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Myrcella felt lost.
The clamor of King's Landing outside the window, the distant clatter of armor in the corridor, all of it seemed to fall away from her at once.
Her world shrank to nothing but the ringing deep in her ears.
Not Robert Baratheon's daughter.
Hers and Jaime's child.
The blood of the lion. Not the stupid stag.
Every word shattered everything she had ever believed into pieces.
"Hahaha."
Myrcella laughed.
She looked at Cersei standing before her. That face, twisted by something close to madness, yet still carrying a strange, morbid beauty.
In this moment, Cersei was no longer the lofty queen. No longer the mother who filled her with shame and fury.
She was an accomplice.
One who had dragged her into the abyss from the moment she was born, sharing with her a secret potent enough to set the entire kingdom ablaze.
Myrcella suddenly understood.
She understood so many details she had never let herself think too deeply about before.
Why Joffrey was so cruel and vicious. There wasn't a shred of Baratheon magnanimity in his bones, only the cold arrogance of the Lannisters.
Why she and her brothers had all inherited their mother's golden hair. Yet not one of them had Robert's signature black.
Why Jaime's gaze always held such tenderness when it landed on her. Why, whenever she had any trouble at all, he was the first to come, whether it was finding a lost puppy or buying her sweets, he always saw to it himself.
Myrcella suddenly felt very stupid.
She had noticed all of it. She had seen the signs for years.
She should have known.
Her entire life, from the very moment of her conception, had been a lie. Beginning to end.
A filthy secret.
"Now do you understand?"
Cersei's voice pulled her back from the edge.
"Do you understand why I did all of this, my dear?"
Cersei looked into Myrcella's green eyes, all the light gone from them now, and saw exactly what she'd been looking for.
That innocence, the kind that belonged only to a girl who hadn't yet learned the world, was dead.
Innocence didn't work in King's Landing. It never lasted long here.
Especially not now, at a moment like this.
"I have wronged you, Myrcella."
"I gave birth to you with Jaime out of selfishness. That was my fault. I am the one who made you complicit."
"But I have been trying to make up for it all these years."
"You are my life."
"I will not allow anyone to harm you."
"But I sheltered you too well."
"So well that it made Joffrey cruel, Tommen naive, and you, pure. Kind."
"And now I understand the truth of it."
"If I die, you all die with me."
"I cannot die."
"And I will not let you die either."
Cersei reached out and stroked Myrcella's golden hair.
"Did you think I truly wanted to marry you off to Lynn?"
"I have a dozen ways to stop a wedding if I want to."
She let out a short, bitter scoff.
"A man who already has a betrothal contract? Making him my son-in-law would be the greatest humiliation House Lannister has ever suffered."
"But I had no choice, Myrcella."
Something surfaced in Cersei's eyes then. A terror that cut all the way to the bone. The vulnerability she kept buried beneath every layer of pride and madness, the thing she had never shown another living soul.
"From the day you were born, I have lived inside that fear."
"Every night I wake from nightmares."
"Dreaming that drunkard Robert discovers the truth. Dreaming he comes with his warhammer and smashes open Joffrey's skull. Chops off your head."
"This Red Keep is nothing but the most magnificent cage."
"Ned Stark. Jon Arryn. Renly Baratheon."
"All of them waiting to expose what you are."
"Like vultures circling a corpse, ready to swoop down and tear us apart the moment they get the chance."
"I needed a force from outside, Myrcella."
"Something that could protect you. Something that could let you survive."
"And Lynn, he is that force."
Cersei's voice took on a feverish edge.
"He has dragons, Myrcella."
"Targaryen dragons."
"Weapons that could melt the Iron Throne down to slag."
"He has the support of the North and the lands beyond the Wall. He holds a fortune that cannot be ignored."
"He is the only man in all of Westeros who dares to grind the king's orders beneath his boot, while that fool Robert can do nothing but smile and wave him through."
"He is the one variable. And he is your only way out."
"Even if Lynn makes an enemy of the entire world, as long as he has those dragons — even in defeat — he can carry you far away. You will never have to fear for your life."
"As for Joffrey and Tommen, I will find another way."
Myrcella listened in silence.
The storm raging inside her gradually stilled as Cersei spoke, word by word, in a voice saturated with a despair she had clearly carried for years.
And then the image came back. The one she hadn't been able to unsee.
Cersei, kneeling before Lynn.
Humiliation. Degradation. Disgust.
The words still turned in her mind.
But this time, something else moved with them.
It wasn't surrender. It wasn't spinelessness.
It was a mother. A queen.
With her back against the wall, staking the last thing she had left, her most precious dignity, on a single, desperate wager.
Buying a ticket to the future with her own body. Her own pride.
A ticket to survive the storm that was coming.
"So..."
Myrcella's voice came out dry and rough.
"You knelt to him. Pleased him. Let him humiliate you. All of it, just to make him believe he had completely broken you?"
"To make him drop his guard and willingly... protect me?"
"What else would it be for?"
A smile crossed Cersei's face. Fresh tears slid down anyway.
"Why would I, the most honored queen in the Seven Kingdoms, do something so indecent, so shameless, so utterly beneath me?"
"Lynn's weakness is lust."
