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AMAURY II
Thunk. Something had moved—some wind shifted, carrying with it spiteful stone. The winds were abnormal to him; the breeze was the mercy of a god, the wind its bellowing call. A vengeful god. The Father... he sobbed. No, he wept. The Stranger. A god he knew well; whose exploits he was well-versed in. Not me, the young boy said, shaking his head profusely. Never me. I shall be a knight, like Ser Arthur Dayne, or Ser Barristan Selmy, one of the best and greatest! ... and then the storm parted, and the day returned. He had been in a town plaza; the plaza of Lys, stood before the vast crowd that watched him. Thousands of eyes on him. Thousands of hands. Not the wind, Amaury decided. But them.
"Gonfaloniere," Amaury spoke as he drew his sword from its ornate scabbard. Men of the silver capes stood by him in rows; behind his victim, another row. "Last words, my old friend Moreio?" His words came as smoothly as if he were highborn Lyseni.
"As I told you long ago, you Westerosi will find no habitat here," the grizzled man replied. Aged as he was, he looked every bit magisterial; they'd dressed him in the celebratory uniform of his election, so as to iron in the point. The crowd made little fuss, at this stage in the affair. It was the anticipation that kept them silent.
"And as I replied, I am not Westerosi," Amaury said again, though the look in Moreio's eye cut through any such pretense, as he lifted the sword. "You will curse me to Yndros, when you see him?"
"Aye, old friend. But the curse you suffer in life will be worse. This land will spit you out, Otho, and leave you nothing but bone."
Amaury tightened his grip around the handle and offered the proud gonfaloniere a parting smile; one not without its sadness. "It's too late for that, Moreio."
He swung.
With the gonfaloniere's head on the pavement, the old order was left bare. They had two magisters of the new party; the First Magister was on route to the barricade in the attempt of escape—led, unwittingly, by a staged rescue. An hour after the public ceremony, Amaury—then Otho, since his exile from the west—received Irren's affirmative whisper. "It is done. Lysandro Lanyr has dipped into his last canal." The First Magister then, as well.
The maneuver had been swift in execution, but arduously slow in its set-up. This was the culmination of years—no, a lifetime's efforts—being lived in the bright, beating day. When the gonfaloniere's head fell, it wasn't only the crowd which applauded him—a crowd primed and readied, a people which supplied the movement just as much as the movement led the crowd, though it was not always this way. Only two years earlier, the riots at the Temple of Trade caught the ardent expansionist Brachar Esseyris off guard, and trampled him. That was the year of the election: that was a set-back. The recovery was immediate—it was almost as if these Lyseni gods were real, and had an eye out for this old foreign knight, who, when forced to seek a new man to propel upon the magisterium, found a perfect compromise—no, not a compromise, an evolution. Lysandro was the moderate whose ascent had to be supplanted at all costs. It was a pity that Otho had come to know his right hand man Moreio so well in the past—but lifetimes of work are not redirected from their course for the sake of a single pity.
The procession brought them deeper into the heart of Lys, onto the magisterial palace itself. There, the people laid siege to the council. Now, Amaury had need to see the people parted. He turned to his man Torreo, styled with the feathered cap of the old gonfaloniere, a small touch of Moreio's blood at its rim.
"Let us prevail upon the people to part," he said. "As I counseled, now is your time. Make your demands known."
"Men!" Torreo shouted, drawing his sword like a whip swung into the air—the steel drew out of the sheath so fiercely it may well have sliced the scabbard open—"In file, see us to the Magisters' Gate!"
The silver capes emanated with a huff of military noise—the growling groans units in blind formation emit at the reception of an order, somehow universal and singular as if all throats growled as one—and stepped methodically, one, two, three, one, two ... and then lowered their pikes. All at once, the crowd, caught by surprise at the immediate reversal of their populist fortunes, drew apart as if thunder had struck them—and it did. Those who were too slow on the uptake, or those lowborn ideologues whose dreams were dreamt to be dashed on the rocks of the powerful, found themselves impaled by several points. After this first wave of bloodshed and cries, the crowd needed no more instruction. It was parted like the sea parts before a storm, and the road to the Magisters' Gate lay bare. That was the road Amaury and his man Torreo walked, accompanied by their closest guard. That was the walk of triumph.
