JAIME

As just about anyone could have guessed, the Seven had once again conspired against Jaime Lannister's push into heroism; they'd decided to have the blacksmith who'd been charged with crafting the wrist-mounted morning stars work with an uncharacteristic haste. Consequently, the morning after his embarrassing murder of the old woman, Jaime was awakened by a pair of squires delivering his new flails. He hadn't even been allowed a chance to metaphorically flip the pages of the good guy handbook. From a dreamless sleep into the irresistible temptation of being able to clobber whole squadrons of foes from horseback; that was how Jaime's morning had gone so far.

"They hook in like this, roit?" mumbled one of the sandy-haired boys, surely a bastard from some distant limb of the Lannister tree. "Give 'em a twist, m'lord. They should lock in roit propa."

"I'm not a buffoon," Jaime snapped. Unfortunately, he felt like one. The squires had detached his left sword for him, but that left him with only the right sword by which to thread the flail into the left wrist mount. It was like trying to wipe his ass with his feet.

"'Ere, m'lord, allow me..." said the other squire.

"No! Stand down, you fool. I can do it myself."

The squires watched Jaime wrestle with his wrist for about thirty seconds. They stood in wretchedly awkward silence. Jaime screamed and blood began to patter on his bedsheets, and one of the squires started forward with an outstretched arm, hoping to offer some kind of assistance. Jaime clouted him with his left stump and sent him flying into a low wooden table which immediately snapped two legs and spilled the boy to the floor. "Just tie the fucking chains around my wrists," he eventually bellowed.

"No need for that, ser!" The boys quickly fastened the turning locks and had the balls mounted to Jaime's wrists. "Give 'em a spin, ser! Give 'em a spin!"

Smiling now, feeling revitalized, Jaime hoisted both balls into the air and began to twirl them in crisscrossing arcs that shattered a lamp, a bookcase, a stunning suit of gilded armor, and one of the squires. The remaining squire ran shrieking from the apartments, clotted with bloody hair and brain matter. Jaime crouched and drank from the wine trough he'd had installed in his chambers, wiped his lips on a wrist, and then rose to his full height. He felt powerful and euphoric. It was time to go shopping.

"Good morning, Kingslayer!" shouted an oafish vendor who Jaime discovered wedged inside an impressive kiosk. The various stuff arranged in glass cases and dangling from the ceiling by narrow hempen ropes drew Jaime in at once. He saw magic potions, voodoo dolls, sex toys, glass-blown smoking pipes, daggers, and a variety of plates painted with silly, colorful imagery.

"What's all this, then?" he asked with a flashy smile as he approached the kiosk.

"My, my, Kingslayer!" the vendor cried, and returned a smile of his own. "I'll answer your question, surely I will, but first, won't you tell me what are those?"

"These," Jaime announced, standing back and beginning to twirl the morning stars over his head in a wild circular pattern, "are my newest hands."

"Some right proper hands they are, ser," the fat vendor assured him. "As for all this, it's part of the king's mandate."

Jaime felt suddenly afraid. The king's ideas were usually the stupidest shit Jaime had ever heard in his life, and he knew the boy was liable to stamp any one of them into permanent law at any moment of the day or night. He clenched his jaw and felt ashamed for not having heard of this latest mandate. "Explain," he said curtly.

"Oh, the king's demanded smoke shops on every corner!"

"Smoke shops? Well, why have you got wooden dildos dangling behind you like links of sausage?"

"Oye, they's just part of the smoke shop ambiance, ser!"

Suddenly Jaime heard the oncoming patter of bare feet running up behind him. He whirled around and saw a macabre red thing wrapped in a dark rag of a dress go zipping past. The thing snapped its head in Jaime's direction and gave him a brief but thorough examination as it went; he felt his future had just been scattered on the ground among tea leaves and rolled bones, laid bare to the eyes of the world.

"Seven hells," he gasped as he watched the flayed woman continue trotting down the street. "Why in the world doesn't somebody put that crazy bitch out of her misery?"

