POV- Barristan Selmy
He had watched kings leave rooms before. He had watched Aerys stride out of council chambers still laughing at some cruelty only he found funny, had watched Robert stumble out reeking of wine with a hunted horn already in his fist, had watched Joffrey swagger toward doors that men scrambled to open for him a full three steps before he reached them. He had never once, in years of service, watched a king leave a room the way Aegon Targaryen left this one, walking a straight line toward the doors as though the walk might convince the watching hall that nothing at all had just been taken from him.
Barristan watched a thousand lords and ladies rustle in their seats beneath that ruin, thought, not for the first time this council, that no king with any sense of history would have chosen this hall to remake a kingdom in. Perhaps that was precisely why Aemon had chosen it. A castle built by a man who thought himself too great to burn, burned anyway. There was a lesson in that, if a man cared to read it, and Barristan suspected the boy on the dais had read it a dozen times before any of the rest of them had thought to look.
Daenerys walked at his side, her spine set, her chin high, and Barristan felt an ache move through him, carried without letting it show on his face. Rhaella's daughter, sworn to a queen dying in all but name that her children would be safe from a king who was not safe to be alone with, and he had failed at that in every way a man could fail at a thing and still went on calling himself honorable afterward. He wanted, as he watched her walk that carpet now with a boy whose claim had just come apart in front of a thousand witnesses, to cross the width of that hall and tell her plainly what his eyes had told him from the first hour of this council.
But was not his place, it had never once been his place. A knight of the Kingsguard was sworn to guard the king on the throne, not the one who opposes the rightful King openly in front of thousand lords and ladies.
Beside him, Jon Connington stood without moving at all, and had not moved since the doors had swallowed the boy he raised. Barristan had known the man by reputation only, in the years before all of this, once the lord if Griffin's Roost and a red-and-white banner and a story that ended, at the Battle of the Bells with a wound to his own pride he never fully recovered from and then ordered exile by the king whom he had served. He looked at Connington now and saw a man who had just opened that same old wound himself, with his own hand.
"You knew him longer than I have," Barristan said, low enough that it would not carry past the two of them. "The boy."
"I raised him." Connington's voice had nothing left in it, scraped hollow after he had spent everything he had on a single sentence. "For more than a decade, Ser Barristan. I taught him his letters and his sword work both. I told myself, every one of those years, that I was raising Rhaegar's son."
"And now?"
"Now I have told a hall of a thousand strangers I was wrong, and I know I did it right for Rhaegar's son. For as much as I love this Aegon as my my own, Rhaegar's blood still holds my loyalty." Connington's jaw worked once. "There is a part no one tells you about doing the honorable thing, ser. It does not feel like honor while you are doing it. It feels like taking a knife to something you loved."
"You could have stayed silent," Barristan said. "No one in this hall would have called it treason to hold your tongue and your Aegon would have rewarded you well."
"I would have called it treason." Connington's eyes did not leave the doors the boy had gone through. "A man does not spend years teaching a boy to be a king and then lets himself walk into a war believing a lie, ser, whatever it costs the both of them to hear the truth spoken aloud. I owed myself the truth and true liege."
"And what do you owe yourself now?"
Connington was quiet long enough that Barristan thought he did not mean to answer at all. "I do not know yet," he said finally. "Ask me again when I finish at least one talk with the King."
Barristan had nothing to say after that, so he gave none, and the two of them stood together in the thinning noise of the hall while Tywin Lannister rose and Westerland rose with him in one great solid mass, and behind them, smaller, less certain of itself, half from the Reach followed Mace Tyrell out through doors that had not yet finished swinging shut from the last lord's leaving.
This Aegon had looked nothing at all like Rhaegar, Barristan thought, watching the doors close for the third time. He had heard men say it about Aemon all council long, the coloring, the bearing, the way the boy held a silence the way Rhaegar himself had held one, and Barristan, who had stood guard outside Rhaegar's own door more nights than he could count, understood exactly what those men meant and understood, too, that Jon Connington beside him understood it better than any of them.
Elsewhere in the hall the hush was already breaking into a hundred private conversations, the low busy whispers of a great council deciding, lord by lord, which way the wind had just turned. Barristan had heard that sound before, after Robert took the throne and after Aerys lost it, men recalculating their own survival.
