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Lin En watched the lioness backed into a corner. Watched her bare her last claws in the most desperate gesture she had left.
She dares to threaten him?
Seems his training hadn't taken well enough.
He let out a soft laugh, then reached for the wine glass on the table and swirled the amber liquid inside, slow and easy.
He was angrier than he'd let on. Angrier than anyone in this room.
But he couldn't show it.
This, the absolute indifference — would infuriate Cersei far more than any retort.
Sure enough.
The moment she saw his expression, Cersei snapped.
"Do you truly think I can't do it?"
Her voice cracked upward, edged with hysteria.
"Do you think Lannister wrath is nothing but empty noise?"
"No." Lin En set the glass down. "I believe you completely."
His gaze settled on her face, that beautiful face, fury pulling it into something ugly.
"Because your trump card can't only burn me."
Cersei's breath caught.
"Those little gifts the Mad King left behind." Lin En's mouth curved. "Quite the surprise."
The smile sent a chill cutting straight through her.
"The little green clay pots hidden beneath the Great Sept of Baelor. Hidden in the ruins of the Dragonpit. Hidden in the filthy cellars of Flea Bottom..."
With every word, another shade of color drained from Cersei's face.
How could he know?
This was her greatest secret. Her ultimate trump card, the one thing that let her challenge every enemy, even dare to make an enemy of all of Westeros after Robert died. The mad plan that belonged to her alone.
Wildfire.
Green. Viscous. A liquid that burned like magic.
It ignited on contact, couldn't be drowned, could burn across the surface of water itself. It clung to everything, cloth, wood, leather, steel. The Alchemists' Guild brewed it in secret, stored it in rough clay pots set inside stone cellars packed with sand or water, because even a vibration, even sunlight, could set the whole thing off.
The Mad King Aerys II Targaryen had planned to use it when King's Landing was about to fall. He would burn the city to cinders and let Robert Baratheon rule a kingdom of ash. It was that madness that drove Jaime Lannister to put a sword through his back and earn the name Kingslayer for the rest of his life.
Lin En remembered how it had played out, in the story he knew. Cersei, cornered by the High Sparrow's faith, had finally used what was buried beneath the Great Sept. The explosion took the building, the High Sparrow, Margaery Tyrell, and half her enemies in a single green flash. It also drove her son Tommen to step from a window. And from that wreckage, Cersei had climbed onto the Iron Throne.
Her trump card was real. It was a genuine threat, even to him.
But not quite enough.
Lin En had greensight. If he let Cersei drag him down with her, he'd deserve to be a laughingstock.
"Light them," he said, rising from his chair, "and yes, you can turn King's Landing into a sea of fire."
He walked toward her. Slow, deliberate steps.
The pressure rolling off him forced her back — one involuntary step, then another.
"But, my dear Queen." He kept walking. "Have you thought it through?"
"Wildfire doesn't have eyes."
"It will burn the Red Keep. It will burn your Iron Throne. It will burn that magnificent silk gown right off your back."
He stopped in front of her. His hand came up and gripped her chin.
"And it will burn that precious son of yours, still sleeping soundly in his bed. Little Tommen."
His voice dropped to almost nothing. A devil's murmur, each word placed precisely against her softest, most unguarded place.
"When that day comes, you will be the greatest woman in the history of the Seven Kingdoms."
"A queen ruling over five hundred thousand charred corpses and a field of ash."
"Assuming, of course, that the green flames leave enough of you to rule anything at all."
"You..."
Her mouth hung open. Her eyes couldn't hold his, they slid away.
The trump card she had been so proud of had been dismantled in front of her, casually, completely. The weapon she thought could destroy everything had become a noose around her own neck.
Lin En had her lifeline in his fist.
"So stop threatening me like this, Cersei. It's beneath you."
"You control the Wildfire. I have men throughout King's Landing. I can control those little toys just as easily as you can."
"And when that time comes, we'll see who blows whom sky-high first."
A trace of impatience finally entered his voice.
This farce had gone on long enough.
"You are in no position to negotiate with me."
"The only thing you can do right now is pray."
"Pray that I treat Myrcella with kindness. Pray that I let your Tommen and Joffrey live out their lives in peace."
Every word she had aimed at him, returned to her. Exactly as she had said it.
Cersei's mind went white.
All the pride. All the madness. All the scheming. Shattered, every piece of it, in this single moment.
Her spirit collapsed all at once.
In those green eyes, eyes that had always looked down at the world, something surfaced that she refused, above all things, to acknowledge.
Fear.
She was afraid.
And she had lost.
She had been completely and utterly handled. Again.
She stared at the man in front of her.
This Northerner, whom she had never once taken seriously. He had laid his trap without a sound, without a wasted gesture, the most skilled hunter she had ever faced. And then he had waited. Patient, unhurried, waiting for her, the self-certain lioness, to walk into it one step at a time.
Until the cage door closed.
Until there was nothing left to struggle against.
And yet, somewhere inside the fear and the despair, a strange thought surfaced.
Robert's conquest had been brutal. Jaime's had been tender.
But neither of them had ever done this. Neither had ever dared to take her soul and her dignity and grind them under his heel.
She had known, the moment she heard Lin En was back, that she had no leverage over him. She'd known it, and she had come anyway. Walked straight through his door and tried to provoke him.
