A Feast for Dragons

Blount, the king’s sworn protectors, were nowhere to
be found. Even her cousin Lancel, who once had claimed to love her, was one of
her accusers. Her uncle had refused to help her rule when she would have made
him the King’s Hand.
    And Jaime …
    No, that she could not believe, would not believe. Jaime
would be here once he knew of her plight.
“Come at once,”
she
had written to him.
“Help me. Save me. I need you now as I have never
needed you before. I love you. I love you. I love you. Come at once.”
Qyburn had sworn that he would see that her letter reached her twin, off in the
riverlands with his army. Qyburn had never returned, however. For all she knew,
he might be dead, his head impaled upon a spike above the city Keep’s gates. Or
perhaps he was languishing in one of the black cells beneath the Red Keep, her
letter still unsent. The queen had asked after him a hundred times, but her
captors would not speak of him. All she knew for certain was that Jaime had not
come.
    Not yet
, she told herself.
But soon.
And once he comes the High Sparrow and his bitches will sing a different song
.
    She hated feeling helpless.
    She had threatened, but her threats had been received with
stony faces and deaf ears. She had commanded, but her commands had been
ignored. She had invoked the Mother’s mercy, appealing to the natural sympathy
of one woman for another, but the three shriveled septas must have put their
womanhood aside when they spoke their vows. She had tried charm, speaking to
them gently, accepting each new outrage meekly. They were not swayed. She had
offered them rewards, promised leniency, honors, gold, positions at court. They
treated her promises as they did her threats.
    And she had prayed. Oh, how she had prayed. Prayer was what
they wanted, so she served it to them, served it on her knees as if she were
some common trollop of the streets and not a daughter of the Rock. She had
prayed for relief, for deliverance, for Jaime. Loudly she asked the gods to
defend her in her innocence; silently she prayed for her accusers to suffer
sudden, painful deaths. She prayed until her knees were raw and bloody, until
her tongue felt so thick and heavy that she was like to choke on it. All the
prayers they had taught her as a girl came back to Cersei in her cell, and she
made up new ones as needed, calling on the Mother and the Maiden, on the Father
and the Warrior, on the Crone and the Smith. She had even prayed to the
Stranger.
Any god in a storm
. The Seven proved as deaf as their
earthly servants. Cersei gave them all the words that she had in her, gave them
everything but tears.
That they will never have
, she told
herself.
    She hated feeling weak.
    If the gods had given her the strength they gave Jaime and
that swaggering oaf Robert, she could have made her own escape.
Oh, for
a sword and the skill to wield it
. She had a warrior’s heart, but the
gods in their blind malice had given her the feeble body of a woman. The queen
had tried to fight them early on, but the septas had overwhelmed her. There
were too many of them, and they were stronger than they looked. Ugly old women,
every one of them, but all that praying and scrubbing and beating novices with
sticks had left them tough as roots.
    And they would not let her rest. Night or day, whenever the
queen closed her eyes to sleep, one of her captors would appear to wake her and
demand that she confess her sins. She stood accused of adultery, fornication,
high treason, even murder, for Osney Kettleblack had confessed to smothering
the last High Septon at her command. “I am come to hear you tell of all your
murders and fornications,” Septa Unella would growl when she shook the queen
awake. Septa Moelle would tell her that it was her sins that kept her
sleepless. “Only the innocent know the peace of untroubled sleep. Confess your
sins, and you will sleep like a newborn babe.”
    Wake and sleep and wake again, every night was broken into
pieces by the rough hands of her tormentors, and every night was colder and
crueler than the night before. The hour of the owl, the hour of the wolf, the
hour of the nightingale, moonrise and moonset, dusk and dawn, they staggered
past like drunkards. What hour was it? What day was it? Where was she? Was this
a dream, or had she woken? The little shards of sleep that they allowed her
turned into razors, slicing at her wits. Each day found her duller than the day
before, exhausted and feverish. She had lost all