Chapter Text
The Riverlands, circa 1924
Thunder rolls over twilight. The sky is moody and threatening rain, growling over a field of blinking fireflies, golden glow and scarlet-and-pink striped tents dotting the late summer meadowland.
The Royal Iron Circus is finishing up their summer tour. On their way back to King’s Landing, they’ve pitched their tents on the outskirts of Maidenpool, and the eastern Riverlands will enjoy a first class midway and carnival tomorrow. For tonight, the performers, the stagehands and the animals all catch their forty winks, in anticipation of the long and grueling opening day ahead.
The ticket box will open bright and early. Varys, the Master of Whisperers, has spread the word in town that this is a show not to be missed, and Littlefinger, the Master of Coin, has set his steel bell wind up mocking-jay clock to a time on or around first light.
With any luck, those resonate bells will wake up the whole company and, fingers and toes crossed, everyone will be ready to go as soon as the locals start lining up for entry.
The diminutive ringmaster needs the next few days to go off without a hitch. If not, he’ll have to explain to his father why he sunk the family business into the ground on his first solo try. And that’s not a conversation Tyrion Lannister wants to have with his father.
Not now, not ever.
He’s already got one problem that requires immediate attention. And maybe it’s too late to do anything about it. But there’s no question that the trapeze act, the crescendo upon which the rest of the show is built, is in trouble.
In fact, it’s perilously close to falling from the heavens and bringing them all down with it. Witty little man that he is, the irony of that statement is not lost on Tyrion.
Tyrion’s always liked the circus life. At his diminished height and with his dwarfish features, he feels made for it even. It’s a tense game of juggling knives and swallowing fire, but he’s got the iron stomach for it.
Well, most of the time. But there are times when…he does not. And this trouble with the trapeze act falls into the latter category.
Or ladder, Tyrion thinks cleverly, as he leaves his tent for the damp of evening. It’s too damp. He casts a glance up at those darkening skies. It’s going to rain tonight, isn’t it? He makes a face at the weather, wondering if it will have the decency to quit before morning.
Probably not, his frown deepens. But a muddy circus does not a happy ringmaster make.
There’s a list of other things that do make him happy. The elephants, for instance. Cersei jumped through literal hoops for those but it was worth it in the end. And they have lions, tigers and a grizzly bear too. He has a gaggle of clowns, master jugglers, an illusionist—whose shadow creatures are as dark and severe as his personality—and his mystical red woman, who may not be much for a laugh but she’s got the catchphrase of the act down, purring in her cut-crystal voice,.
The night is dark and full of magic.
There’s an honest-to-goodness giant in the company too, a one-eyed man who can light his sword aflame with his bare hand, and a fortune teller in a lacquer mask who’s always been a little too dead on in her predictions for Tyrion’s tastes.
(She recently told him that he’d be better off quitting the family business and buying a vineyard far, far away)…
But the Targaryen brother and sister trapeze team, Viserys and Daenerys, with their natural grace and seamless, dazzling flights across the big top…ah, yes them.
They are the “silver draw” in an “iron business,” as Tywin Lannister likes to say. Iron for the rails they use to crisscross this vast country of prairie settlements, river towns and mining camps. Silver for the stunning and exotic color of the Targaryens’ hair. And with their dragon-like feats of flight, the gold pours into the gilded coffers of Lannister & Co., making Tyrion’s father a very wealthy man.
Until tomorrow, perhaps, as Viserys has had another squabble with his sister and stubbornly says he won’t go on. He’s retreated to his own tent with Doreah, one of the bally girls, and is refusing to come out for anyone, including his employer’s son.
The Imp does not command the dragon…he sneered to Tyrion earlier in the night.
If Tywin were here, the young man wouldn’t dare pull such a stunt. But Tyrion’s father is in Pyke for the next few days, attempting to recruit a man who they say has drowned and come back a dozen times. There are also rumors that the man’s deranged but that could be said about half the performers in this company.
Death-defying stunts are rarely attempted by the sane and well-adjusted.
While he’s away, Tywin’s given over his spotless scarlet waistcoat, his elegant, black top hat and his gold-handled, lion-embossed ringmaster’s whip to Tyrion, to serve as the master of ceremonies in his stead, and the one thing he impressed upon his youngest son before he left was, “Whatever you do, don’t you dare lose the Targaryens…”
And then he added, in a lion’s menacing rumble, “…or I’ll skin you like a gutted stag when I get back.”
He wishes he could say his father was joking.
Tyrion grits his teeth on the memory of those words and suddenly has a craving for a bottle of red wine. Why did he agree to this again? He knows his father would have preferred that Cersei or Jaime mind the circus while he was away, but Cersei went with him to Pyke and Jaime…well, Jaime’s over there with the elephants, feeding the big creatures their sister loves so much.
The brothers exchange a wave but no more. Tyrion can’t stop. He’s a man on a mission with little time to talk.
Don’t you dare lose the Targaryens…
It’s not that Viserys is threatening to quit the company outright, despite what he says. No, it’s not that at all. Viserys loves the attention that the crowd gives him. He lives for it. He’ll sit up on that fly bar at the end of each routine, waving and blowing kisses to his adoring fans through three encores.
But what the young, silver-haired acrobat has begun to notice—and how he didn’t notice earlier is beyond all of them—is that the encores aren’t really for him. The crowds don’t line up at the ticket box for a quarter mile or more on account of Viserys Targaryen.
It’s his sister that they want to see, for it’s his sister who is the better aerialist. Always has been, always will be. She was born for flight, the last true dragon of her family.
And this is making Viserys green with envy. Green like a common garden snake.
So he may just skip the performance tomorrow to sabotage the act. He said as much when he stormed into Tyrion’s tent earlier to demand “what’s owed him” and “the golden crown of this dog and pony show.” He wants the spotlight on him at the end of the act. And he wants a public apology from his sister before the show.
If he doesn’t get both, he says he’ll burn it all to the ground.
Tyrion might take it all as an empty threat, except that Targaryens are a volatile bunch in general. Legendary aerialists for more than ten generations but unpredictable and a little too prone to self-destruction. Old Aerys the Mad Aerialist comes to mind immediately.
But it’s an affliction common among even the saner members of the family. The eldest Targaryen brother, Rhaegar, was incredibly talented, self-assured and beloved by the crowd. He always performed his routine without a net to give the audience an extra thrill and he had the balls and skills to do it. It wasn’t all ballyhoo.
The night Rhaegar died, you could hear a pin drop in the crowded big top. The house went dead silent in the minutes after the silver-haired Flying Prince somehow missed his catch on the twist. Wingless and flightless, after all, he plunged like a lead weight to the hard ground.
Thud.
No, Viserys can’t be trusted to do the right thing. Tyrion needs this all smoothed over as soon as possible.
And that’s why he’s down at the animal cages, going straight for the ring at the end of the row, to ask a favor of the tall man dressed in country wools and boiled leather (the stubborn man won’t abide sequins and satin, not even for the show), all muted earth colors like the pine forests he grew up in, currently wrestling a full grown grizzly named Dacey.