His attention found the woman again before he had entirely decided to let it. She stood near the base of the dais still, not to far from him, sword resettled at her hip, breathing evened out long before from whatever had passed between her and Aegon's drawn blade only moments ago, tall enough and broad enough through the shoulder that half the hall had likely mistaken her, at first glance, for a male knight rather than the woman she was. Barristan had heard the whole of her story secondhand, Summerhall, Morne's Gap, King Aemon who had knighted her himself for deeds most highborn ladies would have fainted merely to hear described. Just like he was knighted by King Aegon, Fifth of his name though his feats then were nothing compared to her now.
He had not yet spoken a single word to her but he found himself wanting to. She reminded him of his past, decades of years younger, a young knight too plain and too earnest for the court that now preferred its heroes and knights decorative. He had then wanted the life of knight marked in honor and rightfulness but not everything in life was black and white sometimes it was just grey.
"Ser Barristan." Aemon's voice came from the dais, and every private thought in Barristan's skull went still at once. "If you please. Step forward."
For one unsteady heartbeat the floor beneath him was not Harrenhal's floor at all. It was the Red Keep's, red stone and gold light and a boy king lounging in his father's chair, and the words had been nearly the same then too, his own name spoken across a crowded room, every eye in it turning toward him at once to watch what came next. He remembered taking off his own cloak from his shoulders in front of men who had served beside him for years and who said nothing to stop it, he remembered the sting of white cloak getting sullied on the ground that it fallen off upon. He remembered walking out through those doors with nothing but the clothes on his back and pride.
Aemon was not smiling the way Joffrey had smiled that day. It was a small thing, barely a curve at all, but it reached his eyes in a way nothing about that boy king's cruelty ever had.
"There is no knight in this realm more honorable than you, Ser Barristan." The king's voice carried to every corner of that vast hall without once rising to do it. "You have given your service to four kings and asked little enough in return from any of them. I would ask you to give it to a fifth."
Barristan felt himself nod.
"Ser Barristan Selmy." Aemon's red eyes held his, and there was nothing performed in them, nothing borrowed for the benefit of the watching hall. "I, Aemon Targaryen, First of My Name, name you Lord Commander of my Kingsguard."
He knelt and his knees didn't complained for it, the way they had begun complaining of most things these last several years, but they knelt today without a sound, and spoke the words of the oath he had spoken once already in private, months past, in the dragonmont where they first met. He spoke them again now for every lord and lady of the Seven Kingdoms to hear, for the High Septon standing solemn near the dais with his hands folded, for a realm that had just watched one king's claim come apart.
"I swear to ward the king with all my strength, and give my blood for his. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall guard his secrets, obey his commands, ride at his side, and defend his name and honor." he said.
"Rise, Lord Commander."
A ripple of applause moved through the hall at that, dozens of old knights and lords who remembered exactly how Barristan Selmy had been sent out of King's Landing in disgrace some moons past, and who plainly thought this correction had been a long time coming.
He rose and found Aemon had already turned, one hand out, and Brienne stepped forward to lay the sword across his open palm before Barristan had fully understood what was happening. It was Aemon himself who carried it down the dais steps rather than have it carried to him, which Barristan suspected half the hall would remember the meaning of.
"A Lord Commander needs a sword worthy of his skill, ser." Aemon held it out, hilt first, and the torchlight caught the blade's rippled dark steel, a Valyrian steel, shifting and dancing in the torch light that no forge fire born this side of Old Valyria could ever quite reproduce. "This was Nightfall, once. Ser Harras Harlaw's blade, before I took his head and his sword both on the same field. I have had it renamed. It is Oathkeeper now, and I would have it be the rightful sword of every Lord Commander who serves this house and throne after you, beginning with the man who deserve it."
Barristan closed his hand around the grip and felt, for one strange moment, the whole weight of every year since the day he participated as a mystery knight in the winter tourney at King's Landing, where he earned his knighthood after unhorsing both Prince Duncan Targaryen and the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, Ser Duncan the Tall. He let it settle into that single grip of Valyrian steel. It was lighter than he expected, the way Valyrian steel always was.
"Your Grace," was all he trusted himself to say.
Aemon did not climb back to the dais. He turned instead toward the base of it, where Brienne still stood, and Barristan watched something in the king's bearing shift, not less serious, but warmer somehow.
