Cold Winds, Long Winter
Margaery
Cersei is not there. Tommen is not there. The High Sparrow may be putrid with blind religious lunacy but Margaery's workings of the mind are not. Something is arot here. Loras' trial and the red worms branding his forehead as the Faith's trinket are suddenly a trifling thing.
Perhaps it is but a moment's unrest, Margaery tells herself. Tommen surely ought to come, her husband, her poor naive king.
But come he doesn't.
Concerns tumefy like an infected boil as the vast hall of the sept can no longer absorb the raised voices of the crowd. Cersei is not here. Neither is King Tommen. They all need to leave. Margaery has come to know the heinous paths the Queen-Mother's schemes usually spiral down. Margaery knows her ill devices, and she has grown to understand the mechanism of them. And now seems like the perfect time for somebody like Cersei to flash her teeth from the shadows.
She watches the High Sparrow put his minions to work, the serpent tightening its coils in her stomach. He is entrusting mere boys barely sporting half a beard with the crucial task of retrieving a woman that should never be underestimated. Cersei Lannister would not allow herself to be bent like this. She is expecting this.
The lion is the grandest danger when the lesser things believe its claws to be uprooted. Margaery's palms slicken with worry. Cersei comes not. King Tommen comes not.
By the time she rushes down to the center of the seven-pointed star in a swish of chaste silk to confront the High Sparrow, she reckons they must be halfway dead already.
The High Sparrow does not listen. His little sparrows never rejoin them. Margaery can almost feel the slow burn of Cersei Lannister's blackhearted, ever-waiting eyes staring at her from afar, carving bloodied patterns on her back. The perverse lick of death is almost tangible as she drags Loras to the exit, only to ricochet against a buffer of black robes and pure madness.
Margaery cannot allow this. Her father is present, as is her brother. The whole of house Tyrell's future resides in this one room. She cannot die here. She mustn't.
She pushes out with all of her might against the chain wall of unflinching, tar-black robes, and yet her fiery demands and her appeals to reason, anybody's reason, achieve little more than Loras' feeble efforts next to her. She's always pushed harder than him, always been the fiercer one. And yet her heart wrenches to see him like this – a shell with its essence spilled to the floor and drained down the city canal.
Loras will not come to her aid, she sees. She doubts very much he's even capable of aiding himself. Once again the women must be strong where men are not. Once again it falls on her to be the one unflinching link that holds it all together. It is up to her, now, to ensure they all have a tomorrow to put the broken pieces back together. A tomorrow Cersei Lannister will go out of her way to deny them.
She tries with words again, these ones spilling hotter, sharper, more insistent from her pursed lips. The High Sparrow will not listen still, though there is a shift in the air. The room is twitching in the beginnings of fear, and so is Margaery.
She is out of her depth when reason fails her and clever words are slipping away from her grasp. She's never had anything else to rely on. She begins to suffocate on a string of words, all swallowed by the roaring clutter of the crowd.
Margaery might be seeing through where others fail, but Cersei Lannister has outplayed the High Sparrow, and through him, she's outplayed them all.
They're all going to die here unless she does something, Margaery realizes all of a sudden as her fists beat in futility against black fabric. The thought hits her like a slap across the face, remote and immediate as only death can ever be. Robes whisper all around in the tongue of cheap fabric. It's only a rough sort of leather, but it feels like forged iron, sturdy and unyielding as a Kinsguard's polished breastplate.
Margaery panics. She must do something, or else this place will be their tomb. She thinks of Loras and of her grandmother and of Highgarden, of the men she has buried in the ground and on high cliffs as her husbands, of a little girl walking through corridors framed in green who used to dream of a crown and a true king by her side.
It's all absurdly distant, what with all the cries and the screams. They all need out. There is not enough air here for the lot of them, and, as if to hasten their end, everybody has taken to gasping wildly, greedily, robbing the one next to them of their rightful breath.
She turns to the High Sparrow one final time, steeling herself for what's to come. His elderly face is blank canvas, though wrinkles break up his forehead into various sections as his eyebrows slowly interlock. And, just a moment before the world goes dark, numbness withdraws from him. His face turns into everybody else's faces: fright and shock crossbreed with something else and Margaery knows this is the end.
Her heart throbs louder than her thoughts. They all need out. They all need out.
The way out has been sealed. What are these alien creatures blocking her way?
She must be going mad with fear, because for a moment there, she swears she hears Cersei Lannister's malicious laughter exploding right behind her shoulder. It's low and throaty, just as she remembers it, like a rumbling beast beneath their feet, erupting from the recesses of the sept, and the entire ground is shaking in response to it.
Could it be anything short of a dragon?
The lucent green swims for but a moment.