Ser Meryn Trant took the Tyroshi by the arm and hauled him off, still protesting. When they were gone, Cersei turned to Osmund Kettleblack. “Ser Osmund, get this thing out of my sight, and bring in the other three who claim knowledge of the Imp.”
“Aye, Your Grace.”
Sad to say, the three would-be informers proved no more useful than the Tyroshi. One said that the Imp was hiding in an Oldtown brothel, pleasuring men with his mouth. It made for a droll picture, but Cersei did not believe it for an instant. The second claimed to have seen the dwarf in a mummer’s show in Braavos. The third insisted Tyrion had become a hermit in the riverlands, living on some haunted hill. The queen made the same response to each. “If you will be so good as to lead some of my brave knights to this dwarf, you shall be richly rewarded,” she promised. “Provided that it is the Imp. If not. well, my knights have little patience for deception, nor fools who send them chasing after shadows. A man could lose his tongue.” And quick as that, all three informers suddenly lost faith, and allowed that perhaps it might have been some other dwarf they saw.
Cersei had never realized there were so many dwarfs. “Is the whole world overrun with these twisted little monsters?” she complained, whilst the last of the informers was being ushered out. “How many of them can there be?”
“Fewer than there were,” said Lady Merryweather. “May I have the honor of accompanying Your Grace to court?”
“If you can bear the tedium,” said Cersei. “Robert was a fool about most things, but he was right in one regard. It is wearisome work to rule a kingdom.”
“It saddens me to see Your Grace so careworn. I say, run off and play and leave the King’s Hand to hear these tiresome petitions. We could dress as serving girls and spend the day amongst the smallfolk, to hear what they are saying of the fall of Dragonstone. I know the inn where the Blue Bard plays when he is not singing attendance on the little queen, and a certain cellar where a conjurer turns lead into gold, water into wine, and girls into boys. Perhaps he would work his spells on the two of us. Would it amuse Your Grace to be a man one night?”
If I were a man I would be Jaime, the queen thought. If I were a man I could rule this realm in my own name in place of Tommen’s. “Only if you remained a woman,” she said, knowing that was what Taena wanted to hear. “You are a wicked thing to tempt me so, but what sort of queen would I be if I put my realm in the trembling hands of Harys Swyft?”
Taena pouted. “Your Grace is too diligent.”
“I am,” Cersei allowed, “and by day’s end I shall rue it.” She slipped her arm through Lady Merryweather’s. “Come.”
Jalabhar Xho was the first to petition her that day, as befit his rank as a prince in exile. Splendid as he looked in his bright feathered cloak, he had only come to beg. Cersei let him make his usual plea for men and arms to help him regain Red Flower Vale, then said, “His Grace is fighting his own war, Prince Jalabhar. He has no men to spare for yours just now. Next year, perhaps.” That was what Robert always told him. Next year she would tell him never, but not today. Dragonstone was hers.
Lord Hallyne of the Guild of Alchemists presented himself, to ask that his pyromancers be allowed to hatch any dragon’s eggs that might turn up upon Dragonstone, now that the isle was safely back in royal hands. “If any such eggs remained, Stannis would have sold them to pay for his rebellion,” the queen told him. She refrained from saying that the plan was mad. Ever since the last Targaryen dragon had died, all such attempts had ended in death, disaster, or disgrace.
A group of merchants appeared before her to beg the throne to intercede for them with the Iron Bank of Braavos. The Braavosi were demanding repayment of their outstanding debts, it seemed, and refusing all new loans. We need our own bank, Cersei decided, the Golden Bank of Lannisport. Perhaps when Tommen’s throne was secure, she could make that happen. For the nonce, all she could do was tell the merchants to pay the Braavosi usurers their due.
The delegation from the Faith was headed by her old friend Septon Raynard. Six of the Warrior’s Sons escorted him across the city; together they were seven, a holy and propitious number. The new High Septon—or High Sparrow, as Moon Boy had dubbed him—did everything by sevens. The knights wore swordbelts striped in the seven colors of the Faith. Crystals adorned the pommels of their longswords and the crests of their greathelms. They carried kite shields of a style not common since the Conquest, displaying a device not seen in the Seven Kingdoms for centuries: a rainbow sword shining bright upon a field of darkness. Close to a hundred knights had already come forth to pledge their lives and swords to the Warrior’s Sons, Qyburn claimed, and more turned up every day. Drunk on the gods, the lot of them. Who would have thought the realm contained so many of them?
Most had been household knights and hedge knights, but a handful were of high birth; younger sons, petty lords, old men wanting to atone for the old sins. And then there was Lancel. She had thought Qyburn must be japing when he had told her that her mooncalf cousin had forsaken castle, lands, and wife and wandered back to the city to join the Noble and Puissant Order of the Warrior’s Sons, yet there he stood with the other pious fools.
Cersei liked that not at all. Nor was she pleased by the High Sparrow’s endless truculence and ingratitude. “Where is the High Septon?” she demanded of Raynard. “It was him I summoned.”
Septon Raynard assumed a regretful tone. “His High Holiness sent me in his stead, and bade me tell Your Grace that the Seven have sent him forth to battle wickedness.”
“How? By preaching chastity along the Street of Silk? Does he think praying over whores will turn them back to virgins?”
“Our bodies were shaped by our Father and Mother so we might join male to female and beget trueborn children,” Raynard replied. “It is base and sinful for women to sell their holy parts for coin.”
The pious sentiment would have been more convincing if the queen had not known that Septon Raynard had special friends in every brothel on the Street of Silk. No doubt he had decided that echoing the High Sparrow’s twitterings was preferable to scrubbing floors. “Do not presume to preach at me,” she told him. “The brothel keepers have been complaining, and rightly so.”
“If sinners speak, why should the righteous listen?”
“These sinners feed the royal coffers,” the queen said bluntly, “and their pennies help pay the wages of my gold cloaks and build galleys to defend our shores. There is trade to be considered as well. If King’s Landing had no brothels, the ships would go to Duskendale or Gulltown. His High Holiness promised me peace in my streets. Whoring helps to keep that peace. Common men deprived of whores are apt to turn to rape. Henceforth let His High Holiness do his praying in the sept where it belongs.”
The queen had expected to hear from Lord Gyles as well, but instead Grand Maester Pycelle appeared, grey-faced and apologetic, to tell her that Rosby was too weak to leave his bed. “Sad to say, I fear Lord Gyles must join his noble forebears soon. May the Father judge him justly.”
If Rosby dies, Mace Tyrell and the little queen will try and force Garth the Gross on me again. “Lord Gyles has had that cough for years, and it never killed him before,” she complained. “He coughed through half of Robert’s reign and all of Joffrey’s. If he is dying now, it can only be because someone wants him dead.”
Grand Maester Pycelle blinked in disbelief. “Your Grace? Wh-who would want Lord Gyles dead?”
“His heir, perhaps.” Or the little queen. “Some woman he once scorned.” Margaery and Mace and the Queen of Thorns, why not? Gyles is in their way. “An old enemy. A new one. You.”