Chapter 119 116

Elena Snow.

"My lord, I have brought Lady Elena," said Ser Claw.

Contrary to her fears, he had not led her to Lord Arryn's private chambers but to his study.

"Thank you. You may go and rest," was all Arryn said.

At their first meeting, Elena had had no difficulty acknowledging that Arryn was handsome. A tall, broad-shouldered man with well-formed features, sand-colored hair, and a bright blue eye. The ladies of the court held that the eyepatch and the inflamed veins around his other eye disfigured him, but Elena found something warlike in it.

The Falcon's Eye, despite being twenty-four years old, looked more like a harmless young man barely past eighteen, or like the gallant knights in Sansa's beloved books. Only the eyepatch concealing his blind eye reminded her of his fearsome reputation. She had kept close watch on Varys and had access to information about Axel Arryn's history that had not been filtered through rumors. The Falcon's Eye had enough blood on his hands that his presence made her genuinely uncomfortable.

Right now he stood with his back to her, staring out the window at something in the distance. He was taking unhurried sips of wine and showed no inclination to begin the conversation. Elena, already beginning to doubt her assumptions about the reason for the summons, decided to use the time to read the room for clues and looked around.

A workspace tells a great deal about its owner, and the most important thing in it is always the desk. To the right sat a neat stack of paper. In the center, everything needed for drafting correspondence. To the left: a candle holder with candles burning low, a jug of wine, a second cup that was presumably for her, a small plate of biscuits, and nothing else. Everything clean, ordered. Her father's study was more chaotic than this. Then, looking more carefully, she noticed something lying beside the papers: a strip of black cloth. The eyepatch.

"I did not expect to encounter a mage in Westeros," Lord Arryn said, his voice entirely calm.

The words first confused her, then sent cold fear through her chest.

"My lord, is this some kind of jest?" she asked, gathering herself.

"Is it?" The Falcon's Eye turned and fixed her with his gaze.

It took a moment for it to register. Both eyes were looking at her. It was the left one that frightened her most, the one the whole world believed to be blind. An iris burning gold, a sclera black as night, veins standing out red and raw around it. You see something like that once and it does not leave you, because nothing like it belongs in a human face. And that unnatural eye was drilling into her with sharp attention. The light panic she had felt before was becoming something much heavier.

"Mm. Judging by the many threads leading from the weirwood, you are a warg, or as some call it, a skinchanger," Arryn continued, as though speaking to himself, driving her fear still deeper.

Then he fell silent abruptly, waiting to see what she would do, and she could not find a single word. Something terrible pressed at the edges of her mind, something inescapable and malevolent. A grey, colorless world was pulling her down into itself. She pushed back, struggled, but it was useless. All she could hear was a tenor voice speaking in a hideous language, something made of metal edges. With each moment the voice grew sharper and louder. Fire gathering itself into a shadow with the shape of a figure. An iron hand reaching toward her face.

Then Elena came back to herself with a jolt. She did not know how much time had passed. More than a few minutes, clearly. Lord Arryn was seated before her, eyepatch back in place. He held out a cup of wine, which she took without hesitation and drained in a single swallow, earning a look of mild surprise from him. Then she finally spoke.

"My lord, I ask you to keep this to yourself." There was no point hiding anything now. Begging was all that remained. The south denied magic and looked poorly on every sign of it, and she had enough problems without adding that.

"I would be delighted to, but a certain curious girl has learned something she was not meant to know." And he set before her a letter stained with blood.

Elena had guessed at the contents, but held out until the last moment for some other explanation, some other letter that could have been someone else's. The method she used to send her messages had never made her think much about ciphering or anything of that sort. Her best effort had been to write without names, using initials and metaphors. In her system the Lannisters were lions, the Starks were wolves, names were replaced with epithets, territories and regions described obliquely or through family associations. That kind of cipher was sufficient to confuse the dull and the uninformed. It was not sufficient for someone clever and educated.

Her worst fears were confirmed. It was her letter. How it had reached him within forty minutes she could not explain, though in truth that was the last thing troubling her at the moment. One did not have to think long about the fate of outsiders who knew too much. She had watched such people disposed of more times than she cared to count.

She had no intention of giving up her life without something to show for it. She had a hidden knife. She could try to kill the Falcon's Eye. Whether she succeeded or not was almost beside the point. Her siblings would not be harmed either way. If she succeeded, Robert would become the new Lord of the Vale and would not dare harm his own blood. If she failed, Axel Arryn would leave them untouched because they were too valuable as political hostages. Elena held no illusions about her own fate, she was going to die regardless, but at least this way something would come of it.

"You know, for nearly half a year, everyone in King's Landing was running around searching for an invisible informant who was making the Lannisters' lives a misery. The great houses could not understand the reason for what they were calling the northern miracle, the most backward people on the continent somehow being the best informed. I will admit," and his voice carried something that sounded, improbably, like admiration, "even I could not work it out. Even I. Can you imagine?"

Elena's hand began moving, slowly, toward the knife.

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