That was the road where the first stone struck him.
He hadn't noticed he'd fallen until Torreo had stopped walking to look down on him with a bewildered stare. "Otho, my friend?" he said, as if something had happened warranting an answer. Amaury tried to answer, but he couldn't. A strange thing.
And then the second stone, which pelted into Torreo. It clinked off of his steel chestplate and left a small, but noticeable, dent on the breast. And then the stones came like arrows, like a volley, like a storm, like they were being carried with the wind. Yndros, you came too soon, Amaury thought, his teeth clamping shut fiercely. He could taste blood—but he was gnashing his teeth in fury, so it might have been that. He slowly drew himself up, feeling his arms shake violently as he did. Rage filled him. Moreio, you bastard, your gods were fake, not real, he screamed silently. You bastard, you truly cursed me.
He felt the back of his head with a hand, and saw blood on his fingers. That was bad. The crowd. Where are they finding these... The stones would not stop coming. Amaury saw a fragment just before him—not a stone, he realized. Tiles. Tiles of... his eyes trailed up to the rooftops. Not the crowd. Armed militants lined the tops of houses and shops alike, tearing clean tiles from the buildings and pummeling the procession with it. But Amaury's eyes descended to the procession itself. The soldiers... Not good. The crowd had been a riot a minute earlier; it was briefly pacified by fear, but a dog whipped will maul the master who drops the whip. Into the palace, Amaury tried to say. Instead, he'd only stammered. By the time Torreo heard his failed attempts at speech, he'd clearly already made his choice.
"Men! Retreat to cover!"
Alas. The thing would be done just until its completion, and then the carrions would feast on what remained. Amaury had failed with Brachar. He would not fail with Torreo—with or without Torreo, he would not fail. The man gnashed his teeth together as he stood tall, and drew his own sword, the blood of the former gonfaloniere still wet upon it. He lifted it into the air and silently marched up toward the Magisters' Palace, not sparing a second of what waking sense remained in his bleeding skull to look back on the reactions of the men or the mob. Damn you, Yndros, but you are no Stranger, he thought. The Stranger does not leave a man half-dead.
This place would not spit him out so easily. It's too late to die, he told himself as he climbed the steps and reached the gate itself, bringing his scarlet-stained sword down onto the handles. It was no more than a symbolic gesture—he hadn't even the sense to recognize that it was not the blade itself, but the men behind him storming the palace in a fervor sparked by his bloody, staggered death march, that tore open the vast, whitewashed thick-wood doors. Just as the magisterium had begun to open to Amaury, he felt it grow distant—he felt it fall beneath his vision. He saw the arch of the door; then the balconies above; then the sky; then the Lysene sun. He fell.
These winds were once abnormal to him. They, who had carried him east, carried him to the Stepstones and beyond, to Tyrosh and to the vast plains of the Free Cities where they made work of love and war in equal greed for coin, and beyond those. He might have died, long ago, at home. Had he come all this way to die in Lys, for another man's conquest? Had he done all this to bring a puppet to the First Magister's chair, and be forgotten? These winds were the winds of doubt: these doubts, the stirrings of fear, the prophet of defeat. And yet Amaury had not been defeated, that day. His heart had nothing more than to cling to that promise; even if I am battered, broken, even if I am crippled and lame, I am not done yet. And he had business to see to: a thing to complete.
The tiles which were leveled at the procession came from the rooftops. The rooftops of Lys: the men of height, the elite. Lyseni oligarchs had reigned in the city since the days of Valyria, perhaps even before—for what were dragonlords if not princes of greed given the richest commodity of history, fire—only, their flames had been cooled. War was waged like love; the passions of combat and the passions of the bed were made to walk on the burning coals of commerce. Anything beyond passing self-interest was burned out of the soles of their feet before they reached the end. But Amaury was not Lyseni, and it was not gold he was after.
