Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds
She was inconsolable.
As soon as she spoke the words, all sound seemed to disappear from Tywin's world, and he watched as she shifted, transplanted, displaced herself about the room, her mouth yawning open in one silent scream after another. Her pale and ghastly face was contorted in horror, and her eyes were red, streaming Tears of Lys down her face and into her skin.
The light behind the shutters turned the room crimson, and she paced and turned towards him and away from him; words like 'coward' and 'animal' erupting out of the silence; and Tywin felt he had returned to the scene, to Castamere, to the red mist that had kissed his face and filled his eyes; except this time she was with him, watching him; standing beside the pool of ruby shadows in which he saw the face of the little girl he had killed, her eyes young and afraid and blue in death.
And suddenly, he could no longer bear the reflection of the red on her face; could not endure the thought of her seeing what he remembered, seeing what he had done, though he was not ashamed of it, and he threw open the shutters, letting in the light. Joanna stormed across the room and slammed them shut again, screaming that the Tywin she knew would not murder women and children like they were pigs at some market; asking him again and again who he was, what he was, what he had become, what he had done and why; calling on all seven gods to bear witness that a name built on dead children was no honourable name at all. And he shouted silently back at her for what felt like hours; about restoring the family name, about uniting the Westerlands behind him, about doing what needed to be done. And he would do it again for their name, he said; he would murder a thousand more children; gladly; immediately; for the honour of their House.
Then her face lost all colour, even red, even white, and her cheekbones turned to gashes in the half-darkness, and her mouth yawned open in a groan and a cry as she sank into the red shadows, blood pooling around her feet. Real blood.
She screamed and pushed him away each time he tried to help her; her blood-stained hands defiling his doublet and his face, the smell of the redness invading him, running him through. Then the maester arrived and turned him from the room, and he was too weak and too fearful to argue with him. He paced the corridor outside their chambers for hours, something inside him gasping for breath and dying as he listened to his wife scream and cry as their child was lost to them, as surely as though Tywin had killed it himself. He wondered, briefly, why she had not told him.
If you were a woman, would you tell a slaughterer of innocents that you were with child?
He realised, then, that to her, he had vanished; his entire being annihilated by one bloody act. Annihilated in her eyes, and whose eyes truly mattered but hers?
I do not regret what I have done. Not even now. Am I wicked?
He was spared his own answer as the door swung open, the maester's lips moving, but no sound emerging as he drew Tywin aside to let the septa pass discreetly, a tiny bundle of white sheets clasped in her arms. The maester had large brown eyes and a kindly face, but Tywin could not hear a word he said. His eyes and ears were full of that tiny bundle, silent and lifeless as it was carried out of sight like a disgrace, a humiliation, a memory to be disposed of quickly, and forgotten.
When he pushed into the room where Joanna lay, sound rushed back into him, Joanna's breathing breaking like waves against a rocky coast, the sound of her tears as they dried on her cheeks streaming through his ears like a waterfall. She stared straight ahead of her, at the window, at the wall, at anything but him. She looked dead. And he was the one who had almost killed her.
His own sobs were like screams in his ears, terrifyingly loud; and the tears branded him, tearing holes in his marble mask and burning it like acid, so that nothing remained but a molten mound of ash.
'Tywin,' he heard her murmur, 'Tywin. Come here. I need you now.'
When he took her hand it seemed to freeze in his, the smell of blood still fresh on her skin. He condemned himself in half-words and half-sentences; the redness of the room and of himself ghosting out of his mouth in meaningless utterances and bundles of nothing.
Even now, I do not doubt that I did the right thing, he thought, even now, at this very moment. I am everything she says I am. Everything she fears I am. My pride has done this. My pride has killed our child; has almost torn asunder what is…what is best in me.
And she was what was best in him. He saw that now. Without her, he had no conscience, no…no goodness.
Just thinking the word was strange to him.
But what are men without goodness? Savages. Animals. Myself as I was, at Castamere.
'Tywin,' Joanna said weakly, looking into his eyes, 'Tywin.'
'Yes?' he replied, kneeling next to her.
'Promise me that you will never do something like this again.'
Without hesitation, he promised.
Notes
Chapter title is from Bhagavad Gita 11: 32, made famous by J. Robert Oppenheimer