Chapter 187

King's Landing. The Red Keep. 300 AC.

Tyrion Lannister.

Was he the mad one, or was everyone around him? Tyrion found himself asking that unpleasant question more and more often. His father, the great Tywin, dead. The core strength of the western army, dead. The Lannister domain itself, ravaged. His uncle, Ser Kevan, too far from the capital to offer any real help. No allies, none in sight either, while enemies had multiplied well past anyone's comfort, and the strongest of them, Renly Baratheon, was marching on them at this very moment. At this stage of the war, the Lannisters found themselves in a genuinely wretched position. A plain fact, and one they'd simply have to live with.

But Tyrion happened to be rather fond of his own head, and went to considerable lengths to avoid an introduction to a spike above some gate. Put simply, a highly motivated dwarf was throwing what meager strength he had into pulling off the impossible: wrestling victory away from a stag who wanted nothing more than to see them all dead. The sensible move, honestly, would have been to evacuate to the west, home ground, but surrendering the capital would mark the end of the lions for good. A fleeing king doesn't remain a king for long.

And while Tyrion worked himself twice as hard toward staving off defeat, his beloved sister and his nephew the king worked three times as hard, each of them, toward handing Renly total victory. There was simply no other honest way to describe what they were doing. Their decisions might buy some small breathing room in the very short term, but further down the road they'd bloom into full-blown disasters.

Until recently, every scrap of Tyrion's authority had flowed from his father. The Old Lion's standing had let him get away with a great deal, even silencing the idiot boy-king and his fool of a mother when needed. And in his time holding that borrowed power, the little dwarf had made himself plenty of enemies among the "important" people of the realm, his own beloved family included. It was something of a miracle he hadn't been thrown in a dungeon, hanged, beheaded, exiled to the Wall, poisoned, or subjected to any number of other unpleasant fates. With his father dead, Tyrion had gone from a serious, semi-autonomous power in his own right to nothing more than the disgraced relative of the ruling family. Joffrey and Cersei had made certain every person of consequence understood that Their Royal Majesties took a dim view of anyone cooperating with the dwarf in any capacity. And so the whole court had turned its back on him.

Losing his power he'd expected. What genuinely baffled him was the mule-headed stubbornness of his own family. Cersei had taken up flirting with the Faith of the Seven. Clearly she'd skipped that particular history lesson, or slept through it. Tyrion, unlike her, knew perfectly well that dalliances with religion tended to end badly, and Stannis's own example made the point rather vividly. It would have been one thing if this amounted to relatively harmless sermonizing, but no. Now a "holy army" ran loose through King's Landing, a small force of seven hundred and seventy seven men (the symbolism, damn it all), busy murdering anyone showing the faintest sympathy for that godless Baratheon. The Faith had poured an absurd sum of money into it, and instead of ragged beggars off the street, this holy army was made up of fully armed fanatics. Nothing about this was going to end well.

Joffrey was no better. Among his more idiotic decisions: raising the price of bread, having crossbowmen mow down a crowd of petitioners outside the castle gates, slaughtering Robert's bastards (though that was probably Cersei's doing), and putting his trust in Littlefinger. That last one was the most foolish of all. Tyrion's suspicions had first taken root when his idiot nephew casually let slip that Baelish, "unlike the useless dwarf," had managed to partially solve the crown's debt problem. How, from where, why, none of that was clear. Tyrion took an interest in Littlefinger's little miracle, and for a long while turned up nothing of substance, until an old friend happened to mention something curious: gold coins were being melted down. Given a bit more time and a handful of indirect clues, Tyrion finally pieced together the whole of Baelish's "magic." Once it dawned on him, his hair stood on end, and the sheer stupidity of his relatives reached fresh new heights. These fools were debasing the gold content of the coinage to conjure new reserves of money out of thin air. In the short term, this would let them settle a good portion of their debts, but further down the line it would gut the purchasing power of the gold dragon across every market in the known world. Put simply, the money of the Seven Kingdoms would lose the trust of, well, everyone. Gold remains gold, and plenty can still be bought with it, but trust is a complicated thing, especially where economics are concerned. And the ones who would suffer worst for it were the Lannisters themselves, the single largest holders of gold in all Westeros...

That last thought caught hold of Tyrion, and he turned it over further. Uncle Kevan had reported that the gold mines beneath Casterly Rock had run dry. No fresh money was coming, and once the sacking of the Rock itself was factored in, House Lannister had all but fallen out of the gold elite entirely, staying afloat now only on what the Castamere mines still produced. Which meant the lions no longer held the largest share of gold in the realm; other houses did now. At present, the wealthiest great lords in Westeros were the Tyrells, and, oddly enough, the Arryns. The former had built their fortune on crops and harvests, but the latter had grown rich off an economic boom of their own making, and the wholesale plundering of the Riverlands besides.