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It is nineteen hours of labour and then the twins burst into the world, one after the other and not a minute in between—he was holding her foot, my lady, I could swear it, the maester will insist afterward—and perfect, as perfect as newborns can be: two identical pink faces and four flailing fists, cries that surge up and double, and anxious parents poised to scoop the squirming bundles into their arms and quell them. They are exhausted, these parents, the haggard products of months of trepidation—they have been told so many times how perilous it is to birth twins—but they see the babes through the night, cradling their delicate heads and crooning in low voices and parsing countless generations of Lannisters for suitable likenesses.
“The Lord of Casterly Rock,” Tywin says, “and the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, I think.” He ducks his head as the little girl propped against his shoulder unleashes a piercing squeal of a yell straight into his ear, then laughs. “She certainly has the temperament.”
“Perhaps we ought to give her a name before we give her a crown,” Joanna chides, but a smile softens the words; it fills her with such joy, the sight of her formidable husband soothing this surly infant. He has been consumed by the prospect of heirs since her belly began to swell but never has he beamed as he did when the midwife placed his bawling daughter in his arms.
Joanna herself has lain awake many nights pondering possibilities—two mischievous boys, two demure girls in pink gowns—and now she presses her son to her chest, smoothing the wisps of hair that swirl over the crown of his head, and finds that all those others have melted away before her. She doesn’t believe she could have imagined it differently, just as she doesn’t believe she spent so many recent months in discomfort, so many hours in pain, gnashing her teeth and seething at the world and calling on the Mother for mercy, then settling for a jumbled litany of curses instead. There is only this sublime calm, and Tywin murmuring about the great things they will build as a family, and the tiny being curled against her and the tiny being curled against him, and her heart pulsing with a love the likes of which she’s never known.
It will be Jaime who receives his name first, and Cersei shortly thereafter, both unprecedented in the Lannister lineage, and nothing will prepare Joanna for how swiftly they’ll relax into their personalities, or how vehemently different they’ll be. By the third day it will be as though she has known them for a century; she’ll tell them apart by their expressions and the way they squirm out of their swaddling clothes and the pitch of the cry that sounds in the bleak hours of the morning—it is Cersei, always Cersei, and Jaime will follow with a stream of long-suffering whimpers. “Put one in the other chamber and be done with it,” Tywin will say, but Joanna won’t have it in her to suffer the fallout, because the one time placid little Jaime will wail, really, truly wail, will be when she separates him from his sister. All they’ve known of life is each other, she’ll think, and it will prove true, over and over.
Jaime will discover Cersei’s fingers before his own and they’ll share a joint fascination that lasts days. For months, they’ll respond to their names as if they are interchangeable. Cersei will stand first, using Jaime’s head as a crutch, but Jaime will take the first steps and she’ll stare at his tottering legs, stunned. He’ll experiment with the notion of flinging himself over the side of his cradle and appear at the door of his parents’ chamber with a broad grin and a bump rising on his brow—and there will be three more bumps before he learns his lesson. In the wake of the third, Joanna will come across the twins babbling to each other in their own language, as if discussing the incident, and catch herself hoping that all her children are delivered to her as two halves.
But for now: a cloudless expanse of night sky and Tywin dozing beside her, the indefatigable well of love that spills over in her chest, and her son and her daughter, who came into the world together, one after the other and not a minute in between.
A feast rages in the great hall and the whole of Casterly Rock is drenched in the sound: the clattering of utensils against plates and plates against tables—rows upon rows of tables soaked in the crimson run-off of liberally poured wine, piled high with the remains of previous courses and populated with dozens of drunken westermen whose voices clamber gracelessly over each other in a bid to be heard. These men—and a cluster of ladies who’ve chosen to brave the din—have gathered, ostensibly, to celebrate the eighth name day of Lord Tywin’s twins, though they are doing rather a questionable job of it.
In the furthest corner of the hall, Uncle Gerion has challenged a group of green knights—Lannister cousins, apparently, but who can keep track?—to a betting game he mastered in Volantis, something that involves knives and fingers and a proximity between the two that has Uncle Kevan hovering nervously by his elbow. Little Tyrion, delirious and elated, has made a pulp of various vegetables and appears to be painting with it. Uncle Stafford lies supine on a bench, slumbering, and no one seems to notice that Lord Tywin has long since absconded, as have the twins themselves.
