Chapter 156: Long Live the Queen

From beyond the hall came new footsteps, faster, more of them, and the ring of armor: the Unsullied, clearing the last of the Red Keep, closing on the throne room, and above the castle Drogon’s low thunder circled nearer. Tyrion looked one last time at the sister whose blood he shared and whom he had hated and fought for half his life, sighed, and turned to go. His task was done. He had settled their account, and he had kept for the falling queen one final conversation that belonged to human beings, rather than the plain trampling of the defeated.

“Tyrion!” She screamed it after him with everything left in her, shrill as a night bird. “Tell the Targaryen! Tell her! She can sit that throne and she will never be free of me! A Lannister always pays her debts! I will come for you all, if I have to come as a ghost! And you, traitor, may you die screaming!”

He did not stop. He turned his head only slightly, and what he said was for himself alone. “Goodbye, sister. May the gods, if there are gods, forgive your soul. As for the debts, the Lannister debts were paid in full long ago.”

He walked on his cane, step by step, toward the light of the entrance, leaving the curses and the screaming and the throne that was about to change masters together in the cold dark behind him. Moments later the Unsullied poured in, spears leveled at the wild-eyed woman slumped beneath the Iron Throne, and after them came Daenerys Targaryen, with Grey Worm, Ser Barristan Selmy, and her generals and counselors, Tyrion among them, the Hand’s chain once more at his collar. Her gaze rested a moment on the ugly chair, some mixed light crossing her eyes, and then fell to the disheveled golden-haired woman at the foot of the steps, still glaring poison at her.

“Cersei Lannister.” Her voice was calm and carried an authority that admitted no argument, filling the empty hall. “In the name of House Targaryen, as rightful ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, I, Daenerys Targaryen, declare you under arrest, for treason, usurpation, murder, and crimes beyond counting against gods and men. You, and your rule, are finished.” She moved one hand, and two Unsullied lifted the struggling, cursing woman and carried her from the hall.

Then Daenerys climbed, slowly, the steps her family had lost and had now bought back with blood and fire, turned, and sat upon the cold chair of a thousand swords, and as she did the sun broke through the ruined dome and lit her silver-gold hair and violet eyes, and lit the subjects and the generals kneeling below. “Dragonfire burns away the usurpers,” came Ser Barristan’s old, thick voice, “and Targaryen has returned.” “Long live the queen!” It went up like a mountain falling, inside the hall and beyond it, wave upon wave.

The Iron Throne, after Robert’s Rebellion, the War of the Five Kings, the Lannister-Tyrell compact, and Cersei’s reign of one, had its new ruler, with the true dragon’s blood in her veins, and a new page of Westeros’s history turned in the old way, by blood and fire. Whether old hatreds and old wounds could be erased by the changing of a chair was another question: the fires of the Reach and Dorne in the south, the shadow war of the Vale and the west, and the ruined kingdom the new queen now had to rebuild and rule all promised that true peace remained a long road off. But in that hour, amid the ruins and the cheering of King’s Landing, an era had begun.

The throne room of the Red Keep, which Cersei had lately used for displays of armed majesty, had been given its first cleaning and repair. The war still showed, the dome unmended, the dragonfire scars dark on the walls, but the hall had recovered the gravity of the center of the Seven Kingdoms. Pale late-winter sun came through the surviving stained glass and laid broken colors on the polished floor, and the air carried new wood, lime, and an expensive incense not quite equal to the ghosts of smoke and blood beneath it.

Along both walls stood the newly raised Queensguard in fresh scale and white cloaks, built on a core of Unsullied, filled out with vetted men from the surrendered Lannister guards and a leavening of Dothraki bloodriders, silent as stone and missing nothing; below the dais stood the white knights of the rebuilt Kingsguard, reorganized under Ser Barristan from the surviving veterans and a few newcomers whose loyalty and courage the war had proved. And gathered in the hall this day were no ordinary courtiers or petitioners, but the envoys of the great powers of Westeros, standing in a tacit order with clear seams between them, every gaze, open or hooded, bent on the dais and the hideous chair of melted swords, and on its new occupant.

