Tyrion's mind raced, searching for some final thread of argument that might yet unravel the certainty settling over this yard, and he threw himself at it with the only weapon still left to him.
"My lord," he said, his voice pitched now with something closer to genuine desperation than his earlier careful reasonableness, "we still have no proof—none—that Joffrey is truly my brother's son rather than Robert's. You cannot execute a man on the strength of accusation alone, whatever grief moves this yard today." His eyes moved across the assembled lords, searching for any flicker of hesitation he might yet exploit. "And consider what killing him buys you. My father will not simply accept this. He will come for every man standing in this yard, every house whose banner flies above these walls, and he will not stop until—"
"I heard you the first time, Tyrion." Michel's voice cut through cleanly, quiet but absolute, and something in its steadiness silenced whatever came next in the dwarf's practiced argument. "Eddard Stark told this realm, with his dying breath, that Joffrey was born of incest between your brother and your sister. He had no reason to lie. A man doesn't trade his life for a falsehood when the truth alone would have bought him mercy—he need only have confessed to treason he didn't commit, taken the black, and lived." Michel's eyes held Tyrion's, unblinking. "He chose death over that lie instead. We believe him. Not because we lack proof beyond his word, but because his word was worth more than any document your family could have forged to dispute it. His honor was the proof, Tyrion. It was the only proof that mattered."
Tyrion's mouth opened again, some fresh argument already forming, but Michel did not give him the chance to voice it.
"And as for your father—" Something harder entered Michel's voice now, carrying clean across the silent yard. "We do not fear Tywin Lannister." He turned slightly, sweeping his gaze across the assembled lords standing shoulder to shoulder behind him—northern faces, Vale faces, Riverlands faces, thousands of men bound now by shared grief and shared purpose. "Look at them, Tyrion. Look in their eyes. Tell me which one of them trembles at your father's name."
The yard remained silent, but it was not the silence of fear. It was something harder, more settled—the quiet certainty of men who had already measured the cost of this war and found themselves willing to pay it in full.
"When Tywin Lannister finally comes," Michel continued, "we will see whether he lives or dies by the same sword that's already broken his son once in the Whispering Wood. But we do not die here today, Tyrion. You do." He let the words settle, watching the dwarf's composure finally, fully crack. "The last time falcon and wolf and fish rose together, they changed who sat the Iron Throne. This time, we won't stop at a throne. We'll change who rules the Westerlands entirely, when this war is finished—strip your house of everything it's held since Aegon's conquest, and give that land to hands that haven't spent it drowning in blood and broken oaths."
Tyrion fell silent at last, and in that silence, something close to genuine terror finally broke through the careful mask he had worn through every clever word spoken so far. He searched the crowd once more, desperate now rather than calculating, looking for even a single face that might yet favor leniency, a single house whose loyalty to the Lannister name outweighed its grief.
He found none. Not one lord among the thousands gathered stood with anything but cold, unwavering resolve in his expression. Even the common soldiers ringing the yard's edges, men who had marched and bled and buried friends across months of this war, watched the Lannister brothers now with open, eager hostility—the particular hunger of men who had waited a long time for exactly this reckoning and intended to see it through to its end.
Michel stepped forward, closing the last of the distance toward the high seat, and when he spoke again, his voice carried final and absolute across the whole silent yard.
"We punish the Kingslayer," he said, "for the crimes his house has committed against ours."