TYRION

The sheer surprise struck like a fist to the stomach. On the deck of the ship, Tyrion almost stumbled. "How… how did this come to be?"

The other guards were shuffling backward, retreating behind the one whom they had forced to be their spokesman. The dark-haired man with the Lannisport accent had no choice but to reply. "'Twere four days past, m'lord. He fell off 'is horse what spotted some apples in a barrel. Lord Tywin, 'e was mountin', you see, his neck broke soon as 'e hit the ground."

A Lord of Casterly Rock killed for a barrel of apples. What would Father would think of that? Tyrion felt the hysterical laughter bubbling in the back of his throat and ruthlessly suppressed it. This was a catastrophe. He had to remain, and appear, utterly in control.

"Who commands now?"

"Er," said the Lannisportsman. All of a sudden, his feet seemed to become spectacularly interesting.

"I see," said Tyrion. His thoughts were racing. He had to… somebody must… but how?…

The other guards were nudging their comrade in arms, whispering. The luckless fellow looked up at Tyrion on the deck, cleared his throat and said, "There's more, m'lord."

"What more?" From the man's expression, Tyrion gathered that it could be nothing good. He looked like he would rather go straight to the seven hells than continue talking.

"It's the prince, m'lord," the guard said. "He vanished, same day as Lord Tywin fell. No-one knows nothin' where 'e's gone."

Dead in a ditch, no doubt. Any trace of humour in the situation flew out swift as wind. The same day? Traitor, you could have at least tried to be subtle.

"Understood," Tyrion said, suddenly very aware of his own mortality. He wished for his mountain clansmen or for Bronn, but of course they all were lost in King's Landing, many miles of voyaging behind him. The world is gone mad, he thought, when the rightful Lord of Casterly Rock is in the midst of his own bannermen and would sooner be with wildlings or sellswords to find men whom he can trust. "I don't suppose you have any more tidings to bring me? This has been such a warm welcome."

The Lannisportsman was trembling. "No, m'lord."

"Well, that's something at least." He turned around and called, "Captain Meryn! Have a boat prepared for us to disembark. Do not leave yet; I'll require your services to send a message to Lady Selyse."

This was done. For the first time since the Battle of King's Landing, Tyrion Lannister set foot on mainland Westeros.

It was hardly the most glorious of homecomings. With his stunted legs and missing right forearm, he had to get one of the dozen taller westermen escorting him to pick him up and lift him out of the boat, else he would have got his clothes too wet and made himself a laughing stock before the lords of the west. His welcoming party consisted of two-dozen lowborn guards and some other soldiers watching idly nearby. There were rather fewer of those soldiers than there had been. Doubtless they hoped to be rewarded for swiftly informing his late lord father's bannermen of the return of their liege's son.

"You," Tyrion said, pointing at a group of men-at-arms sitting together, "I want representatives of each House sworn to the Rock to come to my lord father's tent. They are summoned. They can answer that summons with alacrity or be excluded; the choice is theirs; be sure to tell them that. We will begin in an hour."

He heard grumbling—"We're no messenger boys, we're soldiers, men grown. Fucking Imp, that ain't fitting. This ain't no task for the likes of us."—but only quietly. He was a Lannister, they all knew that, and he spoke with a voice that sounded like he knew he was going to be obeyed. He was obeyed.

Word of Tyrion Onearm's arrival would spread quickly, he knew. His own commands had to follow hot on its heels. He dared not allow his father's bannermen time to gather and ponder their options together, united in interests opposed to his own. I must strike while the iron is hot. He had no time to waste, especially not by waiting for messengers to soothe the pride of some of his father's guardsmen.

"You—" Tyrion pointed at another group— "will escort me there. So will you, you and you. Now let us be off."

The soldiers he gathered were not much of an honour guard, merely about a hundred men who happened to have been near the downstream edge of the camp. He discreetly perused them as they walked, but other than their accents and the badges over their hearts he knew nothing of their origins or names and nothing of their loyalties. For all he knew, some of them might have played a role in the murder of his lord father. He wished fervently that Lady Selyse had not forced him to relinquish his hold on the survivors he had led out of the Battle of King's Landing, men who had served him and his uncle in battle and were at least somewhat accustomed to obeying him, to her mad scheme against the Lord of the Arbour, but what else could he have done? Unless he wanted his dwarfish head to be delivered to Renly on a silver platter he could hardly have denied her.

Still, he dared not go unescorted. Without his own men, these would have to do.

