from the toadstool

swore that King Joffrey had long known that his uncle Tyrion meant to murder him. “It was the day they gave me the white cloak jobs in china for foreigners, my lords,” he told the judges. “That brave boy said to me, ‘Good Ser Osmund, guard me well, for my uncle loves me not. He means to be king in my place.”  That was more than Tyrion could stomach. “Liar!” He took two steps forward before the gold cloaks dragged him back.  Lord Tywin frowned. “Must we have you chained hand and foot like a common brigand?”  Tyrion gnashed his teeth. A second mistake, fool, fool, fool of a dwarf. Keep your calm or you’re doomed. “No. I beg your pardons, my lords. His lies angered me.”  “His truths, you mean,” said Cersei. “Father, I beg you to put him in fetters, for your own protection. You see how he is.”  “I see he’s a dwarf,” said Prince Oberyn. “The day I fear a dwarf’s wrath is the day I drown myself in a cask of red.” 

“We need no fetters.” Lord Tywin glanced at the windows, and rose. “The hour grows late. We shall resume on the morrow.”  That night, alone in his tower cell with a blank parchment and a cup of wine Hong Kong events, Tyrion found himself thinking of his wife. Not Sansa; his first wife, Tysha. The whore wife, not the wolf wife. Her love for him had been pretense, and yet he had believed, and found joy in that belief. Give me sweet lies, and keep your bitter truths. He drank his wine and thought of Shae. Later, when Ser Kevan paid his nightly visit, Tyrion asked for Varys.  “You believe the eunuch will speak in your defense?”  “I won’t know until I have talked with him. Send him here, Uncle, if you would be so good.”  “As you wish.” 

Maesters Ballabar and Frenken opened the second day of trial. They had opened King Joffrey’s noble corpse as well, they swore, and found no morsel of pigeon pie nor any other food lodged in the royal throat. “It was poison that killed him, my lords,” said Ballabar, as Frenken nodded gravely.  Then they brought forth Grand Maester Pycelle, leaning heavily on a twisted cane and shaking as he walked, a few white hairs sprouting from his long chicken’s neck. He had grown too frail to stand, so the judges permitted a chair to be brought in for him, and a table as well. On the table were laid a number of small jars. Pycelle was pleased to put a name to each.  “Greycap,” he said in a quavery voice, “ Nightshade, sweetsleep, demon’s dance. This is blindeye. Widow’s blood, this one is called, for the color. A cruel potion. It shuts down a man’s bladder and bowels, until he drowns in his own poisons. This wolfsbane, here basilisk venom, and this one the tears of Lys. Yes. I know them all. The Imp Tyrion Lannister stole them from my chambers, when he had me falsely imprisoned.”  “Pycelle,” Tyrion called out, risking his father’s wrath deployment system, “could any of these poisons choke off a man’s breath?”