[johns mind changed with a bit of flesh craft his thoughts quicken and his boyish words and slurs receded his words becoming less human and more machine a pillar towards crowns unseen slicked with bloods that was both his and not]
The laughter rolled out of Robert Baratheon like thunder, and when it ebbed he drew a long breath through a stranger's lungs and found their weight pleasing. Sweat tickled the nape. Mail rasped. The destrier shifted beneath him, strong but near spent. To his left, Renly's grin; to his right, the sullen heat of Stannis. Behind, the white cloaks, the red cloaks, and one nervous boy with a golden lion for a name.
John flexed the king's fingers once on the reins, measuring tendon and reach. The body was blunt force—booze-pickled, tendon-thick, and deceptively quick if you told it to be. He let the wine sit in the mouth, then swallowed and willed the flesh to burn it faster. Heat surged; the fog thinned.
"Lancel," he said, letting Robert's voice ride the laugh to its end. "No more Arbor for a spell. Water it to half."
The boy blinked, glanced toward Renly as if for permission, then scuttled off. Renly's amusement cooled by a degree.
"Grown sensible, have we?" Renly said lightly.
"Grown thirsty," John-as-Robert replied. "For a boar, not a barrel."
He spurred on. The party followed, clatter and snorts and the constant metallic rain of harness and spur. John kept the pace just hard enough to string them out—Renly and Stannis tight to his flanks, Barristan a length back, Jaime's mare dancing at the edge, Sandor Clegane bored and dangerous at the tail. The crownlanders sweated. The Lannister knights talked too much. The Stormlanders cursed like they were paid for it.
From the canopy a jay shrieked—one of his. He didn't need to look up to feel it: the small shape perched in the green, a sliver of mind tethered to him by threads no maester had words for. The bird's eyes were his eyes when he wished, its throat his whisper. He let it be. No display. Not yet.
A game trail broke left. Boar sign. Fresh, wet. John breathed once, tasting the musk and loam, the green slap of the Kingswood in summer. He raised a fist and the column checked raggedly.
"Boar," Barristan said before anyone asked. "Big. Recent."
"Ser Barristan," John said without turning, "take Ser Mandon and three. Loop wide and flush him gentle. We'll take him on the run."
Barristan's visor dipped. The old knight loved orders that made sense.
Stannis ground his teeth. "We are hours from the Red Keep and you play at—"
"At hunting," John said, letting a grin cut Robert's beard. "You came to watch numbers add themselves? Hunt, Stannis. It's a king's sport and you've too little sun."
The grinding stopped. The anger didn't, but Stannis swallowed it because that was what Stannis did when duty told him to. Renly's eyes crinkled; he filed away the barb for later, as he always did.
They took positions along the brush-frayed bend of the trail. John took center, spear couched and braced. He bled a sliver of energy into muscle, nothing a maester's scale would catch—a quickening of twitch, a smoothing of the tremor that wine etches into men. The armor felt lighter for a heartbeat.
The boar came like a battering ram with tusks. Barristan's line did their work—no shouting, no grandstand—just pressure and angle until the creature burst from the green, mad with fear and wounds it didn't yet know it had. The destrier reared. John's spear dipped, then steadied. The world narrowed.
He didn't try to be graceful. Robert never was. He leaned with the blow the way brawlers do, used weight and a mean streak, and drove iron into the shoulder, not the chest—let the shaft take the shock, let the boar turn into it and soil the ground with its own momentum. It screamed, bull-saw and pig-cry together, churned, slammed the haft, broke it.
Then Sandor's sword took the tendon and the beast crashed ten paces on, and Jaime's lance pinned it to the earth like a banner nail. Renly whooped; Stannis exhaled through his nose, the closest he came to praise.
Barristan dismounted and finished it clean with a knife behind the foreleg. Blood steamed in the heat. Flies declared their own small victory.
"Well struck, Your Grace," Barristan said, because that was the right thing to say.
"Luck," John said, because that was what Robert would say when he wanted the praise but not the responsibility. He kicked free of the broken spear, swung down, and laid a hand on bristled hide as if to bless it. In truth he drank—only a mouthful of heat through skin, a pulse of stolen vigor. Animal flesh was thin fare, but it paid for the quickening and left no trace a maester would name.
He straightened. "We'll haul the tusks. Quarter it at camp. And then we ride early."
"Early?" Renly cocked his head. "The kitchens are stocked. You could gorge three days."
"King's Landing gorges without me," John said, wiping the blade and handing it back to Barristan hilt-first. "The Hand will have three ledgers for every boar we don't bring home. If I must be bored, I'll be bored where the chairs are softer."
