GOT: I Plunder Skills — Chapter 391 - Tyrion's Fealty — The Conversation

Daenerys stiffened.

Something complicated moved through her violet eyes.

She remembered the Dothraki.

In the beginning, Khal Drogo's khalasar was the largest anyone knew. He commanded roughly forty thousand riders, and a great khalasar carried nearly as many non-combatants as warriors , sometimes more. Drogo's tribe alone could have numbered eighty to a hundred thousand souls.

And across the Dothraki Sea, hundreds of khalasars were scattered like seeds on the wind, ranging from a few dozen riders to tens of thousands. Many khals boasted cavalry in the thousands, some claiming ten or twenty thousand. By any measure, across all of Essos, those numbers stood alone.

If not for Lynn, she would have almost been handed to those savages.

"Dothraki?"

She grabbed Lynn's sleeve without thinking.

"They're... they're brutal. And there are so many of them."

She had seen it herself, wandering Essos with Viserys. The Dothraki moved like locusts , a tide of horsemen that swallowed everything in its path and left nothing behind.

"Brutal?"

Lynn smiled. He turned and laid his hand gently over hers.

"The Dothraki worship only one thing. Strength."

"A man who can summon blizzards. Who can raise the dead and send them to war. Who rides a dragon."

He held her gaze.

"What do you think they'd see when they look at me?"

Daenerys went still.

"They revere the strong," she murmured.

"Exactly." Lynn nodded. "So — do you think they'd dare raise a blade against me?"

Tyrion staggered into the hall then, face flushed with wine, a flicker of unease beneath the red.

"I caught some of that. You're talking about the Dothraki."

He belched.

"Don't make the mistake of underestimating them. Those madmen on horseback will do anything for gold. If the fools in Meereen throw everything they have at the problem, the Dothraki will come like dogs smelling blood."

It was a sound judgment, by Westerosi standards. Buy the savages with coin. For a nomadic people with nothing to farm and everything to raid, gold was an irresistible force.

"They won't come," Lynn said flatly.

"Why not?"

"Because they're not stupid."

Lynn walked back to the high seat and settled into it.

"The Dothraki are greedy, yes. But they fear what they can't explain even more than they love gold. A khal can lead tens of thousands of riders. I can make snow fall on a summer city." He paused. "They'll weigh it."

"And when they're done weighing it, they'll carry the heads of Meereen's Great Masters to Yunkai, kneel in front of me, and swear themselves to my service."

He said it the way someone else might describe the weather.

Tyrion felt the wine drain out of him.

He stared at this man , at the calm that lived in him, the particular stillness of someone who looks at the world and sees only pieces on a board , and felt something cold move through his chest.

Lynn wasn't predicting.

He was describing something that had already happened in his mind.

"Even if you're right," Tyrion said after a moment. He poured himself another cup. "Then what?"

"You freed Astapor. You took Yunkai. Meereen is next. Say you unite the whole of Slaver's Bay. Then what? Sail back to Westeros? Plant yourself on that uncomfortable Iron Throne?"

He fixed Lynn with a look.

"You abolished slavery. You handed land and power to freedmen. The laws you've written are — they're not just reform, they're pulling the entire noble class up by the roots."

"If you bring that army and those ideas back to Westeros, do you have any idea what happens? Every lord in the south unites against you. All of them. They spend everything they have to put you in the ground."

His voice rose slightly.

"You become the enemy of everyone."

He couldn't make sense of Lynn. Nothing this man did followed the logic a conqueror was supposed to follow.

"Enemy of everyone?" Lynn repeated the words slowly.

He smiled.

"Tyrion. You're wrong about that."

"Do you think the order in Westeros right now is how things should be?"

Tyrion blinked.

"A few hundred families with their boots on the necks of tens of millions." Lynn's voice was even, almost conversational. "They hoard knowledge. They claim the land. They write every rule to serve themselves."

"A blacksmith's son is always a blacksmith. A farmer's daughter marries another farmer. Class is a locked door — and nobody ever gets a key."

"And the Faith of the Seven? That's the opiate they feed to the poor. It tells them the suffering of this life is payment for glory in the next. Be patient. Submit. Accept. Your reward is coming."

A thin smile.

"What a comfortable lie."

Lynn rose and walked to the balcony's edge, looking down at the city spread below him , broken not long ago, now breathing again, slowly becoming something new.

"You want to know what I want?"

"I want a new world. A world with no hereditary lords. No priests with their hands around the throat of government."

"I want every child , it doesn't matter who their father is, who their mother was , to walk through a schoolhouse door and learn to read."

"I want every person who works with their hands to earn a wage they can live on, and time to rest, instead of being ground down like an animal until there's nothing left."

"I want a parliament elected by the people themselves , to write the laws of this city, to decide its future."

He turned to face Tyrion.

"When a country's people are educated. When they have something to call their own. When they feel like this land is theirs , the force that country can generate is beyond anything any army has ever imagined."

Tyrion hadn't moved.

"So tell me. The farmers in Westeros who can't fill their stomachs. The smallfolk who get beaten by their lords for sport. When they hear what I've built here , what do they choose?"

"Do they pick up swords to defend their pitiful kings and masters? Or do they open their gates and cheer my army through?"

"Tyrion. I don't need to conquer Westeros."

"I just need to plant one seed of hope in that starving soil."

"It will grow on its own. It will grow into something that can shake every wall in that kingdom to rubble."

"And those lords. Those kings."

The look on Lynn's face was not contempt. It was something quieter and more final than contempt.

"They don't qualify to be my enemies."

"Their own people will drown them. In spit and fury."

The hall was silent.

Tyrion's wine jug slipped from his fingers and struck the floor with a hollow clang.

His mouth was open. Nothing came out. His mind had stopped , not the pleasant blurring of drink, but something else entirely, a full halt, like a millwheel frozen mid-turn.

The idea was insane.

But the world this madman had laid out in front of him , it had a pull to it he couldn't fight. It pressed on his chest until he forgot to breathe.

If the world could actually be that.

He thought about himself. A Lannister. A dwarf.

Born at the top, cursed by it every day of his life. Mocked by the world he'd been handed. He had spent every last scrap of his intelligence clawing out a sliver of dignity within the rotten rules of that game , and that was all he'd ever managed.

And this man.

This man wanted to overturn the board entirely.

Smash every piece onto the floor and start over with rules of his own making.

Tyrion's breath came faster. He looked at Lynn, and something moved across his flushed, wine-worn face that had never been there before.

Not calculation. Not survival.

Genuine reverence.

He walked forward slowly until he stood before Lynn.

And then , under Daenerys's gaze , the dwarf from Casterly Rock, one of the last heirs of House Lannister, sank to one knee.

Slowly. With a solemnity he hadn't known he was capable of.

"My whole life," Tyrion said, "I have sat in the filthy taverns and gilded halls of Westeros and played one pointless game of thrones after another."

He looked up. His mismatched eyes were clear , clearer than they'd been in years.

"And you, my lord."

"You are making history."

"Allow this small and insignificant dwarf to offer whatever loyalty he has left , to something worth giving it to."

He bowed his head.

"I, Tyrion Lannister, swear it."

"From this day forward, I serve you. Until I have no more days left."

➤ Next: The Great Masters Have Fled