It began with a communion of a look—Jaime glancing across the dais; Cersei turning her head at the same moment, meeting his eyes—and then one plan blossomed in two minds, because Jaime saw the way she pulled at her gown, knew it was too tight, that she’d been growing again and the sleeves that were meant to wrap around her wrists were biting mercilessly into her arms, because Cersei saw the way his fist was clamped around an unused fork, how his face contorted when Aunt Genna pinched his cheeks, knew that he was bored and uneasy, same as she, so he signed and she nodded, ducking under the table and waiting for him to creep across to her, the two of them crouched in shadow until an outburst over a toppled lantern cloaked their sprint to the door.
Now they sit facing each other on Cersei’s bed, a stolen tray of cakes between them, their hands sticky with the fillings—raspberry jam and amber globs of honey—their laps dusted with the debris of each bite, and they find that they are far enough from the feast to joke about it, and even more so when Cersei releases the strings around the bedposts and the canopy swings down, closing out the world and all its noise. She has lost her faith in adults in the four years since Mother died and the thunderous presence of so many makes her want to be extra alone.
Jaime understands this, understands that there is a sadness in her that goes deeper than any he has ever seen, one that roots her in place and ties her stomach in knots, so he quickly pushes a cake into her hands and watches her eat it with gusto, then punctuates its disappearance with an exchange of smiles and another mouthful. They slam the crusts together as if they are goblets, unloosing a shower of golden crumbs, and Cersei laughs, a sound that is light and sweet and laden with relief. She has hated so much for so long—hated everyone who crossed her path, hated Tyrion, hated her septa who lied to her and Father who didn’t, hated that she couldn’t help but ascribe weight to their words. And sometimes she hates when it rains, because it makes her feel cold, and sometimes she hates when the sun shines, because she still feels cold, and most of the time she hates Casterly Rock, because it doesn’t make sense that a difference of one person could render a whole castle unalterably empty.
She has never hated Jaime, though, and this is one of those moments that enables her to see why, because she is struck with the feeling she sometimes gets, the feeling that she could cup her whole life in her hands like water and pass it over to him and he wouldn’t spill a drop.
A pink smear of jam darkens the corner of his mouth and she leans in and clears it with her thumb, then scrambles over the tray and kisses him there, that spot that is not quite his lips and not quite his cheek, for she is suddenly overcome with tenderness, a warm rush of gratitude that makes it—her life, the stark eight years of it, and his; their collective life—all seem very real. She nestles against him and he touches the ends of her hair and it’s as though his heart is an ember, glowing and crackling and alive, reassuring him that he’s done well, satisfied a purpose.
This is not a new sensation; he’s felt for some time that Mother’s death decided something between them—it’s why he went back for the sweets earlier, and why he made up all those excuses when she was too sad and too scared to leave her bed, and why he slept outside her door that time they forced her to lock him out, night after night curled up on cold stone until they realized that separating him from his twin wasn’t worth the risk of Lord Tywin discovering that his heir had nested in the corridor.
It’s why he has loved her twice since it happened and it’s why when the next person disappears he will learn to love her three times.
He inclines his head, trying to discern her expression through the murky candlelight. She notices him watching and reaches out, her small hand curling around his wrist, the pads of her fingers pressing into his pulse. The world seems quieter, shrunken somehow, and they succumb to the comfort of it when the remaining cakes—a mess of half-eaten rounds with ragged bites torn out of them—are relegated to the floor and sleep overtakes them, their bodies curved towards each other like bows laid end to end.
They find crumbs in the sheets for days and days.
Shadows dance over stone—vague oblong shapes cast about by the sconces lining the walls, each one bearing a torch tipped with wildfire and lending itself to the ghostly glow that illuminates the corridors, though it is only Jaime who haunts the Red Keep at night. He moves through the dark with ease now—has done for a time, for he breathes more securely when he is alone, and he is not alone until the king retires.
He paces along the empty galleries and weaves through passages and drags himself up stairwells; sometimes he walks the battlements, squinting through a curtain of snow as wild gusts of wind whistle past his ears. He does what he can to distract himself, to withdraw his mind from his mind, because night is the worst. Night is when the day comes rushing back to him.
