But now voices on the black council were raised to question Ser Addam’s loyalty. The dragonseeds Ulf White and Hugh Hammer had gone over to the enemy…but were they the only traitors in their midst?
Lord Bartimos Celtigar thought not. “Bastards are treacherous by nature,” he said. “It is in their blood. Betrayal comes as easily to a bastard as loyalty to trueborn men.” He urged Her Grace to have the two baseborn dragonriders seized immediately, before they too could join the enemy with their dragons. Others echoed his views, amongst them Ser Luthor Largent, Commander of her City Watch, and Ser Lorent Marbrand, Lord Commander of her Queensguard. Even the two White Harbor men, that fearsome knight Ser Medrick Manderly and his clever, corpulent brother Ser Torrhen, urged the queen to mistrust.
Then Queen Rhaenyra grew most wroth, Septon Eustace writes. In a voice as cold as ice, she commanded Ser Luthor Largent to take twenty gold cloaks to the Dragonpit and arrest Ser Addam Velaryon. “Question him sharply, and we will learn if he is true or false, beyond a doubt.”
Everyone on the Black Council met a terrible ending, one way or another.
Taken, the queen’s despised master of coin was bound to a post and tortured until he revealed where all his wealth was hidden. Then a tanner called Wat announced that his lordship had failed to pay his “cock tax,” and must yield his manhood to the Crown as forfeit.
Even the fearsome Ser Luthor Largent could not escape the carnage. His sword torn from his grasp, Largent was pulled from his saddle, stabbed in the belly, and bludgeoned to death with a cobblestone, his helm and head so crushed that it was only by its size that his body was recognized when the corpse wagons came the next day.
Ser Torrhen lost a quarter of his men fighting his way back to the Red Keep…yet escaped lightly compared to Ser Lorent Marbrand, who led a hundred knights and men-at-arms into Flea Bottom. Sixteen returned. Ser Lorent, Lord Commander of the Queensguard, was not amongst them.
When the disease crossed the Bite to White Harbor, the prayers of the septons and the potions of the maesters proved equally powerless against it. Thousands died, amongst them Lord Desmond Manderly. His splendid son Ser Medrick, the finest knight in the North, survived him by only four days before succumbing to the same affliction.
Nor would he ever forgive the king for the brusque manner of his dismissal, or the way His Grace “murdered” the royal progress, whose abrupt end his lordship took for a deeply humiliating personal affront.
She had fled King’s Landing in terror of her life, without so much as a coin. Despairing and fearful, Her Grace walked the castle battlements of Duskendale weeping, growing ever more grey and haggard. She could not sleep and would not eat.
Looks like there is justice in Westeros after all. 🥹
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