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Myrcella's skull was full of noise, like a thousand golden wasps hurling themselves at the walls.
She scrambled off the cold floor on her hands and knees, half-crawling, half-stumbling back to her bed. She threw herself face-first into the cold velvet quilt and pulled it over her head.
As if that could shut out the truth.
As if anything could.
It was useless.
That image was branded onto the backs of her eyelids, seared in with a red-hot iron, deep and merciless. It didn't matter how tightly she curled up, how hard she trembled. It kept burning. Blazing with horrible, perfect clarity.
That queen. That woman who held herself above every living soul, who guarded the glory and dignity of the Lannisters as if they were worth more than life itself.
That queen who blazed like the midday sun, so proud, so radiant, that no one had ever dared harbor even the smallest profane thought about her.
She had actually...
In that posture. Kneeling before...
Myrcella couldn't let herself finish the thought.
An invisible hand seized her stomach and wrung it. A violent surge of nausea, dragging last night's dinner along with it, rose up her throat.
She pulled herself into a ball beneath the quilt. A fledgling bird, drenched and shivering.
Fear. Disgust. Confusion.
And then, underneath all of it, pressing down on everything else, a bone-deep shame that crushed the breath from her lungs.
Why?
Why did she do that?
Was it for me?
That man... was it Lord Lann?
It had to be him. Who else in this world could make that golden lioness sheathe her claws and lower her head?
Myrcella's heart clenched and throbbed. The pain made it hard to breathe.
It was worse than what she'd felt back in the North, when she discovered Lynn's closeness with that Wildling girl. A thousand times worse.
Then the sounds started again.
Not the same sounds as before. Those had been nauseating. These were different. Muffled. Broken. Deliberately strangled down to almost nothing, and still not quiet enough.
Sobbing. Panting. Barely suppressed, and failing.
The sounds slipped through the thick wall, through the layers of quilt, and slithered into Myrcella's ears like a cold, wet little snake.
She clapped her hands over her ears.
It didn't help. The sounds rang inside her skull now, twining around that image she couldn't shake loose, playing something that had no business being called music.
And then her body started doing something strange.
The bed was freezing. She was shaking with cold. But underneath her skin, heat was building, deep, sourceless, climbing her spine without permission.
It reached her throat. Her cheeks. The back of her neck, the curve of her ears.
Every inch of skin felt like it was about to catch fire. A feverish, sickly pink bloomed beneath her flesh.
The sounds from next door kept going. Faster now. More frantic.
Like the most depraved lullaby ever composed, they dismantled something in Myrcella, brick by brick, 14 years of careful etiquette, careful morals, careful distance from exactly this.
And beneath the rubble, something stirred. Something that had been sleeping far too long.
Myrcella twisted and turned in her quilt, miserable with it. Her silk nightgown was soaked through with sweat, clinging to every line of her body. She felt like a fish thrown onto scorching sand, desperate for the cool of the water, with no way back to it.
The heat built. And built. Until it found somewhere to go.
Somewhere specific.
Myrcella's breathing went fast and shallow and burning.
Her green eyes, the ones that always held that trace of sadness, lost focus in the dark, veiled in a haze she didn't have a name for.
Her hand moved on its own. Down the smooth silk. Slowly.
Her whole body seized, sharp as a lightning strike.
She tried to snatch her hand back.
Her fingertips wouldn't obey. They felt pulled, magnetized, held by something she couldn't see.
From next door, Cersei's sounds grew clearer. Humiliated. Fractured. Right at the edge of breaking completely.
An invisible hand closed around Myrcella's wrist and pressed it downward. Without mercy. Without pause.
The night lasted forever.
Long enough for a sheltered princess to be dragged, inch by unwilling inch, through the filthiest, most primal, most honest corner of the adult world.
Long enough for the heavy door that had stood sealed inside her for 14 years to be pried open. Not with any kindness. With a key soaked in Cersei's humiliation and a stranger's desire, forced into the lock, forced until something gave.
When the sounds finally stopped, the sky to the east had gone a sick, pale gray, the color of a corpse's belly.
Myrcella was still lying there with her eyes wide open.
She was drenched. Soaked through, as if someone had held her underwater and let her go. Her golden hair was plastered in wet strands across her cheeks and neck.
On the sheets beneath her, a dark, damp stain.
She stared at the ornate patterns on the ceiling above her.
Those beautiful green eyes held nothing now. The clarity was gone. The innocence was gone.
Just hollow.
She was truly ruined.
---
Morning.
When Cersei pushed open Myrcella's door, this was what she found.
Her most cherished golden rose, sitting quietly at the vanity.
A plain white dress. Golden hair combed into perfect order by the handmaiden. Not a single strand out of place.
Everything exactly as it always was.
Elegant. Correct.
But Cersei's instincts, honed over years of survival, told her immediately: something was different.
The room was too quiet. The air had a weight to it.
"Myrcella?"
Cersei's voice came out careful and soft, almost coaxing. She didn't notice she'd done it.
"Did you... sleep well last night?"
Myrcella didn't turn around.
She looked at herself in the mirror — at that familiar, unfamiliar face — and when she spoke, her voice was still water. No ripple. No edge.
"Very well."
"But I had a long dream."
Cersei's heart dropped.
She crossed the room and stood behind Myrcella, studying that too-calm face in the glass. Those hollow green eyes sent a cold thread of panic through her chest.
"A dream... what did you dream?"
"I dreamed..."
Myrcella turned. Slowly.
Not through the mirror. She looked up and looked directly at Cersei.
Cold eyes. Sharp eyes.