Two years a hostage, two years since he has so much as laid eyes on his family, and in their place reigns horrors too grisly to be real, and yet he knows he is not imaginative enough to have conceived them himself: what it is to be sworn to a madman, to watch a pyromancer nurse a growth of green flame under the feet of some meagre lord who has failed to carry out some impossible task, the reek of it; to stand in silence until the king is cackling over a mound of ash; to stand and stand and stand, long after his legs start to numb and his eyes itch with exhaustion and he has burrowed so deep into his head that he can see the back of his skull, see memories he didn’t know he had—her smallest smiles and the words she murmurs in her sleep and her restless hands making furrows in wet sand—all the while too afraid to blink or breathe or wipe his brow for fear that the next pyre will be his own.
And then the endless day concedes to an endless night and he shuffles back to the White Tower and draws the sheet to his chin and finds that the stone in his chest doesn’t vanish with the sun. It remains there, blocking the air from his lungs, and even the refuge of sleep is lost to him.
He rounds a corner, turning onto the battlements, and the bite of winter is merciless, but he isn’t bothered. There is a sliver of moon and a solitary star hanging over the city, and when he pictures the last time he saw Cersei, he can’t even be sure it happened. He wiped the tears from her cheek and told her that Father would seek out another lord—someone worthy of her—and didn’t tell her that every time she spoke of marriage it felt like cold hands were wringing his insides, that for all Father’s talk of lordships and betrothals, he thought their childhood stretched before them indefinitely and didn’t see the cliff until he went skidding over the edge.
It almost amuses Jaime now, that the prospect of Cersei being promised to Rhaegar Targaryen was once the worst of his problems. He laid awake under a heap of blankets and listened to her breathe and comprised whole speeches about how it could work, how he would make it work, because maybe Dorne, maybe Essos, maybe right there, for somewhere in the nearby kingdoms must’ve lived the septon who had married the king to his sister, and how could Father object if he and Cersei turned up one day and it was already done?
They were complicated and they were simple, the plans he devised to knot their futures together irrevocably—and now he’d give an arm just to be within a mile of her: Cersei, who can imply twenty things with a flutter of her lashes, stubborn and serious and proud to a fault, but witty and tender and tragic and tangled up in his mind like a riddle he’ll never solve. Jaime sees that face so vividly, he supposes he must have left part of himself behind with her, and he does not know if he will ever be able to reclaim it.
Mother said we would be together even when we weren’t together, he thinks. Do you remember that?
The night remains silent; not even the bitter wind offers a rebuke. He leans over the ledge, his arms sinking into the snow that has piled atop the stone crenellations, and his mind races through bouts of everything and nothing, memories too distant to be a comfort and premonitions too realistic to be called into question, a longing so deep it makes his stomach ache and a prayer so shallow it sits on his skin, and only then does he recall that it is his name day. He is seventeen.
Night deepens and Cersei slips into the bath, sighing as sharp needles of heat prick her skin and restore feeling to her limbs. It has been a long day, but not so long that she is ready to see the end of it yet. Jaime will be along soon and she yearns to see him, to let her time bleed into his and prove that she is not the woman she was a year ago, when having her name day pass unacknowledged by her husband felt like the twist of a hot knife in her side, when her baby died and life tossed her about like a piece of driftwood on a furious, frothing sea: twenty-one years old and reckoning with the fact that her father had sold her to a drunk with a turbulent temper and she was to navigate the rest of her existence with her eyes half-closed, doused in glacial torrents of grief and disappointment and often unable to find the merit in opening them at all.
It is strange to consider those days now, strange because time sprawled so dismally ahead of her, grey and endless, and then it all changed, the sky cleared and the storm wore itself out, and now there is something like peace blooming in its wake.
She tips her head back and a small hum of a chuckle vibrates in her throat. She is not fool enough to buy into the folly of sudden improvement; she knows that she will not slough off two decades like an old skin merely because she is now twenty-two, but every day will carry her further and further from them until they are the distant past, and her new son will be born, the son she made with Jaime, who loved her through the worst, who raps his knuckles against the door and enters, bolting it without a word, because she asked him to come to her and he knows she wants him alone.
