Then Stark’s men burst into the council chambers, disarmed the guardsmen at the door, pulled the aged Sea Snake from his chair, and dragged him to the dungeons. There he would soon be joined by Larys Strong the Clubfoot, Grand Maester Orwyle, Ser Perkin the Flea, and Septon Eustace, along with half a hundred others, both highborn and low, that Stark found cause to mistrust. “I was myself tempted to return to my cask of flour,” Mushroom says, “but thankfully I proved too small for the wolf to notice.”

Not even the Lads were spared Lord Cregan’s wroth, though they were ostensibly his allies. “Are you babes in swaddling clothes, to be cozened by flowers and feasts and soft words?” Stark berated them. “Who told you the war was done? The Clubfoot? The Snake? Why, because they wish it done? Because you won your little victory in the mud? Wars end when the defeated bend the knee and not before. Has Oldtown yielded? Has Casterly Rock returned the Crown’s gold? You say you mean to marry the prince to the king’s daughter, yet she remains at Storm’s End, beyond your reach. So long as she remains free and unwed, what is to stop Baratheon’s widow from crowning the girl queen, as Aegon’s heir?”

   When Lord Tully protested that the stormlanders were beaten, and did not have the strength to field another army, Lord Cregan reminded them of the three envoys that Aegon II had sent across the narrow sea “any of whom might return upon the morrow with thousands of sellswords.” Queen Rhaenyra had believed herself victorious after taking King’s Landing, the northman said, and Aegon II thought that he had ended the war by feeding his sister to a dragon. Yet queen’s men had remained, even after the queen herself was dead, and “Aegon is reduced to bones and ashes.”

The Lads found themselves overmatched. Cowed, they gave way, and agreed to join their own power to Lord Stark’s when he marched against Storm’s End. Munkun says they did so willingly, convinced that the wolf lord had the right of it. “Flush with victory, they wanted more,” he writes in the True Telling. “They hungered for more glory, for the fame that young men dream of that can only be won in battle.” Mushroom takes a more cynical view, and suggests that the young lordlings were simply terrified of Cregan Stark.

The result was the same. “The city was his, to do with as he wished,” Septon Eustace says. “The northman had taken it without drawing a sword or loosing an arrow. Be they king’s men or queen’s men, stormlanders or seahorses, riverlords or gutter knights, highborn or low, common soldiers deferred to him as if they had been born to his service.”

For six days King’s Landing trembled on the edge of a sword. In the pot shops and wine sinks of Flea Bottom, men placed wagers on how long the Clubfoot, the Sea Snake, the Flea, and the Dowager Queen would keep their heads. Rumors swept the city, one after the other. Some said that Lord Stark planned to take Prince Aegon back to Winterfell and wed him to one of his own daughters (an obvious falsehood, as Cregan Stark had no trueborn daughters at this time), others that Stark meant to put the boy to death so that he might marry Princess Jaehaera and claim the Iron Throne himself. The northmen would burn the city’s septs and force King’s Landing to return to the worship of the old gods, septons declared. Others whispered that the Lord of Winterfell had a wildling wife, that he threw his enemies into a pit of wolves to watch them be devoured.

   The mood of euphoria had vanished; once more, fear ruled the city streets. A man who claimed to be the Shepherd reborn rose up from the gutters, calling down destruction on the godless northerners. Though he looked nothing like the first Shepherd (he had two hands, for a start), hundreds flocked to hear him speak. A brothel on the Street of Silk burned down when a quarrel over a certain whore between one of Lord Tully’s men and one of Lord Stark’s set off a bloody melee between their friends and brothers-in-arms. Even the highborn were not safe in the more unsavory parts of the city. The younger son of Lord Hornwood, a bannerman to Lord Stark, vanished with two companions whilst roistering in Flea Bottom. They were never found and may have ended in a bowl of brown, if Mushroom can be believed.

Soon thereafter word reached the city that Leowyn Corbray had left Maidenpool and was making for King’s Landing, accompanied by Lord Mooton, Lord Brune, and Ser Rennifer Crabb. Ser Corwyn Corbray departed Duskendale at the same time to join his brother on the march. With him rode Clement Celtigar, old Lord Bartimos’s son and heir, and Lady Staunton, the widow of Rook’s Rest. On Dragonstone, young Alyn Velaryon was demanding the release of Lord Corlys (this much was true), and threatening to descend upon King’s Landing with his ships if the old man was harmed (half-true). Other rumors claimed the Lannisters were on the march, the Hightowers were on the march, Ser Marston Waters had landed with ten thousand sellswords from Lys and Old Volantis (all without truth). And the Maiden of the Vale had set sail from Gulltown, with Lady Rhaena Targaryen and her dragon (true).

As armies marched and swords were sharpened, Lord Cregan Stark sat within the Red Keep, conducting his inquiries into the murder of King Aegon II even as he planned his campaign against the dead king’s remaining supporters. Prince Aegon, meanwhile, found himself confined to Maegor’s Holdfast with no companions save the boy Gaemon Palehair. When the prince demanded to know why he was not free to come and go, Stark replied that it was for his own safety. “This city is a nest of vipers,” Lord Cregan told him. “There are liars, turncloaks, and poisoners in this court who would murder you as quick as they did your uncle to secure their own power.” When Aegon protested that Lord Corlys, Lord Larys, and Ser Perkin were friends, the Lord of Winterfell replied that false friends were more dangerous to a king than any foe, that the Snake, the Clubfoot, and the Flea had saved him only to make use of him, so they might rule Westeros in his name.

With the infallibility of hindsight, we now look back through the centuries and say the Dance was done, but this seemed less certain to those who lived through its dark and dangerous aftermath. With Septon Eustace and Grand Maester Orwyle languishing in dungeons (where Orwyle had begun writing his confessions, the text that would provide Munkun with the foundation on which he would build his monumental True Telling), only Mushroom remains to take us beyond the court chronicles and royal edicts. “The great lords would have given us another two years of war,” the fool declares in his Testimony, “it was the women who made the peace. Black Aly, the Maiden of the Vale, the Three Widows, the Dragon Twins, ’twas them who brought the bloodshed to an end, and not with swords or poison, but with ravens, words, and kisses.”

   The seeds cast into the wind by Lord Corlys Velaryon during the False Dawn had taken root and borne sweet fruit. One by one the ravens returned, bearing answers to the old man’s peace offers.

Casterly Rock was the first to respond. Lord Jason Lannister had left six children when he died in battle: five daughters and one son, Loreon, a boy of four. Rule in the west had therefore passed to his widow, Lady Johanna, and her father, Roland Westerling, Lord of the Crag. With the Red Kraken’s longships still menacing their coasts, the Lannisters were more concerned with defending Kayce and retaking Fair Isle than with renewing the struggle for the Iron Throne. Lady Johanna agreed to all the Sea Snake’s terms, promising to come herself to King’s Landing to do obeisance to the new king on his coronation, and deliver two daughters to the Red Keep, to serve as companions to the new queen (and as hostages to ensure her future loyalty). She agreed as well to restore that portion of the royal treasury that Tyland Lannister had sent west for safekeeping, providing that Ser Tyland himself was granted pardon. In return, she asked only that the Iron Throne “command Lord Greyjoy to crawl back to his islands, restore Fair Isle to its rightful lords, and free all the women he has carried off, or at the least all those of noble birth.”