Chapter 190

The Riverlands. 300 AC.

Axel Arryn.

The moment my conversation partner stepped into the tent, I couldn't help cataloguing the changes in his appearance. The transformation was significant enough that, had I not been paying close attention, I might not have believed this was the same man I'd once served alongside in the same company of sellswords. In Essos, Jon Connington had been clean shaven and dyed his hair blue. Now a bright red bearded man stood before me instead. He'd gone from a clown doing a poor imitation of a Tyroshi to something closer to a grim Westerosi knight. I had any number of theories about why he'd come.

"Why are you here?" I looked into those pale, cold, ice blue eyes and decided there was no point dancing around it.

"Is this how you greet an old comrade?" Jon said, gesturing toward the wine.

"I have a great deal of work waiting, and I'd rather not spend the evening guessing. Besides, you and I were never exactly friendly." Still, I poured wine for the both of us. "How is Aegon?" He clearly didn't want to say his piece outright, so we'd circle around it a while, though the personal question was a genuine one.

Aegon had been my squire once, back when I served in Essos. Sharp, strong willed, a skilled fighter, a good tactician, and a decent man in his own right. It came as no surprise that our knight and squire relationship had settled comfortably into something more like friendship over time. It had gotten to the point where I'd suggested more than once that he return to Westeros, where he might reclaim his inheritance and the seat of Griffin's Roost. Not an easy path, and not a lawful one either, but what use is power you can never afford to abuse a little?

"He's well," Connington said, the lines of the Griffin's face easing, a small smile finding its way through. "Already a lieutenant, with his eye on a captaincy."

Not bad at all, especially in something like peacetime. Rising from an ordinary foot soldier to lieutenant in just over six years, Aegon clearly hadn't wasted his time. My own three years couldn't really be compared to his, granted, but we'd started from different places and climbed under very different circumstances. I'd joined the Golden Company in the thick of a sprawling war of all against all, cut down plenty of the company's enemies along the way, and worked myself deep into its politics and finances besides. All of that together let me climb to the highest post available to me in record time. Aegon, by contrast, had become an official member of the company during a relative lull, while the whole of Essos was still licking its wounds after the slaughter. There were battles, of course, but nothing on that scale.

"We'll have plenty to talk about, then." If my former squire ever made it to Westeros, I certainly wouldn't mind a conversation with him. "Have you ever thought about coming home yourself? The order for your execution was lifted long ago."

Woe to the vanquished, as the saying goes, and it fit here well enough. After the fall of House Targaryen, every loyalist left standing was hunted down without mercy, and the truly committed ones were meant to be wiped from the board entirely. Trials followed, purges, sanctions, executions. The new regime threw everything it had into securing its own position and cutting off any possibility the Dragon might ever rise again. The losing side, understanding perfectly well how a new royal court would treat them, scrambled to flee to Essos as fast as they could. That hadn't sat well with Robert, and he'd issued an unofficial order calling for the execution of any former Targaryen loyalist who tried to flee justice rather than stand trial. Which was how several hundred slow moving knights ended up dead under mysterious circumstances. Jon Connington, as the closest companion of Prince Rhaegar and a former Hand of the King besides, had sat near the very top of that death list. Only under Daeron II was the order finally lifted.

"Perhaps," Jon said, in a tone I couldn't quite place. "How do you see Westeros's future unfolding?"

"Hm?" Unexpected question, that.

"The last twenty years have shown just how poorly the Baratheons can actually hold power over the Seven Kingdoms. After the usurper Robert's death..."

"King Robert," I cut in. A washed up exile doesn't get to butcher a friend's memory in front of me. "Watch your tongue, you're in my tent."

"...Robert Baratheon's death, the realm has fallen into a chaos these lands have never truly seen. Not Aegon's Conquest, not the Dance of Dragons, not a single Blackfyre Rebellion brought a catastrophe to match it. The lords are at each other's throats, and the hatred circulating endlessly between them won't let anyone sit down at a negotiating table until it's far too late."

He wasn't entirely wrong, and we'd likely slide back into something like the pre-Conquest era, every man a king unto himself. It was exactly why I'd worked so hard to make the Vale self sufficient: if the realm did fracture, my region would come through it with as little pain as possible. I might have welcomed this sort of talk from almost anyone else. Not from the Old Griffin, though. Jon Connington was the dead Silver Prince's most devoted creature, and he was almost certainly here to try to talk me into bending the knee to either Viserys or Rhaenys, dangling every promise under the sun in front of me.

Unfortunately for him, I knew both of them well enough, secondhand at least. One was a hysteric with not a shred of self control, the other a fool incapable of taking a single castle on her own. Following either one would be an insult to my own dignity. I'd hazard a guess that the Golden Company wasn't sailing for Westeros to help the Lannisters at all, but for reasons of its own, which would explain rather neatly why Connington still ran with them.

"All very tragic." No, I couldn't care less. "I'll even say a prayer in the sept for the souls of the unfortunate. But why tell me any of this?"

"What if Westeros had a better chance, if just once in its history the Seven Kingdoms were led by a genuinely honorable man?" Viserys, then, I assumed.

"A half mad boy who dragged the Dothraki into Westeros, that's the better chance? If he's the realm's 'last hope,' we might as well throw ourselves off the nearest cliff right now."

"Viserys?! Gods, no!" Connington cut off my assumptions at once. "I represent the interests of Aegon Targaryen, true born son of Prince Rhaegar and Princess Elia Martell. The one who once went by the name Young Griffin. The one you rode into battle beside against sellswords, Dothraki, and Unsullied alike. The one who calls on you now as his friend and mentor. Aegon asks for your help."

...Hell.