The Kraken and the Lion

Chapter 2

by Technomad

Asha Greyjoy

The next morning, Asha awoke to the sounds of weapons clashing. Before she realized where she was, she leaped to her feet, naked, and ran for her sword belt. Then she remembered just where she was, and felt rather silly. If the castle was under attack, there'd be trumpets blowing and almost certainly men shouting in anger as they fought. Instead, it sounded like weapons practice.

Wrapping her cloak around herself to shield her body, she went to the window and looked down. In the courtyard below, she saw a bunch of rough-looking men, and a few women, practicing with weapons. Shouts came to her ears:

"Ho! If you do not give Shagga son of Dolf more of a challenge, little Burned Man, Shagga will cut off your manhood and feed it to the goats!"

"The day Timett son of Timett fears your threats, you great hairy ox, he will burn off his own balls!"

This sounded interesting. Asha jumped into her clothes and flew through her morning routine, then left her rooms, gathering her men about her as she walked down the corridors. Soon, they were standing at the edge of the courtyard, watching the training. This attracted some attention.

"Hey, you soft men! Why do you watch us? Does Shagga son of Dolf make you tremble?" This was the biggest man in the courtyard, a mountain of muscle and hair.

"We are ironborn, and we never learned how to tremble. We enjoy watching your practice." That was Hagen the Horn. He stepped forward. "What sort of men are you, anyway?"

"We are the clansmen of the Mountains of the Moon. And I am Shagga, son of Dolf, who fights with an axe in either hand! Can any of you 'ironborn' face me on the practice field?"

Hagen selected a blunted weapon from a rack that was standing nearby. "Shagga son of Dolf, Hagen the Horn of the Iron Islands accepts your challenge." With that, formalities were complete, and the bout began. Everybody else stood back to watch.

Asha was slightly worried; Shagga son of Dolf looked like he could overwhelm Hagen easily, and Shagga clearly agreed. With a roar, he leaped forward, surprisingly quick on his feet for such a big man. However, Hagen was no battle-virgin, and dodged aside, slashing out with his practice sword and nearly scoring one on Shagga.

Asha found herself standing next to a tall, dark, saturnine man who rather put her in mind of a wolf. "You're new here, my lady," he remarked, looking her over boldly. "Who might you be?"

"Asha Greyjoy, my lord. I was sent here by my father as a representative of the Iron Islands. Who are you?"

"Bronn, and I'm no lord. Just the captain of my lord Hand's guard."

"You mean Lord Tyrion? Are these his guards?" Asha began thinking hard. If the Hand of the King, the second-most-powerful man in the kingdom and the real ruler during the king's minority, needed his own guard force, things here were worse than she had thought.

"Yes, they are. They're mountain clansmen, from the Vale of Arryn. Lord Tyrion recruited them after we were released from the Eyrie. He recruited me in the Eyrie, after I represented him in a trial by combat."

"Really?" Asha pricked up her ears; this was meat and drink to an ironborn. "What was the trial about?"

"He'd been accused of trying to have the young son of the Starks, Bran, assassinated in his bed. Lady Catelyn had had him arrested at an inn where he'd stopped on his way back to Kings Landing from the Wall. She'd had him taken there because her sister Lysa rules the Eyrie, and she hoped that her sister would execute the Imp."

Asha was dumfounded. "She must be mad, and so would her sister have to be to do such a thing!" In the Iron Islands, any family trying that on a prominent member of another family would have been deliberately inviting a blood feud, and would get no sympathy whatsoever if things went wrong. "Why did she think Lord Tyrion would have her son assassinated, anyway?"

"That, Lady Asha, is a very good question, and one I'd like to find the answer to, myself." Asha turned to find herself confronted with the very man they'd been discussing. Tyrion Lannister quirked a sardonic eyebrow. "Do go on. Don't mind me."

