I aplogize to everyone for being so late. This chapter was supposed to be published three days ago. I was so busy these last few days that I couldn't find time to go on my computer, re-read the chapter and upload it.
Here it is, and if nothing goes wrong, the two chapters should follow in the next two days.
MARGAERY XX
Mira was putting some order in the room. She was very silent, and Margaery was glad of it. It was a chance that it wasn't Sera who was there tonight. Mira was much more respectful of Margaery's privacy than Sera, waiting for Margaery to speak first more often than not. And right now, silence suited Margaery very well, for she had no envy to talk to anybody.
I know Jaime and Cersei very well, better than anyone. I don't know when they began. Maybe it started before I was even born. All I know is that it lasted for many years, even before Robert married Cersei, and it continues today.
She wished she had been wrong. She wished all this was a lie, just like Tyrion told her on the road, and just like he kept telling her until she came back from the Stormlands. She wished… she just wished what Tyrion told her first had been the truth all along.
Loras was dead. Her little brother was dead, killed by the will of Cersei Lannister, a woman Tyrion protected, a woman he lied for, a woman who slept with her own brother, committed the incest, murdered babies and had her own husband assassinated. It wasn't enough for Cersei to sleep with her cousin. She also slept with her twin brother, and she did so for years, maybe before Tyrion was born, according to him.
How could he lie to her? She trusted Tyrion. She believed him when he said Cersei and Jaime didn't sleep together. She had never thought he could be hiding something like that. Not long after he told her about Tysha, she had stopped to doubt about him. Maybe there had been a few moments when she wondered if he was telling the truth, but she has brushed aside the possibility of lying. She thought he ignored about his brother and sister, not that he was actually protecting them and hiding this secret. Maybe she should have known. It wasn't the first time he hid something from her. He didn't tell her about Cersei's attempt of murder. However, if he did hide the truth from her, he had never lied to her like he did when she questioned him about his family.
She came back to King's Landing with the intent to convince her husband they had to deal with Cersei and Joffrey once and for all. It was no longer the time for long-term plans, to erode their power and to wait for the right moment to send them in exile somewhere they couldn't cause any trouble. She believed she may need a few days to convince Tyrion that Stannis Baratheon was probably telling the truth. She didn't expect it to be easy. Joffrey was Tyrion's nephew, and Cersei was his sister. She knew it was very difficult to turn on your family, especially to the extent Margaery was considering. However, she never considered the possibility that her husband might reveal to her that he had known about his siblings for years.
Loras was dead, and Tyrion betrayed her. It was betrayal. She ruled the Westerlands and to some extent all the Seven Kingdoms with him for three years. They shared the same bed. She even gave him the one thing she thought she would never give to a man. Her heart. She had fallen in love with him, something she never thought would happen, something she didn't want to happen. And yet he lied to her about this, hid the truth about Cersei. This woman had tried to kill her. Loras was dead, murdered by the kingsguard she sent with her. She felt that she had lost not only her brother, but also the man she loved. And it hurt, it hurt almost more than the loss of Loras.
"Do you need anything, my lady?" Mira had finished to prepare the bed. Margaery had been longing for a night in this bed while she was one the road, but now rest was the last thing on her mind.
"No, Mira. You may leave. I wish to be alone."
"Yes, my lady."
From where she sat on the couch, she didn't see Mira's face. She looked at the floor. Her friend lingered behind for a moment, but then she left hastily. Margaery was now alone, but although this was what she wanted, she didn't feel any better.
Mira had lit up the candles before she left. Outside, darkness was falling over the city and its five hundred thousand inhabitants. She recalled the children who died when the City Watch slaughtered Robert's bastards. She remembered the despair in the mothers' eyes as she visited them, offering condolences that couldn't bring their children back. Jon Arryn, Robert Baratheon, Eddard Stark, his household, the children of King's Landing, Loras, the list of people Cersei and Joffrey had killed kept growing, and that was without accounting for the people they tried to kill, like Brandon Stark. Children, innocent people, good men who only wanted to live peacefully. And everything their deaths achieved was to start a war that could only end with the deaths of many more people. The worse was that Tyrion had been an accomplice in all this.
One of her personal guards, a man sworn to her father and Highgarden, walked in. "My lady, Ser Jaime Lannister wishes to speak with you."
"Tell the Kingslayer he can go and fuck himself," she replied. She never spoke that way usually, it was more in Tyrion's style, but she couldn't care less. She would say what was on her mind. The knight looked surprised, but he didn't leave.
"He says it's urgent. He says it might be the last time he can speak to you."
