Chapter 14: Confirmation Bias Is a Thankless Task (II)
"-. 273 AC .-"
Walys Flowers was blessed with a prodigious imagination. Not the glut that saw people slipping into delusions and hedge fancies. But not the dearth of it either, that saw even the most learned of maesters become little more than droning regurgitators of words when called upon to put their learning to good use. That didn't mean he could predict every possible turn of events, as indeed no one ever could. It did, however, mean that he could well imagine all the paths that events could take if he knew the starting scenario and the actors involved.
Few things had been on the maester's mind the last few years besides what would now surely unfold. The shape of things upon succeeding in his purpose. Or, as had instead become the case, being found out.
He rather knew what would now come.
Then the demon walked to the largest window, unlatched the blinds, opened both panes wide and took three steps back, bracing itself as if something was going to bowl him ov-
Alban swooped into the room through the window and landed on the monster's shoulder.
Walys Flowers felt all the blood drain from his face.
"You used to care for me when I was small, maester," The monster turned in his direction, some ghastly hellsmoke flowing over both its eyes as it stared at him. "Inquired after me. Worried over me when the mindstorm took me. Even later after we butted heads more and more often and you never made a secret of your disapproval of me… even that seemed just so genuine. For a while I even thought my suspicion of you was totally unfounded. What did I have to go on after all? Pure conjecture from vage dreams and you being a southron Andal." Maester Walys barely registered what he was hearing, gaping in horror at the sight of his one, closest companion being suborned and taken from him like everything else had been. "And then you go and prove that even baseless suspicion can be right by trying murder my mother you self-absorbed, oathbreaking, bastard shitfuck-!"
"Son-"
"No, dad! I don't know how you can still sit there and take it but I can't stand for this anymore."
"Oh spare me your blandishments, you f-AH!" the sword abruptly kissed the skin of his neck.
"Do not speak out of turn," Rickard Stark commanded with all the weight of an iceberg. "Brandon is above you. Do not interrupt him. Ever. Do not comment. In fact, until I say otherwise, do not speak at all."
Maester Walys choked back his words and promptly forgot what he'd been about to say.
"And you, son, will not interrupt me."
"… I know, father, I'm sorry but even now he can't help it! He does it to everyone, he even did it to me." The thing had the gall to glare at Walys as it spoke over its supposed father, finally shedding the guise of the dutiful child. "You even did it to me, you bastard. I watched you rant and rave about me to your pet for months and I felt sorry for you, even guilty sometimes! Even when mom got sick I could never tell if you were really poisoning her or trying to help until I sat and watched you literally code that secret correspondence. You never healed her, did you? You treated her symptoms while the real problem got worse. Even then you only treated her chill so it would seem like she was improving even though that wasn't the problem. Even after I knew it, it still took me seeing your secret stash to finally do something! It was blind luck you decided to drink yourself stupid enough to go and ransack your own poison stash while I was looking on! And you didn't even use any of them on mom. You just gave her stuff that only worked without awful side effects when they weren't in combination. Not that I knew it at first," it admitted bitterly.
If everyone knew what they needed when they needed it, you'd not have survived past that night, Walys thought with ample bitterness of his own.
"I knew chill treatments don't addle the wits. I knew consumption doesn't do it either. And I still sat on it like a fool! Congratulations, maester! If not for magic, you'd have had your way and I'd never been able to do a thing! If not for that last message the raven was there for, if I hadn't watched you apply that cypher, I still wouldn't know if there was a group of you or if you were bought by someone or just acting alone. Was there any point where you were actually trying to help? How long until you'd have resorted to those dusts and vials under the raven nesting boxes? Or would you have just kept up what you were already doing? Why the hell did you even change your mind? What the hell possessed you to think I want to kill my own mother!? Even if you think I'm a demon, it would've been inconsistent with everything I've done my whole life, I even told you I'm trying to find a poison for diseases, not people-!"
"Brandon!" Valyrian steel literally drew blood as Walys flinched when Lady Lyarra spoke and rose behind him. "Brandon stop!"