They cut straight through the armor Cersei had built from pride and lies and carefully maintained pretense, the armor she'd spent the night fastening back into place.
Guilt hit Cersei like a hand at her throat. Her gaze tried to slide away.
"I dreamed of a very proud lioness," Myrcella said. Soft voice. Every word landing clean. "Trapped in a cage by a cleverer hunter."
At the moment she began speaking, her fingertips pressed into her palms. Almost imperceptibly. Almost.
"Every day the hunter fed her the finest meat. And every day he tormented her in the cruelest ways. Humiliated her. Pulled out her claws. Ground her pride to dust."
"Until one day, the lioness was completely tamed."
"She knelt at the hunter's feet. Like a docile little pet, wagging her tail, licking her master's toes. Begging for mercy."
The silence that followed hit Cersei like a physical blow.
Every drop of color left her face at once.
She looked at Myrcella. At that faint curve at the corner of her mouth — barely there, barely a smile — that cut deeper than any blade.
She knew.
Myrcella had seen. Myrcella knew everything.
The realization landed like a slap loud enough to ring through a hall.
Shame. Humiliation. The specific, annihilating despair of being seen at your absolute worst by the person you love most.
Cersei's legs went soft under her.
She wanted to explain. She wanted to argue. She wanted to scream that it wasn't what it looked like, that she'd done it for Myrcella, all of it, every last piece,
But those green eyes were watching her. Seeing through everything. And every word Cersei had prepared turned to stone in her throat.
They faced each other.
One of them had just crawled out of hell, still wearing the cold marks of its chains.
The other had stood at hell's gate all night, watching.
A chasm opened between them. Silent. Unbridgeable.
Then knocking, sudden, sharp, urgent, broke the silence apart.
"Your Grace. Your Highness."
A Kingsguard's voice through the door.
"His Grace the King summons Lord Lann to the throne room, and requests you both attend."
The King's summons.
Cersei grabbed it like a drowning woman grabs a rope. Her gaze skittered away from Myrcella's face.
"I... I need to change."
She threw the words over her shoulder and fled, nearly fled, out of the room she could no longer stand to be in.
Myrcella watched her go. That panicked retreating figure. Her own expression didn't change at all.
She stood slowly. Smoothed her skirt with practiced grace. And followed.
---
The Throne Room.
Robert Baratheon sprawled sideways on the Iron Throne with a great horn cup in his fist, pouring ale down his throat. His face wore the battered look of a long hangover layered over something feverish and wrong.
Lynn stood calmly in the center of the hall. Still. As if the room arranged itself around him.
Ned Stark stood at the Hand's post with a face like carved northern stone.
Lord Renly, Varys, and the rest were all present, every expression carefully weighted with things unsaid.
Every eye in the room was fixed on the man who was about to become the most powerful lord in the kingdom, the King's own good-son.
When Cersei and Myrcella walked in, Robert's face split open.
"Ha! Myrcella, come here!"
He beckoned her over with the easy warmth of a man summoning his favorite.
Myrcella's steps slowed for just a moment.
She lifted her gaze, looked past the assembled lords and ladies, and found Lynn. Precisely. Without searching.
Their eyes met.
His expression was exactly as it always was. Calm. Undisturbed. As if last night had been a farce happening in some other world, to some other people, with nothing to do with him.
Something sharp went through Myrcella's chest. Her fingertips went cold.
Lecherous bastard.
She looked at him.
Just you wait. I won't be like her.
She filed that vow away somewhere quiet and private, then withdrew her gaze, walked to Cersei's side, Cersei, who had gone the color of old wax, and stood still.
"Lynn!"
Robert emptied his horn in one long pull and hurled it at the floor. CRASH. The sound rang through the hall.
"I have decided!"
"Your wedding to Myrcella will be held in 3 days!"
"I want all of King's Landing to know — no! All of Westeros!"
"I, Robert Baratheon, am giving the most beautiful princess in the realm to my most loyal subject!"
The words boomed through the empty hall, heavy with swagger and barely veiled threat. He wanted this wedding. He wanted the spectacle of it. He wanted everyone, Stark, Lannister, every house with a name, to kneel beneath the iron heel of House Baratheon.
"And I will officiate it myself!"
He rose from the throne and clapped Lynn on the shoulder with a hand like a shovel blade.
"Ned Stark will place Myrcella's hand in yours with his own two hands!"
Robert's eyes swung to Ned. The malice in them was naked, unadorned. Not bothering to hide itself.
The Warden of the North. Arya's father. Forced to personally give a Baratheon princess in marriage to the man who should have wed his own daughter.
Ten thousand times worse than kneeling in blood.
Ned's body shook. Just once. Hard.
The hand bearing the Hand's signet ring, hidden inside his sleeve, closed into a fist, nails biting deep into his palm.
He said nothing. He lowered his head further.
The heart he had given Robert Baratheon 20 years ago was already dead.
What remained was only a father. A father who could swallow any humiliation the world chose to heap on him, if it meant something better for his daughters.
"Hahahaha!"
Robert's laughter tore through the hall. Manic. Triumphant. He loved this, the sight of them all swallowing it down, rage locked behind careful faces, unable to say a word.
He was the King.
He was the one master of Westeros.
The audience ended in the ringing of that laughter.
The lords and ladies filed out.
Ned Stark fell into step beside Lynn. His feet slowed for a moment.
He looked at this young man. The man who was about to become his good-son. The man who was already the husband of his other daughter.
Those gray eyes held something Ned Stark had never worn before, a knot of feeling too complicated to name.
His mouth opened.
And closed.
And what came out, in the end, was barely a sound at all.
➤ Next: Now It's Truly Impossible to Explain
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