"Ser Brienne." Aemon's voice found her directly. "It was I who knighted you, on a field near Morne's Gap, for defending the weak against men who thought themselves entitled to prey on them. I promised you then that a white cloak would follow, when the time was right to give it to you properly, from Ser Barristan's own hand rather than mine. That time is now."
Brienne knelt where she stood, and if her hands trembled at all taking that oath, Barristan could not see it from where he stood, only her voice, steady and low and entirely without worrying about judgment from others and awkwardness he had half expected from a woman who had spent, by all whispers that had reached him, most of her life being told by other men that she did not belong in rooms like this one.
He took the cloak from the servant who came forward with it folded over both arms, white wool heavy with the weight of everything it was meant to mean, and fastened the clasp at her shoulder with hands that had done this once before, with knights who did not deserved it at all.
"And then there were two," he said, quiet enough that it was meant for no ear but hers.
Somewhere behind him a lord murmured something to his neighbor that was not quite quiet enough, a woman not just a knight but wearing a Kingsguard cloak, and someone else made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been surprise dressed up as one. Brienne's jaw tightened at the sound of it, the only sign she gave that she had heard, and Barristan, fastening the last of the clasp, found himself hoping, with more heat than he usually allowed himself to feel about anything, that whoever had made that sound would live long enough to eat the words later. He suspected, watching her rise, that they would, probably in spar.
Aemon climbed the dais then, and Brienne fell into place at his back with Barristan at his other shoulder, and the hall, still restless with the departure of Aegon and a female knight and kingsguard, went quiet again to hear what the King they had chosen meant to do.
"House Targaryen asked for loyal lords, in the midst of a hundred houses and more." Aemon's voice carried out over the crowd. "House Tarly came and together with them came House Rowan and Ahford. House Dondarrion came, and Darry did and so did House Mooton. The lords of the Narrow Sea came, Velaryon and Celtigar and all the other from Cracklaw Point and came House Rykker. Martells came, the sun and spear, and House Dayne came and the rest of Dorne too. House Royce came from the Vale, and House Baratheon came from the Stormlands, whatever road it took to bring them here." He let a pause open after that, long enough that Barristan felt the whole hall lean into it. "The house that did not come was my own mother's house. Not one banner from the North rode south for this council, save the men of Greywater Watch, who came because Lord Reed keeps his promises whatever it costs him to keep them."
Barristan let his gaze travel the benches as the names were spoken, and found what he always found when a king said aloud which houses had proven loyal and which had not, pride on some faces, plain enough to read from across the hall, and on others the careful blankness of men who had gambled correctly. Randyll Tarly sat with his arms crossed and his jaw set, a man who had never once needed anyone's good opinion to know his own worth. Near him, Mathis Rowan inclined his head at the sound of his own house's name, brief and formal, the nod of a man confirming a debt rather than accepting praise for it. Somewhere among the Dornish delegation, low laughter cut through the room.
His eyes found Eddard Stark across the width of the hall, and did not move from him.
"Tell me, Lord Stark. Why was that."
Barristan watched every face in that vast hall turn the same direction at once, the way a field of grass turned when the wind changed, and found Eddard Stark sitting very still among the northern lords who had been spared cells for this Great Council, his face carrying stillness, that he had no answer he was willing to give in front of this many witnesses.
The silence stretched. It went on long enough that Barristan heard, from somewhere, a chair creak under a man's shifting weight, and still Ned Stark said nothing at all.
Barristan had met Eddard Stark only a handful of times across a long life spent mostly when Robert brought him south for Hand of the King, but he had heard what every man in Westeros had heard, that Ned Stark did not lie, that a man could set his own sworn word beside Stark's and trust the two would match. It was strange, watching that reputation hold even now, in a silence that condemned him as surely as any lie could have. He had not lied in front of High Septon, even when the said King was the reason of his son's defeat and daughter's death.
Not far off, Jon Connington watched the same silence stretch, and Barristan wondered whether the man was thinking, as he was, that honor asked more of some men than it gave back to them.
"Very well." Aemon's voice did not sharpen and nor did not rise. "If silence is the answer you mean to give me, my lord, I will take it as the answer it is."
He turned then, and his gaze found the black cloaks clustered at the front near the northern lords, and the smaller, rougher-dressed figures beside them that Barristan had marked earlier and taken, correctly he now suspected, for wildlings brought south under a black-cloaked escort that would once, in any other reign, have been called an invasion rather than anything else.