He regards her from the threshold, a furrow forming between his brows. “You’re pale,” he says. “You’ve been sick again.” He strides across the chamber, and her eyes slip closed as he stoops next to her and runs his fingers through her hair, sending a slow trickle of pleasure down her spine. His thumb skims her temple and he murmurs, “You’ll have to tell them eventually.”
A sigh of impatience leaks through Cersei's compressed lips. He hasn’t adjusted to the sight of her keeled over a chamber pot, the disagreeable reunion she has with every meal, and he has made his stance clear, but it is her secret to share and she is not yet willing. She has endured this before; she knows that there is nothing that can be done for it, and she knows that her maids will piece it together, if they haven’t already, and she’ll be made to suffer one of Jon Arryn’s meandering lectures about queenly conduct. But until then her child is hers, hers and Jaime’s, and she means to keep it so, though she would be more inclined to clarify the choice now if she didn’t lift her eyes and allow herself to be distracted when he flashes her a grin and begins to tug his shirt over his head.
“You won’t fit,” she chides.
“That sounds like a challenge.”
By the time he wedges himself into the bath half the water is seeping across the floor and her legs are draped awkwardly over his, her foot resting flat against his chest, his fingers trailing lightly over her ankle. She studies his face through silver curls of steam and her breath catches somewhere in her chest but she tries not to let on; it alarms her at times and annoys her at others, the power he has over her moods—the warm current of relief that flows through her when he steps into a room, the way her stomach twists in anticipation at his touch.
But she has been through enough, hasn’t she? She’s lost enough, and she deserves to be loved by someone like Jaime, who smells like clean skin and new leather, who can unravel her as the sky is purpling and piece her back together by sunrise, who peels away the anger and the shame and all the ugly things that live in her—twenty-two years’ worth of bad days and a towering mass of burdens that he felt as acutely as she did, because they were not his to bear but he took half the load anyway, stood by her until bitter tears and barred doors were secret smiles and patient caresses. And now she has a choice: she can turn her head and watch the worst of it recede, or she can stare down an expanse of decades that no longer daunts her to the point of paralysis. But she does neither, content as she is at this crossroads, with their eyes fixed on each other and his calloused hand gliding over her pink skin and her inability to tell him that she only has her life because she had his love.
“Are you on guard tonight?” she asks instead.
“No, but I haven’t seen Tyrion in three days,” he says. “I suppose I should find whatever hovel he’s in this time and fish him out before he drowns.”
Half of his mouth crooks up in a smile and his eyes glint with a promise of mischief—almost as though he might be open to other suggestions—and there is something in the way his fingers slide along her calf to the crook of her knee and then back to her ankle, circling the foot that he emerged holding when they were born a thousand years ago—proof that they were never meant to be separated—that makes her feel safe. Safe, and cherished and wanted, and she is suddenly all too aware of the prickling sensation that’s been spreading across her body, the surge of heated blood and the splash of cold water.
“Stay with me,” she says.
And then she says, “Stay until morning.”
Thunder gouges into the dead of night and then the storm splits the horizon in two—a great bolt of lightning that lingers like a golden welt in the blue-black sky—and Jaime watches Cersei as she watches her children, a gentle hint of a smile gracing her lips. She has had a good day; he has made sure of it. Weeks past, he and Tyrion began to seed tales of a monster of a boar spotted skulking through the kingswood and, shortly after, of his plans to hunt it in celebration of his thirty-first name day, so naturally Robert ordered him to remain behind while the royal party sped off in pursuit of the fictional beast. The lot of them now verge on three days gone, and their absence has served Jaime well as a gift to his twin, and to himself: vacant halls and serene afternoons and long, uninterrupted nights—that is, until two stunted shadows turned up in the doorway, pleading fear of the storm.
Tommen, splay-limbed and slack-jawed, three years old and lost to the realm of unperturbable sleep, sprawls among a fortress of pillows, and Myrcella, her head cradled in Cersei’s lap, her hand loosening its grip on a doll, drifts there and back, stirring as thunder roars somewhere overhead. Cersei smooths the girl’s hair and croons words that Jaime can’t make out and then casts a glance over to him, to where he sits on the other side of the chamber, the candlelight shining in her eyes, and it kindles a feeling in him that is rare enough to seem novel. He has not yet encountered the urge to be a father, not once in the nine years of Joffrey’s life, and he hardly passes for a good uncle, not when compared to Tyrion, but every so often there is a moment in which he is struck by the quiet force of Cersei’s devotion to them, these three beings they put in the world, and he lets himself be impressed by all they’ve built, that they could cobble together something like stability in the heart of what Father would no doubt consider reckless treason.