They walked onward, a hundred taller men tightly surrounding Tyrion, bristling with spears. He was going through the great host of the westerlands, more than ten-thousand men of whom he hoped to soon be in command, and yet he could scarcely see them. All that he could see were the clothes and mail of his guards.

They had lost one Lord of Casterly Rock recently, he supposed. It would look like carelessness to lose another.

His guards spread out around him, letting him see again, at a tent which Tyrion recognised at once as his lord father's. He had seen it before, and nobody else would have owned such a thing. It was a pavilion the size of a small house, a great expanse of cloth-of-gold. Some called it a symbol of the nobility and power of House Lannister. Tyrion himself had always thought it rather gaudy.

He saw men-at-arms waiting around his lord father's tent. Not all of them wore the sigil of his lord father.

"Let us enter," said Tyrion, gesturing to some of his guards to go first. Of all possible ways to die, it would be rather foolish to get himself killed by an assassin waiting in a tent which mayhaps nobody had stepped in since Lord Tywin died. A dozen of his men came in before Tyrion himself entered.

They were not alone.

"Greetings, Lord Richard, Lord Ilyn, Lord Damon, Ser Ormund." Tyrion gave them a bow, keeping his voice light. "You are early."

"Greetings, my lord of Lannister." Their mode of address was careful, chosen to be courteous without affirming or even implying recognition of overlordship.

"It is important to be punctual." Damon Marbrand, Lord of Ashemark and a cousin of his lord father's, surveyed him with cool blue eyes. "I confess, I did think you were dead."

"The southerners will be dreadfully disappointed to hear otherwise," Tyrion said brightly. "They did try—" he brandished his stump, affecting nonchalance— "but they couldn't find my neck."

"Is the king here?" asked Lord Ilyn Algood.

"His Grace the King is safe on Dragonstone," said Tyrion, "where I took him from the battle. Given my uncle's unfortunate fate, His Grace has named me Lord Regent to act in his stead."

"I see," said Lord Ilyn. But before he or any of the others could speak again, the outermost tent-flap opened, and they heard a man taking off his boots in the outer part.

"Why, Ser Terrence," Tyrion said with a smile, "please do come in. The comfort of my pavilion awaits you. And Lord Willem too? A pleasure."

As a trickle turning to a flood, the lords and highborn knights of the westerlands poured in. All of them fit in without a problem. This pavilion was so vast that if they were pressed together it could have held well over a hundred men. Tyrion welcomed all of his father's sworn men with courtesy, acting as a host, as if it were indisputable and undisputed that of course this tent was his. Some gave him condolences for his lord father's death, and he acted the part of the dutiful son, bearing the burden that fell to him but mourning and deeply upset at his bereavement.

Then spoke Lord Richard Serrett of Silverhill, one of the mightiest lords in the westerlands, and his clear cold voice cut through the babble like a knife. "It has been an hour or thereabouts since my lord of Lannister arrived, by my reckoning," he said. "Now mayhaps we are to learn for what cause we were summoned so brusquely."

The westerlords fell silent, gazing at the dwarf who all of them knew had been his father's shame.

Tyrion dared not be too apologetic. He resolved upon audacity. "Very well. The cause is this: I propose that you bend the knee to the rightful Lord of Casterly Rock and swear me your fealty."

The sheer boldness of this opening suggestion took his father's bannermen aback. There were a few moments of silence before Lord Richard said, "And why in the Father's name should we do that?"

Tyrion affected obliviousness. "The law of succession," he said. "My late lord father had two sons. One of them is Lord Commander of the Kingsguard. That makes the matter quite clear, I should think."

"Kingsguard oaths can be broken," said Ser Harrold Moreland, "as your lord brother himself has shown. Or would you condemn him for that?"

"Mad King Aerys deserved to die," Tyrion said, not allowing himself to be snared in the trap of appearing as a traitor to his own family. "That doesn't mean that all honour of pledges and oaths are worthless, else King Robert, who agreed my brother's deed was not evil, would have dissolved the order of the Kingsguard. And besides…" He aimed the barb, and flung it. I am sorry, Jaime, but the west needs a lord here and now, not a lord in a faraway dungeon. "Which would you rather have as your lord: the man who made the Battle of the Blackwater, or the man who made the battles at Riverrun?"

The westerlords exchanged looks. The Battle in the Whispering Wood and the Battle of the Camps, between them, had resulted in thousands more westermen dead or imprisoned than even the Battle of King's Landing. That was not a happy memory.

