Sorry for the delay on this, it's been a manic few weeks. Firstly some relatives came over from the USA, and the house had to be made ready for them (my book collection has been culled a little, heavily dusted and placed into a kind of order). Secondly we all then went over to France for a week, the blokes to Normandy to see the 75th Anniversary of D-Day and the women to Paris to sightsee (I saw all five beaches, Pegasus Bridge, the Merville battery, Cherbourg, Pointe de Hoc and the place where the Bruneval Raid happened). And thirdly we lost our oldest cat, who finally crossed over the rainbow bridge, having been held by me at the vet and told that he was the best kitty ever. And yes, I don't mind confessing that I was in bits that day and occasionally a bit afterwards.

Renly

The best thing to do when talking to Lollys Stokeworth was to have a look of concerned interest and nod occasionally. That was the best way to deal with the wave of words that washed over you as she talked about everything and everyone, including just how much she disliked her older sister. A sweet girl, kind, but not one the great thinkers of the world.

He made a mental note to find some Stormlord somewhere who would take this poor girl away from her family and keep her happy. There was no way in all the Seven Hells that he would ever want to marry her, but she did deserve something, if only for the fact that she meant well.

Eventually she came to an end and he realised that she had asked him a question and for a moment he desperately tried to remember what that question had been. Ah. "No, his Grace the King will not be returning soon to King's Landing. In fact I believe that he will be headed to the Wall to see what the situation there is."

She nodded, her eyes quite wide. "He answers the Call, does he not?" he nodded. "Mother says that the Call is nonsense, but she is very strong in the Faith of the Seven and I'm not sure that she really believes that it's nonsense. I heard it."

He looked at her carefully. "You heard the Call?"

The nod this time was almost violent. "I did!" She lowered her voice as much as she could, going from a squeak to a slightly lower pitch. "The Others come. The Stark calls for aid. You are needed!" She shuddered a little, before looking at him. "I told Mother about the head in the cage that I saw. She said that I was a silly girl and had been lied to and tried to slap my hands for listening to lies. I told her she was wrong. I think I'll stop talking to Mother." And then she curtseyed and wandered off, reminding him a little of a slightly bewildered but rather resolute puppy.

As he passed on along the corridor he wondered what other younger daughters the Lords and Ladies of Westeros would send his way. Jon had carefully spread the word that he was looking for a wife and as the news of the disgrace of Cersei spread there were many who were taking the opportunity to ally themselves with House Baratheon, probably out of the cold but realistic belief that if Robert dropped dead tomorrow Stannis would need a viable male heir.

He winced a little as he remembered all the fine words that Loras had regaled him with in an effort to bolster the position of House Tyrell in the court. He had no doubt that that ravens were now flying from Highgarden to Winterfell from Mace Tyrell, promising Robert that his daughter Maegery would make a splendid wife, whilst perhaps some other match (not a Florent of course) could be made for Renly.

Wondering where Loras was at the moment was not a good idea. He missed him, but with matters the way that they were… he sighed.

Boots hit floorboards ahead and he looked up from his musings to see Jon Arryn walking towards him. "Renly, are you well?"

"As well as I can be after talking to Lollys Stokeworth," he sighed. "A sweet girl, but… not much of a thinker."

Jon looked at him with eyes that seemed to understand a great deal. "You should meet her mother," he said dryly. "And then again perhaps not. Dreadful woman. Come, walk with me. The Red Viper has returned from the Pyromancer's Guild and apparently he has been talking with Pycelle and Seaworth."

He raised an eyebrow. "An interesting combination," he noted dryly, before matching pace to Jon's. The old man was almost back up to his old pace, which was a good sign after the attack by his wife.

They trotted down the corridor, around a corner, up the short flight of rather pointless stairs and then through the doors, which a pair of silent servants opened for them. Inside they found Pycelle and Ser Davos Seaworth huddled over a set of plans on the table whilst Oberyn Martell lounged in that rather bonelessly offensive manner of his on a chair. He was holding what looked like the hood of a pyromancer and seemed to be highly amused at something.

