Valon had been in King's Landing for three weeks and he'd spent most of that time sitting in rooms where men argued about things that weren't the thing they were actually arguing about.
The Small Council chamber smelled like candle fat and sweat and stale stone. Lyman Beesbury had gone red across his neck and forehead and was jabbing his finger at a column of numbers that Valon had put together for him the previous week. Good numbers. Clean numbers. They showed that the Reach lords were slipping grain through private channels to dodge the crown's tariff men, and the money they were dodging wasn't small.
"Forty thousand bushels declared at Bitterbridge," Beesbury said. "Sixty-two thousand recorded at Oldtown. Where'd the rest go, Ser Tyland? Did it walk off the wagons?"
Tyland Lannister sat with his hands folded over his stomach and his chin tilted back and that careful look he wore when he wanted you to think he hadn't been paying attention. He was thinner than his brother Jason and quieter in the hands and he watched everything in the room without moving his head. Otto had gotten him a seat on the council six months prior, and Tyland had settled in quietly – no fuss, no noise.
"Could be the toll collectors at Bitterbridge can't count," Tyland said. "They've been short-staffed since the last rotation. I wouldn't call it theft when it might just be sloppy bookkeeping."
"Sloppy bookkeeping that happens to benefit the same three lords every single quarter," Beesbury said.
Otto Hightower sat at the head of the table with his fingers laced under his chin and his face perfectly still and he didn't say a word. He'd been sitting like that for twenty minutes. He'd sit like that for twenty more, and then he'd come in with something measured and careful that split the difference.
The king's chair was empty. Viserys had left an hour ago, clutching his left hand against his chest, the fingers swollen and stiff and gone a mottled purplish red that the Grand Maester had stared at without offering a diagnosis. The king had waved his good hand at the room and told them to sort it out and then he'd walked out leaning on a cane. Valon hadn't seen the cane before this visit. Nobody mentioned it.
Through the open door, Ser Criston Cole stood in the corridor with his arms crossed and his shoulders squared and his white cloak hanging straight. The Lord Commander of the Kingsguard watched the council chamber – still and intent. He didn't blink much.
The argument went on for another twenty minutes and ended the way these things always ended. Beesbury wanted an audit. Tyland wanted a review. Otto proposed sending the crown's own inspectors to Bitterbridge and sticking the Master of Laws with the job, which was convenient because the Master of Laws wasn't in the room and couldn't object. Nobody argued. The proposal passed in silence, which was how most things passed in this room when the king wasn't sitting in his chair. Men who would've fought tooth and nail in front of Viserys held their tongues when Viserys left, because the arguments weren't about grain and the man they were performing for was gone.
Valon shut his ledger and stood and walked out. Nobody stopped him. Tyland gave him a small nod on the way past, quick and professional, and Valon returned it and kept walking.
He'd come for the quarterly audit of the Unified Bank's crown accounts. Four days of work, he'd figured. Maybe five. That'd been three weeks ago. He'd stayed because something had changed in the city, something he couldn't see from Pyke, and you had to watch it up close or you'd miss the shape of it.
—
He'd seen it most clearly at supper, three nights after he arrived.
The king's table in the Great Hall had always seated the family together. Viserys at the head, Alicent on his right, Rhaenyra on his left when she was around, children scattered along the sides. It'd worked for years, if not warmly.
That night the table had split down the middle.
Rhaenyra sat at the far end with Laenor beside her and her three boys clustered close. Jacaerys was the oldest, brown-haired and square-jawed, and he held his eating knife angled outward the same way his mother did – a habit she'd picked up from her sword training. Lucerys sat next to him and Joffrey was in a nurse's lap behind the table, gnawing on bread with both hands and most of his face. They'd arranged themselves in a knot at one end and left a stretch of empty linen between their group and everyone else.
At the other end, Aegon sat slumped with a cup of wine that never seemed to reach the bottom. His face went back and forth between bored and something uglier. Aemond sat beside him, straight-backed, his sapphire eye catching the candlelight and his good eye tracking Rhaenyra's boys down the length of the table without stopping and without blinking. The kid didn't look away. Not once, the entire meal. Helaena sat between Aemond and the queen, her fingers working against each other under the table in little patterns – counting something or talking to herself; hard to tell which. Alicent sat upright and ate small bites and spoke to her children in a voice too low to carry.
And Viserys sat in the middle and looked at none of them. He ate and drank and laughed at a joke some Hightower cousin told about a mule and a septon, and his bad hand sat on the table in front of him, the knuckles swollen and dark, the fingers curled in on themselves. He didn't look left toward his daughter. He didn't look right toward his wife and sons. He stared at his plate and his cup and some middle distance that let him pretend his family wasn't splitting itself into two armed camps at his own table.
The Greens and the Blacks. Valon had heard the names whispered for years. He'd treated it as background noise. Courts always split into factions. As long as Viserys was alive and the trade kept moving and the money kept flowing, the Greens and the Blacks were somebody else's headache.
But Viserys wasn't going to be alive much longer.
Valon had watched him age over the past decade. The joints going stiff and swollen. The weight dropping from his face and chest while his belly stayed. The way he gripped the chair arms when he sat and the way he stopped at the top of staircases to catch his breath. The cane. The lost finger, taken by a fever last spring that the maesters hadn't fully explained. The man was fifty-three and he moved like seventy. Something in him was rotting from the inside and nobody at court would say it plainly, but Valon had eyes and Valon could count, and the count was short.
