Beneath dragons' jaws and dragonfire, before an undefeated army of steel, making trouble meant death.
For the lords who received the news first, this advantage in information was an enormous boon.
"Within crisis lies hope." Roose Bolton thought it through carefully. If that was so, even if the people beyond the Wall and the White Walkers invaded in great numbers, those with the greatest foresight would still benefit.
Who, then, could offer stronger backing now than the Dragon King Gendry? A king with dragons instantly rose to a different level from the other houses. Kingship had regained its sanctity.
History was filled with a peculiar absurdity.
Twenty or thirty years earlier, the Old Wolf Rickard Stark had been ambitious for his house's future power. His sights had been set on the south, so he had arranged the marriages of Brandon to Catelyn Tully and Lyanna to Robert Baratheon.
Who could have expected that, decades later, the southern lords would instead head north together to lend their support?
Gendry stood before a map of Westeros. Though he had spoken only a few words, without a single writ of appointment or dispossession, he had already revealed the will of power.
The many lords and the Department of Magic's "advisers" sat on folding camp seats around a folding table of unfinished pine. Apart from those remaining at their posts, nearly all the Seven Kingdoms' foremost knights and lords were here.
This was no kitchen, yet the lords and knights seemed to hear meat being carved: the redistribution of power in the Seven Kingdoms, the rise and fall of lords great and small.
The king's will would determine the division of power in Westeros. Under his plans, Westeros would surely enter a new stage.
Some would soar to great heights, while some old powers