Measuring the Ruling Class's Willingness to Obey; the Vale Calls Him a Maegor Among Maegors

Suleiman said nothing more.

He simply sat quietly in the chair that symbolized power, leaning back.

His hands rested loosely on the armrests, his gaze lowered.

He seemed to be studying a speck of mud on his boot, or perhaps his mind had wandered far away.

He paid no attention to the suffocating standoff before him.

He gave no further orders, urged no one on, and did not even change the rhythm of his breathing.

The air inside the great tent seemed to congeal, so heavy it was hard to breathe.

Every gaze, hundreds of pairs of eyes,

fell on the six Riverlands knights who had stepped out of line, like hundreds of invisible blades.

The six knights still held Morton Waynwood down, but they might as well have been frozen by a spell.

Sweat ran down their temples and into their eyes, stinging fiercely, yet none dared raise a hand to wipe it away.

Their palms pressed against the Vale nobleman's shoulders. What had begun as a show of force against a captive

now felt unbearably hot, as though they were holding down a red-hot branding iron instead of a man.

This was an experiment in political desensitization.

Suleiman's goal had never been to torment one or two particular men from the Vale, or to force his subordinates to do something they did not want to do.

He was testing them.

With this almost cruel silence, he was testing how far the Riverlands' ruling class would bend in obedience.

The feudal society of Westeros still rested on two ancient, stubborn ethical foundations.

The first was the rules of war between nobles.

War was understood to be a limited, negotiable game.

They were all respectable people. If one lost, one paid a ransom. The point was to preserve their class's