"Well," Bronn continued, clearly enjoying getting attention from an attractive woman, "Lord Tyrion managed to get them to allow him a trial-by-combat, instead of just having him thrown out the Moon Door. The Eyrie is up a very tall mountain," he explained, "and the Moon Door opens on a six-hundred-foot drop. It's how they execute people there."

"Bronn, here, won out against an armored knight, which they didn't expect. He's 'just a sellsword,'" Tyrion smirked, "and they didn't think he had much of a chance. After the fight, they had to let me go, and so they did…right down the path on the mountain, through the clans' territory. I met them, and…persuaded…them to let us pass."

" He offered them good arms. They were equipped with whatever odds-and-ends they could scrounge, and he said that he'd give them arms and armor. They liked that idea, and sent a bunch of their people along with him to make sure he came through. He did, and they stayed on in his service."

"A Lannister always pays his debts. Always." Tyrion gave Asha a smile that reminded her of a cat that had managed to steal and eat a big fish. Asha figured out that the mountain clans and the people of the Vale did not get along, and that the Vale had always had the upper hand…until Tyrion came along.

By that time, her crew and the mountain clansmen had paired off, and were practicing, hard and heavy. Asha noticed that one of the clansmen was a clanswoman. "Who is that?"

"Chella, daughter of Cheyk. She's a clan chief in her own right, of the Black Ears." Asha saw a necklace of withered black things around Chella's neck. "She's taken forty-six ears by herself, and her sons have taken fifty between them, she says."

Asha whistled her admiration. "If she were ironborn, I'd want to recruit her for my crew!" While most ironborn women stayed at home and had babies, there were exceptions, she being merely the most conspicuous among them. One of her own crew was a woman, the daughter of Hagen the Horn.

Chella looked over, and her eyes widened at the sight of Asha. "Hey! Ironwoman! Care to have a go?"

Asha smiled broadly. "Don't mind if I do!" She selected a practice sword and shield and walked over to Chella. "Shall we?"

"Chella daughter of Cheyk of the Black Ears clan will show you a thing or two, ironborn woman. Stick to your ships and leave fighting to us!"

"Asha daughter of Balon of the Greyjoy clan will make you eat those ill-chosen words, Chella!" With that, the two women went after each other, their blunted blades ringing off each other as they circled, eyes narrowed as they probed for weaknesses in the other's style. Everybody else stopped practicing to watch.

"Timett son of Timett could show that ironborn woman a thing or two," commented the one-eyed mountain clansman.

"Hah! Shagga son of Dolf would make her wish she had stayed home and had his babies!"

Asha and Chella attacked simultaneously, slashing and parrying; from what Asha could tell, they were pretty evenly matched. After a little while, they backed off by unspoken mutual consent. Asha wiped sweat out of her eyes and grinned; some exercise was just what she had needed to get her muscles back in tone and her land legs back after her long voyage from Pyke.

"You're pretty good, Chella! Back home you could hold your own with anybody!"

Chella grabbed a water-bag someone threw to her and took a quick swig before tossing it back. "And you're not unskilled yourself, ironwoman! You could lead a mountain clan yourself!"

Lord Tyrion came over. "Much as I hate to interrupt, I need to claim Lady Asha. It's time for the Small Council to meet, and she's expected to be present."

"Another time, Chella." Bowing slightly to her opponent, Asha went over and put up the practice sword and shield she had been using. Then she turned to her crewmen. "Keep on practicing, lads. Show these mountaineers what ironborn can do!" Then she had an inspiration. "Maybe teach them how to finger dance!" With that, she turned to follow Lord Tyrion and Bronn, who seemed to shadow Lord Tyrion.

As she paced along, a little slower than she wanted to go in deference to Lord Tyrion's difficulty in moving too fast, Asha was thinking, hard. If Lord Tyrion's the Hand of the King, why does he need a personal guard force? Are there people who're out to take him down? Who could dare do such a thing? She resolved to keep her eyes open and find out more.