"Prince Oberyn, I take it that the Pyromancer's Guild is still intact?" Jon said with a slight smile as he sat down. "What did you discuss there?"

"Oh, we discussed a great many things," the Dornishman said wryly. "Including the inadvisability of trying to keep things from me and then trying to lie very badly about that." He held out a small roll of paper. "I always wondered how people like Aerion 'Brightflame', or Aerion the Monstrous, could carry wildfire around with him in little vials and almost juggle with it. Now I know how he did it."

"Vials of wildfire?" Renly said, his eyes a little wide. "I thought that was just a tale?"

"Oh more than a tale," Oberyn grinned. "And he made the wildfire safe – or at least less dangerous than it would otherwise be – by adding certain powders to it that diminish its tendency to explode." He shrugged. "It makes sense. The Targaryens commissioned its creation, so they would have wanted to know everything about the 'substance', as the pyromancers call it." His amusement dimmed a little. "The problem is that these powders burn off or dissolve or just vanish after a while. So our mature wildfire can be tamed – but not for long."

"How long exactly?" Ser Davos asked, his eyes keen.

There was a pause as Oberyn Martell seemed to think about the question. "A month at the most."

The Commander of the Goldcloaks exchanged a look with Pycelle. "It might be enough to get it North." He straightened up and coughed a little. "I've designed some changes to a ships hold that might suffice. A cross-grid of wooden walls that are well-braced and screwed down. If we place the barrels in them, surround them with sand on all sides and then screw a roof on the whole thing so that no sand can shift about…"

"It is a sound idea and it should work," Pycelle said crisply. "We need screws because it would not do to nail the boards down. Combined with Prince Oberyn's powders… we can ship it out of here to where we need it."

"It will need calm weather and above all crews that have been paid well and promised that if they don't come back their families will be taken care of," Ser Davos pointed out quietly. "But it can be done. Making those screws will be expensive as well."

There was a pause as everyone looked at Jon, who was looking at the design that lay on the table with bright, keen eyes. "Very well, let it be done," he said eventually. "I want the wretched stuff away from here as soon as possible."

Ser Davos nodded, rolled up the plans and then paused and coughed again. "Whilst you are all here my Lords I must say that I have heard an interesting tale from an old acquaintance of mine on the docks. He said that he had seen the Braavosi fleet heading towards Pentos. Heading there in full force I might add."

There was a pause as they looked at the former smuggler. "Damn it, I wish that Varys was here," Jon muttered. "Still no words from him?"

"None," Renly answered gravely. He had to admit that he was wondering where the Master of Whispers was himself. "But if he was in Pentos…" A waggle of the hand displayed his uncertainty.

A fist banged on the doors and he looked around to watch as Quill slipped in with a small scroll for Jon. As the servant left he turned to observe Jon – who seemed to be struggling with something.

"A raven from Oldtown," Jon said slowly after a while. "Mace Tyrell… is dead."

He looked up quickly. "Dead? How?"

But there was no quick answer from Jon, who was reading the message again – and then rereading it. "Your pardon my Lords and Sers, this is all most odd. Apparently the old Lord Tyrell died after rescuing a Septon who tried to cleanse a… a gate of some kind in the lowest level of the Hightower itself. The gate killed the Septon and eventually Lord Mace Tyrell." He lowered the message and then tossed it onto the table.

It was Oberyn Martell who picked the message up. "The lowest level of the Hightower? The level built of black oily stone built by some unknown people?"

"The same," Jon replied. "Lord Willas Tyrell is the new Lord Paramount of the Reach."

He thought of Loras instantly and he wished he could comfort him in his grief.

"My young friend Willas will be a far better Lord of the Reach than his father, although I always wondered if old Mace was a bit more wily than most people thought he was," Oberyn mulled, making Renly frown a moment in thought. There was a tapping noise as he flicked a fingernail repeatedly against the scroll as he seemed to think very hard. "This gate though… what could kill a man? This is all most odd."