"But… I…he…" the demon stumbled over its own words as its body's mother strode for and took its face in her hands. The white raven squawked in startlement and flew away to watch quietly from the top of the display cabinet. Both demon and mother ignored him.
"Brandon, stop. Stop. I'm fine. I'm here, I'm walking and I'm getting stronger by the day."
"But that's still a tenth of what you could do before, and you got sick exactly ten years after the wasting decimated Winterfell," the demon said despairingly. "Your moonblood comes and goes, right? Your womb still pains you, doesn't it? You still piss blood don't you? Don't you?" The woman didn't seem to have an answer. "…When father takes you to bed, do you bleed afterwards?"
The question only gave way to a deep silence damning enough for even the darkest confessions, but the monster wasn't satisfied if he didn't infringe on even that. "The worst part is that it doesn't even matter now. He can't heal you anyway. Nobody knows how to heal consumption, not even the Citadel." The thing looked away from the lady and glared at him again, before just averting its eyes from everyone. It had the gall to look grief-stricken. "And neither can I."
"Brandon-"
"I know exactly what to make and how to make it!" The gall of the thing to pretend Rickard Stark's order not to interrupt didn't include the lady. "I could spit out seven, a dozen, two dozen different steps from memory right now, but it's worth jack shit! I don't know what the catalysts are called, or even if they're all known. I know what they should do, but I don't know what else they can do, or even what they all look like. I couldn't properly describe them to someone who actually knows natural sciences even if I tried. I can name half again as many of nature's building blocks than the citadel knows about, but I don't know even half the reactions for them, let alone for naturally-occurring compounds! And I can't even make a contest or it, because we don't have alchemists and our own court healer's been actively murdering you for the past few months!"
Maester Walys stared blankly at the fretful creature falling to pieces before him. Having had no choice but to look at it due to the sword at his throat, he found himself noticing things he'd not noticed before. The paleness of its skin. The bags under its eyes. The redness creeping up into the white from beneath its lids like gnarly roots. As it spoke, its eyes even grew watery, almost. The thing before him was a despairing, fretful, exhausted mess of a young boy. It really looked and acted like just a boy… Strange and knowledgeable and too precocious by half but… Could it be that…?
"Dad, I'm calling in that one request," the thing brazenly said, as if it had any sort of rightful claim on anything at all. "Whatever else happens, whatever else you decide to do, don't send us south. Don't foster us, don't betroth us, don't marry us off. Any of us. Keep us here. Keep us above the Neck."
… but no. Even here and now its words were poison. The memory of one and a thousand eyes dotting some unthinkable abomination flashed through his mind just as clearly as always. The maester's face twisted under the realization that it once again got to him. To think a demon would be able to fake even mournful grief and exhaustion. What manifold and disgusting mummery! Did it never grow tired of lying?
What was he thinking, it was a demon from the Seven Hells, it literally thrived on lying and-
"Denied."
The word crashed the fell mood to pieces with all the grace of House Gardener's last gasps upon the Field of Fire.
"Wife," Lord Rickard spoke in the grim silence that followed, breaking Walys' train of thought completely. "Why don't you go prepare our son's bedchambers and have some warm milk and honey summoned up? It seems our son needs an early night. I'll send him to you shortly."
"What? But…" Whatever protests the thing wanted to spout died on its lips.
"… That may well be a good idea," Lyarra Stark agreed, stepping away from the boy-thing and pointedly not looking in Walys' direction. "… I'll have some myself, I think."
"Honey works on infections," the demon said thickly, turning away to wipe at its eyes. "But not this one."
"Well I'll enjoy it regardless," Lyarra Stark said with barely a waver in her voice as she wiped her son's tears away before leaving. "I'm not dead yet."
The door opened and closed, leaving behind two men who hadn't moved, one by choice and one by lack of it, and the demon of a boy that turned to glare at Walys with moist eyes and opened its mouth to-
"Son."
The childlike beast bit back whatever it was going to say with a snarl. It then looked between the maester and behind him to the door the Lady had just left through, before averting its eyes from them both and turning to Rickard Stark, who gazed sternly down at his supposed progeny while Ice still bit into-
"What does gaslighting mean?"