Jaime notices himself thinking about Father more and more these days—the man who, at thirty-one, had been Hand of the King for years, had wiped the Westerlands clean of the Reynes and restored House Lannister to a glory it hadn’t known in centuries; Tywin Lannister, the subject of songs, the man who shits gold, a king in all but lineage, and his eldest son in contrast: thirty-one, and the sum of his accomplishments? Fucking another man’s wife in another man’s castle. A streak of tourneys. A pair of hands that the court would have him believe are still soaked in the blood of Aerys Targaryen. And though it often seems to Jaime that the man he struggles with most in this cess-pit of a city is himself, he sees Cersei tuck the coverlet around Myrcella and can’t abide the vision that coalesces in the back of his mind: the life in which he slinks back to Casterly Rock and allows Tywin Lannister to mould him into the likes of Tywin Lannister.
He does his best to let the notion fade, lets himself sink into the distraction that presents itself when Cersei crosses the chamber and he catches her around the waist, pulling her onto his knee. He sweeps her hair back and presses his mouth to her shoulder as she stares into the storm, captivated by a crease of lightning that converges with its reflection amidst the waves churning the bay.
“Not an ideal night to be on a hunt, is it?” he murmurs, and she exhales an inelegant little snort of a laugh, and the fact of the matter is that he could escape to the other end of the world, live out an existence far removed from the king’s drunken jibes and the machinations of the council and every sorry flock of knights who imagine themselves warriors, and he wouldn’t forget her for an instant.
He is slow to learn, but she doesn’t learn at all; she still lets life pain her, has done since balancing her moods was as easy as snatching a plate of cakes from a feast, and Father, whatever his deeds, whatever his beliefs, lost the woman he loved and got locked up inside himself and never broke his way out, never found anything to close that rift in all his years of scowling and scheming and ruling, so rain lashes the walls and the children sigh in their sleep and Cersei lifts his hand to her lips, tasting no blood, and Jaime draws her closer, draws her into a kiss that is worth more than any coin or kingdom, as he leans back into his lot, content.
And then one day they are thirty-nine—she in King’s Landing, he in Harrenhal—she a widow, he a cripple—and it strikes them as unfair somehow. Days are fleeting but years accumulate, and when they close their eyes it is as though time has raised a tower under their feet and stranded them at the top, bowed over the edge of the parapet and feeling winded by the view down. Then they open, these four green eyes, and a pale moon blinks at them from behind a layer of translucent cloud and the air is thick and stifling, suspended between storms, and he lies in an unfamiliar bed with a handless arm slung across his chest, and she props her chin on her fist, staring in no particular direction, and even now, when nothing is wrong, everything is wrong.
She is tired. She is alone. (She is tired of being alone.) She meditates on a disorderly chorus of crickets and rushing waves and lantern-lit revels in the gardens and pretends that she does not spend as much time thinking about Margaery Tyrell as she once did about Lyanna Stark.
It is a tedious task and not isolated; the night is long and lonely and delusions run in crowds, so the stretch of darkness before her veils truths about Joffrey’s worsening proclivities, and Myrcella’s safety in Dorne, and Father—the belief she once held that passing years would narrow the chasm between them, make it so they’d be near enough to be equals. Yet here she is, beholden to him and betrothed to another, submitting to an age-old pattern in which she heeds his commands and he rewards her with more commands.
She sits in silence, but her rage is piercing; it hums in her ears and in her bones, leaves her shaken and defeated, because she has had her life for thirty-nine years and not for a day has she truly had it. She’s been sold and struck and sold again and when it’s required of her she crumples into the woman she was two decades ago, ruled by hurt and fear and unworthy fixations—where are you? she thinks—and feeling so very, very small as she sinks her face into her hands and longs for the arms of a man who, somewhere in the Riverlands, in a dark vault of a guest chamber, battles his own mind and finds himself similarly flattened by the prospect of existence.
