Chapter 81: Long Live King Joffrey
By the time Henry rode out in full armor with his men, the road was already quiet.
The fighting had ended before he arrived. The column had taken casualties — several dead, more wounded — and the plan to continue to King's Landing died with the ambush. Henry turned the whole party around and brought them back to Iron Fist Keep: nobles and servants, wounded on litters, prisoners walking with their hands bound, Tyrell knights riding in the tight silence of men processing what had just happened to them.
Mace Tyrell rode without speaking for the entire journey back. Lady Olenna sat in the wheelhouse with the curtains drawn.
Joffrey pulled Henry aside on the road and told him quietly what he needed to know about Loras. Henry listened without interrupting. When Joffrey finished, Henry found Gendry, spoke to him for less than a minute, and had someone fetch a plain helmet from the supply wagon. Loras rode the rest of the way back with his face covered and his hands tied like any other prisoner, and the only people who knew who he was were the ones who needed to.
The great hall of Iron Fist Keep had not been designed for two hundred people in varying states of shock, but it was doing its best.
The wounded had been handed off to Maester Winston, who had cleared the keep's solar and turned it into something between a surgery and a ward. The prisoners had been bandaged — adequately if not generously — and locked in the dungeon to await whatever came next. The nobles and their retainers filled the hall in clusters, speaking in the low, rapid voices of people who are comparing what they saw and trying to arrive at a shared account of it.
Henry came in still wearing his armor. He set his helmet on the table, pulled off his gauntlets, and brought his palm down on the oak hard enough that the nearest candles guttered.
The hall went quiet.
"My lords." His voice carried to the back of the room without effort. He waited until every eye had found him. "I'll tell you what we know. The cavalry that hit the column was riding under Renly Baratheon's command."
The noise that came back was not surprise exactly — several of the knights who'd been in the tournament had recognized the antlered helm and gilded armor of the man who'd ridden away — but the confirmation of it had a different weight than the suspicion. Voices crossed over each other. Someone near the back said something that got cut off by the man beside him.
Henry let it run for a moment, then brought his hand down on the table again.
"I also have news from the prisoners." He let the room settle fully before he continued. He looked at the assembled faces — Crownlands lords mostly, knights and their ladies, men who had ridden to his wedding two days ago and were now sitting in his hall trying to understand what kind of world they'd woken up in. "Yesterday, King Robert the First passed from this world."
The silence that followed was a different kind than the one before.
Then the hall found its voice again, and this time Henry let it run longer. They needed it. The murmur moved through the room in waves — grief and calculation and fear in different proportions depending on who was doing the calculating — and eventually it ran itself out, the way these things do, and faces turned back to Henry one by one.
"Renly Baratheon concealed his brother's death," Henry said. His voice had gone harder. "While his king lay dying, Renly was counting men and sharpening swords. While the realm had no king to speak for it, he gathered those swords and pointed them at his own nephew." He let that land. "He intended to kill the Crown Prince. He intended to kill all of you on that road — everyone who could carry the truth back to King's Landing."
The response to that was not the muttering of men calculating odds. It was the response of men who have been told someone tried to murder them personally, which is a different kind of anger.
"Traitor." The word started somewhere on the left side of the hall and spread.
"We will send ravens," Henry said, pitching his voice over the noise. "Every castle in the Seven Kingdoms will know what Renly Baratheon did before the week is out. From the Wall to Sunspear. His own words in his own mouth. Every man who followed him to that road will have his name on the same raven." He paused. "And when we have gathered sufficient strength, we march to Storm's End and bring him before a proper court to answer for it."
The knights who had been sitting stood up. Several of them had their hands on their sword hilts without having consciously decided to put them there.
Henry raised his hand and the noise dropped.
"But that comes later," he said. "Right now we have a more immediate problem." He looked around the hall — at the faces of men who had ridden to a wedding, been ambushed on the road home, and were now sitting in a keep two days from King's Landing with the news that their king was dead. "The King died yesterday. You are all still here. Every raven from King's Landing has been silent. No riders have come. No official word." He let that sit for a moment. "That is not an accident. Renly still has people inside the city working to keep the news contained."
Heads nodded around the hall. The logic of it was plain once it was said.
Henry didn't know the full shape of what Renly had arranged in King's Landing — the prisoners knew about Robert's death and nothing else useful. But the silence from the city was real, and whatever its cause, it needed to be answered before it hardened into something worse.
He pushed back from the table and stood.
"A kingdom cannot wait," he said. "Not for a day. Not for an hour. His Royal Highness Joffrey was named heir by King Robert before witnesses, sworn to by every lord in this hall among others, confirmed by royal decree." He looked directly at Joffrey, who had been sitting straight and still through all of it. "He is not the Crown Prince any longer. He is our king. And we are going to take him home."
He stepped down from the dais.
He drew Red Rain from the scabbard across his back — the dark Valyrian blade catching the torchlight, the gold crossguard gleaming — and walked to the center of the hall. He held the sword point-down, lowered himself to one knee, and placed the blade flat on the stone floor in front of him.
"The king is dead." His voice was steady and carried to every corner of the room. "Long live the king."
He bowed his head.
"I, Henry of House Reyne, Lord of the Bay of Crabs, Defender of the Blackwater Rush — swear my sword, my keep, my men, and my life to Joffrey of House Baratheon, First of His Name, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm."
He raised his eyes to Joffrey.
"Long live King Joffrey."
The hall came off its feet.
Swords came out of scabbards across the room — not as weapons, as declarations — and went to the floor, and their owners went to one knee behind them, the sound of it rolling through the hall in a wave that had no clear beginning and no clear end.
Maewyn Sarsfield knelt with the White Cloaks of Iron Fist Keep's garrison, his voice joining the rest.
The Tyrell knights knelt, Garlan among them, adding House Highgarden's voice to the oath.
Mace Tyrell knelt, somewhat more slowly than the others, and Lady Olenna inclined her head from her seat with the precise, minimal acknowledgment of a woman who has decided this is the correct outcome and sees no reason to be theatrical about it.
Gendry knelt. The Bastard Guard knelt. The household men knelt. The nobles of the Crownlands knelt.
Tommen knelt beside his brother. Myrcella beside Tommen.
Joffrey stood in the center of it — in his father's antlered helm, with his father's sword at his hip, in a hall full of people swearing to follow him — and looked at Henry for a moment with the expression of a boy who has been prepared for something for a long time and has finally arrived at it and found it heavier than he expected.
He nodded once.
The oaths crashed through the hall and out through the open doors into the yard, where the men standing guard took it up, and it spread from there to the stables and the walls and the road beyond, the same words from a hundred different voices:
Long live King Joffrey. Long live His Grace, King Joffrey of House Baratheon.
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