Dorne. Sunspear. 299 AC.
Oberyn Martell.
"That was... unusual." Oberyn wanted to curse, but managed to hold his tongue.
"It could have gone worse," Doran observed.
Twenty months of their little "game" had not passed without cost; the brothers could feel the distance growing between them. Oberyn backed his niece's claim to the Iron Throne; the Red Viper believed that with the right approach, Rhaenys could become a queen the realm would accept. Doran had reasonable doubts that the lords of Westeros would accept the notion of a queen on the throne at all; the bitter memory of Rhaenyra, and the memory of the namesake of Rhaenys herself too, the Queen Who Never Was, still lived on in people's minds. Each of them had a dozen arguments, the stubbornness of rams, and an unshakeable certainty in his own rightness, bolstered by whatever circumstances suited him best.
Dorne had effectively split into two camps: those who backed Oberyn and Rhaenys, and those who stood with Doran. Unfortunately, the younger generation of Martells had caught the same fever, and unlike their more measured elders, they were ready to go for each other's throats. Only the brothers' mutual love, trust, and good sense had kept the matter from spilling over into civil war.
From the outside, the whole situation looked deeply wrong, but it troubled the Martell brothers not at all; in essence, nothing much had changed for either of them. Doran spun his intrigues, Oberyn spun his own, and neither got in the other's way. The only difference now was that the Red Viper carried more weight in any discussion, a fact neither of them disputed.
They had awaited Viserys Targaryen's arrival at the head of an army with real eagerness. An army that would kill their enemies, the Lannisters, was always welcome news. A pleasant bonus lay in the simple fact of Viserys's Targaryen blood. There were still families scattered across Westeros loyal to the House of the Dragon, and Viserys could rally them around his person. That both strengthened their allies and weakened their enemies: nothing but upside. Despite their disagreements, the brothers, each to his own degree, counted the Targaryen an ally, and the young king shared that view of them. Their meeting in person had been long awaited, and it gave them a great deal to think over.
"Truly?!" Doran's melancholy manner sometimes irritated him. "The boy honestly believes Westeros prays to him, that people secretly raise their cups in his honor, that they ache for his return. He lives in some world of his own making and doesn't see the obvious: the Dothraki don't listen to him, the lords of the narrow sea bent the knee only because they had no wish to fight savages, and he has almost no allies left on the continent. He cannot conquer Westeros, not with a horde everyone despises."
"You're too biased. Viserys isn't a fool; his plans are reasonably sound, if overly optimistic. That can't be simple self delusion, or he'd speak of it differently..." Oberyn admitted he was not as clever as his brother, and so did not stand in the way of his thinking. "Someone has been deliberately feeding Viserys false hope."
"And why would anyone do that?"
"I don't know." Of course, not knowing was not the same as "not suspecting. "Not that it matters. What matters is that we share a common enemy, and our aims don't cross."
"Speak for yourself. I saw nothing in Viserys that would make me abandon my niece's claim." Doran ignored the jab. "What do we do?"
"Watch and wait for the right moment." Oberyn could not help a grimace.
Viserys had arrived with his Hand, Jorah Mormont. While the brothers spoke with the Targaryen, the dragon laid out his grand design to overthrow everyone and everything before restoring his dynasty, and the exiled knight kept mostly silent, speaking only when he had something useful to add. As unlikely as the talk of executing every rebel in the realm sounded, the invasion plan itself was practical, clearly the work of a man who understood war. The Dothraki were a plague in truth, impossible to control, so the Hand had chosen the simplest course: land the horselords in the Stormlands and watch their enemies drown in blood. Meanwhile, thanks to the timely maneuvering of the lords of the narrow sea, Viserys would reclaim his ancestral seat, and the combined fleets of Pentos, and their sworn allies would make him unbeatable at sea. The pair said little of what came after, but from the military hints they let slip, that fleet clearly had further use in mind.
On the whole, the plan suited Oberyn well enough, but a few points troubled him. Chief among them was the matter of the Dothraki's obedience. What reason would such barbarians have to listen to Viserys? Daenerys might be khaleesi to the great Drogo three times over, but that gave the rest of her family no standing at all. As it turned out, his worry had not been misplaced. Recalling his younger days, the Red Viper drank with a few sailors and learned something interesting: the Dothraki did not consider the Targaryen boy a man worth reckoning with at all, no more than they considered any outsider one of their own. The one exception was Mormont, whom even Khal Drogo treated with respect and whose counsel he heeded.
During the Targaryen's stay, Sunspear turned into a true battlefield, though the weapons here were words and intrigue rather than swords and spears. While Doran worked on Viserys, Oberyn spent his time with the Hand. Those meetings proved dull. Mormont was an unremarkable man, without charisma, without grand ambition, without any striking store of knowledge. The one thing that set him apart was worldly wisdom; the King's Hand had a wide and varied store of experience, and he made skillful use of it.
Oberyn came to understand that Jorah Mormont was walking a narrow line between the king's wishes and the savages' hunger for plunder. Later the two of them talked and came to an understanding: the Dothraki would be driven south, so that the Dornish could cross the Marches and lend a hand in the difficult work ahead.
At the start there had been two armies attacking the two most important castles on the border, Nightsong and Blackhaven. Rhaenys led one, Oberyn the other. Rhaenys's rise to command had not gone smoothly, and owed far more to politics than to any tactical logic. There had been plenty of grumbling, but Rhaenys's faction held one clear goal: to make his niece queen of Westeros, and that could never happen unless the would be queen first built a solid reputation. The fastest and most useful way to win renown was war. That was precisely why Oberyn had chosen to step back from helping his niece directly; had he taken part and things gone well, the credit would have gone to him rather than to Rhaenys.
The defeat at Nightsong struck a heavy blow to the soldiers' morale and to their appetite for fighting on Rhaenys's behalf. Under the most favorable circumstances, Dorne might muster fifteen to twenty thousand men, but that would never happen now, not with results this modest. Eight thousand swords was the more likely figure. With an army that size, there was no dreaming of seeing Rhaenys on the throne. And yet the Red Viper was not a man to back down in the face of difficulty, especially when the solution sat within a single castle. So Oberyn took no action against his niece's rival claimant; the time was not yet right.
The Targaryen princeling's latest whim was a wish to take Rhaenys as his wife. Here at last the Martell brothers found common ground and did everything they could to smother the idea. Their success was middling; for whatever reason, Viserys had fixed his mind on a "doctrine of purity" and wanted a wife of his own blood. That could not be allowed to stand, and Oberyn had already begun arranging a small fever for the Targaryen when an unexpected blow landed instead. Doran, privately, informed Viserys that Rhaenys had not been a maid for some time and had more than once made use of moon tea. The Targaryen dropped the matter, and within a week the whole city knew of it, the news spreading swiftly across the region. What Dorne would have taken in stride, the rest of Westeros would not receive so kindly. Potential supporters would turn away, possible alliances would fall apart, and everyone would draw the comparison between the Sand Dragon and her many times great grandmother, Rhaenyra. In a single stroke, his brother had wrecked Rhaenys's reputation, which had hardly been in good standing to begin with after her crushing defeat.
Oberyn knew it well enough: in this round of intrigue, he had lost to Doran. But they had not called him the Red Viper for nothing. His time would come soon enough.
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