He thought, for a long treacherous moment, about volunteering to go to Oldtown to investigate this. But then he caught a flicker of the eyes from Jon and he realised that that would be selfish of him. No. He needed to stay here.

He had his duty to House Baratheon to carry out.

Daenerys

Bolthole had a bath, a large one, and people to heat water almost to boiling point and so she had spent that first evening bathing and scrubbing the filth of the road off her, whilst her dragons had watched from a perch, obviously confused as to what she was doing. And then she had slept in a very comfortable bed for quite a long time, a long and dreamless sleep.

And Bolthole itself was… interesting. It was more than a farmhouse. It was larger than she had thought at first, and luxuriously appointed in many places. The dead Magister had planned well for any future exile here, with a large number of quite luxurious furnishings.

There was something else though… it was quiet here. The servants came and went, the guards patrolled the area, but above all the background noise of a city was gone. She wasn't sure if she liked it or not. Not just yet anyway.

And all around them the rolling hills and valleys of Andalos. With the odd lump and bump of a ruin. She could see one now on the horizon and she shuddered a little.

There was a polite tap at the door and she turned from looking out of the window to see a servant. It was Tirys, who unnerved her sometimes by staring at her as if she was either holy or bizarre, she could never properly describe the look. "My Lady, Lord Varys would like to see you in his solar, if you please."

She nodded, looked at where her dragons were sunning themselves in the sun to one side, and then strode out into the corridor. Varys's solar had previously been the Magister's and there was a fresco outside it that showed Mopatis as he had been when he had been younger and less, well, fat.

As she approached a travelstained man in dark clothing stepped out of the room. He looked weary and he walked off without so much as a look in her direction. As she entered the solar she could see that Lord Varys was sitting at a large desk. He was staring at a letter on the desk in front of him as if it had personally offended him. After a moment he seemed to notice that she was there and stood up to beckon her over.

"A thousand pardons my dear, but I have just had some rather odd news. It's a good thing that you're here, as it involves your family. I have a letter here from your great-great-grand uncle, if I have the relationship right."

She smiled slightly as she sat. "More or less. May I read it?"

Varys hesitated for a moment and then picked it up. "It's written in his handwriting." He said the words in an odd voice.

She stared at him, confused. "How can that be? He's blind."

The eunuch shot her a quick look, eyes flickering at her. "He was. The man who brought his letter here was at Castle Black when the Lords of the North arrived. When Ned Stark especially arrived."

She frowned. "Why Ned Stark especially?"

Varys straightened up and looked at her. "Because when Lord Stark looked at Maester Aemon his eyes blazed with red fire and he spoke with the voice of the Old Gods as he restored the vision of Aemon Targaryen. That's what the courier said at least. He owed me a favour and I see no reason why he would lie on the matter. Not when another of my little birds confirmed it and above all there is the letter, addressed to you in Maester Aemon's hand. All… most peculiar."

They stared at each other for that long moment of mutual confusion. "The Old Gods?" She asked the question hesitantly. "Truly?"

"It would seem so," Varys answered as he sat as well. "But then they have been making their presence felt in all kinds of places of late. It's been all most confusing. Now, I am a little behind the news at the moment – when I am at King's Landing my little birds bring me their songs directly. My time in Essos has, however, meant that I am trying to catch up as I start to hear their songs again."

And then the plump man looked, just for a moment, almost haggard. "But one thing I have witnessed with my own two eyes is the reason why Ned Stark summoned the Lords of the North to Castle Black. It was the reason behind the Call. For some weeks now men of the Night's Watch have been going South with cages made of some unknown metal. I saw one, no, two in King's Landing. Both contained the severed heads of what had once been human beings. But human beings die when you cut their heads off. These… well, their eyes opened and closed and followed you about the room and the mouths tried to bite all who came near them. Tell me, my dear, are you familiar with the Northern tales of wights? Because that what was in those cages. The heads of wights."