Harrenhal, he thinks, indulging a mental scoff. He couldn’t place it on an unmarked map, but he’s been here before. He knelt in a patch of grass outside the king’s pavilion and swore a vow and then Gerold Hightower clasped a white cloak to his armour and he stood taller than any man has ever stood.
Now he has returned and he is nothing; his body less a body and more a sentient fever, a topography of interconnected aches, and his mind a maze that he staggers through nightly, forgetting over and over that at the centre there is only quicksand. He fights and flails but it pulls and pulls, and sometimes it is the past that traps him, and sometimes it is the future, but either way he remains stuck.
The past: because it wasn’t so long ago that Father clapped a hand to his cheek and said I need you to be the man you were always meant to be, and he is baffled by the recollection—it doesn’t seem real, given that he has had his life for thirty-nine years and hasn’t come close to determining who that man is. He supposes he was too occupied with being the man his sister needed him to be.
The future: because being the man his sister needed him to be was predicated on him being the sturdier half, on protecting her—the one vow he ever kept—and now she has her children and her throne and this could very well be the time she chooses not to wait, but he can’t accept that, because he has been to the seventh hell and back and all he longs to do is look upon her face and take her in his arms, and the root of it is so deep it feels as though he’ll come apart.
And he knows, he knows, that the scale of her need is identical, that the pain of it splinters her too, even if she denies it, even if she’s resolved to meet him with scorn. So he’ll endure the gloom of Harrenhal and the grime of the road and he’ll bear the unbearable jolt of each step and the torment of phantom fingers and he’ll make good on the one thing of which he’s ever been certain. It’s all he can do.
I can’t bear it, she thinks.
He thinks, Just a little longer.
Forty-two, and she wakes in agony—ribs aching, back knotted, pain as if her hips have been pinned to the mattress while invisible hands wring her muscles. She groans and reaches out, nails closing down on dead air and her own unsuspecting palm, and it is then that the icy tendrils of panic release into her veins, forcing the realization that she is alone. Even my body is betraying me, she thinks, and the thought is tailed by something that is not quite a prayer—after everything, who is there to pray to?—and not quite a plea, not quite words even, as she squeezes her eyes shut and pulls at her robe, seeking blood. Her fingers come away dry and she sucks in a breath that reverberates uncomfortably through her core, but the relief is instant. Be strong for me, little one, she thinks, and I will be strong for you.
Her handmaiden comes upon her eventually, then Qyburn, and the queen has time enough to compose herself between their visits, coaxing her clenched body upright, grinding the heels of her palms into her eyes until starry streaks of colour adorn the black canvas. It occurs to her that this has happened before, with Tommen, or perhaps Myrcella, and the refuge of the half-memory slows the furious stampede of her pulse. All was well then, as it will be now, surely. And yet she is not wholly soothed—it’s left its trace on her, the fear that stretched her taut, the relief that snapped her back, one after the other in so short a span, and she’d like to give in to the whirlwind, to reel with her emotions, to exhale a shaky laugh and say gods, I was so worried, but she is too deeply entrenched in this war and there is no time to squander—her choices make the choices and leave her out of it.
(It is moments like this when his absence strikes her like a blow to the back of the knees.)
Qyburn presses the bulge beneath her shift and assures her that there is no cause for concern, except, perhaps, that she has taken too much upon herself, and she assures him that, regardless, she is fit to meet with her council, that they are to wait for her.
The creases around his mouth deepen, but he does not protest. He bows and makes for the door and a sudden surge of words constricts her throat. “I don’t suppose there is news from the North,” she blurts.
“It seems that preparations for battle continue, Your Grace,” he says.
The queen nods and dismisses him and a cadre of maids rushes in to help her dress. One of them bears a plate of fruit that will go untouched, concentric circles of melon and peach and pomegranate, all colourful, all cloying, all deposited alongside a considerably less nauseating flagon of wine—a tart Arbor red; the queen hasn’t bothered with anything Dornish since she consigned Ellaria Sand to the brightest of the black cells.