"Oh, that's just Queen Cersei," the vendor explained with a demonstrative wave of his hand. "She's gotten rather weird lately, ser."

Jaime felt his mind roll slowly over in his skull. He nearly fainted.

"Cersei was flayed?" he asked. When he'd been kept in Riverrun's dungeons, the drunkard guarding his cell had often taunted him with tales of Cersei's gruesome fates; she'd been flayed one day, drawn and quartered the next, and then, maybe the day after that, fed to vicious penguins that were bred specifically to peck people and given sharpened iron beak attachments.

"Oye, she was, all right! She hardly shuts up about it, ser! In fact, it's hard to have a conversation with her about anything else."

"Well, that seems only natural," Jaime told the man defensively. "It must hurt quite badly."

"No, no, she's in no pain at all, ser. The flaying was her own idea. She had it done it to annoy the king and the vice king."

"To annoy them? Wait, what in Aegon's holy name is a vice king?!"

The vendor scratched his chin. "Well, ser, it's like a regular king, I think, only... a little worse. More crippled, like."

Tyrion, Jaime thought dazedly. He wandered away from the smoke shop feeling as though he'd just woken from a coma, or—something. What could have possibly gone on during his absence from King's Landing to cause all this snowballing lunacy? Suddenly he whipped back around and returned to the kiosk.

"What kind of potions do you have?"

The vendor jumped in surprise. "Well, they're mostly bullshit, I think," he admitted. "I'd not lie to you, ser. They're just different colored water."

"What about that one there?" Jaime used one of his stumps to point out an elaborate glass vial with a spiral neck, sparkling like a sapphire in the morning sunlight.

"That one there's especially bullshit, m'lord."

Jaime snorted impatiently. "What's it supposed to do? I see an illustration of a man with a large Afro. Does it reverse hair loss?"

"Oh, surely it does, ser! Slather a bit of this blue shit on the ol' dome twice a fortnight and before long you'll wake up choking on your own hair! A ponytail to get stuck between the butt cheeks, ser! Locks with which you could strangle the enemy!"

Jaime squinted at the sky. "I'll take ten vials," he said. "Put them—er, just slide them into the gaps in my armor, if you're able. That's it. Perfect. You can get one or two more in there, I think. Right. Okay! Now. What do I owe you?"

"Well... just forget my face, ser. When that blue shit doesn't do anything for you, please don't come back and break my head with those awesome morning stars. That's all the payment I ask."

Jaime grimaced. "Unfortunately, the Jaime Lannister you all knew is dead and gone. I've turned a new leaf. I'm a good guy now, and I'll pay you for this useless shit. What's the damage?"

"I don't need no money, ser," the oafish vendor said in a low voice. "All the new merchandise was paid for by the crown. I don't even know what the MSRP on an item like this would be."

"Well, what do you want?" demanded Jaime. He was losing his patience.

"Let me have a feel on that gorgeous snout, m'lord," the vendor mumbled shyly. "Only a quick caress, that's all."

Jaime leaned forward and let the man fondle his nose for a moment.

"Yes, oh yes," the man whispered as he withdrew his hand. "Just like I always imagined it would be. Soft, but strong. Faintly sloped. I'll never wash this hand again, I won't."

"If you ever tell anyone I let you do that, I'll come back and cave your face in with these morning stars," Jaime told him. Damnit, he realized instantly. A good guy would never say that. He cleared his throat, and said: "I misspoke. I meant to say that I'll... address a very strongly-worded letter to you, condemning your actions and suggesting you don't do them anymore." He smiled icily.

"Please don't, ser! I couldn't take it!"

"Then you'd better keep quiet."

He walked carefully back to the Red Keep, rattling and sloshing with the ten vials of smuggled snake oil. His plan was solid: good guys were always giving gifts. And if my lord father doesn't appreciate this one, then he can suck my golden dong, Jaime thought, seething. He was in a terrible mood. He didn't like that Cersei had been flayed, and he especially didn't like the way she had run by and stared at him without speaking.