A Game of Thrones — Eddard IV
Ned arrives to find the small council smooth and the crown six million in debt; the Hand's tourney is announced against his wishes.
The chapter retold
Ned takes up the Handship formally and discovers the job is worse than he feared: the crown is six million gold dragons in debt to the Lannisters among others, the small council runs on flattery and evasion rather than honest counsel, and against Ned's explicit objections, a grand tourney is announced in his honor anyway, at ruinous cost the treasury cannot remotely afford. His new colleagues — Grand Maester Pycelle, the eunuch spymaster Varys, and Littlefinger, who as master of coin somehow keeps the insolvent crown afloat through debts and tricks Ned doesn't fully understand — are each, in their different ways, harder to read than any battlefield he's ever stood on.
This is Ned's introduction to governance as a fundamentally different discipline from lordship: at Winterfell, his word simply was the law; in King's Landing, his word competes with three other men's private agendas before it reaches the king at all. The tourney he can't stop despite outranking everyone at the table is the first small proof that being Hand doesn't mean having the hand on the wheel — a lesson the book will keep teaching him, at steadily higher cost, until it kills him.
This movement: The Hand Investigates
- Ned retraces Jon Arryn's last weeks: a book of lineages, an armorer's shop, a black-haired bastard.
- The Hand's tourney: Ser Hugh of the Vale dies on the Mountain's lance; the Hound saves Loras and wins the crowd.
- Bran wakes, broken; the wolf dreams begin.
- Word of Tyrion's arrest reaches the capital, and lions begin to gather in the west.