She fills a goblet to the brim and sips at it, silent. Tentative fingers graze her back as they sort out the trail of buttons on her bodice and then she splays her hands and watches the usual array of rings slide past her joints, refusing all the while to be lured by the reflection that lurks in her peripheral vision; she can’t stand the sight of the pale, haggard woman who peers back at her.
He’ll die, she thinks. He’ll die and it will serve him right.
And then the day begins in earnest. The council chamber lies at the centre of a labyrinth of corridors that gives her the sensation that she has slipped into someone else’s life, but she does what she can to ignore it. Shutters have been fitted over the windows to ward off winter’s chill and still the keep is cold—cold and dark and impossibly desolate. She’d hole up in her quarters if she could; these halls are haunted, the air too thick with the past. She spots them everywhere, shadows and handprints, wisps of movement that could be a child rounding a corner, the inexplicable presence of a second goblet, the voices that carry from the solar she still thinks of as Father’s and the heavy thud of boots across a courtyard that is also a continent.
Guards throw open the doors and she finds that the council, such as it is, has indeed waited for her, and that she is almost relieved to see them, her paltry collection of dissipated lords and idle mercenaries. Euron Greyjoy is the last to rise, a lazy smile twisting the bottom half of his face, and she takes her seat, inclining her head as she is submerged in a roiling ocean of words, thrice journeyed discussions of tactics and fortifications, all of which she hears and doesn’t. Two dragons, the Unsullied, the Dothraki, she thinks, and then she thinks, the Iron Fleet, the Golden Company, the Red Keep, and still she can feel death panting over her shoulder. And when she manages to shake free of it, the commander of her armies, such as he is, is once again complaining about the Ironborn.
“When my men don’t get the fight they were promised,” Euron responds, as if it is all within the bounds of reason, “they create one.”
“Then perhaps their captain ought to control them,” the queen says brusquely.
His eyes flick across her in a manner that presumes far too much and she holds them until he slinks back like an admonished child, lapsing into a silence that will no doubt break before she’d prefer it to. I need a proper advisor, she thinks, and still she ends up under him.
The feel of it is wrong in a way that she can’t quantify and she can taste her own wine stores on his breath and it’s like fucking a ghost, really, though she’s never quite sure which ghost, only that it’s not the worst of them, considering Lancel once existed, but certainly not the best of them either, and her mind won’t let her forget it. Because Jaime was taller and slimmer and more beautiful than she could ever admit, even maimed, even tired and greying and studying her like he couldn’t fathom the person she’d become, and he found her every time, with his hands and his mouth and his cock, he found her and took her somewhere better. So Euron Greyjoy bucks against her and slurs lewd nothings and the queen lets out a moan, something thin and mournful, something that’s been building inside of her, and he must mistake it for pleasure, because his thrusts get slower and harder and she thinks, Jaime won’t die without me. He wouldn’t dare.
He finishes, and she seizes his hair and pushes his head between her legs, holding him there until friction makes her come, and then he collapses onto the pillows with a satisfied sigh and she takes the measure of him, this man who is not Jaime. There is a scar along his ribs that she often pores over, crafting herself a fantasy in which her twin puts it there during the siege of Pyke, but she knows it couldn’t be true—if he crossed blades with Jaime, he would not have lived to bear the mark of it.
She fought Jaime, though, after the krakens styled themselves kings and set fire to Lannisport, she fought him bitterly. She did not want him to go, couldn’t understand how he could be so desperate to prove himself, could be thinking of the men who ridiculed him when she chose him over and over, made him the father of her children—and with Joffrey always clutching at her skirts and Myrcella toddling about and Tommen no bigger than the babe growing in her now, she would not see herself deserted. She lost, of course, and he left and returned some months later, and it was one of their worst, a dangerous precedent, but still she remembers it with fondness. The arguments that bubbled and burst like blisters, because she was too fearful, too guarded, too dishonest, ploughing through life as her best imitation of Father, because Jaime was too brash, too stubborn, too unconcerned, convinced he could put a sword through every threat and that would be the end of it. But they came back together every time. He came back every time.
And now he is gone and she stares straight into the heart of nothing and tells herself that she hates him, because it is easier than missing him, because you will never be forgiven suits a queen far better than come back I love you I need you, because if she looks any closer at that last day she will realize that the woman who watches him go and says nothing is the half of the scene that she truly loathes, for that woman is the reason she lies next to a strange man and his strange scars on what is likely her last name day. Forty-two, and all the wine in the world couldn’t flood it from her mind.
