Chapter notes

Though it is possible to work out the passage of time and character ages from the dates, I'll save everyone the trouble this time round. This chapter takes place a year after the previous one. Tommen is fourteen and Myrcella fifteen.

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Myrcella dodged Ser Meryn's admirable attempt to bar her path and flung open the doors to Tommen's chambers with the letter still clutched in her fist.

She found her brother on his back, with his member buried in one whore and his bottom being stroked by another.

'Oh gods, TOMMEN!' Myrcella shrieked; bile rising in her throat as her brother, noticing her, suddenly began to squirm and blush with all the embarrassment of a child caught in the pantry after dark.

'Myrcella!' Tommen squealed in horror; trying to both disentangle himself and cover himself up; 'stop looking, you shouldn't be – you shouldn't –'

He attempted to rise several times, but the whores were still 'working' despite his protests and did not seem to want to release him.

In another life, Myrcella might have found the situation embarrassing, mortifying; even funny. But now.

The sight of her brother's nakedness made her nauseous. She wanted to look away, but she couldn't. She wanted to know how Mother and Uncle Jaime could have looked at each other in this condition, and felt anything apart from revulsion. She wanted to know. She didn't know.

'Myrcella this is not a condition in which a brother should receive his – WILL YOU DESIST, LADIES?'

The ladies in question desisted almost grudgingly; the one Tommen had been coupling with sighing with regret as he slowly drew his member out of her. It was long, red and hard.

Myrcella looked. Myrcella didn't understand.

Tommen hastily threw on a gold brocade dressing gown, and set about paying the whores from his own pocket, seeing them out personally and thanking them graciously for their 'kind service'. His kittens, meanwhile, were hopping resentfully back up onto the bed and reclaiming the space that they saw as their own, except for one snow-white beauty that remained stretched out in Tommen's chair; the sunlight glistening in his coat of snow.

Tommen scooped up the kitten in question, seated himself, and offered Myrcella wine and the chair opposite him. Myrcella sat, and drained the cup in one gulp; studying her little brother the king as he scratched his kitten between the ears and made soothing noises to help the little animal fall asleep again.

Tommen had grown a lot in the past two years. His face was longer, and thinner, and lined where it should not be.

Mother's death had been hard on him.

He was tall, but not gangly, though he had grown very quickly in a very short space of time. And he was gentle, despite Uncle Tyrion's best efforts. Myrcella loved him for it, and feared what Margaery Tyrell would do about it when Uncle Tyrion deemed Tommen mature enough not to be completely undone by her.

'I don't know why you're looking so disapproving,' Tommen mumbled.

'Yes, you do,' Myrcella replied; pouring herself another cup of wine.

'You could have knocked,' Tommen insisted.

'And you could have dismissed that idiot Trant long ago,' Myrcella rejoined; sitting back in her chair; 'do you know he flatly refused to let me in?'

'He's only doing his job!' Tommen blushed.

Myrcella cocked an eyebrow at him.

'As a glorified bodyguard while you amuse yourselves with – what are they exactly?'

Tommen looked at her as though she were the worst human being in the world.

'Their names,' he huffed, 'are Violet and Rose.'

'Whores,' she corrected.

'They have names!' Tommen innocently contended.

'You were coincidentally sent two whores called Violet and Rose?' Myrcella mocked.

Tommen stuck his bottom lip out in displeasure.

'They were a present from Uncle Tyrion,' he declared.

'Uncle Tyrion gives you too many presents,' Myrcella stated, 'he can't have whores now that he's married, so giving them to you is the next best thing. I don't think Lady Sansa would be happy.'

'Lady Sansa has worse things to be unhappy about, with her at Winterfell and Uncle Tyrion here,' Tommen told her; earnestly shaking his head; 'though it's better than Uncle Tyrion being surrounded by Northern lords who'd cut his throat at the first opportunity. I maintain it's his own fault. Him and his smart mouth.'

