The Kraken and the Lion

Chapter 22

Asha

Asha and Tyrion spread out a large sheet of paper on a big table, and drew a diagram on it of the Great Hall. They began setting out cyvasse pieces, representing people who had been in the Hall during the wedding feast. It took about four sets of pieces to represent everyone who had attended, and another couple of sets to account for the servants.

Tyrion and Asha had, separately, questioned every servant that had had anything to do with the food and wine served the King, and had come to the conclusion that none of them had been directly involved in the poisoning. None of them had had any particular personal reason to hate the King, and they all insisted they had been treated well. Pry as they would, Tyrion and Asha could not uncover any motives for murder among them, so the servants, for the moment, were off the list of suspects.

"At least," Tyrion remarked, "we can eliminate the idea that one of the servants poisoned the King deliberately. None of them knew anything like enough about poisons to have been able to use the Strangler. What we're looking for is someone knowledgable."

"Which should leave Lady Sansa out," Asha said. "I don't think she has any background in such matters at all. Pity your nephew executed her septa. Septa Mordane would have known what she'd taught Lady Sansa."

"Yes, that was a damned shame," Tyrion muttered. "What was he thinking? We're just lucky that we didn't get in trouble with the Faith for that little stunt!"

"Good for you that the High Septon was in your family's pocket then," Asha said. "Personally, had I been in his shoes, I'd have raised the seven hells over that. Aren't septons, septas and people like that supposed to be sacrosanct?"

"They are," Tyrion acknowledged. Then he quirked a grin at her. "And you're sounding more and more like you were raised in the faith of the Seven. Are we rubbing off on you?"

"Just trying to fit in to my new family, darling," Asha said. "If we had been in Pyke, I'd have referred to 'raising the Storm God.'"

"In any case," Tyrion said, pointing to the diagram and cyvasse pieces, "we need to figure out who could have administered that damned poison. The Strangler works very quickly, so it had to have been done at some time during the feast. We need to reconstruct who was where, and at what times."

Asha hauled out the notes that they had taken about the feast, and they got to work, systematically bringing it back to life on the table in front of them. Eventually, patterns began to emerge.

"There weren't that many people near the King at any time, and some of them, like my sister, we can eliminate. Others, I'm not so sure about. My father was close by, but I don't know if he'd do it or not. He has had things to say about my dear nephew's resemblance to Mad King Aerys, and that might have got him thinking that Tommen'd be a better ruler overall."

"Are you sure we can eliminate Cersei?" asked Asha. She smiled to herself at the thought of her good-sister being condemned for filicide and regicide. "Joffrey was becoming more and more uncontrollable, and she does like controlling things. She might have thought that Tommen would be an easier puppet to keep on her string."

"Quite sure," Tyrion said, his voice flat. "I know my sister. She's a hateful bitch, and she'd cheerfully shove me down a well if she thought she could get away with it. But that plaguey brat was the apple of her eye. She'd almost sooner have murdered our brother Jaime as harmed him."

"So we can eliminate the Queen Dowager. Who all does that leave who came close enough to the King to slip something into his wine?"

"Oleanna Tyrell, the bride's grandmother, was up there not long before Joff started showing signs of poisoning. But why would she want to kill the King?" Tyrion mused.

"If someone like Joffrey was planning to marry any granddaughter of mine, I'd find murder mighty tempting," Asha said grimly, putting her hand on her swelling abdomen. "And since they just decided to marry sweet Margaery off to Tommen instead, the Tyrells' position at court wasn't jeopardized. Could she have found out enough about Joffrey to decide that he was better dead?"

"That's a distinct possibility. We'll have to put her on the short list of suspects. But where would she have obtained the Strangler from?" Tyrion mused. "That stuff is not exactly found in every marketplace."

"As a high noblewoman, she may have studied many things," Asha said. "We need to look farther into her background. Women may not study formally at the Citadel, but she could have learned many things in her lifetime. And the Tyrells also have enough money to be able to buy what they want."

Tyrion

Over the next few days, Tyrion built up a picture of exactly what had happened at the feast. He questioned everybody who had been there, and eventually was able to reconstruct the movements of all of the participants.

Not many people had been close enough to the King or to his wine cup to dose it. The more Tyrion thought about it, the more he liked Oleanna Tyrell as chief suspect. Accusing her would be very tricky, though.

"Right now, the Crown depends heavily on the Tyrells. Bringing charges of regicide against their matriarch would blow that alliance out of the water," Tyrion said, as Asha lay back on their bed. It had been a long day for her, and her feet were hurting.

"To be honest, love, I am not sure that charging anybody would do much good. I'd almost rather we just said that the King choked on his pie. The gods - yours and mine - know, he was eating like a pig and swilling down that fancy wine like it was cheap slop. People have been known to just choke. Has the word that he was poisoned spread very widely?"

"Hard to say, darling. Trouble is, even if we said he 'just choked,' there'd be a lot of rumors about poison. That sort of thing always goes on when someone prominent dies unexpectedly." Tyrion sat back, rubbing his forehead. This detective work was more difficult than he had anticipated.

