Chapter 15: Lord Eddard Confronts Queen Cersei

The letter took him three days to write, which was two days longer than the thinking had required.

The thinking, in truth, had taken no time at all. He had sat before the dying fire on the night of his discovery and known, with the absolute clarity that sometimes masquerades as courage, precisely what he must do. A man of his position, in possession of such evidence, had one obligation and only one: to present what he knew to the person most immediately affected before presenting it to any authority of public record. The King was dying — not literally, not yet, but in the way that men who drink as Robert drank were always in the process of dying, by comfortable instalments — and could not be burdened with intelligence of this magnitude without preparation. The Queen must be given the opportunity to conduct herself with whatever dignity the situation permitted.

This was the honourable course. Eddard was sufficiently self-aware to recognise that it was also the catastrophic one, but honour and catastrophe had been on intimate terms throughout his life, and he saw no reason to alter the arrangement now.