Chapter 8: Tyrion's Dinner Party and the Intelligence It Furnishes

The invitation arrived on a Tuesday, written in a hand that suggested both education and irreverence, and contained the information that Lord Tyrion Lannisford would be grateful for the company of Lord Starkton at dinner on the Thursday following, along with several other gentlemen whose names Eddard recognised and whose company he had not yet had occasion to assess. The hour specified was fashionably late by King's Landing-upon-Thames standards, which is to say an hour at which Wintermere Park would have been dark and bolted for two full hours already, a circumstance Eddard noted and filed alongside the other adjustments the capital had required of him.

He accepted. Lady Catelyn read the acceptance over his shoulder and said nothing, which in their twenty years of marriage was a form of commentary he had learned to translate with reasonable accuracy.

"It is only dinner," he said.