Chapter 29: The Succession Cracks Open

The news that Lord Tyrwick Lanneth had addressed the Small Council on the matter of the succession spread through King's Crossing by the method that all genuinely important news travels in a capital: not by herald, not by formal announcement, but by the particular quality of silence that descends upon a room when three people who know something encounter two people who do not, and choose, with visible effort, not to speak of it.

By Tuesday morning, that silence had taken up residence in every drawing room, every gallery, and every corridor of consequence in Redkeep. It sat at breakfast tables. It accompanied lords on their morning constitutionals through the east garden. It made itself thoroughly at home in the spaces between sentences wherever two or more members of the Small Council happened to find themselves in the same room, and showed every intention of remaining through the winter.

Lord Edwyn Stark had been dead for four days.