House Ironhart

House Ironhart is the royal house of the Kingdom of Ironhold and the nominal centre of the world. The Throne, the Royal Guard, the rite of accession and the right to strike coin are all in their hands, and for 400 years every king has come out of this one house.

The house device is a stag in profile, its antlers branching into seven tines for the seven realms. It is this antler-pattern that is stamped on the rim of the iron coin, and even worn flat the number of tines can still be made out — that is what the markets go by to tell true coin from false.

Their deepest belief is that ceremony can hold the truth down. So long as the drums and pipes of an accession are beaten as they always were, the god-statues stand as they always did and the rites text is recited as it always is, the world will go on believing that the king is the king, the wall is the wall, and nothing at all has happened in the north. There is sense in the belief. In 400 years Ironhold has come through three crises of succession, two famines and one Crimson Flame army at the gates, and it came through them on ceremony. Ceremony has never once failed them.

What holds the belief up is a whole stratum of officials. The Household, the Bureau of Military Affairs, the Mint and the Bureau of Post Roads at the capital each keep their own ledgers, and the ledgers are reconciled against one another; if a thing is entered in three ledgers then in Ironhold it has happened, and if it is not, it has not. Most of the irregularities reported up from the north over those years went into the Bureau of Military Affairs' ledger alone and not into the other two, and so in the records of the capital those things amount to nothing having happened.

The Royal Guard is another stratum. Three thousand men are quartered permanently in the capital; they take orders from the king and the Household alone, and are at the disposal of none of the seven realms. On the day of an accession the Guard is drawn up on both sides of the seven steps, facing outward — what they are watching is the heads of the houses below the steps, not the new king above them.

Now the 105th king is dead, the body is not yet buried, and the Throne stands empty. The first order House Ironhart gave was for the Household to prepare the ceremony and put the next man on that chair within seven days. The result of the examination lies on a desk, and no one has asked for it. As though, so long as there is somebody on the chair, the names flaking off the wall and the character grown out of a tongue can all be treated as not having happened.