Chapter 8: On the Road Again

The rest of the ride to the capital was decidedly tense, the queen’s men both wanting to pick a fight with me and knowing that they’d likely die for it. I had set Jon and Ghost to guarding Arya and Nymeria, and started giving Arya’s Nymeria and Sansa’s Lady the mana treatments to increase their growth and strength so they could better protect their mistresses.

Other than that, a lot of people wanted to talk with me. The first was, somewhat understandably, Robert who summoned me to ride with him the next day. He was escorted by Ser Barristan and a score of mounted men at arms and knights in Baratheon colors. After ordering his men to patrol at a distance so we could talk, he stayed silent for several minutes, visibly thinking about what he wanted to say.

“You’ve put me in a damned hard position, Odysseus,” he began. “Trial by combat or not, you’ve killed my wife’s twin, Tywin Lannister’s eldest son. They’ll come for you for that.”

“Thank you for the warning. I have faith that between myself and Togo we can see ourselves safe, Your Grace,” I replied.

He snorted, shook his head. “Of course you do. And I suppose we’ll see what happens when they eventually send the Faceless after you, or the Sorrowful Men.”

Again, there was a silence.

“What the hell were you thinking?” he burst out.

I paused a moment to consider, to organize my thoughts. “Well, Your Grace, that’s a complicated question. May I speak freely?”

“Do you know any other way of speaking?” he grumbled angrily.

“A good point. But I’m not sure where to start. In fact, can I tell you a story?”

“Why not,” he sighed and rolled his eyes.

“This is a story from my homeland, about a scorpion and a fox. One day, a fox comes to a river and sees a scorpion waiting to cross it.

“Fox!” says the scorpion. “Please, I have to cross this river. Won’t you help me?”

“No, you’ll sting me,” says the fox.

“I’d have to be crazy to sting you,” argues the scorpion. “We’d both drown!”

The fox thinks about that for a moment, then agrees with that logic. Halfway across the river, the scorpion stings the fox.

As the poison courses through his veins, the fox looks up to the scorpion riding on his back. He only has the strength for a single word. “Why?” he gasps.

The scorpion looked sad for a moment, then answered him. “I couldn’t help myself. It’s in my nature.””

The king thought about it for a moment and nodded. “A good story. What is the point you wanted me to draw from it?”

“There were two, Your Grace. First, just as the scorpion cannot help his nature, I cannot help my own. I owe Ned, and I will serve him as best I can. That includes protecting his daughter, whether from a bully with a steel sword, or a woman’s sharp, cutting words. No matter their station.”

His face worked for a moment, then he just sighed. “I don’t think any true man could do otherwise,” he admitted. “You said there were two points though.”

“The second, is about the queen. The woman is a scorpion. She just can’t help but sting. She made this issue far greater than it should have been, fanned the flames of a campfire until it engulfed a whole forest. Consider the image. A boy nearly a man attacks a girl five years his junior. He has live steel, she a wooden stick. Then consider that the boy is the prince, the girl the daughter of Lord Stark. And this happens not one mile from the Ruby Ford. Further, a royal calls for the girl to be punished when the prince’s wicked assault is rebuffed by her loyal pet.”

Robert grimaced, his face flashing with rage as he remembered his own youth. “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

“Perhaps not, Your Grace. But I can tell you, other Lords did, and that word will spread. No one wants to have a madman on the throne. Not again,” I warned.

“And do you think the prince truly as bad as that fucker, Rhaegar?” he asked with a dark tone in his voice.

“I don’t know him well enough to judge truly,” I replied honestly. “But I can tell you, he meant to murder Arya. If Nymeria hadn’t been there, if I’d arrived later, you might have been explaining to Ned how his daughter died. As for Joffrey being as bad as Rhaegar… well, Rhaegar certainly did worse. Lyanna likely suffered greatly before her death. But Rhaegar didn’t start at nearly so young an age either. It’s presumptuous of me to ask, but has Joffrey been known to torture and kill animals? To trick servants into being punished, or give them cruel penalties?”

I saw the thoughts in Roberts eyes at that. It seemed that Joffrey truly was psychotic, at least a little.

“Why?” Robert asked.

“It’s a sign of a mental illness my people call psychopathy,” I answered. “Those afflicted have reduced empathy, and don’t see others as truly human, more objects for them to play with. They typically have a superficial charm and glibness, inflated sense of self-worth, lie and manipulate pathologically, have poor control over their behavior, issues with impulsiveness, blame others for their faults, and are in general blackguards. They often commit murder, and some enjoy the sorts of things that Aerys is told to. And they tend to escalate as they age.”

Robert closed his eyes, wincing. “Joffrey killed a cat and cut open its belly to see the kittens inside once,” he admitted. “And I had heard that servants considered him particularly harsh. Is there any treatment you could recommend?”

“The causes of psychopathy are debated, Your Grace,” I explained. “The best medical minds in the subject agree that it is typically caused by a combination of hereditary traits and upbringing. There are ways to help reduce the symptoms, but those are only really effective on people who exhibit just a few negative traits and want to change themselves, fearful of sliding into the abyss. I would not expect them to help much, save to teach him how to better hide his traits.”

“A hell of a thing to tell a man, that his son is a monster,” Robert said. “What would you do in my position?”

“As a man, I would likely debate the issue, turning it over and over in my mind, trying to protect my son until he did something truly unforgivable,” I replied. “As a king, I would have him sent to the Wall or the Citadel. I would have him gelded so that he could not have any progeny with ambitions. And I would send away the boy’s mother so that the other children were not subject to her poisonous affections.”

Robert looked at me, his eyebrows raised. “That’s a bit extreme, don’t you think?”