Jaime's old friend Ser Addam Marbrand sprang to his defence. Ser Addam said hotly, "You lost the battle that mattered. You lost King's Landing, despite the Battle of the Blackwater."

"The Battle of King's Landing was a defeat," Tyrion agreed, "but that was because the City Watch mutinied mid-battle and opened the River Gate. I saw it with my own eyes. That ruined a perfectly good defence which Renly showed no sign of breaking. Tell me, do you think the noble lords of the west to be as worthless as the gutter-born shit of the capital?"

He felt his calculated insult strike. Ser Addam fumed but he did not retort. None of the westerlords did. That rhetorical question was not one to which they could answer, "Yes."

Ser Jaime Peckledon spoke next, a young man with a missing leg. His voice was soft. "There are other choices than you and your brother, my lord of Lannister." He was careful not to address Tyrion as 'Lord Lannister', or even the less explicit 'my lord', which could sometimes, though sometimes not, imply a bannerman speaking to his liege. "You have cousins on your father's side and on your mother's, many male and bearing the Lannister name. Lancel, Martyn, Willem, Tyrek, Daven, Damion… any one of them could be our lord, and they do not share your… your condition. They could lead us."

"I do," said Tyrion, "but they cannot lead us. There's no time to waste; two separate armies are marching upon us; and my cousins are not here."

Nobody disputed that.

"Tell me, then," said the crippled knight, "if you are to lead us, whither shall it be?"

"Homeward," declared Tyrion, and he heard a low murmur among his father's men. "We must withdraw the raiders from the riverlands. We dare not stay here any longer; the usurper's strength in the field is too great. The remnants of Lord Bolton's defeated army have spent more than four turns of the moon trapped in holdfasts under a siege they didn't expect or prepare for. Starvation will have done most of our work for us. We reduce those holdfasts one by one—we cannot leave Bolton at our rear—then we march to meet Edmure Tully on the riverroad, or Robb Stark, for doubtless he's already on his way to join his host to his uncle's. Make a peace if Lord Stark will accept that, even acknowledging his crown, for we must conserve our strength as best we can to fight Lord Renly. Crush him if he won't. Then we'll be back in the westerlands, well ahead of the usurper's host, ready to face the southerners from behind our own walls in our own land."

There was another rumble of muttering. Whether it was in agreement or derision, Tyrion could not tell.

"You would give up the riverlands?" said Lord Willem Falwell. "After all we have sacrificed here?"

"We cannot keep the riverlands," said Tyrion. "Fight here, and we'll lose, caught between the northmen and the southerners. We stand some chance against either alone. We can't fight both at once. We would simply die, and what good would that do to our lost kin? What honour would it do their sacrifice? And I am not the Lord of Riverrun, but of Casterly Rock. I'd give up the riverlands to save the westerlands a dozen times in a heartbeat."

Tyrion watched his father's bannermen as he spoke. Some of them seemed in agreement, especially with that last sentiment. Others seemed offended and angered.

"We can fight both, and we must," urged Ser Tommen Foote. "King Robert won his crown at the Trident. We can secure it for his son. Crush the northmen first, I agree, but then we shouldn't run away from the usurper with our tails between our legs just because of one lost battle. Fortify the river, burn the bridges, cover the fords with stakes and crow's-feet and put a company at each one, and let Lord Renly come. He can't forfeit the northern riverlands. He'll have to fight us, trying to cross a defended river. He'll fail."

"He won't try," said Tyrion. "He'll leave an army strong enough to hold us off, then take most of his strength and ravage the westerlands. He'll burn our homes, steal our gold and have our women raped till we can't bear it any more and come running to fight him on his terms—a battle we cannot win."

"Burn the northern riverlands badly enough and he'll have no choice but to come to us," Ser Tommen said.

"That's not so. The usurper's men are largely from the stormlands and the Reach. What do they care if the riverlands are aflame? The southerners won't care half as much about the riverlands as we westermen care about the west."

Then the Lord of Ashemark spoke, throwing an accusation harsher than any other so far. "It seems to me," said Damon Marbrand, "that you mean to be Lord of Casterly Rock but not your other claimed title, Lord Regent of the Seven Kingdoms. It seems to me you wish to throw away most of His Grace's realm."

