Notes: Written for Trick or Treat exchange for spookykingdomstarlight. Maybe he rescues and keeps the severed wight arm and keeps it as a pet? you prompted. I took that literally. Enjoy!
The Hand's Hand
In her time in the Red Keep, Alys has heard gossip about a great number of lords and ladies, each and every one of them stranger than the last. The stories the servants used to tell in hushed whispers about the Mad King still make her shiver three Kings and a Queen later.
Yet call her mad herself, if you want, or call her biased for never having been quite so close to these stories before, but she's certain there's never been anyone stranger in the Red Keep than Qyburn, the Queen's Hand.
He has a great number of frightening and terrible things in his laboratory and some even here in his study, but to her none have ever been as disturbing as that severed arm he got from the Targaryen girl. Came from a right proper dead man walking, rumor said; everyone had been talking about it for weeks. Lord Qyburn keeps it in a glass box – a cage – pillowed on red velvet as if it were a crown.
Alys's eyes stray toward it just in time to see Genna fiddle with the heavy stone on top of it.
She grasps the arm of the sweet young thing come all the way from Casterly Rock, and gives her a firm shake. "Loyal to the Lannisters, no doubt, but not an ounce of common sense in your head!"
"But…"
She watches the indignation on the girl's face for a moment before explaining, "You don't ever open the cage the Hand keeps… that hand in." The girl opens her mouth to protest. "No! Not to clean, and most certainly not to get a better look!" She gives the girl a sharp look. "It's no funfair trick or automaton. What do you think happened to the last girl?"
Genna pales and doesn't protest anymore. She gives the glass cage a fearful look.
The arm has gone still again like a sulking pet. It doesn't like being bothered.
"Lord Qyburn loves that arm more than all of us together, do you understand?"
Genna nods. "I do."
They go back to cleaning.
Lord Qyburn returns soon after, he takes no notice of them. He knows them to be loyal, and beyond that they are of little interest to him.
After putting down some scrolls on his desk, he approaches the glass box and removes the heavy stone placed on top of it.
The withered arm isn't scrabbling at the walls of its cage as it did when Genna approached it, it lays calm its velvet pillow, only the fingers twitch in excitement.
The Hand reaches into the cage and strokes the dead fingers.
More than once has Alys come in to hear Lord Qyburn coo to that arm as if it were a beloved pet.
The fingers wriggle under the caress, and the arm wags like a dog's tail.
Alys turns away and shudders.
Each one of them stranger than the last, each one of them stranger, you can trust her on that.