… or things could go ahead and unfold in a way completely unforeseen, Walys thought blankly.
"What does gaslighting mean, son?" Rickard Stark repeated himself even though it was one of the things he most disdained.
"… It's when someone secretly makes you doubt your own memory, perception or judgment so that you don't know what you believe anymore and start thinking low of yourself." The thing had the nerve to glare at Walys as he spoke. "It basically makes you incapable of acting in your own interests and dependent on them for validation and emotional support."
"I thought it might be something like that," Rickard Stark mused, as if he wasn't holding a sword to the neck of the chief advisor he'd nearly beheaded scant moments prior in front of his wife and supposed son of eleven years. "But the word doesn't make any sense, I'm sad to say. The best I can think of are wisps, those burning balls of gas that mislead people traveling the swamps along the Neck. Failing that, maybe bad air? Like if you interfered with the candle light used to detect whether or not there's bad air about to addle or kill everyone in a mine. Either way, it's a stretch at best. And even if it wasn't, no one outside colliers and crannogmen will ever know what you're talking about. You should be more careful or people will think you addled, if not mad. Do recall that you talked about being screwed almost a moon before you even made the things."
The demon opened its mouth, closed it and twisted its face into a grimace. "Baelished by my own brain again," it muttered. "… I know what you're doing, Dad."
"Then you should have little trouble not making me repeat my next question. What do you know about Queen Alysanne?"
The maester drew a blank. What did that have to do with anything?
Perversely, the demon before him seemed to be just as dumbfounded. "… This is going to be like the Children, isn't it?" It muttered to itself before finally answering and what did he just say? "Alysanne Targaryen was the rider of Silverwing and the queen consort of her brother King Jaehaerys the Conciliator between…." Its brow furrowed as it thought further. "I'm sorry, father. I'm still shit with years."
Rickard Stark said nothing. Merely continued to sit on the edge of the desk and hold Ice to Walys' neck while he beheld the boy, waiting.
"They say Alysanne Targaryen learned to read before she was weaned," the boy-thing said with a frown. "That she was an accomplished archer and hunter and she'd have been sent to the Citadel if she'd been born a man. That she was so high-spirited, charming and intelligent that everyone loved her even without accounting for her charities, highborn and lowborn alike. And when she wasn't gaining the adoration of all women and men, she spent her time on music, dancing, reading, and flying on her dragon. Every last chronicle agrees that she had a great wit and that she made a powerful impression on those who met her." The childlike thing grimaced near the end. Self-deprecatingly. "I'm guessing this is where you tell me how biased Septon Barth and all these others were when writing their histories?"
"Alysanne Targaryen is the dumbest bint to ever disgrace the halls of power." Rickard Stark said as his son's jaw dropped and wait just a moment, what? WHAT!? "That inbred tart was an egoist to rival Aegon the First and Maegor the Cruel combined. The most self-absorbed of hypocrites. The greatest waste of intelligence history has ever seen. She was, and remains to this day, the most famous of House Targaryen's useful idiots."
Brandon Stark gaped in shock at the borderline treason coming out the mouth of its father, then the brat haltingly climbed back in its chair so that its shock didn't make it fall on its arse on the floor outright.
"She eloped with her own brother against her parents' wishes, ensuring once and for all that incest became seen as an intrinsic Targaryen failing," Rickard Stark said, sounding every bit like… like… like Walys himself when he gave a lecture. "Inbreeding aside, this destroyed any chances of the Faith Militant dying with Maegor, by giving its supporters and members a permanent grievance to rally around even after they disbanded, one lasting to this day. It also forced house Targaryen to spend virtually all the dregs of political capital left after the Cruel's reign, on buying special treatment via the so-called Doctrine of Exceptionalism. Jaehaerys shoulders half the blame for it, but that was just the start of the woman's exceptional contributions. Do you know what happened right after the death of their mother Alyssa Velaryon?"
The boy tried but ended up shaking its head that he didn't.
