POV- Cersei Lannister
They woke her before dawn so that she would have time to dress. A woman brought her a gown of grey wool cut for someone smaller, and a comb, and a basin of water. Cersei washed her face and combed out her hair, counting the strokes as her mother had taught her when she was small, and when the woman held up a mirror she looked into it until the woman took it away.
"Will I be allowed to speak to him?" she asked.
"To who, my lady?"
"My son."
The woman gave no answer. She gathered up the basin and went out, and Cersei heard the bar drop on the other side of the door.
They brought her down to the outer ward when the sun was over the God's Eye. It was cold. Ash from the fields beyond the walls had blown in on the night wind and lay thin on the cobbles, grey as the gown, and her slippers left prints in it. Two Dornish spearmen walked on either side of her. They did not touch her.
The ward was full. She had known it would be. Men liked this. She had stood beside a great many men while they watched others hang from the gates, and she had seen them smile. They had come the same way here, lords and knights and archers and kitchen boys, packed along the walls and up on the battlements and leaning out of the windows of the Kingspyre, and they went quiet when they saw her. She kept her chin up.
They had built a platform at the foot of the Hall of a Hundred Hearths, rough planks on trestles, and on the planks they had set a block of black oak. There was straw scattered around it. Someone had thought ahead.
At the far end of the ward the red dragon lay curled against the wall of the Kingspyre with her eyes open, watching. Cersei looked at it once, and looked away, and did not look again.
They had put Jaime and the dwarf and Lancel on the far side of the platform, in chains, with a line of Vale knights between them and the crowd. Jaime saw her. She saw him see her. She had never seen his face look the way it looked then, and she turned her own face away from it.
Then they brought out her uncle.
Kevan walked between two guards with his hands bound behind him and his head bare. He looked old. She could not remember when he had grown old. He was the one who had taught her to sit a pony at Casterly Rock, patient and dull and kind, when her father had no time for it and her mother was dead. He climbed the steps to the platform without help, and stood beside the block, and looked out over the ward.
The bastard came up after him.
He wore plain black. No crown, no cloak, nothing gold anywhere on him. He carried a sword in his hand, long and dark, its steel rippled like smoke, and Cersei knew it at once from the tapestries in the Red Keep. Blackfyre. Aegon's sword.
So, she thought. He would do it himself, like a Stark.
"Ser Kevan," the bastard said. His voice was not loud, but it carried in the cold air. "Is there anything you would say?"
Kevan was quiet a moment. "My son," he said. "Lancel. He's to go north with the others."
"He is."
"Will you promise me he gets there?"
"I will."
Kevan nodded. He turned and looked down the length of the ward, past the platform and the Vale knights, to where Lancel stood in his chains, white as milk. Cersei could not hear what he said. She did not think he said anything at all. He only looked at his son for a while. Then he knelt, and laid his head on the block as if he were laying it on a pillow.
The sword came down.
It was quicker than she had thought. She had watched men die before, a great many of them, but never one of her own. The sound was what she would remember. It was very small. Then Kevan's body slumped sideways against the block, and his head was in the straw, and somewhere along the wall a woman began to sob.
Lancel had fallen to his knees. The dwarf was holding him up by the arm with both chained hands.
They took the body away. They took the head. A servant scattered fresh straw on the planks.
Then they brought out Joffrey.
He was fighting. Of course he was. He was her son. He kicked at the guards and screamed and twisted in their grip, and they had to half carry him up the steps. When he saw the block he went rigid, and then he began to scream again, high and broken, a child's scream. His face was blotched red and wet. He had soiled himself. She could see the dark stain spreading down his hose from where she stood, and so could every man in that yard, and she thought that of all the things they had done to her and hers, that was the one she would never forgive.
"Mother!" he screamed. "Mother! Mother, tell them! Tell them who I am!"
She stayed where she was. The Dornishmen on either side of her had not moved either, but she could feel them there.
I'm here, she thought. I'm here. I'm here.
She did not say it. If she said it, he would turn his head and look for her, and see her standing in the ash in a grey gown with no crown, unable to do anything at all, and that would be the last thing he ever saw. She would not give him that. She had given him everything else.
The bastard never asked Joffrey if he had anything to say. He nodded to the guards, and they forced Joffrey down onto his knees and pressed his head to the block, and he was still screaming for her when the sword fell.
Then he stopped.