“Given the circumstances, the potential harm to the country, I would say that it was proper.” I could see he didn’t like the idea much, but it was planted, and Robert spent much of his time drunk. With a bit of luck, sometime he was deep in his cups Joffrey or Cersei would infuriate him and lead him to remember this conversation.

“But if you wanted a stop-gap,” I continued, “I would send the boy to someone tough but fair, who I could trust to either reshape the prince’s personality, or break him. And I would give documents to my most loyal supporters, including the man responsible for the prince, stating that unless he had that man’s approval he was disinherited and to be sent to the Wall on either his coming of age or the king’s death. Your brother, Lord Stannis, sounds like a likely candidate.”

The king was deep in thought. “You certainly spoke your mind.”

“I hope I didn’t offend, Your Grace.”

He just looked at me. “No, you didn’t. You felt certain things needed to be said, and said them, and didn’t pay one thought to offence.”

He was right. I was never the most socially adroit of individuals, and tended to a certain blunt, analytical, utilitarian pragmatism that many found difficult to stomach.

“That too, Your Grace,” I replied.

He shook his head. “I can understand why Ned likes you,” he said. “Just the same way of speaking your mind, the two of you.”

We rode back to the camp in silence. As we came close, he turned to me again.

“This wasn’t how I thought our talk would go. I didn’t like what you said, but I’ll think on it. Now, off with you. I need a bloody drink. And a woman who isn’t my wife.”

The king crawled into a bottle, fell to debauchery, and didn’t stop for the rest of the journey.

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The king wasn’t the last to speak to me. Powerful Lords sought me out, whether to find out more about where I stood, or to draw me into their factions, or the first steps of forming a faction around the new Hand.

For all that I had added to his difficulties, and fanned the flames of the Stark-Lannister interactions, I had massively strengthened Lord Stark’s position. The Hound, one of the Lannister’s most feared attack dogs, had lost his eye to my blow and the brain damage left him crippled with poor muscle control on one side of his body. He was barely able to walk, let alone fight. And now Jaime Lannister was dead, the “Yellow Prince” as he was being called shamed in front of the whole court.

It seemed as if the momentum was against the queen’s faction, that the Starks were coming to court and smashing anyone who stood in their way. Politics are largely about perception. Win, and seem strong, and keep winning and seeming strong, and people will fall in line.

Renly had approached both Lord Stark and myself to offer his support and gain our aid for his positions. He really formed the nucleus of the counter-Lannister faction at court. He was a young man, twenty one just like me, and to my modern eye obviously a homosexual. Hell, he even wore gold and green, the colors of his “special friend” Ser Loras Tyrell. Loras, meanwhile, was known as the Knight of Flowers. I mean, come on guys. Are you even trying to be subtle? But I never heard any rumors about them, and never started any either.

I had found three minstrels willing to compose songs about the fight between Togo and the Kingslayer, and the preceding fight between Arya and Joffrey. They were all part of Renly’s faction, which made sense as the king’s brother was aligned with us against the queen.

My favorite song was The Toothless Lion, a simple but catchy and comedic song. It had some great lines about the loss of Lion’s Tooth, the “most heroic blade ever made, sized for a boy’s hands” and Togo, “the great Kingslayer-slayer.” I cracked up every time I heard that. It was already spreading through the villages we passed, brought back to keeps as lords and ladies joined and left the procession.

That kind of propaganda was easily worth the handful of gold dragons I paid for it.

Lord Stark didn’t really approve, but even he could see that the feud with the Lannisters was irreconcilable.

For a week I spent every moment I could that we were stopped working on my curse. I just couldn’t get it to work. The sympathetic bond wouldn’t take. I knew I was missing something, some basic trick, and that if I could just see a working example I could manage it too, but I couldn’t.

The best I managed was a Connected Mark spell, which allowed me to create a sympathetic bond on two very similar materials but had to be cast on both materials at the same time. In other words, for it to work I’d have to be touching the queen or prince, and the bloody sand, and cast a spell. No way were they letting me that close, and no way was that going to work.

After that, I threw my hands up in disgust and gave up. I spent the rest of the time figuring out how to make the Oak-skin spell into a permanent, deeper Oak-flesh. After I figured that out, I applied it to all of the pets and myself. With my experience turning a buff into an enchantment, I managed to figure out how to do the same with the Combat Precognition; I basically became, much to my glee, a budget jedi knight at that point.

In the remaining time I got to work on a White enchantment, a conceptual imposition of order and being protected. It wasn’t strong, but it helped reduce and spread impacts, and every little bit helped. With time to reinforce it I would become tougher and tougher to harm. In the future I was hoping to turn it into a more general Superman style inviolate invulnerability, though I could tell that the enchantment fell short of that mark and would need to be substantially improved in general, qualitative ways before I could use it in that fashion.

Other than that I sparred daily with Jon and the Winterfell guardsmen, improving my skills with sword, shield and spear. I needed to be ready to see off the attacks that could be coming. I trained them in how to fight unarmed as well; as bodyguards they’d often have their weapons sheathed when they came under attack. I focused on how to fight against armed enemies, my own skills in such growing as I taught and practiced.

Socially, things were really weird. People didn’t react the way I expected to Jaime’s death. He was an incredibly important person, but he died in a trial by combat and most people basically just shrugged and got on with it. The antipathy from the queen’s faction was equal parts a reflection of her rage and the growing Stark-Lannister conflict in general, with only a small bit due to Jaime’s death and even that from the more hot-tempered and younger persons.

I guessed that when life was cheap, and easily taken by disease or lost in war or tourneys that death became less impactful too. So long as it happened in a way that everyone had basically decided was legally and socially acceptable.

And then we were at the capital.