"Alysanne went and intruded on her sister Rhaena at precisely the worst time, then ignored her wishes that she leave and even tried to take her daughter away. This was immediately after Rhaena's husband had murdered all her lovers and friends before confessing it all and promptly committing suicide to deny her all retribution. Her daughter Aerea was the only thing driving her on. Alysanne effectively destroyed any chances of the woman mending fences with the rest of her family, as might instead have happened if she'd had just let things be until time and Rhaena's hatred of Dragonstone drover her back into their arms on their own. To say nothing of how much it might have contributed to the decision of Rhaena's daughter to go get herself killed with the great dragon Balerion. This permanently deprived House Targaryen of one of its most influential figures and dragonrider, and possibly killed the largest ever dragon. Failing that, it could have caused a Dance of Dragons a century earlier if Jaehaerys had been any less a silver tongue. Such a civil war could easily have inflicted more damage than their hold on power could cope with after Maegor, depending on how many dragons were left after. More's the pity."
Maester Walys gaped in shock at the man who'd just besmirched the name of the one Targaryen against whom all but the most cantankerous of the Citadel's Archmaesters had never-
"Alysanne Targaryen was eternally displeased by her husband's refusal to make Daenerys heir over Aemon, even though she should have known the folly of trying to upturn yet another core tradition of the people she ostensibly wanted to rule justly. Clearly, getting her way on everything else up to that point was not enough for her. It was doubly foolish so soon after they'd spent all their political capital on upturning a major tenet of the Faith of the Seven, as I mentioned previously. Later, she was right to support Septon Barth's plan of constructing wells, pipes, tunnels, and cisterns to provide King's Landing smallfolk with clean water. But she was not right to force an ultimatum upon the Master of Coin and her own husband when they rightly balked at the costs. Can you guess why?"
"He was a priest," the boy said immediately, as if it was something that had been on its mind before. "He wasn't qualified for it. He was a priest, not a builder. Or an engineer."
"Correct. However much he might have learned from his blacksmith father or the Red Keep's library, Septon Barth was a septon. He was not an architect or craftsman or tradesmen or a coin counter. Whatever plan he might have come up with would surely have been riddled with flaws and inefficiencies. The speed with which King's Landing thereafter degenerated into the sad state of today proves this. If he had anyone helping him on it, they were complete failures or phonies at their job. The proposal should have at most been set aside for expert review over the next few moonturns. But Good Queen Alysanne wanted her victory now, so she served the two men a tankard of river water and challenged them to drink it. Not that the men are blameless for capitulating. Woe the man whose mind is ruled by his emotions. Or, worse, his wife's emotions. Spineless fools the both of them, but what else can you expect of southron summer children like them?"
If not for the blood slowly welling around the sword blade that was still embedded into the skin of his neck, Walys Flowers would have long since sagged from sheer astonishment in his chair.
"By this point the Good Queen had already done enough to be awarded the crown of fools thrice over, but of course she would not be stopped at just that. The Widow's Law was innocent enough I suppose. We'll set aside how vastly she overstated the problem. Or the succession crises it ended up causing all over Westeros. Including the one that gave so much strife to your great grandfather and the rest of his generation, incidentally. But no, what followed was her one, crowning achievement."
"The Progress to the North," the boy-thing said when Rickard fell silent and waited for it to speak.
"Her infamous Progress to the North," Rickard confirmed with a nod. Derisively. "Truth be told, Alaric Stark would have preferred being left well enough alone. He secretly rejoiced when Jaehaerys was detained at King's Landing. Alas, the Good Queen was convinced it would be an insult not to go. So she came North alone. Proceeded to be as southron as possible when judging how we conduct our business, which she did a lot of. Because of course it made sense to judge the North based on our richest smallfolk in the borderline southron-minded White Harbor. Never mind that she only paid attention to the few women who managed to have complaints despite living in the most affluent place of the North. When she later came to Winterfell, she somehow convinced herself Lord Alaric abiding by decorum somehow meant he warmed up to her simply due to her charm and wit, because of course she would. Everyone else in her life did the same, didn't they? Even Alaric's daughter Alarra, but more on her later. When Jaehaerys finally came North for all the important talks that ended up not amounting to anything but a slap in our face as usual, Alysanne quickly became bored with the matters of the state she was ostensibly deeply involved in. So she left northwards again. Scared the life out of the smallfolk on the way. I doubt she ever wondered if it wasn't admiration but fear that made them welcome her and rename their settlements in her so-called honor."
