— Dany —

The Lannister rider came in under a white banner on a grey afternoon, on the Roseroad two days north of Highgarden, and the Dornish outriders held him at lance-point for twenty minutes before anyone fetched Khorane.

By the time Khorane reached the picket line, the rider had, in his unhurried way, asked three times for the lady from the south with the white horse, declined to give his name, declined to give his lord's name, and accepted a cup of water with the grave courtesy of a man who had been on a road for sixteen days and did not particularly mind waiting another ten minutes for his audience. He was small. He was very small. He was sitting on a brown gelding that was nearly as tall at the shoulder as the rider was head-to-foot, and his eyes — one green, one black, Khorane noted with the small professional pleasure of a woman who collected unusual details — were the calmest eyes she had seen in a Lannister-coloured cloak in a year.

"My lord," she said in Common, "I am Khorane Sathmantes, advisor to Her Grace. State your business."

"Lady Khorane," said Tyrion Lannister. "I am here, in the most flagrant violation of every protocol of Westerosi diplomacy, with no herald and no escort and no proper letter of introduction, because my father is in a hurry. I have come from Harrenhal under a safe conduct that he and Prince Doran arranged through couriers I do not entirely understand. I would like very much to speak with Queen Daenerys, if she will have me. Failing that, I would like to speak with her sister. Failing that, I would like a hot bath and a bed, and we can discuss the rest of it tomorrow. My name, since you have not asked, is Tyrion Lannister, and I am here to surrender the West."

Khorane Sathmantes, who had spent twenty years training her face not to show surprise at trade negotiations, lost the battle entirely for one full second.

She found it again.

"My lord," she said, with the careful even tone of a person making sure she had heard correctly. "Repeat the last part, please."

"I am here to surrender the West. To the queen. With terms my father has authorised me to offer. Lady Khorane, may I dismount? My back has seized."

Dany received him an hour later, in the command pavilion, with Doran in his wheeled chair on her right and Arianne behind him and Missandei on her left and Khorane standing beside the entrance flap like a polite, watchful door. She had made Tyrion Lannister wait an hour because she had needed an hour: Doran had used three quarters of it to brief her on every relevant fact about Tyrion he and his spies had collected over the past decade, and Missandei had used the other quarter to make sure Dany ate something, on the grounds that one did not negotiate the surrender of a quarter of a kingdom on an empty stomach.

Tyrion came in alone. He had washed. He had changed into a clean if travel-creased doublet of plain dark cloth, with no Lannister sigil. He bowed, properly, to Dany; nodded to Doran with the careful respect of one cripple to another, which Doran accepted with the smallest possible quirk of his mouth; and stood, waiting.

Dany looked at him for a long moment.

Then she said, "Lord Tyrion. Sit. Tell me what your father is offering, and tell me what your father wants."

He told her.

He told her clearly, in unornamented Common, in roughly the order Tywin had laid it out for him: surrender of the Rock, surrender of the Westerlands as a polity, renunciation of any claim to the regency by Cersei, the heads of the worst of the riverlands butchers — Gregor Clegane named first, by name, as a personal offering — and his father's own retirement to whatever small holding the Crown wished to grant him. In exchange: the lives of Cersei, Joffrey (in exile, septon's robes, a small far island), Tommen, Myrcella, and Jaime.

He did not flinch on his father's name. Dany noted this. He delivered the line my father will retire to whatever small holding the Crown sees fit, or accept whatever other disposition Her Grace deems just with the flat affect of a man who knew exactly what or accept whatever other disposition meant in the mouth of a Targaryen at the head of a winning army, and who had decided not to soften it.

When he was finished there was a silence in the pavilion.

Dany did not break it at once.

She looked at Tyrion Lannister. She looked at Doran. Doran, very slightly, inclined his head — yes, this is real, yes, this is what it appears to be. She looked at Missandei. Missandei's eyes, very briefly, went to a small ledger at her elbow and then back, and Dany understood: the offer matches what our spies have been hearing from the Rock for a moon. Tywin has been preparing this. It is not a bluff.

She looked back at Tyrion.

"Lord Tyrion."

"Your Grace."

"Why you."

"Because I am the only Lannister you would receive without ordering killed, Your Grace. My father's words, not mine."

"Why are you the only Lannister I would receive."

"Because I had no part in the death of your father's reign or the rape of your goodsister Elia. I was a child when Robert took the throne. I have never sat in the Small Council. I have, in fact, been carefully excluded from every important decision of the past two years by my sister, who does not trust me, which has had the unintended effect of making me one of the few Lannisters in the realm with clean hands. My father has, as is his habit, identified the asset and deployed it."

"Are your hands clean, Lord Tyrion?"

He paused.

"Cleaner than my sister's, Your Grace. Cleaner than my father's. Not entirely clean. I have killed men. I have ordered men killed. I have funded a war I did not believe in because I am a Lannister and Lannisters fund wars. I make no claim to be a good man. I claim only to be a useful one."

Dany almost smiled, despite herself. Useful was a Lannister word. She had been warned about it.

"Lord Tyrion. Your father is offering me his head."

"He is."

"Will I take it?"

