"You are my lady's uncle," Wydis said with a frown.
"Not anymore. My brother has expelled Lysa from House Tully."
"In my own name." Gendry looked at Wydis. "As the lawful heir to the Iron Throne."
"Then come now. You barely-barely qualify as our guests," Wydis said, his face livid. Five men, three of them old; they could still be kept under control. "Let the gods above see which of you is lying. If you lie, you will be thrown from the Eyrie."
Everyone climbed the spiral staircase from the winch room. The Eyrie was not large, merely seven white towers clustered together like arrows in a quiver, perched on a mountaintop. Though it had no stables, smithy, or kennels, its granary was as large as Winterfell's, and its towers could house five hundred men. Yet as Gendry passed through it, he found the castle strangely desolate. Echoes rang through empty halls of white stone.
As high as honor, as high as loneliness.
"My lady is on the terrace." Wydis looked displeased. "You are the first claimant to the throne to arrive here, though Lady Lysa will not like it."
Lysa's chambers stood above a small, circular garden surrounded by white towers, with blue flowers growing amid its soil and grass. Weirwoods could not survive here, so successive lords had planted lawns instead, placing statues among the flowering shrubs.
Lysa had just finished washing and dressing. She wore a cream velvet gown and a necklace of jade and moonstones around her milky-white neck, and was now holding court on the open terrace.
Attendants, knights, and lords great and small crowded around Lysa. Most still hoped to marry her, bed her, and rule the Vale of Arryn at her side.
"What exactly are you trying to do, Uncle?" Lysa's face fell