Cersei found that her hands were clenched so tightly at her sides that her nails had cut into her palms. She could feel the blood, warm and slick between her fingers. She did not unclench them. She looked at the straw, and the black block, and the small shape the guards were lifting away, and she kept her face perfectly still, because her father was next and he would be watching.
Her father climbed the steps alone.
They had not bound his hands. Someone had thought better of it, or he had refused, and she could imagine the look he would have given any guard who tried. He wore the same doublet he had worn at Hayford, crimson and gold, and he walked to the block as he had walked into every hall of his life, as if he owned the floor and was deciding whether to have it relaid.
He had not spoken in days. Not to her. Not to anyone. She had waited for it the whole road north, every mile. One word. One look. You were my daughter. You were the only one of them worth anything. She had never once in her life heard him say it, and she had told herself that he would say it now, at the end, because there would be nothing left to lose by saying it.
He did not look at her.
He looked at the bastard. The two of them stood a yard apart on the platform, the old lion and the boy with the white hair and the red eyes, and her father looked at him for a long time. Cersei saw something in his face that she had never seen there before. She could not name it, was it fear.
Oberyn Martell had come to stand at the foot of the platform steps. He wore a cloak of sand-colored silk, and he was not smiling now.
"Your Grace," the Dornishman said. "When it's done, I'll have the head."
The bastard looked down at him. "For Elia."
"For Elia. And Rhaenys. And the boy." Oberyn's voice was very quiet. "My brother has a spike waiting for it at Sunspear, next to the Mountain's."
"Take it, then."
Her father knelt. He did it without hurry, settling one knee and then the other, and laid his neck on the block with his face turned toward the dragon at the end of the ward. Cersei could see his eyes. They were open. Pale green, flecked with gold.
He was still looking at the dragon when the sword fell.
Afterward they brought her back to the Widow's Tower, and she sat by the window until it was dark. She did not cry. She sat with her bloody hands in her lap and looked down at the ward, where they had taken the platform apart by noon and swept up the straw and burned it, and she thought. They had given her a room, not a cell. A room with a bed and a window and a fire, two floors above the one where they kept Myrcella. She had heard the girl crying through the floor at night.
He had not said her name in the hall. He had looked at her, and looked away, and said nothing.
He cannot, she thought. He killed my father and my son with his own hand in front of the whole realm, and he could not say my name. He's Ned Stark's boy, whatever color his eyes are. Stark's boy and Rhaegar's. Rhaegar couldn't bear to kill a fly. Stark couldn't lie to save his own head. There's something soft in him. There has to be.
A girl came at sunset with a tray: bread and soup and a cup of thin wine. She was young, fourteen or fifteen, a kitchen girl with red hands and a pockmarked face, and she would not meet Cersei's eyes.
"What's your name, child?"
The girl jumped. "Wenda, m'lady."
"Wenda." Cersei smiled at her. She had smiled at kings. She could smile at a kitchen girl. "That's a pretty name. Where are you from, Wenda?"
"Here, m'lady. Harrentown. My da's a cooper."
"And does your da have enough coin, Wenda? With all these soldiers about, and the fields burned?"
The girl hesitated. "No, m'lady."
"No. I didn't think so." Cersei looked at her for a while. "My father's gold is at Casterly Rock. More of it than you've ever dreamed of. A girl who carried one letter for me, only one, to the right man, would never want for anything again in her life. Nor would her da."
Wenda went white. She set the tray down so hard that the wine slopped over the rim of the cup, and backed toward the door. "I can't, m'lady. I can't, they'd hang me, they'd..."
"Think about it," Cersei said gently. "That's all. Think about it, and come back tomorrow."
The girl fled. The bar dropped on the far side of the door. Cersei sat back down by the window.
She'll come back, she thought. Or she won't. There'll be another. There's always another.
She thought about the letter she would write. Not to the Rock. The Rock would fall; Tarly would see to that. To Ser Addam Marbrand, if he still lived, or to one of the Lannisport cousins. Not a call to arms. Arms were finished. A letter that said only: Wait.
Because Myrcella was alive.
Myrcella was young, and beautiful, and a ward of the crown, which meant she would be raised at the bastard's court, at his table, under his eye. In three years she would be fourteen. In four she would be a woman grown. And the bastard would need a queen. Every lord in Westeros would be offering him a daughter, a Velaryon girl or a Martell girl or some Vale nobody, and Myrcella would be there in his hall every day, golden and soft-spoken and sweet. With Lannister blood. She would have her mother's face.
