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The Master of Coin's tower was quieter than the Hand's Tower at night.
The air smelled of old parchment and dried ink.
Sansa Stark sat behind the oversized desk, candlelight catching her profile and making her look almost unreal.
She had not done what Lynn suggested, had not simply used her authority as Master of Coin to drag those two leeches in.
She knew what she was. A girl standing at the edge of a cliff, with nothing but a long drop beneath her.
Every move she made was being watched. Countless pairs of eyes, all waiting.
A green girl from the North, barely warm in her seat as Master of Coin, already going after the Crown's old servants?
To the lords of this city, that would not be a show of strength.
It would be the ugly, grasping hunger of House Stark clawing for power.
It would push her into a worse position. It would push her father into a worse one.
Lord Lann had taught her how to slay dragons. But how to swing the blade, that still required her own wisdom.
She could not be the blade.
She needed to be the hand that passed it.
Someone else would do the work for her.
And in all of Westeros, there was no blade sharper or more useful than Robert Baratheon.
Sansa closed the ledger. Her blue eyes caught the candlelight, something strange flickering behind them.
She stood, reached into the chaotic pile of parchments beside her, and drew out a few scrolls that looked like nothing, utterly unremarkable.
A quarterly wear-and-tear report from the armory. The daily procurement list for the royal feasts.
She organized them carefully and walked out of the tower.
---
Mornings in the Throne Room always started the same way: King Robert's hangover, and his curses.
"Wine! Bring me wine!"
Robert paced beneath the Iron Throne like a boar in a cage, restless and furious.
Then Sansa Stark walked in.
She wore a deep blue gown, neat and proper, a few scrolls held in her hands. Her expression was perfectly calibrated, just enough confusion, just enough helplessness.
"Your Grace."
Her voice was soft. Like a cool breeze passing through the room, it took the edge off his temper.
"Oh. Sansa."
Robert looked up. Through the bloat of his hangover, he managed something close to a smile.
"What is it? Something you can't handle?"
"Yes, Your Grace."
Sansa stepped forward and dipped into a curtsy.
"There are some accounts I... I truly cannot make sense of. I came to ask your counsel."
"Ha! Then speak up! Whatever it is, lay it all out!"
Robert swept a hand through the air, generous and expansive.
"Let me see which blind fool thinks he can play tricks with my coin purse!"
He liked this. Especially this, the vanity of it, being needed.
This Northern girl was looking at him with those wide, admiring eyes. Dependent. Trusting.
It made him feel like more than a man who drank and fought. It made him feel like a king who could govern.
"It concerns the armory's expenditures, Your Grace."
Sansa unfurled the first scroll.
"The quartermaster reported that the damp weather has rusted 300 sets of plate armor beyond repair. They need to be replaced entirely."
"This is the budget for that replacement. 3,000 gold dragons."
"Three hundred sets? Three thousand gold dragons?"
Robert's brow came down hard.
"Damn it — I don't even think Casterly Rock's armor costs that much."
"No, Your Grace. I found it strange as well."
Sansa's expression shifted, settling into something more troubled.
"And... I also found a patrol log from the armory guards."
She offered over the second scroll.
"It says there was very little rain last month. And that the guards oiled and maintained the armor every single day."
Robert's face went dark.
He was no fool. He was just too lazy to think most of the time. But when someone laid the pieces out in front of him, one by one, even that boar's brain of his could follow the trail.
"What else?"
His voice had gone quiet. The dangerous kind of quiet.
"There is also... the feast hall's procurement list."
Sansa's voice dropped lower. She sounded almost frightened.
"They've been ordering 50 gallons of Dornish red every day. The listed reason is that your... that your drinking capacity has recently improved."
"Bullshit!"
The roar cracked through the Throne Room like a thunderclap.
"I've been drinking nothing but ale! Nothing but ale for weeks!"
"Those damned leeches!"
"They're using the king's coin to drink Dornish red for themselves!"
Robert's eyes had gone bloodshot. The rage burning through him was the real thing, not bluster, not theater.
He felt betrayed.
He had fed those dogs himself. And they had laughed at him.
"Barristan!"
The bellow echoed off the walls.
"Carry my command! Drag those two fat pigs — the armory quartermaster and the feast hall steward — out into the courtyard!"
"I'll flay them with my own hands!"
Sansa watched the lion rage.
Quietly, without a word, she took one step back and let the shadows take her.
---
The screaming from the Red Keep's courtyard came shortly after.
King Robert kept his word.
When it came out that the embezzlement ran far deeper than 2 line items on 2 scrolls, Robert personally had both men strung up from the flagpole and flogged them to death.
No royal decree could have achieved what those 2 bloody corpses did.
Every official in the Red Keep stood and stared. Then they went very, very still.
