The Kraken and the Lion, Chapter 24
by Technomad
Tyrion LannisterTywin and Tyrion both stared and stared at Oleanna Tyrell. She stood up under their combined silent scrutiny for some while, but then she visibly became more and more nervous. Sweat beaded on her brow, as she looked left and right, as if for her absent guards, or for a way out of the room.
"Do you think Ser Ilyn is available at the moment, Father?" asked Tyrion. At the mention of Ser Ilyn, Oleanna paled, and began to squirm as though she needed the jakes.
"Oh, Ser Ilyn isn't the man we need at the moment," Tywin responded, giving Oleanna a look that would have scared Gregor Clegane, had the man-mountain been its target. "We've some excellent, skilled questioners down in the dungeons. They could make a slab of granite grovel and confess its sins. This one will be no problem at all for them."
Hearing torture mentioned, Oleanna's eyes went wide. Tyrion gave her a smile. Or at least he showed his teeth. Right then, he felt like he could have put the old woman to the question himself, her age and noble rank be damned!
"Or would the ouiblettes at Casterly Rock be more appropriate, I wonder?" Tyrion wondered aloud. To Oleanna, he added by way of explanation: "Some of those are so narrow that you can't turn around once we've lowered you in. You'd have a bit more room there than the average prisoner, but it's still more like you're wearing it than being confined in it. And it's dark…pitch-black. If you talk, nobody hears. If you scream, nobody hears. Doesn't that sound inviting?"
"You can't do those things to me! I'm a noblewoman and the mother of the head of House Tyrell, and you need House Tyrell!" Oleanna's ploy was rather damaged by the way her voice quavered with fear. She could plainly see that Tyrion and his father were both deadly serious.
"Oh, we can't?" Tywin widened his eyes, his voice edged with mocking surprise. "What are the words of House Lannister?"
"Hear Me Roar! Everybody knows that!" Oleanna seemed to have regained some of her courage. Tywin and Tyrion both gave her a round of mocking applause.
"Ve-ry good," Tyrion purred, "but you forgot our second motto! 'A Lannister always pays his debts!' And right now, from where I stand, House Lannister…and House Greyjoy…owe you a rather large debt! I wonder how high we should set repayment? Father? Over to you!"
"For killing my grandson, and trying to kill my unborn grandchild? Maybe a life for a life would do? What do you think of that, Lady Tyrell? Margaery Tyrell's in our hands, after all. Any number of dreadful things could happen to her. She might find something in her food she wasn't planning on eating!"
"True, that," Tyrion mused aloud, enjoying watching the Tyrell matriarch squirm. "Let the punishment fit the crime! Or, maybe, she could take a tumble off some stairs. There are lots of stairs in this castle, after all; she can't avoid all of them, as much as she might want to!"
"Or there are ever so many other possiblities," Tywin said, his keen eyes on Lady Oleanna. "There are a lot of secret passages all through the Red Keep. I bet that if I asked him in the right way, dear Varys would be willing to show me ways to get into and out of Lady Margaery's chambers that nobody else knows about."
"And if she does happen to die suddenly, who's to say who did it? That is, if it's even seen as murder?" Tyrion thought aloud. "The Faceless Men are still very much in business, and they have ways of ingress and egress that nobody has ever been able to fathom! Not to mention, the Sorrowful Men…" His face twisted into a satirical moue of sorrow. "I am so sorry…" he intoned, quoting the Sorrowful Men's catchphrase, used right before they committed a murder.
"There's a large Dornish contingent in this castle, and they may well have all sorts of connections. Just because Lord Oberyn's currently under lock and key, doesn't mean that others in his train don't have skills that are just less well-known than his!" Tywin leaned forward, his face an inch from the Lady Oleanna's, and he hissed: "Right at the moment, my lady, your life and the life of your beloved granddaughter are hanging by a very, very slender thread! Your only chance of survival, or of becoming a great-grandmother, lies in coming clean! You'd better tell us the truth!"
"And don't forget, my lady, my lady Asha and I have been doing a great deal of investigating, and haven't seen fit to share what we know," Tyrion added. "So lying to us is dangerous! You never know when some little lie you tell, some tiny, insignificant lie, might be exposed by facts we already have! We already have a great deal of evidence against you, and you don't know what, now do you?"
Lady Oleanna visibly struggled with herself, then finally burst out with: "All right! I'll tell you everything!" Tywin and Tyrion leaned back, inviting her wordlessly to go on.
Once the dam was broken, Lady Oleanna couldn't seem to stop herself. "We'd heard a lot of nasty rumors about King Joffrey before the offer came from Kings Landing for a match between the King and my granddaughter! We weren't sure about it, but after our support of Renly Baratheon, we didn't feel free to refuse.