If that wasn't foolish, what was it?
Had she wanted this? Had some part of her wanted to be pushed to the floor and made to feel small?
Cersei shook her head and forced the thought out.
No. It was for Myrcella. All of it was for Myrcella.
But that hardly mattered now.
She had acted rashly. She had come here on impulse, struck at him first, and now she was here.
So what could she do?
Beg?
No.
She was Cersei Lannister. Queen of the Seven Kingdoms.
She did not beg.
But... Myrcella. Tommen. Joffrey.
She would not let her recklessness fall on them.
The problem needed a solution. There was no version of this where she cursed him to his face and still walked away forgiven. Lin En was not a fool, and she had always known he never absorbed a loss without answer.
In the suffocating silence, Cersei slowly bent her noble knees.
Yes.
She accepted it.
If she couldn't fight, then she would yield. She would bow her head and admit her fault.
The long black silk skirt spread across the cold stone floor like the petals of a dying rose.
Cersei knelt before Lin En once more.
The first time she had knelt, it felt as though every drop of her strength and dignity had been wrung out of her.
This time, somehow, it felt like less. Not nothing, but less.
She was enduring. Bending for a purpose. That was all.
The thought made it easier to bear.
She drew a slow breath. Her head dropped low. The golden hair cascaded down like a waterfall and covered her face, which had gone utterly bloodless.
Lin En said nothing. He only watched.
He watched the proudest woman in Westeros kneel at his feet like a penitent at prayer.
Cersei raised her head.
She caught it, the flash of anger in his eyes, there and gone in an instant. Those green eyes that had always blazed with contempt now held something else entirely. Humiliated submission.
Lin En was angry. He'd been angry since she walked through his door. Of course he was. Being hunted down in the middle of the night by this madwoman and threatened to his face, anyone would be furious. He wasn't carved from stone. He had his limits too.
"My dear Queen."
He looked down at her.
"Did you think kneeling would be enough to put out this fire?"
"I am not Joffrey. A few words won't settle this."
"Right now..." His voice was even, almost pleasant. "I have quite a lot of fire in me."
Cersei looked up at him. Her lips moved.
"Then tell me what you want."
Lin En chuckled and took her chin in his hand.
"Very simple. Something the Queen should find quite manageable."
"So I'll ask my most esteemed Queen — with her own mouth..."
"To put this fire out."
In the end, under Lin En's flat, unhurried gaze, Cersei reached up with those careful, manicured hands, hands that had only ever lifted golden goblets and pressed seals into wax, and the metal buckle rang out, sharp and clear in the dead silence.
CLANG!
It shattered the last of what she had left.
Her golden hair. Rich as the finest silk.
The room held no other sound.
Lin En could smell the expensive rose pomade in her hair. He could see the tips of her ears burning red.
Conquering a woman's body was simple. Conquering her soul was something else entirely. And when that soul belonged to Cersei Lannister — proud, vicious, imperious Cersei, who looked at the world as though it owed her — the satisfaction was something different altogether.
Every time he saw that haughty, above-it-all expression of hers, something in him wanted to tear it down completely.
He grabbed her golden hair.
...
In the room next door, Myrcella lay on her soft bed and stared at the ceiling.
Sleep wouldn't come.
A few months. That was all it had been, and yet it felt like more life than her first fifteen years combined. She was exhausted in some deep, formless way, and at the same time, more awake than she had ever felt.
She shifted. Turned over. Stared at the dark.
And then she heard it.
A sound, drifting through the wall from Lin En's room. Faint, indistinct.
Something striking the floor in a slow rhythm.
THUMP... THUMP... THUMP...
And beneath it, someone holding something back. A low, strangled sound, like a person in pain.
Myrcella frowned.
Was Lin En unwell?
She held still and listened. The sound stopped.
Her heart turned over.
She thought of the stories she'd heard in Winterfell about the Red Keep. The Mad King's ghost, they said, still walked the halls. The wrongly killed maidservants wept in the walls.
She pulled the blanket up and tried to seal the sounds out.
But they came anyway, threading through the fabric, finding her ears no matter what she did.
She listened more carefully.
It didn't sound frightening, actually. It sounded like someone, retching?
Her curiosity got the better of her fear.
She pushed the blanket aside, slid out of bed, and set her bare feet on the cold floor. Then, quiet as a cat, she crossed the room step by step to the hidden door between the two chambers.
She pressed her ear to the cold wood.
This time she could hear it clearly.
Not a ghost.
That was Cersei's voice.
Filled with something she had never heard from Cersei before. Humiliation. Pleading.
Myrcella went rigid.
She found the old keyhole, long forgotten, still there, and put her eye to it.
The room was dark. But she could make out a figure kneeling on the floor. A cascade of gold hair, unmistakable even in the dim light.
She would not mistake that in a thousand years.
Queen Cersei.
And standing before her, a tall man.
She couldn't see his face.
Then she saw what they were doing, and the image burned itself into her forever.
Her mind went completely blank.
She slapped her hand over her mouth just in time.
Her whole body turned cold, as though she had been dropped through ice.
What was happening?
Who was that man?
Why was he in Lord Lin En's room?
What were they doing?
➤ Next: The Wedding in Three Days
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