Chapter 220

The Crownlands. King's Landing. 301 AC.

Jorah Mormont.

"Your paranoia will bring you nothing but trouble," those were the king's words. "Leave Littlefinger alone."

"Your Grace, a man cannot be trusted who..." Once again, Jorah tried to make his point.

"I've said all I intend to say, Mormont." But Viserys had no interest in anything his Hand had to say. "You may go."

…..

"Lord Hand, the warehouse on Bread Street was attacked by bandits. Five Gold Cloaks were killed, another dozen wounded. We've questioned several of the prisoners. They claim they work for Tommy Pox on Silk Street."

Banditry in the streets was nothing new. That kind of scum always flourished in the worst of times: war, failed harvests, sieges, plague, and the like. Bandits destabilized what fragile peace the capital still had, and sowed unrest in people's hearts. Honest folk could easily be tempted by easy coin. After all, if a neighbor turned bandit and got away with it unpunished, that was temptation enough for anyone. Criminals needed to be crushed, and crushed without mercy. The Gold Cloaks, reinforced with another hundred men, were ordered to root out the infection.

"Lord Hand, the High Septon has raised his protest against the foreign faiths from Essos. He's deeply offended that honest people are being lured away by priests of false gods, and he demands appropriate action be taken, or else he threatens..."

Relations with the Faith stood on shaky neutral ground. In King Viserys's army, only half the men followed the Seven, the rest was a mixed bag of every Essosi religion under the sun. And really, what could anyone expect, when Jorah himself, the King's Hand, was a man of the North who worshipped the Old Gods? The Septon's complaint was ignored. A man's faith was his own affair; if he chose to follow a different religion, that was entirely his right. Still, Jorah issued a decree stating that no religion had the right to cause harm to the city's citizens (something had to be done about the red priests afterall).

"The merchants are refusing to accept royal coin. It's recently come to light that the Lannisters had been melting down gold coins to lower the actual gold content before their deaths." The lions had left one last parting gift behind, and it would take years to undo the damage.

"The price of bread has risen again, and certain private parties are looking to run a large scale hoarding scheme." Mass buying up of food, followed by reselling it at triple the price, an old and thoroughly ugly tactic.

"A brawl broke out between Lord Velaryon's men and Boros's company of sellswords, ten dead." Not the first such drunken brawl between the various factions in King Viserys's army, and unfortunately, not likely to be the last.

"Lord Hand, there's a problem with the blacksmiths..."

"Another gang has appeared..."

"The situation at the shipyards gives little cause for optimism..."

"My lord, there was a question..."

Jorah listened to all of it, growing more furious by the minute. The calm after Littlefinger's appointment hadn't lasted long. For a little over two weeks, the streets of King's Landing had known peace and order. At some point the King's Hand had allowed himself to relax, but apparently, far too soon. Problems of every stripe began erupting across the capital with renewed force. Chaos swallowed King's Landing whole, and only decisive action could pull the city back from the edge.

"ENOUGH!" Jorah's patience finally snapped. "Where is Lord Baelish?"

Jorah was absolutely certain Littlefinger bore the blame for most of these problems. He'd grown sick of standing helpless against the Master of Coin, and decided the time had come to force the issue. Seize the bastard, beat a confession out of him, then have him executed. Not even the king's own orders would stop the enraged bear now, his patience had run out long ago.

"His Grace sent Lord Baelish to Pentos to negotiate with the magisters," the servant bleated, and Jorah simply ground his teeth.

"Listen to my orders..."

...

Bypassing both the small council and the king entirely, the King's Hand marched a portion of the army into the city and carried out a sweeping purge of every dissident element he could find. Bandits, deserters from the Lannister ranks, enemy agents, religious fanatics and their sympathizers, all were swept up in mass arrests. The King's Hand, Ser Jorah Mormont, wanted the chaos in the streets brought to a swift and decisive end, and wanted proof, once and for all, of Petyr Baelish's hand in it.

Any suspicion, any denunciation, any passing thought from an interrogator was enough, and a man would be dragged off to the dungeons of the Red Keep, where every scrap of useful information would be beaten out of him. If a person was found implicated in anything unlawful, he was tried with the full severity wartime justice allowed. Sympathizers were publicly beaten with rods, collaborators had their property seized and were driven out of the crownlands, and members of anti royalist movements were simply executed outright. There were plenty of missteps along the way, but results did follow. A Tyrell spy network among the merchants was uncovered, along with Arryn informants planted among the Gold Cloaks, loyal servants of the Lannisters hidden among the Red Keep's own staff, some Dornish prostitutes, and minor knights still loyal to King Renly. A staggering haul, and that wasn't even counting the hundreds more caught up in connections to who knew what.

For two weeks, King's Landing was "cleansed" of every trace of hostile influence, but it came at a devastating cost. When people have their family, their kin, their friends, or their acquaintances dragged off to the dungeons without a word of explanation, only to later find their heads mounted on spikes, fear takes root first, and hatred follows close behind. Only so long as the fear outweighs the hatred does the mob stay quiet. Unfortunately, Lord Hand Jorah had been so consumed by his fury that he'd forgotten that simple truth entirely.

At the public execution of the last four members of the so-called holy army, a group first organized back under Joffrey Baratheon, the people rose up. Faith had always held a special place in the hearts of the common folk, and when the disgraced "apostles of god" called on the crowd to rise up, the mob descended into a frenzy. Targaryen knights were torn apart with bare hands. Townsfolk, heedless of their own losses, threw themselves at the king's soldiers. Blood ran through the streets like a river. For every knight killed, ten townsfolk fell in turn, but what good was that trade, in a city of nearly four hundred thousand souls?

Lawlessness swallowed the city whole. And the rebels demanded only one thing: the death of the Bloodthirsty Bear, Ser Jorah Mormont.

…..

"I trusted you, and you failed me." King Viserys was grim, and for once, entirely free of his usual petulance.

"Your Grace..." Mormont tried to say something, but found no words worth offering.

All he'd wanted was to expose Littlefinger's vile true nature. He'd used the harshest methods available to do it, but none of it had worked. Petyr Baelish left no threads behind that could ever lead back to him. What evidence there was remained circumstantial at best, and couldn't hold up, not after the loss of trust and the riot that had followed in the capital.

"ENOUGH!!! I don't want to hear another word from you! Only the blood and lives of my enemies can atone for your sins now." As quickly as the king's rage had flared, it cooled just as fast. "Make your pin earned and get out there and fight. Don't bother coming back without victories."

"It will be done..."

The Old Bear's life could well be summed up as a pendulum: one moment the second most powerful man in the realm, the next a disgraced servant exiled to war against countless enemies. Perhaps a dark stretch had settled over his life now, but he remained certain it wouldn't last forever. Every dark night gives way to a bright dawn eventually.

The next morning, Ser Jorah Mormont set out with his army to bring the border castles between the Crownlands and the Reach to heel.

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