"When we got here, we made sure to invite the Lady Sansa…who, by the way, is completely innocent…to dinner, one night. It was difficult to make her talk, since she was sure that Lord Varys' little birds were listening to her. Finally, though, she broke down and told us about how the King had treated her. We'd been braced for something bad, but we were all quite shocked at how vilely and cruelly he'd abused her." Color flowed back into the old woman's cheeks. "I must say, any grandson of mine who did a thing one-tenth as shameful and evil as what 'King' Joffrey did to that girl…and in the very Throne Room, too!…wouldn't live to see the evening!"
Tywin did not look surprised, Tyrion noticed. Asha had said that she'd told him everything that had gone on in his absence. To Lady Oleanna, he purred, in a voice like poisoned honey: "Do go on. Tell us more." In the privacy of his mind, he couldn't blame Lady Oleanna for her anger on Sansa's behalf. Even so, regicide was regicide, and attempting, much less succeeding in, murder of a Lannister was an affront that had to be dealt with. No noble family could afford to be seen as weak; in this, Tyrion was as one with his father, for all that they disagreed. On the subject of maintaining the greatness of House Lannister, they agreed completely.
"Well," Lady Oleanna went on, a trace of her usual acerbic manner creeping back into her voice as she warmed to her subject, "when I heard what Lady Sansa had to say, I set my servants to work to suss out what had been going on. While Lady Sansa doesn't strike me as untruthful, there might have been other explanations for what she told us. And I don't know the Lady Sansa well enough to know how much to trust her." Lady Oleanna's eyes narrowed dangerously. "The more I heard, the more I was convinced that allowing that monster to marry my Margaery would be a dreadful mistake! I'd sooner have trusted my granddaughter to the Mad King himself…or to one of the Targaryens' dragons, if any were still alive!"
"Do go on," said Tywin, his face utterly unreadable. "What all did you find out about?"
"That dreadful incident where the crowd was at the castle gates, crying out for bread, and that spoilt little monster amused himself by shooting that crossbow that someone gave him in an evil hour into them, just for starters!" Lady Oleanna sat up straight, indignation written all over her. "Honestly! Didn't it occur to him that if Kings Landing revolted, he could lose the war on the spot? The Red Keep might be able to hold out for a while, but the servants come from the city and would almost certainly defect. Same goes for most of the common soldiers, and there aren't enough knights and nobles and Lannister soldiers to hold this castle against any kind of determined enemy!"
"We…Asha and I…did try pointing this out at the time," Tyrion said. "He wouldn't listen to us. Once that crown was on his head, even his mother had a very hard time making him do anything but what he wanted to do at any given moment."
"Just the sort of person this kingdom needs at the helm!" sniffed Lady Oleanna. Reluctantly, Tyrion nodded agreement, and he could see that his father also agreed. "You have no idea how much I regretted it when King Robert, may he rest in peace, died! For all his faults, he could at least make people love him! And he wasn't fond of inflicting pain and suffering just for the sake of it, as he did with poor Lady Sansa!" Lady Oleanna's voice went hard. "If any man or boy had done unto any daughter or granddaughter of mine what that monster did unto Lady Sansa, I swear by the Seven I'd not rest till he was roasting in the hottest of all seven hells!"
Tyrion agreed with her completely. "So how did you do it?" he asked, keeping his tone conversational. Now that Lady Oleanna was talking, he wanted to keep the flow going. He was willing to let his father be the menacing heavy figure, while he was the gentle questioner to whom the old lady would open up. He had learned much in his reading, and this was a chance to employ it.
"Well," Lady Oleanna said, warming visibly to her subject, "we knew that an opportunity would open up at the wedding feast. I procured the Strangler from a source of supply I have in Highgarden. It's small enough that a messenger raven can carry it. As for administering it, I had it up one of my flowing sleeves, and carried it on into the hall myself. Who, after all, would dare search or question the grandmother of the royal bride?"
In an abstract way, Tyrion had to admire her. She had brains and nerve, which made her a deadly player in the game of thrones. For all that she was small enough, and old enough, that a high wind would likely blow her away, she was nobody to underestimate. And she had had the ruthlessness to do what it took to protect her granddaughter. In a lot of ways, he thought she was very like his Asha.
The thought of Asha, and the dreadful peril she had barely escaped, hardened his heart. Leaning forward, his eyes narrowing, he asked, careful to keep his voice conversational: "And after the King was dead? What were your plans, then?"
"Oh, la, I knew that the marriage would go on, but with little Tommen instead of Joffrey. Tommen's such a sweet little boy! He couldn't be more different from that horrible older brother of his if they were from different parents! I'd have no fears for my lovely Margaery if she were married to him! Yes, he's young…but every day will work to remedy that fault!" She scowled. "And maybe if he's kept separate from that horrible mother of his, he won't grow up to be a monster in his own turn! We don't need another Mad King, not with winter coming!"
Winter coming…Tyrion suddenly flashed on Sansa Stark, and the Starks. For all that he owed Catelyn Stark some suffering in requital for her having him abducted and trying to have him thrown out of the Moon Door of the Eyrie in the Vale, Sansa herself was guiltless of her mother's excesses, and, in Tyrion's estimation, had suffered quite enough. "What did you think when my sweet sister called for the arrests of Lord Oberyn and Lady Sansa? Did it occur to you when you formulated your brilliant little scheme that innocents might well suffer for what you did?"
