9

Chapter 9: Part IX

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Disclaimer: I own nothing, just borrowing for a while.

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"I came, I saw, I reorganised."

Joffrey Augustus, Emperor of Westeros and Essos - 356 AL

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The Red Keep - King's Landing – 298 AL

All the looming towers of the Red Keep admittedly made for an impressive structure that dominated the skyline of King's Landing, Octavian thought to himself, but scaling all the damn steps when you needed to travel from one tower to another was all too much like hard work he concluded when finally reaching his destination in the Tower of the Hand. "I don't know how you can possibly wear that armour all the time Clegane" he remarked to his bodyguard. "All that extra weight to haul around, to say nothing of how hot it must get."

"If you wear it all the time you get used to it and it stops slowing you down" Sandor Clegane replied flatly. It was a pain in the arse when you had to haul yourself up all these stairs though he had to admit. "What are you looking at?" he growled at the guard in Stark livery on the door to the Hand's quarters who now blocked their way.

"Don't mind Clegane, he's just ill-tempered by default" Octavian apologised for his companion's manners. "Varly isn't it?" he checked, thinking he remembered the man's name correctly.

"Yes My Lord" the Stark guardsman confirmed, surprised at the Prince remembering his name, although he had met him previously when Joffrey visited the tower. "Are you here to call on Lord Stark?" he queried. "Or Lady Sansa perhaps?"

"What business is it of yours?" The Hound growled again.

Octavian sighed, he suspected that if Titus Pullo was here right now he'd suggest Sandor Clegane either needed a few drinks or a woman to lighten his mood. "Gods, Clegane!" he exclaimed. "The man is just asking what you would if your situations were reversed" he pointed out. "I'm here to call on Lady Sansa, I told her I might" he informed the guard. "Although if Lord Stark is in his quarters and can spare a few moments I might have a word with him too" he added.

"I'll let them both know you're here if you'd care to wait just inside to be collected" Varly replied, bowing to the Heir to the Throne before opening the door for them.

While Varly went to inform the household of their presence Octavian rubbed his eyes. "I've got to stop staying up past midnight reading" he observed, yawning.

"At least you don't have a hangover" Clegane muttered, helping to explain why he was even more surly than normal. Over the past couple of months at the behest of the Prince he had started to talk more, expressing his thoughts if not his feelings, but he was still uncomfortable about it sometimes, particularly because Joffrey seemed to genuinely listen if not necessarily agree to often.

The Red Keep had been ordered constructed by Aegon the Conqueror, first of the Targaryen Kings, who had come to Westeros three centuries before with the intention of building an empire and had the dragons to make it happen. Such was the scale of the project that it wasn't finished until decades later during the reign of the third Targaryen king, the aptly named Maegor the Cruel who had all the workers killed after they finished the castle so they couldn't tell anyone where all the secret passages were.

Rome had certainly never built a fortification of such scale, Octavian knew, nor the Greeks, Carthaginians or Egyptians, but if Herodotus was to be believed Babylon had walls over three hundred feet high and eighty feet thick that stretched for over fifty miles around the city so the Westerosi weren't alone in favouring excessively formidable defences. The Red Keep was intended by the Targaryens to as much intimidate the conquered peoples of the Seven Kingdoms as it was to keep enemies out, hence walls that were much higher than they needed to be to forestall the use of scaling ladders or siege towers.

Still, at least the walls of the Red Keep weren't as pointlessly high as The Wall in the far north of Westeros. At a reputed seven-hundred feet in height bowmen at the top wouldn't even be able to aim properly at anyone assaulting the thing below, they would have to loose arrows in their general direction and hope for the best.

"My Lord Joffrey!" Sansa said brightly, sweeping up the corridor towards them. She was very pretty, Octavian had to admit, although if she got any taller he feared he was going to have to start wearing shoe lifts for fear of looking Tyrion's height by comparison when they walked out together. "I feared you weren't going to come" she told him.