—
He walked to the Unified Bank's branch through streets that smelled like bread and horse shit and river mud, his four Unified Guard men falling into step behind him in their Ironborn Steel half-plate. The city watch at the Red Keep gate nodded him through without a word. They'd been doing that for three years now. Valon Greyjoy and his armored escort walking through King's Landing had become as unremarkable as the fish carts rolling up from the docks.
He sorted what he knew as he walked, the way he always sorted things – one column for facts, one for projections, one for the things he didn't have enough information to call either.
Otto Hightower had come at him twice during this visit.
The first time was social. A cup of Arbor gold after a council session, Otto asking about trade volumes and port revenues and the health of the Bank's Westerosi branches. Sharp questions, well-aimed, and Valon had enjoyed answering them because Otto was smart and because the real conversation sat underneath the polite one, waiting.
The second time came two days later. Otto had been walking with Alicent near the Great Sept on Visenya's Hill, and Alicent had excused herself and walked away with a timing that was just a little too smooth, and then it'd been Otto and Valon standing alone in a corridor with the afternoon light coming through the windows and nobody else around.
Otto hadn't bothered with the warmup.
"The realm needs to think about the future," he'd said. "The king's health is a public concern. His Grace wouldn't want to leave the realm without direction."
"The king named his heir," Valon had said. "The realm has direction."
Otto's mouth thinned out. "He named a girl when he had no sons. He's got three sons now. The eldest is coming into his own."
Valon had seen Aegon at supper the night before – wine stains on his doublet and his eyes gone glassy and vacant. A young man who'd figured out that drinking was easier than being anything at all. He hadn't mentioned this to Otto.
"The king's word is law," Valon had said.
"The king's word holds while the king's alive," Otto had said. "When he dies, it dies with him. What's left is custom and precedent and the will of the lords who have to pick who they're following. Custom and precedent favor the male line. You know that as well as I do."
"I know a great many things, Lord Hightower."
"Then you know the Unified Bank and the East Essos Trading Company need a stable throne to operate under. A disputed succession would gut every trade route and every branch office and every contract your institution holds. You need stability; I'm offering it."
Valon had let the quiet stretch for a few seconds, long enough for Otto to hear it, and then he'd thanked Otto for his candor and excused himself and walked back to the Bank and sat in his office and stared at the harbor for twenty minutes.
Three days after that, a letter came from Rhaenyra.
She'd written it herself – tight angular handwriting, the ink pressed hard into the paper. She wrote from Dragonstone and spoke of the Unified Bank's quarterly figures, which she'd gotten hold of through channels Valon could guess and didn't want to think too hard about. It mentioned the EETC's fleet strength and the Iron Islands' economy. It mentioned, carefully, that the heir to the Iron Throne valued loyalty and had a long memory for the people who stood with her when it was hard to stand.
At the end she'd written that she'd welcome a visit from Lord Greyjoy at Dragonstone. At his convenience.
Valon had read it twice and locked it in his desk alongside the notes he'd written from memory about Otto's pitch. Two different approaches. Two different factions. And the same ask dressed up in different clothes – pick us.
—
He climbed the stairs to his office in the Bank and shut the door and sat down behind his desk and rubbed his face with both hands.
Tyla's latest letter lay open on the blotter. Dalton had started putting together full sentences. He'd taken to calling the kraken banner the "squiddy flag" and he'd bitten his nurse's thumb hard enough to draw blood and then, according to Tyla, had stared at the nurse with genuine confusion about why she was upset. Tyla had written the whole thing with that dry and precise humor of hers, and Valon had laughed out loud reading it alone in this office, and then the laugh died and the quiet came in behind it and he'd just... sat there.
He pulled out a blank sheet and a quill and started writing. Not a letter. A private tally. Facts and projections that nobody else would see, because he was going to burn it when he was done.
Viserys was going to die. That was the first thing, and everything else hung from it. The man had a year left, maybe two, maybe five if whatever was eating him slowed down, which it showed no sign of doing.
When Viserys died, Otto would move. Twenty years of building alliances and calling in favors and whispering about male primogeniture in back corridors, and Otto would pull the lever the moment the king's chest stopped moving. Andal tradition said the oldest son inherited. Viserys had broken that tradition by naming Rhaenyra, but the naming was only as strong as the man who'd done it, and the man was falling apart.
Otto had the Hightower fleet and Oldtown's money and the Faith and the Hand's office and Ser Criston Cole running the Kingsguard. He had Tyland Lannister on the finances, though Valon figured Tymond would have opinions about how deep Lannister commitment actually ran.
Rhaenyra had the king's decree. She had Dragonstone. She had Laenor Velaryon and his fleet. She had Syrax, and her sons and their own dragons.
And both sides had come to Valon Greyjoy with their hands out and their smiles on, because both sides could do arithmetic. The EETC controlled more ships than the royal fleet and the Velaryon fleet put together. The Unified Bank held the financial guts of two continents. The Ironborn Steel foundries armed half the lords in the Seven Kingdoms. Whoever had Greyjoy's backing could probably win a war without Greyjoy ever picking up a sword.
Valon put the quill down and pressed his thumbs together and stared at the wall.
Hela.
His daughter was the one variable that existed beyond anyone’s control, beyond anyone’s ability to charm. Westeros was headed into a period of great strife and Hela… Hela would be the one to tip the balance.