At the name—the Hand—Stannis's eyes moved, sharp. Good. Jon Arryn lived, which meant the gameboard still had its old lines. Varys whispered in tunnels; Littlefinger smiled too much; Cersei measured power by the cup. Tywin counted debts in gold and blood. All of them expected a drunk bear lumbering through decisions.
He would give them the bear until it was time to be the knife.
—
Camp was pitched where the trees admitted a cold stream and the midges were only mildly cruel. Lancel watered the wine until it stopped being a weapon and became a drink. John made a performative show of accepting the weaker cups with poor grace, then drank three in quick succession and laughed about it like a man at peace with his vices. The men relaxed by inches. Habit is a kingdom; he would rule it first.
As the light failed and the flies surrendered to smoke and dusk, John took Renly aside under the pretense of brotherly complaint.
"King's Landing grows soft," he grumbled in Robert's comfortable register. "Flowers everywhere. Make yourself useful. Ride ahead at first light, find the Lord Commander of the City Watch, and tell him I want a hundred more spears on the walls by week's end. Tall men, steady hands. Storm's End sends coin for it."
Renly arched an eyebrow. "A hundred? Janos Slynt will squeeze a purse until it screams."
"Then he'll learn to scream softer." John clapped him on the shoulder. "Pick some men from our own to seed them. I want boys who answer to stags before coins."
Renly liked the feel of order when it came gift-wrapped as favor. He began to count names without realizing it. "As you wish."
Next he found Lancel with a skin and a tremor. The boy's fear of failure was a leash anyone could hold; Cersei had cinched it. John loosened it, just enough.
"You'll carry letters," he said, low. "To the Hand and the Grand Maester. You won't read them. You will say I wrote them sober." He smiled, slow and mean enough to be true to the face he wore. "You'll also tell no one I've watered the wine. Not your cousins. Not your lady."
"Y-yes, Your Grace."
"If you serve me well, I'll make a man of you. If you serve two masters, you'll end a story people tell about what happens to boys who forget who hands them bread."
The boy swallowed. Leash changed hands. Good.
By firelight, John scratched at parchment. The letters were short and dull, which made them powerful. To Jon Arryn: a request for a private dawn audience on His Grace's return and an accounting of port tariffs from Gulltown to Oldtown ("numbers make me sleepy; keep them tight," he added, which would sound exactly like Robert). To Pycelle: a request for a poultice for a "strain in the shoulder" from the day's hunt (a plausible reason to be less riotous, a reason to dismiss people early, a reason to keep his chambers quiet).
He sent a third raven in his own hand—well, Robert's—to the Lord Commander of the City Watch: an order to enroll twenty new men recommended by Lord Renly's household. Names would follow. The names would be his archers, already tramping toward the city in peasant browns, new oaths burnt into their mouths where tongues couldn't reach.
When the camp settled to a low hum—dice clatter, boot scrape, the distant dog's bark—John closed his eyes and pressed his mind sideways into the small bird on the branch above his tent. The world jumped to cold feet and feather breath. He watched the firecircle from leaf-shadow, then winged along the dark line of the road toward the city's glow.
King's Landing pulsed on the horizon like a hearth you could never quite get warm by. In its alleys were a thousand throats and a hundred knives and more ears than any man could count. He would not count them. He would make them.
Back in the tent, he opened his eyes into a body that snored even when it wasn't asleep. He let the sound come, an old habit to lull watchers. In the quiet, he sorted immediate necessities from appetites.
Jon Arryn first. An honest man could be turned if you gave him the right truth and the right enemy. Or he could be broken. But broken things cut hands. Better to guide, if possible.
Varys would already know the king had killed a boar and watered his wine. Good. Let the Spider think the bear had whimsy and moments of clarity. Littlefinger would be arranging debts for sport; John would pay one too quickly, just to see whom it frightened.
As for Cersei—he set the thought aside, away from appetite. Power first. Beds were easy. Thrones were not.
He slept then, a king's rumble through a stranger's chest, while a jay watched the camp and another little mind—lean and hard from the Kingswood—slipped past the city gate in a cart full of onions, a bow wrapped in sacking at his feet.
In the morning they would ride. By evening he would sit a familiar chair with unfamiliar intent. The board looked the same. The hands had changed.
-- short cry of a a man without voice or face-
[Robert felt a gripped a choke by unseen hands his thoughts and councousness was strangled as he made to gasped and shout. a veil was thrown over his councousness his mouth moved a laughter that was both his and wasn't, he saw before him the faces of renly and his men non noticed his terror or his grasping. For his hands moved not by his will for when he tried it was as if iron. And he felt it a strangled and a choke so terrible it was erasing him and he could do nothing, and Robert a man bostrous and courageous for a moment fell tears on a flesh that could not cry. A flesh that bore his mark yet refused to let any tears fall on its eyes, and a mouth laughing while his soul was devoured all in the sight of his jesting brothers and his men]