"We have a war ahead of us with this Aegon, and with the Lannisters and Tyrells who still call him king." Aemon's tone shifted, not softer, but graver. "That is not the war I fear however. Lord Commander Mormont. If you would."
Jeor Mormont did not look like a man who relished the task in front of him. "Your Grace." The old bear's voice was rough with more winters than his years alone could account for. "What the realm is about to see, no man or woman has ever laid eyes on. I would ask every lord and lady here to hold themselves still, whatever they feel the need to do."
"They will hold themselves however they hold themselves, Lord Commander," Aemon said, not unkindly.
Jeor Mormont turned to the men of his own order, and four of them went out through a side door at a quick pace, and Barristan felt the whole hall's attention gather itself again, uncertain now, the low murmur of several hundred people who sensed, without yet knowing why, that whatever came through that door next would not be something any of them wanted to see.
It came back in a crate, iron-banded, large enough that it took two black brothers to carry it between them, and the thing inside it was not still. It shifted against the wood with a slow, wrong rhythm, and Barristan, who had faced men and monstrous men both in a life that had given him more than his fair share of each, felt the hair along his own arms rise before the crate had even been set down before the dais.
"Fall back," Aemon said, the words meant for no single man and for the whole hall at once, and men obeyed him without questioning why, the whole front rank of lords and knights drawing back a full three steps as one body.
Then gate came open.
What crawled out of it had been a man once, Barristan understood that much from the shape of it, the ruin of a black cloak still clinging in strips to shoulders gone the color of white and blue, flesh drawn tight. Its eyes found the torchlight and held it, and the color that looked back out of them was not any color Barristan had ever seen in a living face, a blue too bright and too cold to belong to anything the Seven had ever made.
The screaming started somewhere in the hall and spread forward faster than Barristan could track it, men and women, chairs scraping back, someone near the Reach benches shouting for a septon, and beneath all of it Barristan heard his own pulse loud in his own ears, forty years of battlefields and yet nothing prepared him for this.
Looking at the faces of people present, he knew that they understood, all at once, that the stories they had grown up dismissing as a nan's tale to frighten children had just been carried into their own Great Council in an iron crate.
Near the front, a septon Barristan did not know by name had gone to his knees with the seven-pointed star clutched between both hands, his lips moving too fast for any prayer Barristan recognized. A lady of the Reach had fainted into her husband's arms without a sound. Among the northern benches, Howland Reed alone had not moved at all, his small dark eyes fixed on the crate with an expression that held no surprise in it whatsoever, only a grim confirmation of something he had plainly expected to see again someday and had hoped, just as plainly, that he would not.
Then the roar came, from somewhere beyond Harrenhal's own walls, low and vast, and it silenced every scream in that hall at once.
The black brothers who had carried the crate back through the gate did not look shaken the way the rest of the hall looked shaken. Grim, yes, and worn thin in a way that went past days march, but not surprised, and Barristan knew, watching their faces, that whatever had just terrified a thousand of the most powerful men and women in the Seven Kingdoms was, to the men of the Night's Watch, simply another day's of work.
"We have a war coming from beyond the Wall." Aemon's voice, when the roar had faded enough to let it be heard, carried out over a hall gone utterly still, save for the scraping of chains where the black brothers had already dragged the thing back through the gate and out of sight. "But before that war, this realm will be stable, and it will not be riddled with traitors and oathbreakers who might yet stab it in the back while it faces that enemy. I mean to see to that first."
Barristan felt the shift in the hall before Aemon said another word, the held breath of several hundred people.
"Robb Stark, who calls himself King in the North, and Eddard Stark, who raised the sword of the North in his son's name against his own trueborn king's claim." Aemon's eyes did not leave Ned Stark's face. "Both are guilty of treachery and usurpation against this crown. Both will take the black, and live out what remains of their lives on the Wall, where a man's crown means nothing at all against the cold."
A sound went through the northern benches, not quite a protest, but not quite acceptance either. Yet Ned Stark's face did not change at the sentence, not by the width of a hair.
"Every house of the North and the Riverlands that lent Robb Stark their swords to make him a king will pay this crown a heavier tax for the next five years, as the price of having chosen a crown that was never theirs to give." Aemon's gaze swept the hall, unhurried. "I would rather send your heirs to the walls, my lords, though I will remind you I am entitled to ask for either."