Tyrion bristled. "I saved His Grace's life. I got this—" he held out the stump of his right arm— "because I waited to save others from that disaster, rather than simply fleeing myself. If I meant to abandon my nephew, I would have left him in King's Landing. This is the best way of preventing the entire fall of His Grace's realm. And let me remind you, Lord Damon, that it isn't I who has allowed a prince of royal blood to be murdered."

"How dare you!" cried Lord Damon, outraged, but Tyrion ignored him, because—

"Your nephew wasn't murdered, my lord," interjected Lord Petyr Broom. "No body was found. He was abducted. A naked serving man was found with a bad injury to the head. Maester Tothmure is trying, but doesn't expect he'll ever wake again. And one of House Hawthorne's messenger boys was threatened to give up his clothes by a big man dressed as a servant. Prince Tommen made his way back to his tent after Lord Tywin's death, we know that, for his and his Kingsguard's armour were left there. They must have not known about any threat; they were come upon unarmoured, and taken."

"Then doubtless he's either dead in a ditch right now or being taken to Renly and will shortly become so," said Tyrion harshly. "It changes nothing. No man here can accuse me of neglecting His Grace. When I had a son of the king to keep safe, I kept him safe."

The westerlords fell silent at that. It was not a friendly silence. Tyrion cursed his own wounded pride. That had been ill-spoken; it had won him no friends.

"Nobody means to impugn your honour, Lord Petyr, nor Lord Damon's," he said, softening his voice in spite of his anger with conscious effort. "You have both fought well and bravely for my House in the early victories in the riverlands and in the Battle of the Banks. All I ask is that you do not impugn mine."

"I see," said Lord Petyr thinly. Lord Damon said even less than that; he merely gazed at Tyrion with narrowed eyes.

Mercifully, the matter passed when the conversation turned back to strategy. "We can't stay in the riverlands," said Ser Cedric Lydden, a nephew to the Lord of the Deep Den, "but it's folly to risk another bloody battle on any but the most favourable terms when Lord Renly already outnumbers us. We can avoid Tyrell and Stark alike if we go by sea. At Dragonstone we'll be safe from the usurper's host. Then all we must do is defeat Paxter Redwyne and we can sail home."

"I thank you for the suggestion, ser," Tyrion said, "but I fear it may not succeed. Lady Selyse lacks the ships to bear us all. It would take several trips back and forth, and the voyage from Dragonstone to Lannisport is a long one. Lord Renly would know of our flight swiftly, for Edmure Tully would find no sign of us and I daresay he'd tell the usurper, to distract him from the riverlands. Then the southerners would march west, and reach our lands before much of our own host."

Ser Cedric said, "The castles of the westerlands will serve our purpose in that."

"Not well enough," answered Tyrion. "Oh, they'd help, but our campaign in the westerlands will be difficult enough in the fullness of our strength. Without that, it'll be nigh impossible. Only overland can we arrive well ahead of the usurper; and only by the more northerly path, on the riverroad, putting us near to the Tully host, can we reach the westerlands without having to come perilously close to the main strength of Lord Renly."

Tyrion paused. No-one spoke. The silence yawned gaping. Very well. Time to throw myself into the lion's maw.

"Which makes it the only choice… for me. For House Lannister. Not for you. For you, all of you, there remains the alternative choice of treason."

This aroused a veritable storm of protest. Tyrion could scarcely hear for all the shouting. "How dare you!" cried one, and "Never!" another. "Mind that Imp-tongue!" yelled a third, who he thought might be Ser Addam Marbrand. "I'm an honourable man!" shouted a fourth. The lords and knights of the west proclaimed their innocence and threw abuse at the man who had questioned it.

"Silence!" called Tyrion. Nobody heeded him. "Silence!" he shouted more loudly, and was still ignored. At last he ordered one of his guards to hold him up, breathed in so fiercely it hurt his throat, then hurled out the sound at the top of his voice: "Silence!"

Silence came. It was broken only by Tyrion's own ragged breath. There he stood, a one-armed dwarf in a taller man's arms, red-faced and panting. He struck a laughable figure, and knew it, and hated that knowledge almost as much as his disfigurement itself.

"I cast no accusation against any man here," he said. "I do not think any of you have betrayed me." Liar, liar, chanted his own thoughts, dwelling on the murder of his lord father and the grisly fate of poor sweet Tommen. "Yet I don't doubt that the thought must have crossed some minds, and that mustn't fester unspoken."

He tried to catch his breath.

