Cersei remained dimly aware that her son was still speaking to her. She could hear the sound of his voice emanating from the pile of blankets and pillows that had been his sickbed since the Bastard of Bolton's murder. She could hear the sound intensifying from a shout to a screech as Joffrey realised her abstraction. But she couldn't pull back to him; couldn't come away from where her mind was taking her, because twenty seconds ago, Joffrey had remarked, 'I think I'll marry the little Stark bitch to Uncle Jaime,' and a warhammer had seemed to swing from nowhere and strike her in the chest. And her breath had been crushed from her lungs like blood from a wound, and memory had filled her heart and mind like poison; one memory that seemed far more familiar than it should have been, as though she had been foreseeing it all her life.

It was the memory of Jaime's face at the interment; his face among the stones and the dead; his eyes fixed intently on the Stark girl; his eyes calling her preposterous grey wolf ones up to his like a siren song; not as if he wanted to take her for a paramour or a whore, but as if he wanted to take her in his arms and hold her while she wept. There had been a gentleness in his expression rendered all the more terrible by the thing that had accompanied it: a dark sorrow that had clung to him like a silent form of torture, and a deep guilt (though she couldn't imagine what for) that had seemed to crush him where he stood. It had given him an air of self-pity that had made her want to hit him till he bled, and now, as she remembered it, she realised that what she had seen in her brother that day had not been pity, or compassion, or infatuation, or even lust, but love; the worst kind of love; love as it was in the songs; so pure, so passionate and so utterly hopeless that no amount of fucking could ever truly consummate it.

Jaime was in love with her. He was in love with that dirty, doe-eyed, foul-mouthed little animal, and probably had been for years; and Cersei hadn't seen it; had refused to see it in – oh gods, in everything, in all of it, in every day, in every -

…in the way that melancholy had suddenly and without warning enveloped her brother and taken him away from her; in the way that circles had appeared under his eyes and silence had taken the place of his speech; in the way that he had come to her bed for the past five years: rarely, and even then as if he didn't need her at all, only the comfort of her flesh.

Had he been thinking of… her during those times? Had he been imagining that scrawny, uncouth child in her place?

I am a lioness, Cersei proudly thought, no one can take away what is already mine.

Joffrey's lips were still moving, and his face growing redder and redder, and Cersei fought the unladylike urge to drive her fist into the wall as she searched herself for every sign, every possibility, every thing that she had not seen; every thing that might have told her earlier. And as the sodden cloth began to slip off Joffrey's forehead and his fingers to fist in the sheets, she remembered a time – only moments after she had lost Myrcella – when the rabble had tried to tear her and Joffrey to shreds, and half the city had descended into a state of anarchy, and Jaime, instead of staying at the Red Keep, with her, had risked his own life to save that little animal from the mob; a girl of one or two-and-ten that he didn't even know.

He had brought Arya Stark back to the Keep clutched in his arms like some breakable thing: snapping at everyone who tried to take the girl off his hands; going with her to the infirmary and staying with her when it hadn't been necessary; and enquiring for days afterwards – in an avuncular fashion that Cersei had found funny at the time – how the girl did, and whether or not she had bad dreams.

'She killed a man, Cersei,' Jaime had gravely answered when she had asked him why.

'What of it?' Cersei had replied.

Her brother had looked at her, then, with something like sadness on his face.

'The first time changes you,' he had replied.

And Cersei had imagined that this was one of those things – those male, warrior, blood things – that she treasured in him, but that she could never fully understand; and she had never thought of the incident again.

It all made sense now, of course. Nothing makes a woman more eager to fall into bed with a man than his saving her from a crowd of raving commoners and pretending to give a fuck about her afterwards. She had had no idea that Jaime was capable of liking them so young either, but then she had never imagined him to be capable of loving another person: apart from herself, of course.

Had he already fucked the girl once before? It might make things more difficult if he had.

Then suddenly, she wanted to laugh, and she berated herself for even considering the question.

I am a lioness, she thought, nobody can take away what is already mine.

'I cannot think the match a good idea,' Cersei said; biting back everything that she could not say to her son.

'Why can you not?' Joffrey snapped; as though he didn't care a fuck either way.

'It's what he wants,' Cersei said; pretending to give a carefully-considered reply.

Joffrey was not convinced.

'So?' he growled, 'who cares if it's what he wants? It isn't what she wants. That's all that matters. I can imagine no worse fate for the little bitch. Apart from the one she's already had, of course.'

Cersei cocked an eyebrow at her son.

'I had no idea you thought so badly of your Uncle Jaime,' she observed; an iron knot forming in her stomach.

'He defies me,' Joffrey snarled; 'he's always forgetting that I'm the King. Always. He's worse than Uncle Tyrion ever was.'

'So why not marry the girl to Uncle Tyrion?'

'Because Uncle Jaime is worse than Uncle Tyrion, ARE YOU FUCKING DEAF?'

The iron knot in Cersei's stomach and the bone whiteness of her knuckles were fast transforming into the desire to walk across the room and hit her son around the face. But whatever that little Tyrell whore chose to call herself, Cersei Lannister was a queen, and would always behave as such; even if the king himself had no such scruples.

'You should think carefully about losing the Lord Commander of your Kingsguard simply to prove that your word is law,' Cersei continued; as if Joffrey had not shouted at all.

'My word is law!' Joffrey snapped.

'Whatever impertinences your Uncle Jaime has committed, he is a fine warrior,' Cersei persisted, 'there are not many others who can replace him.'

'I may appoint one of the Kettlebacks,' Joffrey replied; beginning to tremble with fever, 'it might be pleasant to have somebody who smiles, for a change.'