Was… was he talking about Queenscrown? Preposterous! The smallfolk there changed its name following Alysanne's visit because of how good she was with them. They even painted the merlons atop the holdfast golden to look like the golden crown she had worn during her visit!
"Not satisfied that she'd done enough, the woman then went to the Night's Watch and started telling them how to do their job. She even used her own jewels to finance an extra castle for them to build as a solution for the Nightfort being just too much for them, poor folk. That Jaehaerys had to later send his own men to build it somehow wasn't enough of a hint as to how the Watch felt about it. But none of that compares to the last and greatest atrocity she committed before she finally left for the southron pit from whence she came. This, I think, you can well guess."
"The New Gift."
"Yes," Rickard Stark said disdainfully. "She 'convinced' Jaehaerys to double the amount of land held by the black brothers."
Mester Walys flinched in pain as Ice jerked just the slightest bit away from him and out of his flesh as Rickard Stark gripped it tightly by the hilt.
"Never mind that the Night's Watch had lived and thrived on Brandon's Gift just fine for eight thousand years. Never mind that the Gift had given them enough to build a surplus when they manned all nineteen of their castles instead of the five back then, let alone their current three. Never mind that the North has the dubious honor of our best farmland being all clustered in the northern-most part of our territory. Her 'generous' donation of land that wasn't hers to give saw the North's best and most bountiful food source cut in half. The woman had the gall to believe Lord Alaric was charmed. House Targaryen had the nerve to pass it on as a good and charitable act. Chroniclers to this day have the gall to pretend we took it lightly. When it literally doomed the North to generational famine." Lord Rickard of House Stark had never looked so dark and terrible and full of hate as in that moment. "If not for the six dragons squatting in our castle. If not for the fact that Alarra Stark was off 'entertaining' the Good Queen's while Jaehaerys 'finalised' the 'agreement' between our houses, the North would have seceded on the spot."
Maester Walys… Walys Flowers had no words to say or even think about the sheer sedition he was witnessing.
"The worst thing is that it was all such a waste. The granting of the New Gift only deprived that land of the lordly oversight and protection. It didn't last five winters. Wildlings could sail around the wall in summer or walk across the ice in winter and raid the lands with impunity. Suddenly, the Black Brothers had to look not just ahead but behind as well. The Night's Watch could already barely mind its core mission, how did she think it would have the resources or manpower to manage such a swath of land when they couldn't handle even the Gift any longer? But there's the thing – she did not think. All that supposed intelligence, wasted, because she lacked even the smallest ounce of wisdom. But Jaehaerys, oh, he had wit in spades, and the sort of shamelessness than even his sister couldn't rival him in. He never missed even the slightest chance to exploit his bitch wife's atrocious marks. Nor did his pet septon fail to put a wondrous spin back in the south on everything she did. Had we revolted then, not even Dorne would have supported us."
Maester Walys had thought it would be the work of decades to turn the North's eyes southwards. Now, as his mind tried and failed to recover from this preposterous interpretation of written history, he was starting to wonder if perhaps it wasn't the eyes of the North he should have been focusing on.
"You'd think the New Gift would be the crowning achievement of her ignorance, but she was barely back in King's Landing before she managed to attain an even higher standard of hypocrisy, somehow. The ban on the tradition of First Night. Ha! Jaehaerys certainly spun that into the greatest win that house Targaryen ever had with the smallfolk, that's for certain. Never mind that house Targaryen practiced First Night so much that half the people on Dragonstone from smallfolk to the Velaryons are their dragonseed bastards. Never mind that the queen's oh so noble second law has absolutely no teeth. My, a highborn took a woman against her will! Their knights do that constantly without censure, while their lords get praises heaped upon them the more bastards they leave behind. There is no provision for actual punishment anywhere. 'Henceforth a bride's maidenhead will only belong to her husband, whether joined before a septon or a heart tree, and any man, be they lord or peasant, who would forcibly take her on her wedding night or any other night will be guilty of rape.' That's all that the law states. And to finish off the good queen's litany of inbred stupidity, she couldn't even claim reliance on existing law for methods of censure, seeing as House Targaryen's decades-long assessment of Westerosi law had barely started at the time."