Militants served whomever had the coin to hire them. In Lys, coin bought assassins, elections, armies, and friendship. He had come to Lys a sellsword, years before—that was when he met Moreio, whose career began in the same company. Where Amaury might have risen, Moreio rose; he became gonfaloniere in a decade of work. Amaury became the revolutionary whose head was clobbered in by a thrown tile. This was because coin could not hire Amaury for long: he left Lys as soon as he began to climb its ranks. In Tyrosh, they took notice of him. In Tyrosh, they had the object of his attention. He'd searched for them in the wastes of Dorne for two years, and given up hope—he'd sailed the Stepstones for less, and found less to match the effort. He'd never given up the cause—he'd never given up his loyalty. And yet in Lys, when he returned from Tyrosh, he was on the brink of despair. Everything he had found after leaving had been seized from him once again—everything, his life, his future, his cause. Besides one hint. One hint of salvation, and all it required was a handful of deaths.
Amaury served with Moreio for years. He'd slept at his side, in the barracks, or underneath tent canopies cowering from the scorching sun. He'd ate his meals with him. He'd drank with him, when he drank, but he'd given that up long ago. Most importantly, he'd fought with him, plenty of times, for plenty of sides. Moreio was a good man; ambitious, yes, but there was not a Lyseni in the world who didn't hunger for gold, power, women, or all three... a good man, and Amaury would have cut his head a hundred more times if it restored his cause.
"I shall be a knight, one of the best and greatest," he once said.
That dream is not yet lost.
"My princess," Amaury said, when he saw her at Tyrosh. He had no gray hairs, then; he was clean-shaven, and still wore the old fox on his gambeson front. He knelt like a knight, and bowed his head like a servant. "No," he corrected. "My queen."
"I am afraid I've no crown, nor throne," the voice came in reply, silky, smooth, but sad... a great elegant sorrow was felt from that voice, one which had suffered a thousand mourning wails. And still, it would not be enough. "But for the few who remain as you do, I do have gratitude."
"You needn't spend it on me," the knight of foxes said, his head still bowed. "I am no hero. I was in the Reach, with your father. I abandoned his side. I'd sooner hear you send me away—disgrace me, scold me."
The woman laughed. She had it in her to laugh, still—what sorrows she had gone through, and yet still she could laugh...
"Ser," Calla said. "My father Rhaegar said you were a loyal knight. And I never once knew my father to be wrong."
He would die for her. He would have, in an instant, whether or not she called for it. He lifted his head when she said the word loyal... and he saw a little bit of her sister's eyes, in hers. Baela, he thought. Your little sister will be alright. I will do for her what I failed to do for...
No—no, it had come too late, left too soon... he hadn't the time to meet the boys, little Maelor and Gaemon... Gods, the terror. Why had it all happened so quickly again? Why was it that when the good men and women of the world thrust in his hands a sword, to be their shield, he froze?
Slowly, the pounding in his head woke him from his fever-dream. Sweat wore heavy enough on him to remind what it felt like to drown. The blurred shapes of tapestries on the walls around him faded in and out, but they seemed imaginary when compared to the thrumming of his heart, and the vitriol in his own mind's voice when it said: There is still time. There is still one.
His waking eyes sharpened, honed in like eagles on their prey, bulging from their reddened sockets as he sat up in his bed, watching a corner of the tapestry of a map hung decoratively across the walls. He hadn't an idea what it was—what it meant, nor had he the sense to recognize the quaking in his body, the pounding of his head, the thrumming of his heart, the drums and cymbals and war-horns blaring in his ears... he stared at a ghost, like a ghost, at the place called King's Landing, at the tiny, scarcely noticeable icon of the Iron Throne.198Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡqhf4coOZdZ