Euron groans and shifts in his sleep, his breaths dragged out of him in uneven rasps, not unlike Robert’s once were, and the queen supposes she’ll have to have him killed too, when this is over, if it ends. It is the justification she gives herself for this lapse in judgement, this bizarre habit of leaving her door unbarred at night. Even after she sits up and wilts inward and resolves that the mistake will not be repeated, that it only worsens the hollow that gapes between her heart and her gut. She has no explanation for it; she is unrecognizable to herself. She is never alone and always alone and the hours are so very long.
She grinds the heels of her palms into her eyes and gazes listlessly into the dark cell behind them until dawn breaks.
“Is there news from the North?” she asks Qyburn.
They ride for hours.
The horses’ hooves drum against the ground, whipping up gritty sprays of dirt, the saddlebags pounding in time with each stride, and the twins’ shouts drown in the roar of the wind. They clutch the reins in their sweaty palms and bob with the invisible current and don’t slow their pace until the hulking mass of Casterly Rock is a distant speck that could be a trick of the mind. They have been planning this for weeks and yet they have no plans. They are thirteen now, and invincible.
A sword dangles from Jaime’s hip, because he’s long dreamt of the day he can put one to real use, envisions himself defending his sister from a leering band of outlaws, the fierce look of pride she’ll get when he drops them, and Cersei’s gathered her hair into a messy plait that’s already come loose, donned her brother’s plainest combination of a shirt and breeches, gloriously free of skirts and stays and sharp hairpins and all the other miserable trappings that exist to please wandering eyes. They have no map, but there’s food and coins and water skins, enough for days, maybe a week—they haven’t yet decided what they’ll do, how far they’ll go or what will happen when they get there, but it doesn’t matter. The world extends for leagues in every direction and they let it, bounding through stretch after stretch of deserted green landscape, running, or else hiding, because the winds that sweep in from the capital carry whispers of winter and war, because Cersei bled for the first time a few weeks past and now they feel the future hanging over their heads like a hammer.
Eventually, they come upon a brook and stop to water the horses. Cersei watches the animals shuffle against each other and blinks into the horizon, following the jagged path of a butterfly into a patch of brush, her gaze landing among a cluster of flowers with bright yellow petals and black centres that dot the scene like miniature eclipses. If her twin is right and they haven’t gone in circles, then they’ve ventured further north than Lannisport is south and she is the farthest that she’s ever been from Casterly Rock. The thought sends a little shiver of excitement down her spine and she glances up at Jaime, who’s climbed a tree to discern their position in relation to the next sign of life.
He catches her eye as he begins his descent—sans any useful conclusion, but she doesn’t need to know that—and his mouth pulls into a grin, framing a remark that swiftly transforms into a yelp when he feels blindly for purchase and plunges his hand through the gauzy membrane of a spider web, his body jerking back in surprise, a branch crunching underneath him. It isn’t a long fall, but it drives the wind from his chest and he’s left with a cut that spans his palm diagonally, running parallel to the grooves already etched into his skin.
When Cersei’s done laughing, she tears a strip of cloth from the handkerchief that’s wrapped around one of the heels of bread they stole from the kitchens and binds his hand with it, her fingers fluttering delicately around his. It unravels rather quickly, but he doesn’t mention it to her—she’s terribly proud of her resourcefulness; he can tell by the haughty little smirk that pokes at the corners of her mouth. He smiles instead, and she smiles back.
They spread their cloaks over the sun-warmed grass and slump down. Shapeless clouds move through the sky and the horses snort contentedly and Cersei is lovelier than any of the maidens in the songs she scoffs at and Jaime is beautiful in a way that makes her heart ache, but he won’t tell her that, and she won’t tell him, so they soak in quieter sounds, alternating stolen looks and secret thrills, the back of his hand brushing the back of hers, the golden light in his golden hair, the faint constellation of freckles that dapples the bridge of her nose.
He doesn’t know how long it’s been when her face splits into a wide yawn and she turns her head, peering at him through heavy eyelids. He shifts his leg and taps the toe of his boot against the toe of hers.
“Let’s not go back,” he says.