A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

for your brother. Rain is rain. Close the curtain before you let any more in. That mantle is sable, would you have it soaked?”
    Tommen did as he was bid. His meekness troubled her. A king had to be strong.
Joffrey would have argued. He was never easy to cow.
“Don’t slump so,” she told Tommen. “Sit like a king. Put your shoulders back and straighten your crown. Do you want it to tumble off your head in front of all your lords?”
    â€œNo, Mother.” The boy sat straight and reached up to fix the crown. Joff’s crown was too big for him. Tommen had always inclined to plumpness, but his face seemed thinner now.
Is he eating well?
She must remember to ask the steward. She could not risk Tommen growing ill, not with Myrcella in the hands of the Dornishmen.
He will grow into Joff’s crown in time.
Until he did, a smaller one might be needed, one that did not threaten to swallow his head. She would take it up with the goldsmiths.
    The litter made its slow way down Aegon’s High Hill. Two Kingsguard rode before them, white knights on white horses with white cloaks hanging sodden from their shoulders. Behind came fifty Lannister guardsmen in gold and crimson.
    Tommen peered through the drapes at the empty streets. “I thought there would be more people. When Father died, all the people came out to watch us go by.”
    â€œThis rain has driven them inside.” King’s Landing had never loved Lord Tywin.
He never wanted love, though. “You cannot eat love, nor buy a horse with it, nor warm your halls on a cold night,”
she heard him tell Jaime once, when her brother had been no older than Tommen.
    At the Great Sept of Baelor, that magnificence in marble atop Visenya’s Hill, the little knot of mourners were outnumbered by the gold cloaks that Ser Addam Marbrand had drawn up across the plaza.
More will turn out later,
the queen told herself as Ser Meryn Trant helped her from the litter. Only the highborn and their retinues were to be admitted to the morning service; there would be another in the afternoon for the commons, and the evening prayers were open to all. Cersei would need to return for that, so that the smallfolk might see her mourn.
The mob must have its show.
It was a nuisance. She had offices to fill, a war to win, a realm to rule. Her father would have understood that.
    The High Septon met them at the top of the steps. A bent old man with a wispy grey beard, he was so stooped by the weight of his ornate embroidered robes that his eyes were on a level with the queen’s breasts . . . though his crown, an airy confection of cut crystal and spun gold, added a good foot and a half to his height.
    Lord Tywin had given him that crown to replace the one that was lost when the mob killed the previous High Septon. They had pulled the fat fool from his litter and torn him apart, the day Myrcella sailed for Dorne.
That one was a great glutton, and biddable. This one . . .
This High Septon was of Tyrion’s making, Cersei recalled suddenly. It was a disquieting thought.
    The old man’s spotted hand looked like a chicken claw as it poked from a sleeve encrusted with golden scrollwork and small crystals. Cersei knelt on the wet marble and kissed his fingers, and bid Tommen to do the same.
What does he know of me? How much did the dwarf tell him?
The High Septon smiled as he escorted her into the sept. But was it a threatening smile full of unspoken knowledge, or just some vacuous twitch of an old man’s wrinkled lips? The queen could not be certain.
    They made their way through the Hall of Lamps beneath colored globes of leaded glass, Tommen’s hand in hers. Trant and Kettleblack flanked them, water dripping from their wet cloaks to puddle on the floor. The High Septon walked slowly, leaning on a weirwood staff topped by a crystal orb. Seven of the Most Devout attended him, shimmering in cloth-of-silver. Tommen wore cloth-of-gold beneath his sable mantle, the queen an old gown of black velvet lined with ermine. There’d been no time to have a new one made, and she could not wear the same dress she had worn for Joffrey, nor the one she’d buried Robert in.
    At least I will not be expected to don mourning for Tyrion. I shall dress in crimson silk and cloth-of-gold for that, and wear rubies in my hair.
The man who brought her the dwarf’s head would be raised to lordship, she had proclaimed, no matter how mean and low his birth or