Cersei closed her eyes and saw it. Her daughter in the Red Keep with a crown on her head. Her daughter's son on the Iron Throne, with Lannister gold in his veins and the bastard's red eyes looking out of his face. It would take ten years. Twenty. She could wait twenty years. She had waited longer than that for Robert to die.
I'll teach her, she thought. Through the floor if I have to. I'll teach her everything.
The bar lifted on the other side of the door.
Cersei opened her eyes. It was full dark now, and the fire had burned down to embers. She had not heard footsteps on the stair, and she should have. The stair was stone, and the guards wore boots.
The door opened, and the red-masked woman came in.
She closed it behind her. She wore a dark cloak and no ornament of any kind, and she moved through the room as though she had been in it before, which perhaps she had. She crossed to the hearth, and knelt, and laid two pieces of wood on the embers, and blew on them until they caught. Then she stood and turned.
"Lady Cersei."
"I know who you are." Cersei stayed in her chair. "The king's aunt. The one they call the Seastar."
"Shiera will do."
"Did he send you?"
The woman took her time answering. She looked around the room: the bed, the window, the tray of food untouched on the table, the wine stain drying on the boards.
"He passed over your name in the hall," she said. "I didn't."
Cersei felt cold go through her, from the crown of her head to her heels. She kept her face still. "He doesn't know you're here."
"He'll know in the morning." The woman came a step closer. "The kitchen girl went to the steward an hour ago, in tears. She thought she'd be hanged for listening to you. It took my word to calm her."
"Then you've come to put me in a cell."
"No."
Cersei stood. Her legs were steady, and she was glad of it. "My father's dead," she said. "My son. My uncle. My brothers are going to the Wall. What else is there? What do you imagine I could do to him, locked in a tower with a kitchen girl?"
"You were going to teach your daughter," the woman said.
Cersei said nothing.
"Through the floor, if you had to." The woman's voice was quiet, and almost kind. "I know. I've seen women like you before, Lady Cersei. I was born into a world full of them. My father had more bastards than he had teeth, and every one of them had a mother, and every mother had a dream to place their sons and daughter near the throne. I watched their sons fight over his crown for sixty years, I watched women seducing men with lust. Five rebellions. Redgrass Field. The Ninepenny Kings. Tens of thousands dead, because no one had the stomach to finish it while there was still time." She was very close now. "I have the stomach."
"He'll hate you for it."
"Perhaps. But he'll be alive to do it."
The woman lifted her hands to her face and took off the mask.
Cersei had heard the stories. Everyone had. The Seastar, the most beautiful woman of her age, with one eye blue and one eye green. She had thought, when she thought of it at all, that it was a singer's tale, the kind they told about every bastard princess. It was not. The face under the mask was young, younger than Cersei's, smooth as cream, and it was the most beautiful face she had ever seen. One eye blue. One green.
Younger, Cersei thought. And more beautiful.
She remembered a tent at Lannisport, and smell of herbs, and the old hag Maggy the Frog, with blood on her finger. Queen you shall be... until there comes another, younger and more beautiful, to cast you down and take all that you hold dear.
She had always thought the old woman meant Sansa or Margaery.
The knife was very thin. She hardly felt it go in. It slid in under her left breast, quick and neat as a seamstress's needle, and the woman's other hand came up and caught her as her legs went, and held her, almost gently, and lowered her to the floor by the fire.
There was not much blood. She had thought there would be more. The last thing she saw was the blue eye and the green eye looking down at her.
Jaime, she thought, and then she did not think anything at all.
*****
POV- Jaime Lannister
Ser Barristan came for him an hour after dawn.
Jaime was already awake. He had not slept. He had sat through the night with his back against the storeroom wall and his chained wrists across his knees, listening to Lancel weep, and stop weeping, and weep again, and to Tyrion breathing in the dark, and to the wind coming in through the high window. He had not let himself think about the platform. He had thought instead about the Kingsguard oath, word for word, every line of it, and found that he still knew it.
The bar lifted. The old knight stood in the doorway in his white cloak, and Jaime looked at his face and knew.
"Cersei," he said.
"Yes."
Tyrion had sat up in the straw. Lancel had not moved.
"How?" said Jaime.
Barristan was quiet a moment. "Quietly," he said. "In the night, in her room."
"By whose hand?"
"I don't know." Barristan's voice did not change, but his eyes did. "The king didn't order it. I was with him when they told him. I've served five kings, Jaime. I know what a king looks like when he hears of a thing he didn't order."
Jaime looked at him for a long time.
"I want to see her."