The looks they aimed at the Master of Coin's tower changed after that. The contempt was gone. The dismissal was gone. What replaced it was something much simpler.
Fear.
They finally understood that the soft-spoken Northern girl was no lamb.
She was a direwolf in sheep's wool.
She would not bite you herself. She would smile, and lead you directly under the lion's claws.
For a while, everyone was watching their own back. Accounts were quietly corrected. There were even murmurs of organizing against her.
But then, nothing.
Sansa did not press her advantage. She made no further moves. The silence stretched on and on.
Everyone exhaled.
And in that exhale, they understood something else: whatever they had done before, Sansa had closed the book on it. She was not coming back for them.
She was nothing like Lord Baelish.
Petyr, so long as his own interests were untouched, could not be bothered. It was Robert's coin purse, after all, not his. His job was to make the ledgers look clean, maintain the pleasant fiction of solvency, and nothing more. As long as no one was too brazen about it, he looked the other way.
Sansa was different.
The contempt was gone. Every last trace of it.
But making them understand that the winds had changed, that was only the first step.
Constant confrontation would only harden them. Push hard enough and you turn the whole room against you.
The lesson had been delivered. They understood now that the treasury had a new master.
Now it was time to offer the sweet alongside the bitter.
---
Night.
Lynn's room.
Lynn sat in his chair.
A soft knock at the door.
"Come in."
Sansa entered.
She had changed out of the dark, authoritative gown and into a moon-white silk robe. Her auburn hair fell loose over her shoulders, the severity of the Master of Coin stripped away, something younger and softer in its place.
Her cheeks were flushed with excitement. Her blue eyes were startlingly bright.
"Lord Lann."
She crossed to him and dipped into a curtsy, flawless, as always.
Only the arc was lower than it had ever been before.
"Did I do well today?"
Her voice carried something barely noticeable, a thread of coyness, the quiet expectation of praise.
"You did very well, Sansa."
Lynn looked up.
"Better than I imagined."
"You didn't use your own authority. You borrowed the king's blade."
"That was shrewd."
"Now that you've killed the chicken, you need to find a way to make the monkeys grateful."
The praise landed. Her eyes went brighter still.
She moved to his side and, as naturally as if she'd done it a hundred times, took the wine bottle from his hand and poured him a glass.
Her warm fingertips grazed the back of his hand, deliberate, or close enough to it.
"It is all thanks to your teaching, my lord."
She handed him the glass, leaning slightly forward as she did.
A scent drifted from her, lemon cakes and winter air, sweet and cold at once, quietly filling his lungs.
"I am merely an obedient student."
Lynn took the glass and looked at her. Really looked.
She was changing fast. Like a blue enchantress flower on the edge of bloom, finding its color in the filthy soil of King's Landing, pushing open petal by petal into something beautiful and sharp.
"You once said..."
Her voice had gone low. Something in it pulled at the air between them.
"A good teacher rewards his most outstanding student."
She didn't say anything more. She just watched him, those glistening blue eyes steady and unblinking.
In them: admiration. Dependence. Gratitude. And underneath all of that, something younger and more naked, a girl's first wanting, unguarded, not quite hidden.
Lynn said nothing. He watched her back.
The room shifted. Not loudly, quietly, the way pressure builds before a storm.
The fire in the hearth threw their shadows long across the wall, the two shapes tangled together, swaying like a slow, soundless dance.
Sansa's heart was hammering.
Her face was hot.
She didn't fully understand why she was doing this. She only knew that she wanted to close the distance between them. Wanted to be closer.
Closer than that.
She gathered herself and took one small step forward. The silk hem of her robe brushed against Lynn's knee.
Then she sat, slowly, carefully, on the armrest of his chair.
For the Sansa Stark who once couldn't hold a man's gaze without blushing, this was tantamount to dancing naked in front of the Great Sept of Baelor.
But she did it anyway.
She reached out and traced the line of his lips with one fingertip, soft and slow.
"Lord Lann..."
She leaned down. Her warm breath fell against his ear.
"I want my reward."
Lynn opened his mouth to speak.
Creak.
The door swung open without warning.
Myrcella stepped in, smiling, a basket of fruit on her arm.
"Lord Lann, I heard you like peaches from the Arbor, I specially brought—"
Her voice stopped.
Lynn didn't move.
Myrcella looked at Sansa Stark, perched on the armrest of Lynn's chair, the two of them close enough that the word intimate didn't cover half of it.
She looked at Sansa's face, flushed scarlet in an instant, shame and panic written across every feature.
Then she looked at Lynn.
Myrcella set the fruit basket gently on the table. She straightened, lifted her skirt, and dipped into a perfect curtsy.
"Pardon the intrusion."
➤ Next: Myrcella's Threat — Heartbreak
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