"You can tell him to go to hell."
"He says this is about Lord Tyrion, my lady."
She didn't reply for a moment. Finally, she sighed. "Let him in, but make sure he has no weapons on him."
"As you wish, my lady."
A moment later, Ser Jaime Lannister was walking in and standing right before her. She didn't leave the couch and looked away, as if he wasn't there.
"So, you know the truth?" he asked.
"What truth? There are many things I know now that I wasn't aware of a few hours ago, and all of them make me despise you, your sister, and your son."
He didn't deny it. "Yes, Tyrion is quite angry at me too."
She lightly scoffed. "What a change." She looked straight at him. "I will never understand Tyrion on that. I don't understand how he can love a brother like you, after everything you've done to him. You don't deserve to be his brother. You were no better with him than Cersei was."
She hated Tyrion right now, but she hated Ser Jaime, and Cersei, and Joffrey even more, and not only for the things they did, but also for the things they did to her husband, and only for the fact they hated him.
"I always loved him more than I loved Cersei," the knight declared.
She laughed. "Hiring a whore for him, making him believe she loves him, and then standing by while she is raped by dozens of men. That doesn't seem like love to me."
She stood up and walked in the balcony's direction, though she didn't go out. She just stared at the darkness of the night.
"I never hired a whore for him," he said from her behind her.
"There's no need for lies. Tyrion told me everything. I know what happened. Keep your lies for people who don't know who you truly are."
"I'm not lying. I'm telling you the truth."
"Then we have a very different view of the truth, for this is not what Tyrion told me."
"It's because he doesn't know the truth. It's because I lied to him." That brought a frown to her face and she turned to face her brother-in-law. "I never hired this girl. The first time I saw her was on the road when she ran to us with two men on her heels. And then the next morning Tyrion was wed to her. That's when I learned her name was Tysha. I don't know who she was, probably who she pretended to be. But when our father learned that Tyrion married her, he was furious. He told me the girl was only after Tyrion because he was a Lannister, and she hoped she would live in a castle. He thought she was in love with his gold, not with him. So he forced me to tell this whole story of a whore I would have hired and to tell Tyrion about it. I didn't know he was going to have her raped by half the garrison of the Rock. I wasn't there when it happened. I only heard about it after it occurred."
For a long moment, she stared at the knight before she spoke. "Tyrion doesn't know about this?"
"No, he doesn't. For him, I'm still the big brother who allowed him to be happy for two weeks with a girl he thought who was in love with him. The truth is… she was truly in love with him. I found her in the streets of Lannisport the same day. She buried a knife into her throat."
A heavy silence took place between them. The memory of her broken husband as he told her the story of his first wife was still fresh in her mind, years after he told her. What she just heard was worse than she imagined. Anger flared inside her, and she didn't know if it was because she was thinking about the husband who betrayed, or about what his brother did to him.
"I wonder how Tyrion would think of you if he knew the truth," she said.
"He would hate me. It would destroy him," he said with a contrite expression. Like always, Margaery noticed all the feelings and emotions that went through the knight's face, like she always noticed on people's face. He was broken, but she didn't care.
"He's already been destroyed by what you did. Do you have any idea how it haunts him? He was still regularly dreaming of her when we met."
"If you're worried that he may go back to her, there's no reason. She's dead."
"You think that's what I care about? Tyrion protected you, more than you deserved, and yet for about ten years you lied to him and he loved you like a brother because of this lie? What kind of brother are you? What kind of man does this to his brother? You deserve all the titles you have. Man without honor, Oathbreaker, Sisterfucker, Father to a Monster, Kingslayer. Can you name me one vow you didn't break? Can you name me one person whose trust you never betrayed? Can you name me one good thing you made in your life?"
Jaime Lannister was stunned into silence. The proud man who was always smirking was now completely silent, unable to answer her. She hated him, she hated Cersei, she hated their child. Stannis was right to have rebelled against them. Anyone who rebelled against them was right. She should have joined Loras in the Stormlands. She wanted to kill Tyrion right now for taking their side.
"Yes, I killed my king," he finally answered.
Margaery scoffed. "You are proud that you killed the man you swore to serve?"
"I'm not proud of it, but it's probably the one good thing I did in my life."
"Why? Because your father ordered you to kill him? Everyone knows he despised Aerys. Like father, like son, both trying to kill the king they swore to serve and torturing their family."
"Tell me, Margaery, you know that when you become a knight, you swear to defend the innocents. When I joined the Kingsguard, I also swore to protect the king and to obey him. What should I do if the king murders innocents?"
