Holy Vows

[Westeros]

It was a surprise for many to have word spread through the Red Keep that King Baelor had determined to hold an open court. Only recently recovered enough to return to the rule of the realm—and even then only haphazardly, torn as he was between the demands of piety and the kingdom’s needs—it was taken as a sign of his renewed strength. And so the courtiers gathered, expectantly. There were so many matters of note that affected the Seven Kingdoms: the embassy to Braavos, say, or the nascent war between Pentos and Lys over the Stepstone that sparked it. Would the king announce something concerning such matters? Or choose instead to allow petitioners to come before him, to lay down their claims?

When he entered, some had a foreboding that something else entirely would happen. For accompanying the young king was the High Septon and a number of the Most Devout. The king’s piety was famous—infamous, in some quarters—and his increasing reliance on the High Septon’s counsel had been noted. Had Baelor not recently declared a rich bride gift for every newly wed couple in the city? That effort to promote the sacrament of marriage had caused a great deal of argument among those who minded the royal treasury and the collectors of the crown’s revenues, but the king was not dissuaded despite reports that a number of less scrupulous kingslanders had gone about wedding one another again and again in different quarters of the city, each time claiming the marriage bounty.

But as it happened, the king did not have more thoughts on the virtues of marriage. Instead, he had a simple declaration for the gathered court: a revelation, shown to him by the Seven, had convinced him (and the High Septon) that it was his calling to be a septon himself, a septon and a king both. With the High Septon’s blessing, he would soon stand vigil, and pray, and on the following day he would be anointed and blessed and raised up as the latest shepherd of the Seven’s flock.

And then he left, with the High Septon and the Most Devout, and the whispers and murmurs followed in his wake. Some were clearly troubled; others were better at dissimulating. The kin had already rejected his marriage to Princess Daena, and repudiated and annulled it with the aid of that same High Septon, and now he was swearing himself to celibacy. If that held true, who would rule next? His uncle, Prince Viserys, if he should live so long…

... or his cousin, the wayward Prince Aegon—nominal head of the embassy to Braavos, who had succeeded in driving the Dornish emissaries out of the Free City but had otherwise made little apparent headway with the Sealord of Braavos in regards to the fighting over the Stepstones—and there were those who saw opportunity in that, when the Targaryen princeling returned from across the narrow sea. And Prince Viserys, the Hand? His face was a mask through it all, but he had arrived before the king, and left after him, and in that some read a strain between the two.

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