"That is for Your Grace to decide. He will not flee. He will not negotiate further on this point. If you ride west he will be sitting in his solar in the Rock waiting for you. If you send a knight to take him he will receive the knight courteously and ride out at the knight's stirrup. He has set his affairs in order. It is — unsettling, Your Grace, to watch him do this. I tell you so you understand the man you are dealing with."

"And your sister."

"My sister is a different matter. My sister will not surrender. My sister will fight you to the last alley of King's Landing if she is permitted to. My father is offering you his head in part, Your Grace, because he is hoping it will be enough that you do not require my sister's. He believes — I believe he is right, although I would not say it in his hearing — that my sister, removed from power, will be no further threat to your reign, because her power has always been a function of her position, and without the position she will be only a frightened woman in a tower somewhere drinking too much wine."

"You speak of her without affection, my lord."

"I speak of her honestly, Your Grace. There is a difference. I love my sister, in the cracked way one loves family one cannot save. I will not lie about her to you in the hope of saving her. If you require her death I will tell my father so and he will accept it. We have come too far for me to bargain with you about Cersei in this tent."

Dany was quiet for a long moment.

"Lord Tyrion," she said, "have you ever met my sister?"

"No, Your Grace."

"Have you read her letters?"

"I have read every letter of hers that has reached the West, yes. Including the ones she wrote knowing they would be intercepted. They were instructive."

"Instructive how?"

"Your sister, Your Grace, writes as though she has been planning this campaign since she was a child. Every letter is calibrated. There is not a wasted word in any of them. The letter she sent to Lord Tywin two moons past — yes, Your Grace, she wrote to him; he did not tell you, perhaps, but she wrote to him — contained, in three paragraphs, an offer not unlike the one I am bringing you today. My father read it twice and burned it and did not reply. He did not reply because he was not yet ready to. He is ready now. I am, in essence, his belated reply."

Dany blinked.

"My sister wrote to your father two moons ago."

"She did."

"Offering him terms."

"Suggesting, Your Grace, that terms might be available, if Lord Tywin found himself inclined to seek them. The phrasing was elegant. I admired it."

Dany glanced at Doran. Doran's expression had not changed. Yes, I knew. She told me. We did not tell you because the letter was a probe, and probes that are explained in advance are not probes. Dany filed it. She would have a word with Aelya about this later, in writing. She found, slightly to her own surprise, that she was not angry. Her sister had been throwing nets across the realm for two years. One more net was not a betrayal. It was the pattern.

She turned back to Tyrion.

"Lord Tyrion. I will give you my answer in three days. You will be my guest in this camp until then. You will be honourably housed. You will have a guard, who is for your protection as much as for ours. You will be permitted to write to your father, but not to send the letter until I have approved it. Are these terms acceptable?"

"They are extremely acceptable, Your Grace. They are also the terms I would have offered, in your place."

"Then we understand each other. Khorane will see you to your tent. Lord Tyrion."

"Your Grace."

He bowed — properly, the second bow, the deeper one — and turned, and limped out of the pavilion behind Khorane Sathmantes, and the flap fell behind them.

Dany sat for a moment in the silence.

Then she put her face in her hands and said, into her palms: "Aelya, my love. I am going to need you for this one."

Doran, beside her, said dryly: "Cousin. With respect. Your sister has been planning this exact conversation for a very long time. I think you will find she has, in fact, already advised you. Possibly multiple times. In letters."

Dany lowered her hands. She looked at him.

"Doran. Did she already advise me on this."

"Cousin. The letter she sent you nine moons ago, the one with the long passage about the only honourable Lannister is a useful one, treat him kindly, his father will send him eventually — that letter."

Dany stared at the ceiling of the pavilion.

"I am going to write to her tonight," she said, "and I am going to be very, very rude."

Arianne, behind Doran, laughed.

— Tyrion, that evening —

He sat cross-legged on the cot in the small honour-guest tent the Dornish had set up for him, and he ate a bowl of stew that was, he had to admit, the best stew he had eaten in a year, and he watched the candle gutter on the small folding table, and he thought.

He had, for sixteen days on the road, been preparing to dislike Daenerys Targaryen.

Not because of her family, exactly, although the Targaryens had a great deal to answer for and his father had paid in full for at least some of it. Because of her position. A young queen on a war camp, with a dragon in her camp and three armies in her sleeve and the Reach rolling under her without a fight — a queen like that, in his experience of queens, was usually a special kind of difficult. Vain. Imperious. Quick to take offense. Slow to listen. Surrounded by sycophants. Tyrion had been bracing himself.

The woman in the pavilion had not been any of those things.

The woman in the pavilion had listened. Had asked the right questions. Had not pretended to a knowledge she did not have. Had taken counsel, openly, from her advisors, without losing the room. Had not flinched when he had laid his father's offer on the table. Had not been cruel when she had no need to be. Had, at one point, smiled at his joke about Lannister words being useful, not the indulgent smile of a queen humoring a clever cripple but the small real smile of a woman who had been amused.

He set the empty stew bowl down on the table.

"Well, Father," he said quietly, to no one. "You may have undersold her."

He blew out the candle and went to sleep.

It was the best night's sleep he had had in a year.