The smell reached her before the city did.
It came across the water in waves — rot and fish and something underneath both, something organic and human and wrong, the accumulated exhalation of a hundred thousand lives pressed together without adequate drainage. She gripped the barge's railing with both hands and breathed through her mouth and told herself, with some firmness, not to be sick into the Blackwater Rush.
This was considerably more difficult than it sounded.
The barge itself was a Lannister courtesy — gilded prow, crimson awning, two rows of oarsmen pulling in the grey morning light with the mechanical synchrony of men who had been told exactly what this particular cargo was worth and had calculated their effort accordingly. Not excessive. Not negligent. The precise, practiced effort of those who understood that minor Tully hostages were to be delivered intact but not impressed.
She had been standing at this railing for some time, long enough to have arrived at certain conclusions.
The first conclusion was that she was not, in any meaningful sense, herself.
This required qualification. She was present. She was thinking. The thoughts were hers — shaped in her particular register, reaching for her particular references, equipped with her particular capacity for irony, which was the only capacity she had that currently seemed of any use. But the hands gripping the railing were not her hands. They were broader, the knuckles reddened from cold, with a small scar on the right index finger that she had not put there and could not account for. The gown she was wearing — dove-grey wool with Tully-blue stitching at the cuffs, a construction of some complexity that appeared to require an architecture of undergarments beneath it — was not her gown. The body wearing it was not her body, though it was, she was forced to accept, the body she was currently inhabiting with no evident means of egress.
She had awoken to this situation approximately two hours ago, in a narrow cabin belowdecks that smelled of river water and tallow candles, with the particular disorientation of a woman who falls asleep in one life and opens her eyes in another. There had been a moment — several moments, if honesty served — of something she declined to call panic, because calling it panic would not improve it. Then the thinking had started, and the thinking, once started, was not easily stopped.
Her name, in this life, was Lady Elara Tully.
She had gathered this from the letter, which had been on the small writing table in the cabin, folded with the Tully trout seal and addressed to the Master of Coin at King's Landing in a hand that was not hers. She had broken the seal without compunction — it was, technically, her seal, or the seal of the man who had signed the letter as her father — and read it twice, carefully, and then a third time to be certain she had not misunderstood.
She had not misunderstood.
The letter was, in its essentials, a document of surrender dressed in the language of alliance. Lord Edwyn Tully of Haresford, whose seat commanded a river crossing of moderate strategic value and a castle that the letter's formal language described as "storied" but which she suspected, from the letter's general tone of barely contained desperation, was probably storied in the sense of having several stories and very little else, had submitted to the authority of the Iron Throne following a military engagement that the letter characterized as "a mutual ceasing of hostilities" and which she suspected had been somewhat less mutual in practice. In exchange for continued governance of his modest holdings, he was providing the Crown with one thing of genuine value.
His second daughter.
Not his heir, she noted. Not the eldest, whose marriage prospects presumably had some currency. The second daughter, who was, the letter implied through careful omission, educated beyond what was strictly necessary for a woman of her station and possessed of an intelligence that had never, in Lord Edwyn Tully's estimation, translated into anything practically useful.
The letter did not say she was expendable. It did not need to. The letter said everything it needed to say by saying nothing about returning her.
She had folded it back along its original creases and sat for a moment with it in her hands, and then she had dressed herself — an enterprise of considerable duration and complexity, involving laces she located eventually through determined investigation — and come above decks to breathe, which had proved optimistic given the state of the Blackwater Rush.
Now she stood at the railing and watched King's Landing come toward her, and she thought: well. Here we are.
It rose from the riverbank in layers, the way a wound rises in layers — the lowest districts first, pressed against the water's edge, ramshackle and dense and evidently home to every unpleasant smell the city could manufacture. Wooden structures leaned against stone ones with the casual intimacy of men who have drunk too much and require mutual support. Dock workers moved along the wharves below, small as insects from this distance, loading and unloading the cargo of an empire. She could see, even from here, the particular geometry of poverty: the too-small spaces, the too-many people in them, the way the streets narrowed as they climbed as if the city were deliberately making itself harder to navigate the further one got from the water.
And above all of it, the Red Keep.
She had not noticed it immediately. This, she would later understand, was because she had been looking for it in the wrong register — expecting something simply large, something that declared itself through size alone. What the Red Keep did was different. It sat on the hill above the city not as an addition to the landscape but as its inevitability, as if the hill had been waiting since the world's making to bear exactly this weight. Its walls were Valyrian stone, she had read — or Elara had read, in some life she was only now inheriting — a dark red that passed for burgundy in the scholars' accounts and was, in the morning light coming sideways off the Blackwater, something closer to the color of old blood.