Tyrion Lannister

Tyrion had been amused, but not too surprised, to find that their guests from Pyke had fallen in with his wild mountain men. Their cultures had a lot in common; the ironmen much preferred raiding to other activities, from what he had read of them. If the ironmen contingent made friends with his clansmen, they'd be likely to side with him if things went bad…and he could think of many ways that things could go very wrong, very quickly.

The war had severely disrupted normal trade, and Kings Landing was hungry. His sweet sister and her royal son pretended that nothing was wrong, but when riding through the streets, Tyrion noticed many things. Food was scarce, and prices for it when it was available were very high. He had seen people who looked to be near to starvation, particularly when riding through Flea Bottom. Bronn circulated freely in the city, and had brought him back many reports, none of which were reassuring.

Tyrion, unlike his siblings, was a reader, and he had read history attentively. As a Lannister of Casterly Rock, he knew that his actions and those of his family had ramifications. He knew of analogous situations to the one that currently faced the regime, and they had never turned out well for the rulers. If Joffrey's various enemies had known just how bad things were in Kings Landing, they could probably have provoked an uprising in their favor just by having their agents spread the word that King Robb, or King Stannis, or anybody else, would bring in plentiful food.

The rest of the Lannisters were too arrogant, and too absorbed in their own lives, to even notice the smallfolk, but Tyrion had never had that luxury. His mind turned to ways to ease the food shortage, and he thought about how the Iron Islanders could help. Their longships were no match for dromonds, as they had found out during Balon's Rebellion, but they were not currently actively at war with any of the other factions, so they could pass unchallenged…and they could carry food from the Lannisport area, which was unaffected by the war so far, into Kings Landing. Not to mention ferrying Lannister troops in, should the land routes become unavailable.

When they arrived, they found Queen Cersei waiting for them, along with Pycelle, Petyr Baelish, Varys and Janos Slynt. The men all rose when Asha entered the room, but Cersei contented herself with a regal nod. "Lady Asha. We welcome you. Please, be seated, all," said Cersei. Tyrion had to admit, his sister could carry off her role in public very well. Of course, she had years of practice, and Tyrion privately thought that had she not been a noblewoman, his sister would have made an excellent actress. Cersei was beautiful, vain, selfish, treacherous, erratic, greedy and cruel; Tyrion believed that she would have fit right into the world of the theater, and likely been happier than she was as a queen.

"We are glad to see you here, Lady Asha, and we hope that this presages a better relationship between the Iron Throne and the Iron Islands. When you have the time, I hope you will favor an old man by answering his silly questions about your people. A maester's duty is knowledge," said Pycelle. Tyrion wasn't sure, but he thought that the Grand Maester's interests weren't purely disinterested…he saw what had to be a gleam of attraction in the old man's eye. To his surprise, he felt a jolt of anger. Keep away from her, old man! She's not for you! Tyrion firmly tramped on that traitorious thought, hoping no sign of it had passed across his face.

Tyrion took control of the meeting, as his sister sat back and concentrated on looking "regal"…which, to her mind, meant looking spectacularly bored, as though the whole Small Council meeting was nothing but a rather dull mummers' show that was being put on for the court. "Lady Asha. What would it take for Lord Balon to commit to an alliance with us against our enemies?"

Asha clearly liked his approach. He had heard that the ironmen were straightforward types, impatient with subterfudge and subtlety. She looked thoughtful. "Well…we're not a wealthy people. We're also not numerous. Dangle riches in front of us, and we're quite likely to be very open to suggestions." She gave them all a smile.

Tyrion and Cersei exchanged glances. "The Throne is not, itself, well-off at the moment. The war, and the previous regime, have left us in debt. However, House Lannister is wealthy, thanks to our gold mines and other resources. And you must have heard that 'a Lannister always pays his debts.' If you help us, House Lannister will consider itself to be in debt to House Greyjoy."

Aha! Lady Asha's face was still, but Tyrion saw a gleam of avarice in her eyes. Carefully, he began to build on that idea, feeling rather like a fisherman reeling in a large pike that had just barely been hooked.

END Chapter 02