The Ironseat Inheritance

Synopsis

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a king in possession of a throne must be in want of an heir — and that all neighbouring lords, regardless of their own ambitions, shall consider themselves obligated to supply one. So begins the peculiar season in the kingdom of Westering, where the ancient Ironthrone sits in the great hall of King's Crossing, and where the late king's sudden death has left the succession in a state of fashionable uncertainty. Lord Edwyn Stark, a man of the north whose chief virtue is his inconvenient honesty, is summoned south to serve as the King's First Counsellor — a position, his wife assures him, of great honour, and which his acquaintances assure him is invariably fatal. Upon arriving at court, Edwyn discovers that the dashing Crown Prince is almost certainly not the son of the man whose name he bears, a revelation which Her Majesty Queen Cerissa Lanneth finds most tiresome and which she intends to address with characteristic efficiency. Meanwhile, Edwyn's daughters navigate the treacherous social waters of King's Crossing: the eldest, Joanna, contracts a most eligible attachment to the charming Lord Renly Barrow, while the younger, Aria, refuses every convention placed before her with considerable energy. Edwyn's nephew, the brooding Jon Snow-Stark, retreats to the northern garrison on the great Wall, where supernatural disruptions threaten to render all questions of succession entirely moot. It falls to Lord Tyrwick Lanneth — small in stature, large in wit, and possessed of a sardonic commentary on every occasion — to observe, manipulate, and occasionally survive the season. Betrayal arrives dressed in the finest court clothes. Executions are conducted with disappointing haste. Alliances dissolve like morning frost, and dragons, it is rumoured, have been sighted somewhere east of good society.