The towers caught the light differently. Their upper sections, newly plastered and gilded, blazed with it, gold and white and impossible, as if someone had set the sky on fire and called it architecture. She made herself look at the base of the towers, where the gilding stopped and the old stone showed through, and found what she had suspected: the stone was dark with damp and cracked in places, and where the cracks ran deepest the mortar had turned to dust, and the dust had been painted over, and the paint was peeling.
Gold leaf, she thought. Over rotting wood.
"My lady."
She turned. The man behind her was young — her own age, perhaps, or somewhat younger — in Lannister livery, which was to say red and gold and faintly aggressive in its precision. He had the look of someone who had been told to be respectful to her and was finding this a mild but genuine inconvenience.
"We'll be docking within the quarter hour. Lord Harlan asks that you be prepared to disembark."
She did not know who Lord Harlan was. She had not yet established the cast of this particular performance, and the names she could access through whatever inheritance of memory came with this body were partial and unreliable, like a map that shows the major roads and leaves everything else to conjecture.
"I am entirely prepared," she said, and was mildly surprised to find that the voice came out steady. It was not her voice — it was lower than hers, with a crispness to the consonants that suggested a maester's education rather than a governess's — but it was a voice she could work with. "I have been prepared since the quarter hour before that one, and the quarter hour before that. Please convey my continued preparedness to Lord Harlan, with my compliments."
The young man blinked. He had not, evidently, been expecting that.
"Yes," he said, after a moment. "My lady."
He retreated. She turned back to the railing.
The city was louder now, close enough that the sounds separated from the general roar into their component parts: shouted orders from the docks, the creak of rope under tension, somewhere a dog barking with the sustained conviction of an animal that had forgotten its original grievance but felt strongly about maintaining the effort. The smell had acquired new dimensions. She identified fish, openly; river mud, intimately; and beneath those, the hot-iron smell of a smithy operating at capacity and something sweeter and more disturbing that she chose, for the moment, not to investigate further.
She breathed through her mouth and took stock.
No allies. She had catalogued this first, because it was the most important single fact of her situation, and cataloguing facts was what she did when the alternative was something less productive. No allies, no associates, no one in this city who knew her face or would be glad to see it. Whatever relationships Lady Elara Tully possessed had been conducted at a remove she could not access; whatever friendships, whatever correspondences, whatever careful courtesies exchanged over years of proximity — none of them lived in King's Landing, and none of them could reach her here.
No resources, except the one trunk of dresses she had found secured below. She had inventoried them during the sleepless hours before dawn: seven gowns of varying formality, two traveling cloaks, an assortment of accessories whose symbolic language she would need to learn quickly, and a small velvet pouch at the trunk's bottom containing a quantity of silver stags that would sustain her for perhaps three months if she were careful and perhaps one if she were not. No weapons — she had checked, with a pragmatism that would have surprised the woman she had been a day ago. No weapons, no seals, no private correspondence that might tell her what this body's original inhabitant had been thinking when she began this journey.
Only the letter. And the letter said, in every way it could, that she was alone.
The barge ground against the dock with a sound like a struck bell, low and resonant, and the oarsmen shipped their oars and moved with the practiced efficiency of men arriving somewhere they had been before. Ropes went out. The gangplank descended. The young man in Lannister livery reappeared, apparently recovered from their earlier exchange, and extended a hand to assist her.
She considered his hand. She considered the gangplank, and the dock beyond it, and the city rising behind the dock with all its weight and stench and complexity and peril. She considered the Red Keep on its hill, the gold bright on its towers and the old stone dark at their roots.
She thought: I am Elizabeth Bennet. I have faced social catastrophe, maternal hysteria, Wickham's smile, and Collins in an enclosed parlor. I have read every novel in my father's library and used them to build a picture of the world that turned out to be wrong in several important particulars. I am in a medieval fantasy constructed on a scale of cruelty that makes every drawing room I have ever occupied look like a pastoral idyll, and I have nothing — nothing — but the capacity to think quickly and the very moderate advantage of not yet being afraid enough to be stupid.
She took the man's hand and descended the gangplank.
The dock hit her feet with a solidity that seemed to travel up through the soles of these borrowed shoes and into the base of her spine. A gust off the river lifted the grey wool of her gown and carried with it the smell of the city at close range — fish and smoke and the particular olfactory despair of a drainage system that had been poorly conceived and never improved. People moved around her with the total unconcern of those who have places to be, streaming past the dock without a glance at the crimson-and-gold barge or its single female passenger.