His eyes settled next on the frail, sunken figure Barristan had marked earlier among the Riverlands lords, an old man seated in a heavy chair that had plainly been carried in for him rather than walked to, his face gone the gray of a man closer to his own grave than to any battlefield, though his eyes, when he lifted them toward the dais, still held anger sharp enough to cut.
"Lord Hoster Tully." Aemon said the name plainly, without ceremony. "You lost your brother to my direwolf, and I am told you weep for that loss even now. I do not doubt that grief is real, my lord. I do not doubt, either, that the ambition beneath it was yours as much as your daughter's or your brother's, that a Tully crown resting upon Stark shoulders was never only Robb Stark's dream."
Hoster Tully's mouth opened, and no sound came from it at all, the same wordless working Barristan had marked in the man since he first entered that hall.
"You will take the black as well, my lord, you and your son Edmure both. House Tully ceases to exist from this hour, in name as in seat. Any person who still holds that name after today will find a path to Wall or Silent Sister, whatever age or sex that person maybe off."
The hall was still silent, and Barristan understood why without needing it explained to him. Men lose their kings in wars and they pay taxes for it. It was a rarer thing entirely, in all the long bloody history of the Seven Kingdoms, for a Great House itself to simply cease, its name struck from the roll of houses as though thousand years of trout banners had never flown over Riverrun at all.
Edmure Tully was not in the hall to hear his own house struck from the world, off somewhere still nursing whatever wound or grief had kept him from this council in his father's place, and Barristan found himself almost grateful for the man's absence, sparing him at least the sight of his father's face in the moment the words were spoken. Hoster Tully did not weep. He sat very still in his chair, an old man's hands folded one over the other in his lap, and Barristan thought that stillness was its own kind of answer to everything Aemon had just accused him of.
A few of the river lords, men who had held their tongues through Robb Stark's sentencing and Ned Stark's silence both, could not quite hold them through this. Low words passed down the benches, more disbelief than protest, the sound of them doing calculation on their own house's fate should they ever choose as badly as the Tullys had chosen.
Aemon's gaze moved on, and found, near the front of the northern benches, a small boy sitting very straight beside a tall, grave-faced woman Barristan placed after a moment as Lady Barbrey Dustin.
"Rickon Stark, son of Eddard Stark, will be named heir of House Stark from this hour, and will remain a ward of House Targaryen until he comes of age to hold Winterfell in his own right." Aemon's voice was gentle, fractionally, while saying it, though it did not soften the substance of the sentence itself. "Whatever quarrel House Targaryen has with House Stark will settle with Rickon Stark taking his father's lordship."
It was then that the shout came, and Barristan did not need to turn to know whose voice it was, though he turned anyway, the old habit of a Kingsguard's eyes finding every threat in a room.
"You destroyed my House, bastard." Catelyn Stark was on her feet, her face white as bone, a woman who had plainly held the whole of this in for longer than any person should be asked to hold anything. "My husband, my children, my father, my brother. Everything, you destro- "
"You still have three sons and a daughter alive, Lady Stark." Aemon's voice cut across hers, not loud, but absolute. "Do you truly wish to see what real destruction looks like."
Catelyn's mouth stayed open, no further words coming from it, and Aemon did not wait for any.
"You left two children behind you when you rode to war for your eldest son's crown, my lady. Rickon Stark, the youngest of them three years old. The other seven, and only just woken from the fall that broke his legs, when you chose to leave his bedside for Kings Landing and then Riverrun instead. You stayed at your eldest's side to help him claim a throne that was never his to claim, and now you stand in this hall and speak to me of my destruction, when I have done nothing here today that your own ambitions, or your father's, or your son's, did not first make necessary." His red eyes held hers, unblinking, and Barristan, who had spent a lifetime learning to read the exact weight behind a king's stillness, understood that whatever mercy Aemon Targaryen had left in him that day, none of it remained for the woman standing in front of him now. "You will join the Silent Sisters the moment this council disperses, Lady Stark, and you will not be given so much as a single moment to see your children first, whether they stand in this hall today or wait for you in the North that will never see your face again."
Two Unsullied in Targaryen red and black had already begun moving through the crowd toward her. Catelyn Stark watched them come, and when the first hand closed, without emotion, around her arm, she did not fight it. She only looked, one last time, toward the northern benches where Rickon Stark sat with his back toward her.
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