Sharp Minds, Sly Words
Thirtieth Day of the Tenth Month 293 AC
Finding Lord Blount's window proves easy. It is one of the few windows lit against the shadows of falling evening, as well as the highest in the keep.
Is he trying to distance himself from a people who do not much appreciate his ascension to lordship, or does he simply enjoy the view, you wonder as you approach on silent wings. The sight that greets you, however, is that of a man who could not be less concerned about which room he happens to be in at the moment. A young man with narrow almost delicate features under a mop of messy ginger hair, sits at a spindly desk immersed in a book, a study in contrasts in almost every way to the jowly, flat nosed Ser Boros who was so very keen to use his strength and position to overpower the maid he had found spying.
You pass through the window, insubstantial as a phantom and still unseen to read over the young lord's shoulder:
"It is thus undeniable, not only by the measuring of rings in petrified trees, which some deride as some anomaly of the silty soil of Sea Dragon Point, but also in the layering of soil that later became rock and which one might find in any ancient sedimentary formation, that the seasons were once as regular as the turning of the days. I make no claim to know what might have unbalanced the cosmic wheel, but in discovering how long ago that was there might be some hint to help us better measure the passage of winter and summer in our current time..."
The Measure of the Days by Maester Nicol, you realize. You had heard of the book in passing, but you cannot quite remember from whom. Ah... Qyburn. He had given it as an example of how the maesters' study of the physical world could reveal certain truths about the world, but their disdain of magic blinded them to the whole of what they see. How much more could the now long dead Nicol have learned about the distant past if he had accepted the 'fanciful' notion that the unbalancing of the seasons was owed to the malicious touch of Winter.
Scholarly matters aside, the fact that Petyr Blount is still reading it at this hour, and the shadows under his eye, hints at the fact that he might prefer the solitude of abstract thought to the rather unpleasant reality of his present position. Down in the tavern you had wondered why he had not sent his armsmen to silence the mockery by threat or even by force, as most lords would have done. Perhaps he simply did not have the heart for it. It is easy enough to imagine how a scholarly nature might be taken as weak and unmanly by high and lowborn alike, particularly if someone had an interest to stir the pot to keep the fief unsteady.
Perhaps the last suspicions is unwarranted, born of having seen too many plots and tangled intrigues, but then again, perhaps not. This would be a most auspicious time for anyone inclined to overturn the succession, and with the Usurper infuriated at Ser Boros' spell-wrought madness, he might be inclined to overturn young Petyr if another candidate could be found.
***
Acting on the impulse, you leave the keep for now and head out in search of the bastard you had heard of in the tavern. Ser Bryan Waters, a hedge knight with a tale of hidden marriages and dead septons.
He certainly seems to be in better spirits than his cousin, you think, spying him surrounded by tankard's of ale in the better of the village's two taverns, the one that caters to merchants and travelers going downstream to King's Landing.
Freer with his coin than you would expect a hedge knight with naught but his sword and horse to his name.
Although he may have something more precious by far to have dared ride here with such a spurious tale; patronage. A single look deeper than the surface of the world reveals the scratched and dented copper ring on his right hand to be enchanted, and though you cannot be sure at a glance, the way it glints in the light of the fire as the man speaks makes you suspect an enchantment to grant a glibber tongue.
Still unseen and floating above the tavern floor that you would leave no mark of your passage, you draw closer to listen in.
"... so then the Dornishman came at me with that great spear of his, you could swear he had the fires of hell in his eyes, but I was good king Robert's man and our cause was just, so I cut off the head of the spear with one blow and sliced open his throat on the back-swing..."
The account of the knight's doings at the battle of the Trident, true or false, have the ring of an oft-told tale, though the constant mentions of the rebel lords and Robert Baratheon in particular feel newly peppered in. What is this so very loyal knight planning, you wonder, and how had he come by an enchanted ring for just the purpose of giving his words weight?
What do you do next?
[] Speak to Lord Petyr
-[] Write in
[] Speak to Lady Daelna
-[] Write in
[] Write in
OOC: This would have been a very short update with just observing the lord so I added looking up the bastard too. Not yet edited.