And with that, he began to stroke the kitten in his lap, as he always did when he was agitated.

'There, there, my little love,' he murmured; his face curving into an expression of utmost sweetness, 'everything will be fine.'

'I doubt it,' Myrcella snapped, 'what's this?'

She tossed the letter, now ball-shaped from its sojourn spent clutched in her fist, at her brother's head. He deftly caught it, fought briefly with his kitten for possession of the sacred object, and slowly unravelled it while Myrcella watched him with anger boiling all over again in the pit of her stomach.

'It appears to be a letter from Prince Doran Martell suggesting the beginning of a fashionable correspondence between you and Prince Trystane,' Tommen declared in his king voice, 'what is wrong with that?'

Myrcella looked pointedly at him.

'What?' Tommen insisted, with a confusion so profound Myrcella almost believed him.

'Don't be coy,' she snapped, 'I know that you're behind this. You and Uncle Tyrion both, and probably Uncle Kevan too.'

She tried, briefly, to contain her anger; the wild beast that had stalked her body and her mind since the day she had taken a bow up onto the roof of the Great Sept of Baelor and murdered her own mother for love for revenge for love.

When the fight to control her anger failed, as she had known it would, she flung herself out of her chair and began to pace; growing irater by the second as Tommen looked at her, stared at her, as though she were out of her mind.

'Sometimes,' Myrcella snarled, 'I detest the cowardice of men. If you want to marry me off, marry me off and get it over with, don't try and accustom me to the idea, as though I were a child who can't take it. I am a princess born, isn't that what I'm for? To be married off to some useful nobleman of your choosing and transformed into a machine for the production of babies?'

'You don't want to be treated with kindness and consideration, then?' Tommen snapped impatiently, 'do I understand you correctly?'

'May I congratulate Your Grace on the depth of your perceptive powers.'

'It's not normal to want to be treated badly. Uncle Tyrion says –'

'I DON'T CARE WHAT UNCLE TYRION SAYS!'

Tommen fell silent immediately.

"Uncle Tyrion says this, Uncle Tyrion says that,' it's all you ever talk about!' Myrcella shouted, though it was not ladylike to raise her voice, 'you speak about him as though he shits marble!'

'Myrcella!' Tommen squealed, 'ladies shouldn't say the 's' word!'

'Lady Arya uses it all the time!' Myrcella protested.

'Lady Arya runs a quarter of my kingdom for me!' Tommen exclaimed, 'in return, I grant her certain liberties.'

Myrcella paused, considered, and decided that her original point was the most worth returning to.

'And when you come into your maturity, and you need to run your kingdom alone, what will you do? If Uncle Tyrion gets hit by a carriage tomorrow, what will you do? Convene with his spirit and ask it for help? Pray to his head? Hang his embalmed body on your bedroom wall?'

'Myrcella, stop it!'

'The Tommen I know would never have cavorted about with whores at all, never mind that you're engaged to Lady Margaery, and –'

'And the Myrcella I know would not spend her life acting like some bitter old hag who thinks she deserves to be punished! Since Mother's death, you've been nothing but angry, angry, angry: all you ever do is shout and complain!'

'I HAVE PLENTY TO SHOUT AND COMPLAIN ABOUT!'

Her voice cracked. Tommen, now vigorously stroking his kitten, stared at her in astonishment; concern and fear in his eyes.

'Like…like what?' Tommen asked.

Myrcella thought about the blood in her veins. The dirty blood; the blood that made her bad. She thought about people with unpolluted minds, like Tommen: people who were happy. She thought about her mother, mad, and the things that she had almost said, that day in the square before the sept. She thought about how she knew and Uncle Tyrion knew and Uncle Jaime knew and Lady Arya knew and Tommen didn't know, and how she had to protect him; even if it meant going mad herself from guilt and disgust and loneliness.

'Nothing,' Myrcella said, and sat down to drain her third glass of wine.

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