Between them, he and Asha had spent hours and hours questioning every person who had been at the feast, or had had anything to do with it. Sometimes, when dealing with particularly recalcitrant people, Tyrion had found it very useful to have both Ser Ilyn and his brother Jaime standing by, not saying anything but making their presence felt. The sight of the headsman and the head of the Kingsguard, Tyrion had found, tended to loosen some people's tongues.

After the interrogations, the two of them had spent hours correlating every detail, looking for inconsistencies and trying to nail down lies. They had uncovered a good deal of information that would normally have been of interest, including a scheme to divert food from the royal kitchens and sell it, at a huge markup, in Kings Landing. Offering the perpetrators of that little chicane an amnesty on condition of their telling the investigators everything that had gone on in the kitchens had proven to be a very useful ploy.

The poison could not have been put into the wine in the kitchens, since the same decanter that had filled Joffrey's cup had also been used to fill many others', and nobody else had been poisoned. The poison had clearly been chosen for its compatibility with wine; many poisons betrayed their presence with bad smells or tastes, or by discoloring the wine. And the poison had definitely been in the wine; a dog, given the dregs of Joffrey's cup in his food, had died in the same way Joffrey did.

So the suspect list was everybody who had been close to Joffrey. Margaery Tyrell Baratheon, now Queen-Dowager and Queen-Elect to King Tommen, was at the top of that list, but it was hard to believe that she'd have the brass nerve to poison her husband at their wedding feast. And the risks to her would have been substantial; Tyrion did not think that she had the sort of courage it would have taken to put herself in such jeopardy.

Also on that list was Oleanna Tyrell, the Queen's grandmother. Tyrion thought she was a very likely person to have decided that Joffrey had to go. He had questioned her at length, and had noticed that her hearing tended to come and go as was most convenient for her at any given time. In his experience, real deafness didn't work that way, which was one reason he was suspicious of her. And his impression of her was that she would do anything at all to protect her granddaughter. If she'd caught wind of Joffrey's proclivity for cruelty - which was perfectly possible; Joffrey's activities were no great secret in the Red Keep - she could have acted on her own, keeping her granddaughter out of the loop so as to establish her own innocence and banking on her age and prominent position to protect her from investigation.

The High Septon had been close by, but Tyrion did not think that he was a likely suspect. The highest priest of the Faith of the Seven was a Lannister creature, bought and paid for. Even discounting the idea that he would be kept from regicide by his piety, Tyrion thought he was much too spineless and docile to even get the idea of killing a king.

And, Tyrion had noticed, the Dornish delegation in general had been far from the King at all times, and in no position to meddle with the royal wine. He sensed his father's fine hand in that arrangement; the Red Viper's reputation was well-known, and Tyrion and Asha had heard repeatedly that Lord Oberyn was not at all shy about expressing his resentment at the unpunished murder of his sister, during the taking of Kings Landing at the end of Robert's Rebellion.

Sansa Stark had also not been close to the King at any time. She had apparently tried, rather half-heartedly, to commit suicide earlier, and had been put under an unobtrusive, but constant guard. The women detailed to guard Lady Sansa had been vehement in their denials that she had been anywhere close to the royal dais. They were convinced of Sansa's innocence, and their statements rang true to Tyrion's ears.

"It's a pity it had to happen where and when it did," Tyrion muttered. "I'd be tempted to tell Father and my siblings that it was the work of the Faceless Men, or the Sorrowful Men, but there's no way one of them could have done it. And all of the people who could have done it are the very sort of people we dare not accuse without a lot of clear proof!"

"I know what you mean, my love," Asha murmured. "Will you excuse me? The jakes are calling. Peeing for two, you know." She leaned down and kissed him, and he kissed her back before she pulled away, smiling rather ruefully.

Asha

Asha had been surprised by the metabolic load that pregnancy had imposed on her. She didn't begrudge any of it, and eagerly looked forward to the day when she would bring a new Lannister into the world. The Greyjoys and Lannisters had never intermarried, so she had no idea of what her babe would look like, but she hoped that it would be as intelligent as its father.

Still and all, there were some real disadvantages to her condition. She had come to think of the Red Keep in terms of how far she was, at any given time, from a latrine. She'd nearly had some embarrassing accidents, and hearing about things that had happened to other women made her that much more determined that they would not happen to her.

After she was done, she thought that a snack would be just the thing, and the smell of good things cooking confirmed it; her tummy rumbled and she began to salivate at the thought of food. She set off down the corridor, toward the Great Hall; there was always a way to get food there, even between mealtimes.

She passed one or the other of Lady Oleanna's ever-present bookend guards, but apart from nodding to him politely, she gave him no thought. Lady Oleanna was in the habit of using them as errand boys when she took it into her head she wanted something. "At my age, I can be forgiven for not wanting to stir abroad more than is needful," she would say. "This castle is colder than I'm accustomed to."

Asha started down the stairs toward the Great Hall, and suddenly, she felt a powerful shove in the middle of her back, sending her flying into space. As she fell, she instinctively tried to position herself to protect her unborn child.