"In the North — the day that boy Bran fell from the tower — I met Lynn alone. I had already seen it then. To get him to tell me more of what he knew, I deliberately let him see my chest. He just stared. Openly."
"You think your title as princess is enough to make him devoted to you?"
"Men are cheap, Myrcella. Especially lustful men like Lynn."
"The more submissive you are, the more he'll tire of you."
"The more you resist, the more interesting you become."
"But none of that compares to letting him believe he has conquered a queen. A proud Lannister."
"He told me himself, he wanted a marriage alliance with the Lannisters. Named you specifically. The one he wanted."
"I knew he had been taken by your looks."
"For your sake, I agreed."
"I let him conquer me. Let him believe he controlled everything. And because of that arrogance, he will take you — the trophy he won from me, and treat you as his most prized possession."
"When the storm comes. When everyone wants to put you in the ground for what you are. He will fight with everything he has to protect that trophy. To protect his pride."
"I took my dignity, my pride, everything I had, and I turned it into a collar around your neck, Myrcella."
"A collar forged from gold and gemstones. One that will make Lynn fight for you like nothing else in this world."
Cersei reached out with both hands and gently cupped Myrcella's face, pale as paper.
"I am about to lose. I can already feel it, my daughter."
"But if you can win, if you can live, then my loss is worth every bit of it."
Her mother's tears were scalding hot.
They fell onto the back of Myrcella's hand, drop by drop. But each one felt like it was burning straight through to her heart.
She looked at the woman in front of her.
Selfish. Vicious. Mad. Someone who would do absolutely anything.
The woman who, in a single moment of error, had personally thrown her into hell, and then spent every year since trying to build her a bridge back out.
Did she hate her?
Myrcella didn't know.
All the hatred she'd carried, in the moment of learning this brutal truth, had become something else. Something more complex. Something heavier than hate.
A sorrow that ran in the blood. A sense of shared fate, two pieces on the same board, neither one free.
They were both pawns in this game of thrones, moved by hands that were not their own.
Only Cersei had wagered her dignity.
And she had wagered her entire life.
"I understand."
After a long silence, Myrcella spoke.
The last trace of confusion faded from those hollow green eyes.
Cersei looked at her daughter's face, at the expression on it, one she recognized perfectly because she'd worn it herself, and finally let out a slow breath.
Her Myrcella had grown thorns at last. The naive, gentle little flower she had been was gone.
"Good."
Cersei rose slowly, and became once more the Lannister queen she had always been, high, cold, untouchable.
"Then you know what to do."
"No more losing your temper at Lynn. No more pushing him away."
"A man like him, the more you resist, the more he enjoys it, but his patience is not unlimited."
"Those two Stark vixens are waiting for you to slip up. The moment you're not paying attention, they will move in and take what belongs to you."
"Go, my daughter."
Cersei walked to the door and pulled it open.
"Go and apologize to him."
"Use your tears. Your fragility. Your body. Everything you have. Win back his affection."
"Make him believe you are still that naive, kind little princess who needs his protection."
"Make him hold you in the palm of his hand and call you irreplaceable."
"You must learn to use everything at your disposal, Myrcella."
"Especially your beauty. And your name."
"Turn them into weapons, the sharpest ones you have, and bind Lynn to you so tightly he can never pull free."
"Remember. From this day forward, you are no longer a Baratheon princess."
"You have no more ties to Baratheon or Lannister. You are Lynn's woman. That is all."
"Never forget that."
The door closed.
Myrcella was alone again.
The bronze mirror on the floor caught her reflection, her face in fragments, scattered across the broken pieces.
She looked at herself. At those green eyes, the eyes that had always, unmistakably, belonged to a Lannister.
Then Myrcella smiled.
She bent down and picked up the shattered jewelry from the floor.
She closed her fist around the fragments and held on, letting the sharp edges bite into her palm.
Blood welled up through her fingers, drip by drip, falling onto the white carpet and blooming into small, dark red flowers.
The pain cut through everything.
She had never felt so clear.
Apologize?
No.
Lannisters don't apologize.
And she hadn't done anything wrong.
Lynn was the one at fault.
But she would make him believe she had come to apologize.
Myrcella let the fragments drop without looking at the wound on her palm. She crossed to the washbasin and cleaned her face with care. Then she went to the wardrobe and chose the plainest white dress she owned, the one that made her look the most delicate, the most soft.
She took a slow breath. Pulled the door open. And walked toward Lynn's room.
Her steps were steady. Not a trace of hesitation.
She stopped in front of his door. Raised her hand to knock.
The door swung open from the inside.
Lynn was on his way out.
He looked at her, different dress, face pale, eyes oddly calm, and paused.
Then his gaze dropped to her hand, still dripping blood, and his brow pulled together.
"Myrcella, your hand, "
He reached out without thinking and caught her wrist.
She didn't pull away.
She let him hold it.
She looked up at him with those green eyes, the moisture in them catching the light.
None of the anger from before. None of the warning.
Only a grief so thick it had no edges left.
"Lord Lynn..."
Her voice was barely above a whisper, threaded through with the tremor of someone trying not to break.
Like a small bird caught in a rainstorm, wings soaked through, with nowhere left to go.
"I'm sorry."
"I... I shouldn't have lost my temper at you."
➤ Next: Cheating with Green Sight
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