A Dance With Dragons

sandals,” she spat at Septa Unella. “You could have given me sandals, you could have done that much.” The knight wrenched at her arm again, as if she were some common serving wench. Has he forgotten who I am? She was the queen of Westeros; he had no right to lay rough hands on her.
    Near the bottom of the hill, the slope gentled and the street began to widen. Cersei could see the Red Keep again, shining crimson in the morning sun atop Aegon’s High Hill. I must keep walking. She wrenched free of Ser Theodan’s grasp. “You do not need to drag me, ser.” She limped on, leaving a trail of bloody footprints on the stones behind her.
    She walked through mud and dung, bleeding, goosefleshed, hobbling. All around her was a babble of sound. “My wife has sweeter teats than those,” a man shouted. A teamster cursed as the Poor Fellows ordered his wagon out of the way. “ Shame, shame, shame on the sinner, ” chanted the septas. “Look at this one,” a whore called from a brothel window, lifting her skirts to the men below, “it’s not had half as many cocks up it as hers.” Bells were ringing, ringing, ringing. “That can’t be the queen,” a boy said, “she’s saggy as my mum.” This is my penance, Cersei told herself. I have sinned most grievously, this is my atonement. It will be over soon, it will be behind me, then I can forget.
    The queen began to see familiar faces. A bald man with bushy side-whiskers frowned down from a window with her father’s frown, and for an instant looked so much like Lord Tywin that she stumbled. A young girl sat beneath a fountain, drenched in spray, and stared at her with Melara Hetherspoon’s accusing eyes. She saw Ned Stark, and beside him little Sansa with her auburn hair and a shaggy grey dog that might have been her wolf. Every child squirming through the crowd became her brother Tyrion, jeering at her as he had jeered when Joffrey died. And there was Joff as well, her son, her firstborn, her beautiful bright boy with his golden curls and his sweet smile, he had such lovely lips, he …
    That was when she fell the second time.
    She was shaking like a leaf when they pulled her to her feet. “Please,” she said. “Mother have mercy. I confessed.”
    “You did,” said Septa Moelle. “This is your atonement.”
    “It is not much farther,” said Septa Unella. “See?” She pointed. “Up the hill, that’s all.”
    Up the hill. That’s all. It was true. They were at the foot of Aegon’s High Hill, the castle above them.
    “Whore,” someone screamed. “Brotherfucker,” another voice added. “Abomination.”
    “Want a suck on this, Your Grace?” A man in a butcher’s apron pulled his cock out of his breeches, grinning. It did not matter. She was almost home.
    Cersei began to climb.
    If anything, the jeers and shouts were cruder here. Her walk had not taken her through Flea Bottom, so its denizens had packed onto the lower slopes of Aegon’s High Hill to see the show. The faces leering out at her from behind the shields and spears of the Poor Fellows seemed twisted, monstrous, hideous. Pigs and naked children were everywhere underfoot, crippled beggars and cutpurses swarmed like roaches through the press. She saw men whose teeth had been filed into points, hags with goiters as big as their heads, a whore with a huge striped snake draped about breasts and shoulders, a man whose cheeks and brow were covered with open sores that wept grey pus. They grinned and licked their lips and hooted at her as she went limping past, her breasts heaving with the effort of the climb. Some shouted obscene proposals, others insults. Words are wind, she thought, words cannot hurt me. I am beautiful, the most beautiful woman in all Westeros, Jaime says so, Jaime would never lie to me. Even Robert, Robert never loved me, but he saw that I was beautiful, he wanted me.
    She did not feel beautiful, though. She felt old, used, filthy, ugly. There were stretch marks on her belly from the children she had borne, and her breasts were not as firm as they had been when she was younger. Without a gown to hold them up, they sagged against her chest. I should not have done this. I was their queen, but now they’ve seen, they’ve seen, they’ve seen. I should never have let them see. Gowned and crowned, she was a queen. Naked, bloody, limping, she was only a woman, not so very different from their wives, more like their mothers than their pretty little maiden daughters. What