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Daenerys Targaryen, Stormborn, the Unburnt, Mother of Dragons, Queen of Meereen, Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Lady of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm, wore this day neither battle leather nor Dothraki dress, but a simple, exactly tailored gown of deep purple velvet with the three-headed dragon worked in silver thread, her silver-gold hair bound up and set with small pearls. She sat straight on the Iron Throne, pale violet eyes moving calmly over the envoys, her face carrying little feeling, only the level, distant majesty of a ruler. After the blood of King’s Landing and the coronation on the throne, the rawness of the returned exile and her idealist’s anger seemed to have settled and clarified into something more contained, and heavier to stand under.

Flanking the throne, slightly lower, sat her two chief ministers: on the left Tyrion Lannister, the Hand’s chain on a black velvet coat trimmed with gold, expression calm, fingers working the chair arm without his leave; on the right Varys, Master of Whisperers, in his quiet silks, wearing the gentle unreadable smile of a man watching events he has already read. And beyond the hall’s great, half-repaired doors could be heard, faintly, a slow enormous breathing, and the rustle of scales over stone, and now and then a vast shadow smelling of sulfur slid across the sunlight in the doorway: Drogon and Rhaegal, healed enough, lying in the Red Keep’s courtyard like the most loyal and terrible of guardian beasts, reminding every person in the hall, continuously and without a word, of the deterrence this queen commanded above and beyond any army.

Against that backdrop opened the audience men would call the Dragon Court: the first formal reception of the powers’ envoys since the coronation, to hear their submissions or congratulations, and to let the new reign say aloud, for the first time, what it intended.

The Reach’s envoy came first, a grey-haired old knight of meticulous manners, speaking for Lady Olenna and Lord Randyll. He offered the most sincere congratulations on Her Grace’s brilliant victory and the restoration of the lawful line, presented lavish gifts, jewels, silks, Arbor gold, and conveyed that the Reach recognized the Targaryen queen’s lawful rule of the Seven Kingdoms and looked forward to friendly and mutually profitable relations with the crown. Then, delicately, the reservation: the Reach was regrettably entangled in a border war with Dorne, its strength strained, and could not at once take up fuller obligations of vassalage, though once the south was settled it would pledge entire loyalty and contribute to the realm’s tranquility. Recognition, in short, conditional and reserved: no tribute now, eyes fixed south. Daenerys heard it out and inclined her head slightly, tone flat. “I thank Lady Tyrell for her congratulations. May the Seven bless the Reach and Dorne to resolve their dispute peacefully and soon, and restore the Reach its peace.” No promise, no pressure; and the very flatness was pressure of its own, granting the Reach’s southern war no legitimacy, and promising no abstention from it.

Dorne’s envoy followed, a dark-skinned lord with quick eyes in ornate silks, for Prince Doran and Prince Oberyn, bearing sand-rose oil, amber, and gem-hilted scimitars, and congratulating the queen warmly on ending the usurpation and recovering what was lost. Dorne, he said, had always remembered its ancient friendship with House Targaryen, and admired Her Grace’s great work of breaking chains across the narrow sea; as for the present unpleasantness, the armies of the Reach had invaded the Marches unprovoked, threatening Dorne’s safety, and the Prince had been compelled to defend; but Dorne held the Iron Throne in unaltered respect, and stood ready to discuss the restoration of a comprehensive peace under Her Grace’s leadership. Submission on the surface, self-justification in the body, and beneath both an invitation for the queen to uphold justice in Dorne’s favor. Daenerys’s answer was equally contained. “My thanks to Prince Doran for his congratulations and his gifts. Targaryen has not forgotten Dorne’s friendship. As to the strife in the Marches, I will hear the statements of both sides, and I would see every dispute resolved within the laws and the peace of the kingdom.” The detached arbiter again; and kingdom’s laws, said from that chair, quietly asserted the throne’s final authority over every territory in question, the Stormlands included.