Lady Oleanna looked rather sheepish for a second. "I hadn't anticipated that Lady Sansa would take any of the blame. I fault myself for not thinking of that. Had I foreseen the possiblity, I would have seen to it that she got something in her food that had her hugging the garderobe all day long during the wedding. I think that just seeing her sitting there, even though she'd never been anywhere within reach of the King, was what put the idea of her guilt into the Queen Dowager's empty head." Then Lady Oleanna grinned wickedly. "I had planned to have Lord Oberyn take the blame. Everybody knows of his reputation, and, by grumbling all over Kings Landing about his pestilential sister, he had set himself up perfectly!"
"True enough," Tywin commented. He'd been listening to Lady Oleanna's confession with great interest, showing no emotion whatsoever. "Your house and the Martells have no love for each other, do they?"
Tyrion hadn't thought of that aspect of this situation. The Tyrell-Martell feud was older than the castle they sat in; the enmity between those two Houses was the stuff of legend. Dornish raiders had hit the Reach repeatedly, and the Tyrells had retaliated as and when they could. Unfortunately for the people of the Reach, the Dornish had their deserts to protect them, while the Reach was relatively vulnerable. Even the Targaryens with their flying, fire-breathing dragons had had a dreadful time with Dorne. It had taken a pair of royal marriages to bring Dorne under the Targaryen crown, and the Martells had exacted a high price for bending the knee.
Any Tyrell…anybody from the Reach…would think it was wonderfully amusing to commit a dreadful crime and see a Dornishman, particularly one of their ruling family, punished for it. Lady Oleanna might have really preferred to poison Prince Oberyn, but getting him beheaded for regicide would be a very nice substitute in her eyes. Not only would it eliminate a very dangerous adversary, but it would cast the relations between the crown and Dorne into shadow for many years. The taint of regicide would haunt House Martell for years, and possibly overshadow his brother's reputation as "the Kingslayer." While it was not widely admitted, a lot of people knew what a madman King Aerys had been, and thought that Jaime had done a righteous thing by slaying him, Kingsguard or no Kingsguard.
"What about my good-daughter?" asked Tywin. "What made you think you could try to have her murdered with impunity? Did you get a bit overconfident?"
"I didn't order my dear boys to eliminate her, but they knew that I wanted her, and the Imp, both dead. They're both much too sharp, and were asking questions I didn't want them to get answers to. Dear Erryk probably thought that he was being pre-emptive and anticipating me. I had said 'Will the gods, or anybody, not rid me of these meddling youngsters?' He just took me more literally than I had anticipated." Lady Oleanna's eyes flickered back and forth between father and son. "The fault, if there is fault, is all mine. Not his."
Unwillingly, Tyrion respected her a great deal for that. Part of good lordship was protecting your people, and even in this dreadful mess, Oleanna Tyrell was looking out for her subordinates. And protecting her granddaughter, as well; Tyrion had noticed that at no time had she said anything to incriminate Margaery. He figured that Oleanna had kept her little plans as close to her chest as she could; what Margaery didn't know, she couldn't let slip inadvertently, or tell on purpose. If Ned Stark had kept his big mouth shut around his oldest daughter, instead of blabbing his plans to have her taken back to Winterfell, he could still be alive, Tyrion mused.
"Very well. I think we've heard enough," Tywin said in a voice that brooked no arguments. "Guards!" When the guards came in, the Hand of the King gestured to Lady Oleanna. "You are to take the Lady Oleanna to some unused apartments. Her possessions will be brought to her there. You are to treat her with the respect due her birth, but not allow her to leave or to communicate with anybody without permission from myself or my son Tyrion."
"So it's off to the dungeon with me, is it?" Lady Oleanna said, her speech back to its usual waspish tone. "Very well. Come!" She snapped her fingers at the guards in a gesture of command that was no longer hers to make, and Tyrion reluctantly respected her for her poise and panache. The guards saluted stolidly and led her out. To a casual onlooker, it would just look as though the Lady Oleanna was being escorted by guards, as befit a high-ranking noblewoman in a castle where a murderer lurked. Nobody not in on the secret would guess.
Once Lady Oleanna was gone, Tyrion leaned close to his father. In a worried voice, he muttered: "Now that we've got the mystery of who killed my nephew cleared up, what do we do? We can't alienate the Tyrells! You had to really work to get them into our faction, even after Renly Baratheon died so suddenly!"
Tywin gave his son a long, considering look. "That is just what I was thinking, Tyrion. Executing the grandmother of the Queen-to-be would create a most horrific scandal, and drive the Tyrells right back into rebellion. Although we've eliminated the Starks as a factor, other Northern families are still in rebellion against us, such as the Tullys, and the war isn't over yet."