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Myrcella stood in the middle of the wreckage, her chest still heaving.
"I'm fine."
"I just knocked some things over."
"No one enters without my command."
The footsteps outside hurried away.
The world went quiet again.
She walked slowly to the bed and sat down, all the strength gone out of her.
She looked at the floor.
Those exquisite things she had once treasured like jewels were nothing but broken pieces now.
Just like her heart.
No. Her heart wasn't broken.
A piece of it had been ripped out of her, leaving a hollow that would never heal.
She thought of Lynn's hateful face. She thought of Sansa's simpering, practiced innocence. And then she thought of last night, behind that door, that humiliating image that had made her very soul tremble.
Jealousy. Anger. Disgust. Shame.
She didn't understand.
She truly didn't understand.
Why?
Why could men take everything they wanted with a clean conscience?
While they, these so-called princesses, these so-called queens, these so-called ladies of noble birth, could only ever be beautiful commodities. Priced and tagged. Traded for favors, for alliances, for power. And forced, all the while, to endure the endless betrayals, the endless wandering hands.
Myrcella buried her face in her palms. Her shoulders began to shake.
"Lynn, you really are a bastard. I never want to have anything to do with you again!"
The door opened quietly.
No knock. No announcement.
Only one person in the Red Keep moved through it like she owned every stone.
Cersei Lannister.
She wore a black silk gown, her golden hair coiled up without a single strand out of place, leaving her face exposed, beautiful, and tired in a way that had settled deep into the bone.
She looked at the wreckage covering the floor. Not a flicker of surprise crossed her face. Not even a ripple.
She took it in, then closed the door.
"It looks like my little darling has run into a bit of trouble."
Her voice was soft. Careful, almost. As if she were afraid of startling something.
Myrcella's head snapped up.
Her eyes were red-rimmed, and the look in them was pure wariness, a cat whose territory had just been invaded.
"What do you want?"
Cersei stepped over the scattered debris without breaking stride and came to stand in front of her. Then she bent down.
She picked up the silver comb that had snapped clean in two.
King Robert had given it to Myrcella on her tenth birthday.
Cersei brushed the dust from it with her fingertips, turning it over, studying the emerald set into the handle. The stone had gone dull. No light left in it at all.
She ignored Myrcella's hostility entirely.
"In my first year of marriage to Robert, I smashed a comb too."
Her voice was perfectly level. Like she was recounting something that had happened to someone else.
"It was made by the finest goldsmith in King's Landing. Pure gold. Set with a hundred pearls from the Summer Isles." A pause. "Far more beautiful than this one."
Her gaze drifted to the window and the gray sky beyond it.
"Robert was dead drunk on our wedding night."
"While he was fucking me, he kept calling out another woman's name. Over and over."
"Lyanna. Lyanna Stark."
Cersei's smile was worse than weeping.
"Do you know what that feels like?"
"I am a person. I have dignity."
"I lay there watching him sleep like a dead pig, and I wanted to kill him. I wanted it so badly I could taste it."
"But I couldn't. The Lannisters were behind me."
"The next morning, I smashed that comb."
"I smashed everything I could get my hands on."
"I thought if I broke enough things, I could break that dead woman out of his heart."
"It didn't work."
She turned back to Myrcella, and the quiet that came back into her voice was almost gentle.
"You know what we are, Myrcella. Women like us. We're like these beautiful combs, these expensive perfumes. Pretty to have. Not necessary."
"Our only value is to please the men around us. When our youth is used up, or when they find something new to play with, we get discarded. Just like that."
Cersei turned her head slowly. Those green eyes, identical to Myrcella's own, had gone completely still. Like two pools of water with nothing living underneath.
She looked at her daughter's face. At all the fury and grief written across it.
"You feel like Lynn betrayed you."
It wasn't a question.
Myrcella's whole body jerked. She bit down on her lower lip until it went white.
"He's tangled up with Sansa Stark. He's tangled up with that wildling girl from the North." Her voice cracked with the force of it. "And I — the princess who is supposed to become his wife — have to stand there like a fool and watch it all."
"By what right does he do this? How dare he?"
"Because he's a man."
Simple. Brutal.
"Because he holds power that you, I, and every last Lannister needs."
"Myrcella." Cersei reached out and ran her hand through her daughter's soft golden hair. "You have to understand something. In this world, love is a lie that poets write down and girls dream about in their bedrooms. It is worth nothing."
"Power is what's real. Power gets you what you want. Power lets you destroy what you hate."