She was, as far as King's Landing was concerned, unremarkable.
She found this, on consideration, more useful than insulting.
"Lady Tully." A man was approaching along the dock — broad, perhaps fifty, with the kind of face that had once been handsome and had settled, over years of outdoor living and indoor politics, into something merely authoritative. He was wearing, she catalogued automatically, the insignia of a Crown official; the quality of his cloak suggested middling rank, significant enough to receive her but not significant enough that receiving her was an honor. "I am Lord Harlan Frey, appointed to see you conveyed to the Red Keep. On behalf of the Crown, you are welcomed to King's Landing."
He said it as one reads a proclamation — the words were there, each in its correct position, but the spirit of the enterprise had been conducted elsewhere.
"The Crown's welcome is received with gratitude," she said, equally formally, and watched his eyes do what eyes did when they were assessing a woman and trying to conceal it — the brief, comprehensive survey, the rapid calculation of threat and opportunity, the settling into a conclusion. His conclusion, she could see, was negligible. A minor Tully. Young. A hostage. Women like this arrived in King's Landing constantly, moved through it without footprint, and disappeared into marriages or obscurity with equal efficiency.
Good, she thought. Let him think so.
A horse had been brought. She was assisted into a litter, which she had not anticipated and found deeply claustrophobic, the curtains drawn against the city's stares. She twitched one open an inch as they moved through the streets, because she intended to understand this city before it understood her and the only way to understand something was to look at it directly.
What she saw through that inch of curtain, as the horses picked their way up through King's Landing's layered districts toward the hill and the castle, was this: a city of extraordinary contrasts in very small spaces. Merchant stalls with cloth of Myrish lace and bowls of spiced nuts pressed against alleys where figures she was fairly certain were not sleeping sat propped against walls in the attitudes of the recently abandoned. Children ran underfoot with the unself-conscious ferocity of those who have learned that hesitation costs something. A septa moved through the crowd with the particular determined calm of the genuinely faithful, or possibly the exhausted. In a space between two buildings too narrow to be a street but too used to be an accident, two men were having a conversation that looked, from the angle of their shoulders and the flatness of their voices, like the kind of negotiation that does not go through middlemen.
Everywhere, Lannister gold. On banners, on guard uniforms, on the sigils above shops whose owners had presumably found such decoration prudent. The Lion of the Rock reproduced ten thousand times over, until it ceased to be a symbol and became a simple statement of atmospheric fact: here is whose air you are breathing.
The gates of the Red Keep opened before them with a sound like something large and slow deciding to permit. They passed through into a courtyard of cold stone and colder wind, where ostlers came for the horses and a steward came for her, and she was handed off with the smooth professionalism of an institution that had long since mastered the processing of persons it considered peripheral.
She stepped out of the litter and stood in the yard of the Red Keep.
Up close, the stone was darker than she had seen from the water. It held the morning's cold the way old stone held cold — not passively but with a kind of deliberate authority, as if the walls had decided, centuries ago, that warmth was a concession they were not prepared to make. The yard was busy with the purposeful movement of a household running at scale: pages crossing at angles, a trio of knights clanking past without looking at her, two women in fine dress who looked at her briefly with the calibrated gaze of those performing an assessment they will not acknowledge performing.
She stood very still and looked at none of them, looking instead at the Keep itself — at the great doors ahead of her, iron-banded oak, standing open on a corridor that disappeared into interior shadow; at the towers visible above the yard's walls, lit gold on their upper faces and dark below; at the window three floors up where a shape stood looking down, still as a statue, and which she could not resolve, at this distance, into a face.
The shape at the window did not move.
She became aware, in the way one becomes aware of things that have been true for some time before one notices them, that she was being watched. Not casually, not as the incidental visual accident of being new in a busy courtyard — this was the watching of someone who had already decided she was worth watching and had been at it before she arrived.
She did not look up. She filed the information, and she followed the steward toward the great doors, and she kept her face as smooth and uninformative as the stone walls around her.
The Blackwater's smell had faded behind the gates. What replaced it was something she would come to know as the Red Keep's own particular atmosphere: cold stone and torch smoke and the faint, sweet, incongruous smell of someone's supper being prepared three floors below, and underneath all of it, underneath everything, the smell she could not quite identify and would not, for several days, find the words for.
By then she would know it for what it was. The smell of a hundred years of fear, pressed into the walls the way damp presses into old wood — invisible from the outside, structural in its penetration, not going anywhere.
She crossed the threshold. The great doors closed behind her with a sound that was not quite a lock and not quite a welcome, and she was inside.