Chapter 3: First Impressions at King's Crossing

The gates of King's Crossing were not, as Aria had anticipated, merely large. They were large in the particular way of things that had been designed to make the person passing through them feel that they had consented, by the very act of entry, to something irrevocable. The stone arch rose some forty feet above the road, carved at its apex with a crown of iron thorns and flanked by two guards in red and gold whose expressions suggested that they had seen a great many northern lords arrive and had found the experience, collectively, instructive.

Edwyn passed beneath without remark, which was, the guards' expressions implied, exactly what a man of the north would do.

The city itself was not what any of them had imagined, though they had each imagined something different and all of them had been wrong. Joanna had imagined elegance, and found instead density — a press of bodies and stone and commerce that smelled of river water and woodsmoke and the particular sharpness of a great many people living in close proximity to their ambitions. Aria had imagined hostility, and found instead indifference, which was somehow more discouraging. Edwyn had imagined a city governing itself with the purposeful calm of an institution that understood its own importance, and found instead the particular chaos of a place that understood its own importance all too well and had long since abandoned the pretence of calm about it.