"Lord Renly has promised lands to his men, and he attaints any House that defies him to steal its land for his own followers. He calls himself a king, but he's no king. He's nothing more than a bandit chief on a realm-wide scale. If he's victorious, he will get his loot from somewhere, and for him, what better choice than the one of the Seven Kingdoms he's already made his bitterest foe? What better choice than the west? So you'll find no clemency from him."

"Renly Baratheon is a kinslayer as well as a usurper," said Lord Jon Myatt impatiently, "as all of us already knew. Stannis Baratheon could tell you how much clemency even a brother can expect from him. This is no striking new argument worthy of insulting the honour of honest men."

Tyrion rather thought it was not universally agreed among the westerlords that going to Renly was a fool's errand, judging by the deaths of his lord father and his nephew, but he did not wish to contradict another westerlord openly.

"As you say, Lord Jon," Tyrion said with a respectful nod. "But even were I wrong in this, in battle or in treaty men need a leader, a man who can speak and have it be known that he speaks for all. If the noble knights and lords of the west betray me, and betray His Grace, none of you will be strong enough to be elevated above all the others and be able to hold that position. Who wishes to let his rival be his master? None. No man will receive the agreement of his fellows to be Warden of the West, or even if one does, he'll long remember the knife you have planted in the back of House Lannister, and he'll always wonder who might be plotting to put another knife in him. And what if he strikes first, to prevent some imagined foe from overthrowing him? Pervasive mistrust is death to any army or any kingdom. A man can't war if his army won't follow him, and he can't treat if the other man has no confidence that what he says he'll do will be done. Betray House Lannister and that fate will come, certain as a western sunset."

"That is a threat," said Ser Tybolt Crakehall, unperturbed, or at least pretending to be. "What do you promise to give us?"

"Unity," said Tyrion Lannister. "Solidarity. A plan to take us home by the shortest, swiftest path in order to defend our lands from the usurper. A better chance of survival than you'll ever have alone—because I tell you, if you betray me you'll soon be betraying each other. Well did my lord father understand how such anarchy undermines everything. Only strength can stop it, strength and a tradition of unbroken rule. I bring both. Now he has passed, but you may rest assured that with his passing the Lord of Casterly Rock's attitude to treason hasn't grown more merciful."

And he hummed a short snatch of a tune, from the refrain of a song that half the westerlands knew by heart. He did not say the words. He did not need to.

And who are you, the proud lord said,
that I must bow so low?
Only a cat of a different coat,
that's all the truth I know.

In a coat of gold or a coat of red,
a lion still has claws,
and mine are long and sharp, my lord,
as long and sharp as yours.

And so he spoke, and so he spoke,
that lord of Castamere,
but now the rains weep o'er his hall,
with no-one there to hear.
Yes now the rains weep o'er his hall,
and not a soul to hear.

There was another, longer silence.

Then Robert Brax the Lord of Hornvale spoke, and every eye in the pavilion fell upon him. "Well, it isn't a superb plan. The chance of losing everything is too high for my liking. But the Warrior hasn't much favoured the men of the westerlands in this war. I think this is the best choice that remains to us." He fell to both knees. "My lord… Lord Lannister, my sword is yours."

"Lord Lannister!" hailed Ser Androw Kenning at once, his knees falling as well.

"Lord Lannister!" cried Ser Ormund Banefort.

"Lord Lannister!" called Ser Tybolt Crakehall, and Ser Richard Hamell, and Ser Jaime Peckledon, and Ser Dennis Plumm, and more. All of those who spoke, Tyrion noticed, were younger men like Robert Brax himself, nearer Tyrion's age than Lord Tywin's. But that trend stopped quickly. Soon others were speaking too, including older lords, swept along by the apparent wave of acclamation. Lords Samwell Hawthorne and Jon Myatt, Lords Lewys Lydden and Amory Garner and even Richard Serrett… none wished to be last to plight their troth, for none wished to be least trusted and lowest in the esteem of the Lord of Casterly Rock. And so the voices of the westerlords rang:

"Lord Lannister! Lord Lannister! Lord Lannister!"

Afterwards, the Lord of Casterly Rock approached Robert Brax and tapped him on the arm. "If the first voice to respond had been opposed, or even equivocal," he said, "that could have ended very differently. House Lannister will not forget this service."

"I thank you for your praise, my lord, but what else would you expect of a Brax?" Lord Robert looked down at Tyrion, his face the very picture of earnestness. "I will always act in the best interests of the westerlands, my lord. Never doubt that."