Chapter 19: The Small Council Meeting That Changes Everything

King Robert Barroway died at half past four in the morning, between one physician's visit and the next, with the quiet efficiency of a large man who had spent thirty years doing everything loudly and had saved his one reserved performance for the end. The palace was informed by seven. The city, which had ways of knowing things that preceded formal announcement by a margin that suggested either supernatural intuition or a very well-organised network of kitchen staff, knew by eight. By nine o'clock, there was not a black ribbon to be purchased between the harbour and the northern gate, the milliners having assessed the situation with the commercial alacrity that genuine grief rarely produces and pure calculation always does.

Lord Eddard Starkton had not slept.

He had sat at the King's bedside until Robert's breathing changed, and then he had sat a little longer, because the habit of keeping company with a man was not a thing that stopped simply because the man had. The physician Colwick had come and gone and come again, and when he arrived the final time he had done so with the particular expression of a man who has been professionally anticipating an event and finds, upon its arrival, that anticipation was no preparation at all. He had drawn the sheet up with careful hands, and Eddard had watched this, and had then stood, and had gone to the window, and had looked at King's Landing-upon-Thames in the grey uncharitable light of very early morning.