both.
"You are a very consistent man, Lord Eddard," he said.
"I try to be," Eddard said. He moved toward the door. "Come. Show me the bastards."
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