Myrcella stared at her.
She looked at that beautiful face, at the exhaustion worn so deep it had become part of the bone, at the madness threading through it like a crack in stone.
She thought, suddenly, that the woman in front of her was a stranger. And at the same time, so terribly, achingly, pitiful.
"So that's why you..."
The words came out rough.
"That's why you knelt before him. That's why you used that way of... pleasing him?"
Cersei went still.
Her hand, mid-stroke through Myrcella's hair, stopped in the air.
"Ha." A breath. Then: "Hahaha."
Then she was laughing, and the tears were coming whether she wanted them or not, rolling free down her face.
She let go. Took two stumbling steps back.
"Yes." The laughter faded. "I knelt."
She lifted her head.
Tears had cut through her makeup, dragging two ruined tracks down that exquisite face.
"I knelt at his feet like a dog. Begging."
"Do you think I'm disgusting? Pathetic?"
She looked at Myrcella, and in those green eyes was a despair that had turned inward and started eating itself.
Something seized hold of Myrcella's heart and squeezed. The pain was so sharp she couldn't draw breath.
She wanted to say no.
She loved Cersei. She did.
But last night's image was still there in her head, vivid and unwanted, and every word of comfort died before it reached her mouth.
"You think I wanted this?"
Cersei pulled her close, wrapping both arms around her.
"You think I was willing to be humiliated like that?"
"Who was it for?!"
"It was for you. For Tommen. For Joffrey."
"If I hadn't done it, do you think he would have let it go? Do you think he would have let you walk into that wedding as his bride without a fight?"
"He would have destroyed us. Destroyed the Lannisters. The same way he destroyed Petyr Baelish."
There was no anger left in her voice. Only a grief so large it had swallowed everything else.
Myrcella stood frozen. Her mind was a blank.
"You don't understand any of this, Myrcella. You don't understand anything."
Cersei pushed herself up off the floor and stood.
She wiped her face clean.
Whatever had been soft in those swollen green eyes was gone. What remained was something colder, and more absolute. A madness that had stopped being afraid of itself.
She walked toward Myrcella one step at a time, a lioness backed against a wall, past the point of calculating the cost.
"Do you think Robert Baratheon — that drunk — ever truly cared about you? As a daughter?"
A smile spread across her face. Strange. Twisted. Almost beautiful in how wrong it was.
"That's right. I got my revenge on him."
"He isn't even your real father."
Something detonated inside Myrcella's skull.
She stared at Cersei. She must have misheard.
"What... what did you just say?"
"I said, "
Cersei leaned in close, her lips nearly at Myrcella's ear, and spoke each word with the slow, deliberate weight of a sentence being carved in stone.
"You are not Robert Baratheon's daughter."
"You are only my child."
"Mine and Jaime's."
"You, Joffrey, Tommen, the blood in your veins is the purest Lannister blood there is."
"Lion's blood. Not the blood of that braying, stupid stag."
Time stopped.
Myrcella's eyes went wide and fixed. She looked at her mother's face, so close, so twisted with madness, at those green eyes with their burning, ruinous light.
Her world came apart.
Father... was not her father.
Her real father... was her uncle?
How. How was that possible.
It was more absurd than anything she had witnessed the night before. More insane. More, the word rose in her throat like bile, disgusting.
"Now do you understand?"
Cersei looked at her daughter's face, white as paper, and smiled.
"You and I are family. Just us."
"The moment Robert discovers who you really are, I die. You die. Joffrey dies. Tommen dies."
"So he cannot find out. No matter what it costs. Because I love you. I love all of you."
"All I need is power."
"When I sit on that Iron Throne. When I am Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. No one will ever be able to take our heads again."
The words poured over her like something warm and wrong and irresistible.
Like the most venomous snake, Cersei pressed her deadliest poison straight into her daughter's already shattered heart.
She wanted to make Myrcella exactly what she was.
Myrcella didn't speak.
She stood there.
In her mind, the same words turned over and over and over.
I am not Robert's daughter.
I am Jaime's daughter.
Lannister blood runs in my veins.
She didn't know how long she stood like that.
When she finally raised her head, the look in those beautiful green eyes was something that made even Cersei go still.
The last piece of the princess, the last bright, untouched thing, had gone out.
What was left was calm. Absolute and cold.
If the very fact of her birth was the greatest lie of all,
then why had she ever bothered with morals, with rules, with any of it?
If this world had always been filthy,
then why should she have to stay clean?
➤ Next: Cersei's Wisdom — Tears Unshed
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