While the Small Council members were busy taking their seats and cutting their food, completely blind to the exchange, Yoriichi registered the entire interaction with perfect, crystalline clarity. His vision, instinctively honed by years of analyzing muscle twitches and blood flow in combat, missed nothing.
How strange. Likely a silent acknowledgment, Yoriichi analyzed, his brow furrowing a fraction of an inch as his mind calmly processed the data points. The Queen's maid and the King's illegitimate son share a hidden familiarity. Are they acquainted? Perhaps she acts as a messenger between the King and the boy as after all she was recommended by the king.
In a court built on whispers and rumors, a maid knowing a bastard was not a crime worthy of drawing a blade. But it was a strange, suspicious variable that he would now ensure he kept a very close eye on.
Robert let out a thunderous laugh, slapping his massive, heavy hand down on Joffrey's back, nearly knocking the teenager face-first into his plate.
"Oh, Joffrey, eat now! You're a growing lad, why are you standing there like a bloody statue?!" Robert boomed, his voice dripping with loud, theatrical affection that he never, ever showed to his trueborn children.
He personally grabbed a massive cut of prime, dripping venison with his bare hands and slammed it onto the bastard's silver plate. "Get some meat on your bones, boy! You'll need the strength if you're to swing a warhammer like your old man!"
At the head of the table, Cersei's jaw clenched so hard she thought her molars might shatter. Her knuckles turned pure, bloodless white around the stem of her wine goblet.
She did not know the exact identity of this arrogant scumbag's mother—some highborn, plotting whore from the Reach, Varys's little birds had whispered—but the fact that Robert was giving this illegitimate bastard such open, lavish, and public attention while her perfect, divine son sat quietly ignored made her blood boil with homicidal fury.
Robert's antics were growing bolder and more humiliating day by day. He was flaunting his seed, threatening the very foundation of Cersei's power.
Down at the siblings' table, the insult was deeply, agonizingly felt.
Myrcella looked down at her lap, her sweet face falling into a mask of profound, quiet sadness. She could not understand why her father, a man who barely spoke two words to her all month and never hugged her, was suddenly showering a strange, arrogant boy with such absolute, roaring devotion. She did not dare raise her voice, but her heartbreak was palpable, tears shining in her eyes.
Jeyne, possessing none of her older sister's restraint or sweetness, openly shot daggers at Joffrey. Her emerald eyes narrowed in pure, unadulterated disgust, her lip curling in a perfect, lethal imitation of her mother's sneer. She looked ready to leap across the table and stab the bastard with her silver fork.
Seeing the dark, turbulent emotions clouding his sisters' auras, Yoriichi calmly reached out his right hand beneath the table.
He placed a steady, warm palm flat against Jeyne's tense back. He didn't say a single word, but he focused his breathing, letting his impossibly calm, rhythmic aura expand slightly. The sheer, grounding spiritual weight of his touch acted like a physical anchor in a hurricane.
Jeyne let out a slow, stuttering breath, the murderous, rigid tension leaving her small shoulders as she leaned slightly back into her brother's comforting presence.
Tyrion, chewing thoughtfully on a piece of crusty bread, observed the entire, horrifying dynamic from his high chair. He noted Robert's boisterous cruelty, Cersei's murderous, contained rage, Joffrey's smug arrogance, and the strange, quiet, absolute power Yoriichi exerted over his fiercely temperamental sisters.
Tyrion then shot a meaningful, highly observant glance toward Jon Arryn and Lord Baelish. The board is set, Tyrion thought, reading the unspoken, suffocating tension in the room. The drunken King is raising a rival to the marked prince. He is planting the seeds of a succession war right at the dinner table. The realm will bleed for this.
For the next hour, Yoriichi simply ate his food in perfect silence, occasionally replying politely to Tyrion's witty, mundane banter. He acted as if he were entirely unaffected by the heavy, toxic atmosphere choking the Great Hall. But behind his calm burgundy eyes, the ancient swordsman was cataloging everything.
The unknown boy was being slowly, deliberately inserted into the royal hierarchy, a dagger aimed squarely at his family's back.
Finally, the agonizing drama of the feast drew to a close. Robert, drunk, red-faced, and boisterous, threw his heavy arm around Joffrey's shoulders and staggered out of the hall, followed closely by the silent, bowing members of the Small Council.
Cersei rose abruptly. Her face was a mask of cold, uncompromising fury. She swept out of the room without a word to her children, Jocelyn trailing closely behind her like a loyal, poisonous shadow. Jaime followed a moment later, offering Tyrion a grim, helpless look before disappearing through the heavy doors.
Yoriichi stood up, offering his hands to help his sisters from their chairs. As they turned to leave the Great Hall, Yoriichi cast one final, long look at the empty chair where Joffrey had sat.
He etched the bastard boy's arrogant face, and the sly, beautiful face of the maid Jocelyn, permanently into his memory. He did not feel petty hatred or childish jealousy.
He only felt the cold, undeniable certainty that the shadows in the Red Keep were growing darker, and it was only a matter of time before they began to reveal their true shapes.