The Knight of Flowers had no recourse but to follow at her heels like the puppy he was. Cersei waited until they were on the serpentine steps before she said, “Whose notion was that, pray?”
“My sister’s,” he admitted. “Ser Tallad, Ser Dermot, and Ser Portifer were riding at the quintain, and the queen suggested that His Grace might like to have a turn.”
He calls her that to irk me. “And your part?”
“I helped His Grace to don his armor and showed him how to couch his lance,” he answered.
“That horse was much too large for him. What if he had fallen off? What if the sandbag had smashed his head in?”
“Bruises and bloody lips are all part of being a knight.”
“I begin to understand why your brother is a cripple.” That wiped the smile off his pretty face, she was pleased to see. “Perhaps my brother failed to explain your duties to you, ser. You are here to protect my son from his enemies. Training him for knighthood is the province of the master-at-arms.”
“The Red Keep has had no master-at-arms since Aron Santagar was slain,” Ser Loras said, with a hint of reproach in his voice. “His Grace is almost nine, and eager to learn. At his age he should be a squire. Someone has to teach him.”
Someone will, but it will not be you. “Pray, who did you squire for, ser?” she asked sweetly. “Lord Renly, was it not?”
“I had that honor.”
“Yes, I thought as much.” Cersei had seen how tight the bonds grew between squires and the knights they served. She did not want Tommen growing close to Loras Tyrell. The Knight of Flowers was no sort of man for any boy to emulate. “I have been remiss. With a realm to rule, a war to fight, and a father to mourn, somehow I overlooked the crucial matter of naming a new master-at-arms. I shall rectify that error at once.”
Ser Loras pushed back a brown curl that had fallen across his forehead. “Your Grace will not find any man half so skilled with sword and lance as I.”
Humble, aren’t we? “Tommen is your king, not your squire. You are to fight for him and die for him, if need be. No more.”
She left him on the drawbridge that spanned the dry moat with its bed of iron spikes and entered Maegor’s Holdfast alone. Where am I to find a master-at-arms? she wondered as she climbed to her apartments. Having refused Ser Loras, she dare not turn to any of the Kingsguard knights; that would be salt in the wound, certain to anger Highgarden. Ser Tallad? Ser Dermot? There must be someone. Tommen was growing fond of his new sworn shield, but Osney was proving himself less capable than she had hoped in the matter of Maid Margaery, and she had a different office in mind for his brother Osfryd. It was rather a pity that the Hound had gone rabid. Tommen had always been frightened of Sandor Clegane’s harsh voice and burned face, and Clegane’s scorn would have been the perfect antidote to Loras Tyrell’s simpering chivalry.
Aron Santagar was Dornish, Cersei recalled. I could send to Dorne. Centuries of blood and war lay between Sunspear and Highgarden. Yes, a Dornishman might suit my needs admirably. There must be some good swords in Dorne.
When she entered her solar, Cersei found Lord Qyburn reading in a window seat. “If it please Your Grace, I have reports.”
“More plots and treasons?” Cersei asked. “I have had a long and tiring day. Tell me quickly.”
He smiled sympathetically. “As you wish. There is talk that the Archon of Tyrosh has offered terms to Lys, to end their present trade war. It had been rumored that Myr was about to enter the war on the Tyroshi side, but without the Golden Company the Myrish did not believe they. ”
“What the Myrish believe does not concern me.” The Free Cities were always fighting one another. Their endless betrayals and alliances meant little and less to Westeros. “Do you have any news of more import?”
“The slave revolt in Astapor has spread to Meereen, it would seem. Sailors off a dozen ships speak of dragons. ”
“Harpies. It is harpies in Meereen.” She remembered that from somewhere. Meereen was at the far end of the world, out east beyond Valyria. “Let the slaves revolt. Why should I care? We keep no slaves in Westeros. Is that all you have for me?”
“There is some news from Dorne that Your Grace may find of more interest. Prince Doran has imprisoned Ser Daemon Sand, a bastard who once squired for the Red Viper.”
“I recall him.” Ser Daemon had been amongst the Dornish knights who had accompanied Prince Oberyn to King’s Landing. “What did he do?”
“He demanded that Prince Oberyn’s daughters be set free.”
“More fool him.”
“Also,” Lord Qyburn said, “the daughter of the Knight of Spottswood was betrothed quite unexpectedly to Lord Estermont, our friends in Dorne inform us. She was sent to Greenstone that very night, and it is said she and Estermont have already wed.”
“A bastard in the belly would explain that.” Cersei toyed with a lock of her hair. “How old is the blushing bride?”
“Three-and-twenty, Your Grace. Whereas Lord Estermont—”
“—must be seventy. I am aware of that.” The Estermonts were her good-kin through Robert, whose father had taken one of them to wife in what must have been a fit of lust or madness. By the time Cersei wed the king, Robert’s lady mother was long dead, though both of her brothers had turned up for the wedding and stayed for half a year. Robert had later insisted on returning the courtesy with a visit to Estermont, a mountainous little island off Cape Wrath. The dank and dismal fortnight Cersei spent at Greenstone, the seat of House Estermont, was the longest of her young life. Jaime dubbed the castle “Greenshit” at first sight, and soon had Cersei doing it too. Elsewise she passed her days watching her royal husband hawk, hunt, and drink with his uncles, and bludgeon various male cousins senseless in Greenshit’s yard.
There had been a female cousin too, a chunky little widow with breasts as big as melons whose husband and father had both died at Storm’s End during the siege. “Her father was good to me,” Robert told her, “and she and I would play together when the two of us were small.” It did not take him long to start playing with her again. As soon as Cersei closed her eyes, the king would steal off to console the poor lonely creature. One night she had Jaime follow him, to confirm her suspicions. When her brother returned he asked her if she wanted Robert dead. “No,” she had replied, “I want him horned.” She liked to think that was the night when Joffrey was conceived.
“Eldon Estermont has taken a wife fifty years his junior,” she said to Qyburn. “Why should that concern me?”
He shrugged. “I do not say it should. but Daemon Sand and this Santagar girl were both close to Prince Doran’s own daughter, Arianne, or so the Dornishmen would have us believe. Perhaps it means little or less, but I thought Your Grace should know.”
“Now I do.” She was losing patience. “Do you have more?”
“One more thing. A trifling matter.” He gave her an apologetic smile and told her of a puppet show that had recently become popular amongst the city’s smallfolk; a puppet show wherein the kingdom of the beasts was ruled by a pride of haughty lions. “The puppet lions grow greedy and arrogant as this treasonous tale proceeds, until they begin to devour their own subjects. When the noble stag makes objection, the lions devour him as well, and roar that it is their right as the mightiest of beasts.”
“And is that the end of it?” Cersei asked, amused. Looked at in the right light, it could be seen as a salutary lesson.
“No, Your Grace. At the end a dragon hatches from an egg and devours all of the lions.”
The ending took the puppet show from simple insolence to treason. “Witless fools. Only cretins would hazard their heads upon a wooden dragon.” She considered a moment. “Send some of your whisperers to these shows and make note of who attends. If any of them should be men of note, I would know their names.”