"Sorry it's later in the morning than I suggested, I overslept a little" Octavian explained apologetically. "I've brought you something" he continued, reaching into his pocket and producing a silk purse. "I hope you like it" he said, opening the purse and producing a pendant from it that hung from a thin gold chain. "It's like the one my mother wears" he explained, holding it up to show her the Lannister Sigil engraved upon it, "with one alteration" he continued, turning it over so that she could see the Stark Sigil engraved on the reverse side.

"It's wonderful!" Sansa exclaimed. "Would you put it on me?" she requested, lifting her long hair out of the way.

Octavian passed the silk purse to The Hound who stuffed it unceremoniously in one of his own pockets while the Prince hung the pendant around the girl's neck. "The Houses of your father and my mother" he noted, letting it fall between what cleavage she was showing. "If you really like it I'll have another made with the Baratheon and Tully Sigils upon it for my father and your mother."

"That would be lovely" Sansa replied, smiling before kissing him on the cheek an act that made Octavian blush despite himself and wonder if he was supposed to do something in response.

"Oh Gods, why do I suddenly feel so nauseous?" a familiar, all too often sarcastic voice interrupted them.

"Go away Arya" Sansa told her sister sharply. "Isn't there something stupid you need to do because some Braavosi told you to?" she asked sardonically, turning to glare at her little sister.

"I already spent an hour practicing my balance" Arya responded.

"Then go catch another cat" Sansa instructed, the little brat was ruining the moment.

Arya shook her head. "The last one scratched me to pieces" she replied. "Some are meaner than others" she added ruefully.

"Catch a cat?" Octavian queried, confused.

Sansa rolled her eyes. "Her Dancing Master had her chasing cats, said she could learn a lot from the way they moved" she explained.

"So she's still taking sword-fighting lessons?" Octavian surmised, Sansa had mentioned before that their father had hired some expert instructor that hailed from across the Narrow Sea. Unlike the slash-and-parry technique favoured by armoured knights in Westeros the swordsmen of Bravos, one of the Free Cities in Essos, preferred a faster more fluid style that had come to be known as the 'Bravosi Water Dance' and which was likely a much better fighting discipline to learn for a young girl. "You're not planning on revenge for me hitting you with that stick are you?" he asked Arya suspiciously.

"Do I look like the vengeful type?" Arya asked sweetly although the look in her eyes was disconcerting in the extreme.

Octavian frowned. "Keep a very close eye on that one Clegane" he instructed his bodyguard.

Sandor Clegane looked the small girl up and down. "I think I'd better" he agreed.

"I'll go take Nymeria for a walk outside the walls" Arya decided. The woods that surrounded King's Landing were a good spot to exercise her pet which suffered from being indoors too much.

"Good idea" Sansa agreed, it would get her sister out of her hair for several hours given how long a decent walk for a direwolf would take. "Take Lady with you as well" she requested. "Just don't let them off the leash inside the city and bring a guard with you."

Arya narrowed her eyes at her older sister. "I'm not stupid you know" she replied. Although largely tame they were still dangerous animals and who knew how they would react among all those people.

"Oh I nearly forgot to say" Octavian said suddenly. "My sister Myrcella said to ask if you both wanted to attend a party she's having next week."

"If it's going to be as boring as the last one then I'd sooner stay here and stare at the walls" Arya responded sarcastically. "All she wanted to talk about was clothes and dolls-houses."

"Both Sansa and Arya will be delighted to attend" the stern voice of Eddard Stark interrupted the conversation. "No arguments" he added firmly before his youngest daughter could voice an inevitable objection.

"Good day to you Lord Stark" Octavian greeted the Hand of the King. "I was going to ask your permission to take Lady Sansa for a walk in the gardens."

Ned Stark nodded his agreement. If they were to be wed it was for the best they get to know each other first. "I'll have Septa Mordane accompany you as a chaperone."

"I don't need a chaperone in the palace gardens father" Sansa protested. "I'm perfectly safe with Prince Joffrey."

Stark chuckled. "Having been a teenage boy once myself I find that hard to believe wholeheartedly" he replied. "No offence intended Your Grace" he added to the Heir to the Throne.

