A Feast for Dragons

Great Sept of Baelor atop the hill.
Have
I really come such a little way?
Worse, a hundred times worse, she had
lost sight of the Red Keep. “Where … where …?”
    “Your Grace.” The captain of her escort stepped up beside
her. Cersei had forgotten his name. “You must continue. The crowd is growing
unruly.”
    Yes
, she thought.
Unruly
. “I
am not afraid—”
    “You should be.” He yanked at her arm, pulling her along
beside him. She staggered down the hill—downward, ever downward—wincing with
every step, letting him support her.
It should be Jaime beside me
.
He would draw his golden sword and slash a path right through the mob, carving
the eyes out of the head of every man who dared to look at her.
    The paving stones were cracked and uneven, slippery
underfoot, and rough against her soft feet. Her heel came down on something
sharp, a stone or piece of broken crockery. Cersei cried out in pain. “I asked
for 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,