She just stared at the man as if he was mad. "But wights are nothing more than a Northern myth," she said, bewildered. "Viserys told me that-"

"Your brother might not have been that well-informed," Varys sighed. "Although I will confess that I thought the same thing. A Northern legend, nothing more. But once you've seen one of those cages…" He leant back in his chair and passed a hand over his forehead before looking at her and smiling wryly. "A Myrish toy, I thought at first. A trick, a device, a thing of wires and plaster. But it was not. Nor was the next one. They were real. And if wights are real… then what of the Others? They animate the dead, or so say the tales, but what if the tales are based on reality?"

She looked at him and then shook her head in amazement. And then she looked at the letter again. The hand that had written her name was a little spidery but it was clear. She picked it up slowly and then tucked it away in a pocket. Now was not a time to read it and by the slightly sidelong glance that Varys sent in her direction that was the right thing to do. She still didn't trust him, not truly.

After a moment he looked at her again. "I must be away again tomorrow, I am afraid. You can rely on the people here and there is a great deal of food both stored and on its way here, by several careful ways. This place is safe for the time being. However, I have been away from my duties in King's Landing for too long and I must return there if I am to continue to straddle so very many different lines."

His eyes flickered at her face and then at the walls and then back at her. "You must consider carefully what you want to do next my Lady. Bolthole is but a pause, a place to gather your strength and to consider where you wish to fly to next. You are a dragon, never doubt that, and Fire and Blood are the words of your family. But Fire and Blood at the moment can only take you so far before they burn any branch you are perched upon. Your family name is not popular and – I know, you are not your father. However-"

He was interrupted by an urgent knock on the door. "Come!"

A servant scurried in with a message that she deposited on the desk hurriedly, curtsied, and then left. Varys scowled at it for a moment – and then he seemed to pale a little. "It's marked urgent and important," he muttered as he picked it up and opened it. "Please pardon me my dear."

As he read it she looked around the room curiously. There were a lot of shelves, some empty, some filled with scrolls, or what looked like rolled up maps, or small caskets. And then she heard a muttered curse, a gasp and then the scrape of a chair. When she looked back Varys was standing and staring at the message in a combination of astonishment and disbelief.

"Are you well Lord Varys?"

He looked at her slightly wild-eyed, before recovering as his arms retreated up his sleeves in that familiar poise of his. "I do beg your pardon my dear. Today has been a day of all kinds of surprises." He sat again and then twitched a small smile in her direction. "News from King's Landing, or rather from Winterfell. It seems that King Robert has lost both his wife and his children, in that he has dissolved his marriage and denounced his children as bastards. The reason for this abrupt act is that Cersei Lannister, as she is once again, was discovered having, erm, intimate relations with her own brother, the Kingslayer, and that the King's children are in fact her brother's. Incest and treason. Not a good combination."

She looked at him, her eyebrows raised. She had no sympathy whatsoever for the Usurper, but she felt some surprise at what had happened. Incest was a tricky subject given the history of her family. At one point Viserys had mulled over marrying her himself, only to change his mind when the Dothraki match had come up. Finally she asked: "What happened to the Kingslayer then? Is he dead?"

"Taken the Black and going to the Wall. But he confessed to something – the true reason why he killed your father."

She leant back in her chair for a moment, surprised, as a hundred memories of her brother's rants about the perfidy of the Lannisters returned to her. "The real reason? Surely he killed Father on orders from his own father?"

Father's old spymaster looked at her carefully, eyes flickering. "I fear not." He paused and seemed to hesitate for a long moment. "In his last days your Father fell into a black and terrible mood. He saw enemies behind every pillar, in every shadow. He was paranoid. His last two Hands were… interesting. Lord Chelsted died in odd circumstances, dipped by your father in wildfire and then burnt alive. I never found out why, save that he had discovered something that your father had been working on. When I started to investigate your father warned me not to, on pain of death. Death by wildfire to be precise.

