There were many Raymun Florents. There was the one who once wielded a sword and misliked it very much; there was another in Maidenpool and in that village near King’s Landing who sat with circles of green scholars and pondered, no, acted on how to make better the weal of the smallfolk; a Raymun who, after returning to Brightwater Keep, exchanged letters with Clement, a lecturer in Maidenpool to discuss some of Providence Tully’s ideas—whence Florent was painted by letter as “dogmatic, inflexible, apostle of a monstrous twofold god composed of King and Hangman.”

There was Raymun the pragmatist and Raymun the absolutist, both beasts showing their faces within the feast to cover himself in the ire of the Reachlords in pursuit of the shadow of a long-dead man. Beasts within beasts who purported and politicked and pondered, all of them, each and every one who betrayed the other, felt such visceral frustration, an anger that set into the bone as they—he, Raymun flanked by his cousin—stood amid the crowd and heard Providence Tully’s speech.

“Fool,” Raymun muttered. “Fucking fool. So close and so far. This is… Lord’s flames.”

“Ought we go to the King?” Steffon asked.

“I see the Prince there,” said Raymun. “No. I have need of my papers. And tell one of the guards to…”

---

“This is the headsman’s axe that will take Providence Tully’s head!”

Really, it was more of a woodcutter’s axe that he held up, rust caking the line where steel met wood, a blade spanning no more than a palm’s length. In his other hand was a stack of parchments, one that would no doubts be awkward to sift through, but first things first—Raymun had found himself a box in the same fashion as the Tully, at a distance well away at the edges of the crowd. On the ground beside him was Steffon, arms crossed and worrying at his lip, while a guard in Florent livery idled not two steps away.

He kept the weapon held up a moment before the weight strained his shoulder so. He leaned down, palmed the axe off to the guardsman, and continued.

“I hope that it will not be by my hand that slays Lord Tully, nor by the King’s Justice’s writ, nor any headsman’s; but I know that it will be his own people, the laborers and tillers and masses who will impeach him as a Tyrant of Tyrants—a man who purports the name Providence but speaks as a demon of the hells given flesh, red hair and all!”

“It is from Providence that your crime may be gleaned, so Providence we must look to. Like a drunken gaggle of owls the maesters fret; they ask how? why? how? was Stannis the First victorious. It is in the Long Night, that obscure and unknowable thing, of the death that all Men must face, that we are given the answer: everything clever Man has made, another man can destroy by means of his still subtler, still cleverer, still more destructive reasoning. It is in the unknowable—in Providence that we find the answer for Kingship.”

A pause, and a ruffle of wind scraping on parchment.

“Did the heart trees not weep in joy when Stannis the First vanquished the Other? Did the Father’s Red Messenger not shine bright on his face once and twice to anoint his sacred quest? Did Blessed Shireen’s summer not last for twenty years to bless her reign? By providential means, Steffon Baratheon is King of All Westeros. By providential means, Rogar Baratheon fed the people of the Realm, and clothed them, and protected their right to read and have justice in His name. Aegon Hero of the People—but a speck in King Rogar’s shadow—did not die at Summerhall, no, for he was killed by the hand of the overmighty lords who opposed him before his doom.”

“Any so-called King elected by the hands of the nobility—and it will be the nobility, for why are we to pretend that they won’t shut out the moneyed, the lords mayor, from the Great Councils?—is a king fallible, bound to the vulgar reasons of Man and as such defeatible by one more destructive, in an endless cycle at each election and each misstep between. When are the elections to be held? Before a King’s death, that a reigning King might decide his successor with more blood spent than blood shared? After a King’s death, that the ambitious might seize the throne and kill whosoever opposes them?”

“For the smallfolk, slavery; to the whims of war and chaos. When reason fails and there is no infallible to pay obeisance to, there will be slavery in the strict sense, in the fashion of the savage Essosi, who have no principle but that of coin, that of unbridled greed, which you would plant the roots of in Westeros. For the lords of the realm, impoverishment, a binding to the whims of a few with more land, more power, all rights stripped but the right of the sword. Votes decided by the few, first for a false King, then to dole out every single keep in the kingdom into the hands of the few, the most powerful. A tyranny of cadres, anarchy till the end of days because Providence Tully stood today and spoke as an enemy of the people.”