Brandon Stark was sitting in front of Rickard Stark, slack-jawed in his chair while staring at him stupidly.
"We allowed the renaming of Queenscrown not as the honor she believed it to be, but as an insult we knew someone as deluded as her would never grasp. We knew it wouldn't be long before the place was deserted. Save for a small stopover village, the holdfast and surrounding lands have stood empty and barren ever since. What else could happen to something spawned by such a barren mind? Even so, the North still weathered her better than the rest of the realm did. It's not a cesspool like the capital is nowadays, that's for certain. Better than her own family, even. You need only think of the disasters that her children ended up becoming later in life. Those that did not get themselves killed or took their own lives over grief at their own poor choices. As terrible as she was as a queen, it wouldn't shock me to learn she was an even worse mother. But I've gone rather far afield I think."
Ice turned on its edge and lay flat against Walys' neck. The maester had to sit up and lift his chin so that it couldn't chip bits off his jawbone.
"Alysanne Targaryen was the stooge through which the Conciliator figured he'd go ahead and play Conciliator with everyone except us." concluded Rickard Stark his character assassination as he uncoiled his hand from around his sword's hilt with a grunt. "And it worked out for him and his house very well."
Maester Walys… didn't know where to even start on everything that was wrong with what that had just been uttered. In all his time in Winterfell he'd seen no sign of this rabid sentiment. He'd never even suspected that House Stark – that Rickard Stark – would so despise House Targaryen for that one incident. Any one incident. When else did the Targaryens ever bother them? Gods be good, even the southrons didn't bother them these days. King's Landing was far too far away to influence the North. The Starks were kings in all but name! In exchange for nothing, the North didn't have to worry about war against southern kingdoms and they benefitted from abundant trade. Not to mention that the Starks could just marry into southern houses and gain influence like everyone else did. And when was the last time the Sistermen were a thorn to the Northerners? The only nuisance the North even had to worry about at this point were Ironborn raiders, but that was true of the entire west coast!
Rickard Stark just ignored him as before though. Took a deep breath and slowly allowed the tension that had built up in him to seep away before addressing his son again. "I'm telling you all this so you can grasp the fullness of my meaning when I tell you that House Targaryen accidentally harming and insulting us and the North is the anomaly. The only one other such was from Jaehaerys himself. Alaric's brother Walton only died because Jaehaerys sent Maegor's former kingsguard to the Wall instead of swinging the sword, the coward. All of our other, many grievances were inflicted knowingly and deliberately and near always from spite. When Alaric showed Walton's grave to the snake, the great Conciliator responded by inflicting upon us our greatest grievance. One wonders the kind of man the so-called saint truly was on the inside. When Dagon Greyjoy was pillaging our west coast, Aerys Targaryen only got off his royal arse after the Ironborn went down to raid the Reach and sack Fair Isle. I suppose he was upset we didn't join either side of the Blackfyre Rebellion. The first one, because someone had to outdo the bint in terms of inbred stupidity. I suppose ensuring generational warfare was the only way to do it. The only great Stark woe since the Conquest that House Targaryen didn't directly contribute to was the death of Willam Stark to Raymun Redbeard. But of course, that invasion was only possible because of the accelerated decline of the Watch and the unattended lands of the New Gift itself, both of which are on their shoulders. Now I personally don't begrudge the king's peace, but everything else? It's enough to make one wish the Seven Hells were real so they can all go burn."
"Burn! BURN! BURN!"
The maester felt his heart lurch and he flinched away from the sword even though it didn't move. His eyes wildly sought Alban up in the shadows, then the still open window where an entire conspiracy of ravens seemed to have gathered while the world swam in madness.
When he spoke again in the eerie atmosphere, Rickard Stark sounded calm and serene as if he'd not just spent the past who knew how long speaking sedition. "What do you know about Rhaenys Targaryen?"
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