“We’ve arrived,” his cousin Walton said, gazing up at the jutting towers of Storm’s End, ash-black against the dying reds and oranges of the sky.
Robb snorted at the pointlessness of that comment, bringing his left leg over the leather saddle and onto the gritty dirt of the courtyard floor. “Seeing as you have such slim evidence as the sight of several hundred foot high towers, I congratulate the miniscule turnip you call a brain for noticing.”
He had come ill prepared for such an event, seeing as it was bound to end in massacre. Only five guards, as a compliment to the Queen of Stags. As an establishment of trust between guest and host. They swept into the courtyard behind him, past the cacophony of the portcullis’ rusted metal and past the two towers leering down beside it, red cloaks twitching aside to reveal the glinting of sharpened metal, and when they’d reached to where Robb and his one-eyed cousin were standing, they dismounted themselves.
“Remember,” he told them, his hands absentmindedly fidgeting with his black collars. “A loose tongue is like loose stitching. Bound to bleed further, vulnerable to the killer’s blade once more, apt to give its owner a bit of… trouble.” Once the collars were thoroughly hiding the scar that wrapped around the back of his neck, he took to tucking his hair behind his ears. “So, lather your words with honey rather than alcohol, remember to bow and scrape to every man with more power than you, and mind your Sers and Ma’ams, your Lords and Ladies, Your Grace’s and Your Majesty’s.” With the hair tucked in, he began striding forward, towards the sound of revelry emanating from feast hall. “Unless, of course,” he threw a grin back towards his men, “a massacre begins over some small rivalry. That’s when I generally want you to call them all two-penny cunts and discounted whores as you stab them all repeatedly in the hearts.”
There was a smatter of laughter at that, and it followed Robb as he continued forward, smirking the smirk of his aggravating ancestors. He twisted his father’s ring - the only thing he’d ever actually deemed worthy for his son to have, the fucker - round and round, only dropping it when the snarling face of the lion (he thought it looked more like a gargoyle, personally) was faced outwards. The guards at the gate glanced at him, then the ring, and opened the gates to his step. The scarred wood groaned like an old lady warding away unwanted visitors, but old lady’s warding away unwanted visitors scared no one but pant wetting, gentlemanly knights of the Reach, and so he shouldered past.
The hall was thing of lies, people scurrying about, whispering, gossiping, talking within each other’s ears, but it was decorated in such fine golds and blacks that no one cared to notice. He looked up toward the main dais upon reaching the center of the hall, noting the beauty of the Storm Queen that he’d take care to compliment later, the… kingliness of his own liege that he’d flatter with an intimidated set to his face, the humbleness of King Arryn that he’d name wise for its quiet grace, the look of idiocy King Rickard was giving the hall that he’d call pure intelligence, and then finally, the stupidity of that ironborn fucker that he’d just call stupidity.
Robb strut over to a place on a table closest to the dais, giving all the Kings and Queens sweetened grins that they were probably too occupied to notice as he sat down. I’ll talk to them later. Feasts were, of course, the most efficient way to explain to someone whether you wanted to fuck them or kill them by the end of their life span, and he didn’t plan to do so any less than he had at any other events.
