Duskendale was stained dark red by the last embers of the setting sun, like blood that had clotted and blackened.
Wind rolled in from Blackwater Bay, carrying a salty tang and damp chill. Like an unseen giant hand, it swept over the walls and pulled the densely packed banners taut, raising a deafening clatter, as though thousands of soldiers and horses were roaring without a voice.
The entire stretch of wall was submerged in a sea of banners.
On one side, golden lions on crimson bared their claws and fangs in the deepening dusk; on the other, red three-headed dragons on black writhed silently beneath the blood-colored sky.
Two colors, two symbols, faced one another across the narrow walls, dividing them into rival domains, as though the wounds of this land were bleeding in silence.
Tyrion had chosen the square with care.
It was broad and unobstructed, large enough to hold nearly all the common folk of Duskendale, along with the Lannister and Duskendale soldiers summoned from nearby and mingled among the crowd.
The more people there were, the more eyes there would be, and the more cautious the newly returned "True Dragon" would have to be. He would be less willing to openly break with them, especially now that they had offered "bread and salt," that seemingly sacred fig leaf.
Tyrion stood on the hastily erected platform, his short frame wrapped in the sumptuous robes of the Hand of the King. He narrowed his mismatched eyes, now sharp as knives, as he watched the black-and-red dragon banners billowing atop the walls, his gaze tightening slightly.
He had ordered those banners hung himself, as a display of "solemnity" and "respect for the Targaryen bloodline."
But he knew very well that these banners had not come from Dragonstone. They had come