"I thought you might." Barristan stepped back from the door. "Come."
They had not moved her far. Someone had lifted her onto the bed and drawn a sheet up to her chin and closed her eyes. That was all. The fire had gone out. The room smelled of cold ash and of something else, faint and sweet, that Jaime knew from a dozen battlefields.
He stood at the foot of the bed. Barristan stayed in the doorway.
She looked asleep. That was the cruelest part of it. Her hair was spread over the bolster, combed, and her face was smooth and pale and calm, and she looked as she had looked at Casterly Rock when they were children and he would creep into her bed at night and lie awake watching her breathe. She was not breathing now.
He went around the side of the bed and knelt on the boards. His chains clinked. He put his hand on hers, on top of the sheet. It was cold.
"She was plotting," Barristan said quietly, from the door. "Yesterday, after. She tried to buy a kitchen girl to carry a letter. The girl went to the steward."
"Of course she was plotting." Jaime kept his eyes on her face. "She was breathing, wasn't she?"
Barristan said nothing to that.
Jaime stayed where he was for a long time. He thought about saying something to her. He could not think of anything she would want to hear, so he kept quiet. After a while he leaned forward and kissed her forehead, once, and her skin was cold under his mouth. Then he got up off his knees.
"I killed his grandfather," he said, without turning. "On the steps of the Iron Throne, with the hand I don't have anymore. And he's sending me to the Wall."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Barristan thought about it. "I think he's had enough of killing men for things they did before he was born, men innocent enough in ways that saved millions." he said. "And I think he knows the Wall will need every sword it can get, soon. Even yours."
Jaime laughed. It came out wrong. "And you, ser? What would you have done with me?"
"Once?" The old knight met his eyes. "I'd have killed you the day you put your sword in Aerys's back, and never thought of it again." He paused. "I'm older now. I've watched a great many men die since then, and I know great many secrets, and I've not felt better for any of it."
They rode out of Harrenhal at midmorning.
There were twelve of them going north. Jaime and Tyrion and Lancel. Mace Tyrell, who could not sit a horse for more than an hour and rode most of the way in a cart, red-eyed, with his hands folded over his belly. Six Vale men-at-arms who had been given the choice between the Wall and a rope for some crime Jaime never learned. And three black brothers, the same three who had brought the dead thing in a crate to the Great Council, grim, silent men in rusty black who looked at the Lannisters the way a farmer looks at a field of stones.
The king never came down to see them off. Jaime had not expected him to.
As they rode out under the gatehouse, he looked back once. The red dragon was in the outer ward where she always was, curled against the Kingspyre. Above the Widow's Tower, circling slowly in the grey morning, was the pale one. It had a rider. Even from that distance, Jaime could see the small red point of the mask catching the light.
He watched it for a long time. Then he turned his face north.
Tyrion brought his pony up beside him after a mile or so. He rode badly, as he always had, with his short legs stuck out at angles and the reins bunched in his chained fists, but he rode.
"Was it bad?" Tyrion asked.
"She looked asleep."
Tyrion was quiet for a while. They rode past the edge of the burned fields, where the ash gave way to scrubby grass, and the smell of dead horses fell behind them at last.
"I hated her," Tyrion said. "You know that. She hated me before I could walk. She'd have had me strangled in my crib if Father had let her." He looked down at his hands. "I thought I'd feel something else when it happened."
"What do you feel?"
"Cold, mostly." He shrugged. "But she was my sister."
Jaime said nothing. Behind them in the cart, Mace Tyrell had begun to weep again, quietly, and one of the black brothers told him to shut his mouth, and he did.
"Shiera Seastar," Tyrion said after a while. "That's who it was, isn't it?"
"Barristan says the king didn't order it."
"No. I don't suppose he did." Tyrion squinted ahead at the road. "That's what frightens me about him, if you want to know. He doesn't have to order it. He only has to keep people around him who'll do it anyway, just to keep their king alive."
Lancel rode a little behind them, alone. He had not said a word since the platform. Jaime looked back at him once, saw his cousin's face, and looked away again.
"Do you know it?" Tyrion asked. "The oath. The Watch's."
"I remember the other one." Jaime kept his eyes on the road. "I said it to myself all night. Every word."
"Did it help?"
"No."
They rode on. The road ran north between the lake and the hills, and the sky was low and grey, and it was very quiet. Somewhere far behind them, over Harrenhal, a dragon roared once, long and deep, and the sound came rolling through the trees after them, and passed them, and went on into the north ahead.
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