"None taken" Octavian replied, smiling. "I can only imagine how my father will react in a few years the first time a boy requests to walk-out with my sister."

"Knowing Robert he'll follow them both around with an expression on his face that would frighten a manticore to death and he'll be carrying a warhammer" Ned Stark suggested humourously. "In any case Varly told me you wanted to have a word, was it only to ask my permission to accompany Sansa to the gardens?" he queried.

Octavian shook his head. "No Lord Stark, I just wanted to let you know that upon re-checking the books and ledgers with Lord Baelish, and then subsequently visiting the royal treasury in person to see first-hand, we determined that the errors I found before were almost certainly mere incompetence on the part of some of his staff rather than acts of theft."

"How are you so sure?" Ned Stark asked, frowning.

"Because we found the money in the treasury" Octavian told him. "The funds were only missing from the paperwork not the coffers" he said. "The Master-of-Coin keeps a quantity of gold and silver to meet day-to-day expenses such as wages or maintenance of the fleet and it was much larger than the records suggested it was."

The King's Hand looked surprised. "How much larger" he asked.

"Tens of thousands of Gold Dragons at least, Lord Baelish is conducting a proper count now" Octavian replied. "We need not have borrowed any for the Tournament after all" he noted. "In any case the result of our inquiry is merely a few men being thrown out of their jobs rather than thrown in a cell awaiting the King's Justice" he said. "I thought it best to let you know today before the Small Council meets tomorrow."

"Thank you" Stark responded. "Good work" he praised the boy's diligence.

"To be honest I'm quite relieved" Octavian told him. "If the money had been missing in reality I would have felt bound to go through all the paperwork to make sure nothing else was awry" he said. "Poor Lord Baelish said he was going to himself anyway so there goes his leisure time for the next few months."

"Ah, that might be why he requested to come see me later" Ned Stark reasoned. Baelish had been cagey as to why but if it was to do with the incompetence of some of the men he hired, and his own failings to keep a better eye on them, that would explain his reticence to explain. For several years now the Master-of-Coin had been lauded for how well he did his job so anything that showed otherwise would damage his reputation considerably. "Was that all?" he checked. "If so I'll talk to Septa Mordane and get back to my desk" he said. "So many ravens bringing so many letters for the attention of the King's Hand every day" he continued sadly. "How Jon Arryn managed to do the job for seventeen years and remain sane I'll not fathom."

"Yes that was all" Octavian confirmed. "If not before I'll see you in the Small Council tomorrow Lord Stark."

"Until then Prince Joffrey" Stark replied, offering a slight bow which Octavian returned.

"Father likes you" Sansa whispered to Octavian. "He often mentions what a bright lad you are."

"Good to know" Octavian replied, wondering if he was making the right decision in not telling The Hand of the King that Petyr Baelish was deliberately making the financial situation of the kingdom look even worse than it was for some reason. The falsified records the Master-of-Coin must have concocted in a hurry might have fooled a lesser mind but Octavian had quickly seen through the misdirection, only pretending to accept the version of events that Baelish was trying to sell as truth.

Lord Baelish had obviously recognised that Robert's Heir was a great deal smarter than the King, unfortunately for him however he still erroneously believed that he was still nonetheless smarter than the Prince. It was this over-confidence that Octavian planned to use against the man if and when it proved necessary.

Best not let anyone know just how clever I really am until I've got something on Varys too, Octavian decided as he walked the gardens with Sansa. The girl was very sweet, loyal and good-natured indicating she really would make an excellent wife, he surmised, recalling his uncle's dictum that 'Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.'

Unfortunately for King Robert you certainly couldn't say that of Cersei.

Notes:

Note from the author:

The Red Keep is a massive structure ordered built by Aegon the Conquerer for much the same reason that William the Conqueror had the Tower of London built in real life.

The Tower of the Hand is the quarters of The Hand of the King and his retinue within the Red Keep.

The Wall is much higher than it needs to be to keep out Giants and Mammoths let alone Wildlings, Wights and White Walkers... it's much higher than it needs to be to keep out Godzilla for that matter!