"I don't know. Maybe you could ask the Starks. It seems they were all innocents, and yet you allowed two kings to kill three of them in your presence. Did you defend the innocents or obey your king back then?"
He was silent for another long moment, then words came out of his mouth like a stream. "The Mad King wanted to burn King's Landing. After the Trident, he stocked wildfire all over the city. Beneath the Sept of Baelor and the slums of Flea Bottom. Under houses, stables, taverns. Even beneath the Red Keep itself. He said, let Robert Baratheon be the king of the ashes. But my father arrived in King's Landing before Robert. He claimed he was here to defend the city against the rebels. I warned the Mad King to not trust him. My father would never have picked the losing side. I urged Aerys to surrender peacefully, but he didn't listen to me. He wouldn't listen to Varys who tried to warn him. It was the one time when he should have listened to him. Instead, he listened to Pycelle. You can trust the Lannisters, he said. So the gates were opened and my father sacked the city. I went back to the king and begged him to surrender once more. He ordered me to bring him my father's head. Then he turned to his pyromancer and said Burn them all. Burn them in their homes. Burn them in their beds. So I killed the pyromancer, and then I stabbed Aerys and made sure he would never come back. That's why I killed him. Tell me, if your brother had been a kingsguard and done the same thing, would you have called him Kingslayer?"
He stared at her defiantly, the first time he did so since he came in. Slowly, she approached him, and like she did with his brother, she slapped him across the cheek. The difference was that she slapped him a second time across the other cheek.
"Do not talk about my brother!"
"I never wanted him to die."
"Well, he's dead, because of you."
"Me?"
"Yes. All this started with you. You made the monster who killed Ned Stark. You pushed Bran Stark from the top of a tower. You stood by and did nothing while Joffrey had the Warden of the North executed. You may feel better about killing the Mad King, but this is only further proof that you are a coward. You served the Mad King until the end, and when you had nothing to lose by turning on him and everything to lose by serving him, you killed him. If you really cared about the innocents and the people, you would have killed him long before. You disgust me. You are no knight. My brother was a knight, but not you."
She turned away and walked to the balcony. "Leave, and never come back." She didn't look at him. She didn't want to have anything to do with him anymore. The more she learned about Jaime Lannister, the more she wanted to kill him.
"You know that I saved your brother. At the tournament…"
"Leave." She wouldn't hear anymore from him. She knew more than enough. She didn't need to listen to more ugly truths or to hear more lies. She was done with Jaime Lannister.
He sighed. When he spoke again, his tone was entirely different. He was begging. "Blame me for your brother's death and for everything else if you want. Blame Cersei, blame Joffrey, blame all the Seven Kingdoms if you want, I don't care, but don't blame Tyrion. He only tried to protect people who he thought were better than they really are. You're the best thing that ever happened to him. He loves you, more than anyone else he's ever loved. He's made his choice. He chose you. And I've made my choice me too."
He left her apartment. She heard his boots echoing in the corridor as he walked away.
She looked into the night. The moon was nowhere to be seen. It was hidden by clouds, for its light didn't bath the night with its white glint. Everything, alive or not, was plunged into darkness. Anything that would happen in the city tonight would remain unknown until the morrow, when the sun would cast its light upon the Crownlands. The only major source of light that was visible to the eye were the many torches of the Lannister camp, outside the city walls. There, thousands of men were sleeping, waiting to fight Stannis for a false king.
She still didn't think about what she would do. She should write to her father, tell him everything so that he wouldn't engage their men into the war. She also had to decide whether she should leave, and if she did, where she would go. Would Tyrion stop her? And more important, why would he stop her? Would he do it because he loved her or, and that's what she feared the most, would he stop her because he needed hers and her father's support? Their marriage had been like that at the beginning, a political union out of a need for both their families to strengthen their power. This purpose still existed, but their marriage had grown into something much deeper. She couldn't suffer her marriage to be purely political. Not if she was married with Tyrion. As much as she hated him, she also loved him.
The door of her chamber opened, and she met the eyes of the man she loved and hated at the same time.
That makes a lot of truths revealed in one single day for Margaery.
I hope Margaery doesn't seem apathetic to you. She just discovered Tyrion lied to her for a very long time about Cersei, and still under the shock of the revelation. Plus she has very conflicting feelings fighting inside of her right now, so this is no surprise that she needs some time, if only a few hours, before she reacts to the information she just got and takes action. At the end of the chapter, she seems ready to go back into action, and then Tyrion walks in.
Please review
Next chapter: Cersei
