Джордж Мартин - Fire & Blood

The challenges he faced were daunting, for winter had descended upon Westeros and would endure for four long years, a winter as cold and bleak as any in the history of the Seven Kingdoms. The kingdom’s trade had collapsed during the Dance as well, countless villages, towns, and castles had been slighted or destroyed, and bands of outlaws and broken men haunted the roads and woods.

A more immediate problem was posed by the Dowager Queen, who refused to reconcile herself to the new king. The murder of the last of her sons had turned Alicent’s heart into a stone. None of the regents wished to see her put to death, some from compassion, others for fear that such an execution might rekindle the flames of war. Yet she could not be allowed to take part in the life of the court as before. She was too apt to rain down curses on the king, or snatch a dagger from some unwary guardsman. Alicent could not even be trusted in the company of the little queen; when last allowed to share a meal with Her Grace, she had told Jaehaera to cut her husband’s throat whilst he was sleeping, which set the child to screaming. Ser Tyland felt he had no choice but to confine the Queen Dowager to her own apartments in Maegor’s Holdfast; a gentle imprisonment, but imprisonment nonetheless.

The Hand then set out to restore the kingdom’s trade and begin the process of rebuilding. Great lords and smallfolk alike were pleased when he abolished the taxes enacted by Queen Rhaenyra and Lord Celtigar. With the Crown’s gold once more secure, Ser Tyland set aside a million golden dragons as loans for lords whose holdings had been destroyed during the Dance. (Though many availed themselves of this coin, the loans did bring about a rift between the Iron Throne and the Iron Bank of Braavos.) He also ordered the construction of three huge fortified granaries, in King’s Landing, Lannisport, and Gulltown, and the purchase of sufficient grain to fill them. (The latter decree drove up the price of grain sharply, which pleased those towns and lords with wheat and corn and barley to sell, but angered the proprietors of inns and pot shops, and the poor and hungry in general.)

Though he called a halt to work on the gargantuan statues of Prince Aemond and Prince Daeron that had been commissioned by Aegon II (not before the heads of the two princes had been carved), the Hand set hundreds of stonemasons, carpenters, and builders to work on the repair and restoration of the Dragonpit. The gates of King’s Landing were strengthened at his command, so they might better be able to resist attacks from within the city walls as well as without. The Hand also announced the Crown’s funding for the construction of fifty new war galleys. When questioned, he told the regents that this was meant to provide work for the shipyards and defend the city from the fleets of the Triarchy…but many suspected Ser Tyland’s real purpose was to lessen the Crown’s dependence on House Velaryon of Driftmark.

The Hand might also have been mindful of the continuing war in the west when he set the shipwrights to work. Whilst the ascent of Aegon III did mark an end to the worst of the carnage of the Dance of the Dragons, it is not wholly correct to assert that the young king’s coronation brought peace to the Seven Kingdoms. Fighting continued in the west through the first three years of the boy king’s reign, as Lady Johanna of Casterly Rock continued to resist the depredations of Dalton Greyjoy’s ironborn in the name of her son, young Lord Loreon. The details of their war lie outside our purpose here (for those who would know more, the relevant chapters of Archmaester Mancaster’s Sea Demons: A History of the Children of the Drowned God of the Isles are especially good). Suffice it to say that whilst the Red Kraken had proved a valuable ally to the blacks during the Dance, the coming of peace demonstrated that the ironmen had no more regard for them than for the greens.

Though he stopped short of openly declaring himself King of the Iron Isles, Dalton Greyjoy paid little heed to any of the edicts coming from the Iron Throne during these years…mayhaps because the king was a boy, and his Hand a Lannister. When commanded to cease his raiding, Greyjoy continued as before. Told to restore the women his ironmen had carried off, he replied that “only the Drowned God may sunder the bond between a man and his salt wives.” Instructed to return Fair Isle to its former lords, he replied, “Should they come rising back up from beneath the sea, we shall gladly give them back what once was theirs.”

When Johanna Lannister attempted to build a new fleet of warships to take the battle to the ironmen, the Red Kraken descended on her shipyards and put them to the torch, and made off with another hundred women in the nonce. The Hand sent an angry reproach, to which Lord Dalton replied, “The women of the west prefer men of iron to cowardly lions, it would seem, for they jump into the sea and plead with us to take them.”

Across Westeros, the winds of war were blowing up the narrow sea as well. The murder of Sharako Lohar of Lys, the admiral who had presided over the Triarchy’s disaster in the Gullet, proved to be the spark that engulfed the Three Daughters in flames, fanning the smoldering rivalries of Tyrosh, Lys, and Myr into open war. It is now commonly accepted that Sharako’s death was a personal matter; the arrogant admiral was slain by one of his rivals for the favor of a courtesan known as the Black Swan. At the time, however, his death was seen as a political killing, and the Myrish were suspected. When Lys and Myr went to war, Tyrosh seized the opportunity to assert its dominion over the Stepstones.

To press that claim, the Archon of Tyrosh called up Racallio Ryndoon, the flamboyant captain-general who had once commanded the Triarchy’s forces against Daemon Targaryen. Racallio overran the islands in a trice and put the reigning King of the Narrow Sea to death…only to decide to claim his crown for himself, betraying the Archon and his native city. The confused four-sided war that followed had the effect of closing the southern end of the narrow sea to trade, cutting off King’s Landing, Duskendale, Maidenpool, and Gulltown from commerce with the east. Pentos, Braavos, and Lorath were similarly affected, and sent envoys to King’s Landing in hopes of bringing the Iron Throne into a grand alliance against Racallio and the quarrelsome Daughters. Ser Tyland entertained them lavishly, but refused their offer. “It would be a grave mistake for Westeros to become embroiled in the endless quarrels of the Free Cities,” he told the council of regents.

That fateful year 131 AC came to a close with the seas aflame both east and west of the Seven Kingdoms and blizzards descending on Winterfell and the North. Nor was the mood in King’s Landing a happy one. The smallfolk of the city had already begun to grow disenchanted with their boy king and little queen, neither of whom had been seen since the wedding, and whispers about “the hooded Hand” were spreading. Though the “reborn” Shepherd had been taken by the gold cloaks and relieved of his tongue, others had risen in his place to preach of how the King’s Hand practiced the forbidden arts, drank baby’s blood, and was besides “a monster who hides his twisted face from gods and men.”

Within the walls of the Red Keep, there were whispers about the king and queen as well. The royal marriage was troubled from the first. Both bride and groom were children; Aegon III was now eleven, Jaehaera only eight. Once wed, they had very little contact with one another save on formal occasions, and even that was rare, as the little queen was loath to leave her chambers. “Both of them are broken,” Grand Maester Munkun declared in a letter to the Conclave. The girl had witnessed the murder of her twin brother at the hands of Blood and Cheese. The king had lost all four of his own brothers, then watched his uncle feed his mother to a dragon. “These are not normal children,” Munkun wrote. “They have no joy in them; they neither laugh nor play. The girl wets her bed at night and weeps inconsolably when she is corrected. Her own ladies say that she is eight, going on four. Had I not laced her milk with sweetsleep before the wedding, I am convinced the child would have collapsed during the ceremony.”