There was one who did not depart as planned, however. Ser Medrick Manderly had agreed to take the men bound for the Wall as far as White Harbor on his galley North Star. From there they were to proceed overland to Castle Black. On the morning the North Star was to sail, however, a count of the condemned revealed a man was missing. Grand Maester Orwyle, it seemed, had experienced a change of heart as regarded taking the black. Bribing one of his guards to loose his fetters, he had changed into a beggar’s rags and disappeared into the stews of the city. Unwilling to linger any longer, Ser Medrick sentenced the guard who had freed Orwyle to take his place, and the North Star sought the sea.

By the end of 131 AC, Septon Eustace tells us, a “grey calm” had settled over King’s Landing and the crownlands. Aegon III sat the Iron Throne when required, but elsewise was little seen. The task of defending the realm fell to the Lord Protector, Leowyn Corbray, the day-to-day tedium of rule to the blind Hand, Tyland Lannister. Once as tall and golden-haired and dashing as his twin, the late Lord Jason, Ser Tyland had been left so disfigured by the queen’s torturers that ladies new to court had been known to faint at the sight of him. To spare them, the Hand took to wearing a silken hood over his head on formal occasions. This was perhaps a misjudgment, for it gave Ser Tyland a sinister aspect, and before very long the smallfolk of King’s Landing began to whisper tales of the malign masked sorcerer in the Red Keep.

   Ser Tyland’s wits remained sharp, however. He might have been expected to have emerged from his torments a bitter man intent upon revenge, but this proved far from true. Instead the Hand claimed a curious failure of memory, insisting that he could not recall who had been black and who green, whilst demonstrating a dogged loyalty to the son of the very queen who had sent him to the torturers. Very quickly Ser Tyland achieved an unspoken dominance over Leowyn Corbray, of whom Mushroom says, “He was thick of neck and thick of wit, but never have I known a man to fart so loudly.” By law, both the Hand and the Lord Protector were subject to the authority of the council of regents, but as the days passed and the moon turned and turned again, the regents convened less and less often, whilst the tireless, blind, hooded Tyland Lannister gathered more and more power to himself.

The challenges he faced were daunting, for winter had descended upon Westeros and would endure for four long years, a winter as cold and bleak as any in the history of the Seven Kingdoms. The kingdom’s trade had collapsed during the Dance as well, countless villages, towns, and castles had been slighted or destroyed, and bands of outlaws and broken men haunted the roads and woods.

A more immediate problem was posed by the Dowager Queen, who refused to reconcile herself to the new king. The murder of the last of her sons had turned Alicent’s heart into a stone. None of the regents wished to see her put to death, some from compassion, others for fear that such an execution might rekindle the flames of war. Yet she could not be allowed to take part in the life of the court as before. She was too apt to rain down curses on the king, or snatch a dagger from some unwary guardsman. Alicent could not even be trusted in the company of the little queen; when last allowed to share a meal with Her Grace, she had told Jaehaera to cut her husband’s throat whilst he was sleeping, which set the child to screaming. Ser Tyland felt he had no choice but to confine the Queen Dowager to her own apartments in Maegor’s Holdfast; a gentle imprisonment, but imprisonment nonetheless.

   The Hand then set out to restore the kingdom’s trade and begin the process of rebuilding. Great lords and smallfolk alike were pleased when he abolished the taxes enacted by Queen Rhaenyra and Lord Celtigar. With the Crown’s gold once more secure, Ser Tyland set aside a million golden dragons as loans for lords whose holdings had been destroyed during the Dance. (Though many availed themselves of this coin, the loans did bring about a rift between the Iron Throne and the Iron Bank of Braavos.) He also ordered the construction of three huge fortified granaries, in King’s Landing, Lannisport, and Gulltown, and the purchase of sufficient grain to fill them. (The latter decree drove up the price of grain sharply, which pleased those towns and lords with wheat and corn and barley to sell, but angered the proprietors of inns and pot shops, and the poor and hungry in general.)

Though he called a halt to work on the gargantuan statues of Prince Aemond and Prince Daeron that had been commissioned by Aegon II (not before the heads of the two princes had been carved), the Hand set hundreds of stonemasons, carpenters, and builders to work on the repair and restoration of the Dragonpit. The gates of King’s Landing were strengthened at his command, so they might better be able to resist attacks from within the city walls as well as without. The Hand also announced the Crown’s funding for the construction of fifty new war galleys. When questioned, he told the regents that this was meant to provide work for the shipyards and defend the city from the fleets of the Triarchy…but many suspected Ser Tyland’s real purpose was to lessen the Crown’s dependence on House Velaryon of Driftmark.

The Hand might also have been mindful of the continuing war in the west when he set the shipwrights to work. Whilst the ascent of Aegon III did mark an end to the worst of the carnage of the Dance of the Dragons, it is not wholly correct to assert that the young king’s coronation brought peace to the Seven Kingdoms. Fighting continued in the west through the first three years of the boy king’s reign, as Lady Johanna of Casterly Rock continued to resist the depredations of Dalton Greyjoy’s ironborn in the name of her son, young Lord Loreon. The details of their war lie outside our purpose here (for those who would know more, the relevant chapters of Archmaester Mancaster’s Sea Demons: A History of the Children of the Drowned God of the Isles are especially good). Suffice it to say that whilst the Red Kraken had proved a valuable ally to the blacks during the Dance, the coming of peace demonstrated that the ironmen had no more regard for them than for the greens.

   Though he stopped short of openly declaring himself King of the Iron Isles, Dalton Greyjoy paid little heed to any of the edicts coming from the Iron Throne during these years…mayhaps because the king was a boy, and his Hand a Lannister. When commanded to cease his raiding, Greyjoy continued as before. Told to restore the women his ironmen had carried off, he replied that “only the Drowned God may sunder the bond between a man and his salt wives.” Instructed to return Fair Isle to its former lords, he replied, “Should they come rising back up from beneath the sea, we shall gladly give them back what once was theirs.”

When Johanna Lannister attempted to build a new fleet of warships to take the battle to the ironmen, the Red Kraken descended on her shipyards and put them to the torch, and made off with another hundred women in the nonce. The Hand sent an angry reproach, to which Lord Dalton replied, “The women of the west prefer men of iron to cowardly lions, it would seem, for they jump into the sea and plead with us to take them.”

Across Westeros, the winds of war were blowing up the narrow sea as well. The murder of Sharako Lohar of Lys, the admiral who had presided over the Triarchy’s disaster in the Gullet, proved to be the spark that engulfed the Three Daughters in flames, fanning the smoldering rivalries of Tyrosh, Lys, and Myr into open war. It is now commonly accepted that Sharako’s death was a personal matter; the arrogant admiral was slain by one of his rivals for the favor of a courtesan known as the Black Swan. At the time, however, his death was seen as a political killing, and the Myrish were suspected. When Lys and Myr went to war, Tyrosh seized the opportunity to assert its dominion over the Stepstones.