"His last hand was a man called Rossart, who was the head of the Pyromancer's Guild. An odd man, prone to giggling and getting… excited when he discussed wildfire. Many wondered why at the time. Now we know why. Jaime Lannister discovered the same thing that Qarlton Chelsted had, the thing that your father had been working on." The eunuch looked at her with strange expression on his face, a combination of horror and fascination.

A feeling of deep unease stole over her, as she wondered what it was that her father had indeed been up to. "Lord Varys, please tell me what happened."

Varys pursed his lips for a moment as he seemed to consider his words carefully. "It seems that your father ordered the pyromancers to bury caches of wildfire all over King's Landing," he said with a brutal candour. "Under the Dragonpit, under the Great Sept, under all the gates, under places like the Street of Steel and… under the Red Keep. Enough to destroy the city. It seems that your father thought that he could become a dragon when it was all ignited when the rebel army approached. Jaime Lannister stopped him from giving that order."

Time seemed to stop as ice water seemed to flow through her veins for a long moment. No. No, that was impossible. Father had, from all accounts, been unstable, but to do that, or at least prepare for it? No.

Something of her jumbled thoughts seemed to show on her face, because Varys sighed, looked at the message again and then looked back at her. "You weren't there," he said heavily. "In those last days. You were not yet born. You did not see the look on your father's face after the news of the Battle of the Bells, or after the Ruby Ford. Or, indeed, as the reports came in of the rapid advance of the rebel vanguard, led by Lord Stark. Confusion, despair, anger… madness. In his last days your father plumbed new depths. I was there to see it."

"But…" She struggled with the words that would not come from her mouth. "To order the destruction of the city… that would be beyond madness. Viserys told me that-"

"Your brother was blinded by his loyalty to your father and his hate for the Lannisters. And he was too young," Varys broke in almost gently. "Too young to understand what was happening. And… the day that Chelsted died, your father mistreated your mother in a most shocking way. Her screams…" He broke off and stared at the nearest window, before finally looking back. "Your pardon my dear. This… changes a few things."

There was the sound of drumming fingers as he sat there at the desk. "You can stay here as long as you like. As word spreads of what your father tried to do… well, the reputation of House Targaryen will fall still further. You have a great deal of thinking to do. Even with the backing of three dragons, many will not follow you based on what your father tried to do. This… narrows the possibilities open to you still further from earlier limitations. If you need a home for the foreseeable future then this is it for the time being, if you so choose."

She thought of the house with the red door for a moment and then smiled with no small amount of bitterness. "Lord Varys, I thank you for your hospitality. However, the idea of 'home' is an alien one to me. We were chased from place to place by the Usurper's assassins, so I do not know what 'home' even means."

Her words bought her an odd look from Varys. "Assassins?"

"Yes," she said wearily. "Viserys always had us moving from place to place, a step ahead of Robert Baratheon's killers."

The bald man stared at her again. "Your pardon my dear, but no assassins were ever sent after you. Spies, yes, to keep an eye on you, but assassins? No. Not to my knowledge."

She looked at him in puzzlement for a long moment. No. Viserys had told her about the assassins, many times. "But that was what he told me."

Varys sighed and ran a hand over his face for a moment. "Oh dear." The hand went back to the desk and drummed some more for a moment. "I need to return to King's Landing," he said after a long moment. "As I have been away for too long. There are certain… proprieties… that I must observe." His face hardened for a moment. "I also need to deal with two pieces on a now defunct board of the Game of Thrones."

She stared at him, suddenly feeling afraid. "When will you return?"

"I do now know, but rest assured that I shall." He looked at her most carefully. "Enjoy the quiet. Raise your dragons. Read Maester Aemon's letter. I will leave instructions for the servants to obey you. And think on your future. It might be that House Targaryen is merely a smaller player on the board than some might have thought. But you are alive and able to think about such things."

And with that he stood up, gathered his papers, bowed to her a little and strode out.