— Margaery —

The queen of the Seven Kingdoms sat on the balcony of Maegor's Holdfast in the late afternoon light and embroidered roses on a square of white linen, and she did this for an hour every day, in the same place, at the same time, where the Red Keep's pages and washerwomen and minor courtiers could see her. The roses were of no use to anyone. The point was the visibility. A queen who embroidered roses on a balcony every afternoon was a queen who was calm, and a calm queen meant a calm court, and a calm court meant the city below the Red Keep stayed calm too, and the city staying calm was, this season, the most valuable political work Margaery Tyrell could do.

The court was not calm. Not really. The court was a kettle approaching the boil. Half the lords of the Crownlands had not answered Cersei's last summons. Three of the Small Council seats stood empty because the men who had filled them had quietly gone home to their estates and were not answering ravens. The City Watch was being paid late. The smallfolk in Flea Bottom were not yet rioting, but the bakers were quietly raising prices, and Margaery's grandmother — who was, technically, in Highgarden, but whose ravens reached the Red Keep three times a week through channels Margaery did not officially know about — had written that the bakers were the reliable indicator. When the bakers raise prices, dear, and the Watch lets them, the city is six weeks from a riot. Mark the date.

Margaery had marked the date. The date was eight days ago.

She embroidered another petal.

The boy — her husband, the king, the most monstrous fourteen-year-old in the Seven Kingdoms — was inside, in his solar, doing what he did most afternoons now, which was sulking. He had wanted to lead the army to Highgarden in person to teach the Tyrells a lesson. Cersei had told him no. His grandfather had not even bothered to write back to the proposal. Joffrey had broken three goblets and a serving boy's wrist over the refusal, and had then, two days later, cut his own hand on a dagger he had been waving around in the throne room, and had sulked since. He was, Margaery had observed with cold professional interest, a less dangerous monster when he was sulking. She kept him sulking when she could.

She was managing him. She had been managing him for almost a year.

It had not been what she had expected of her marriage. She had been raised to expect that managing a husband would be a matter of charm, and beds, and well-timed whispers; she had practised all three. None of them had worked on Joffrey. Joffrey did not respond to charm. Joffrey was bored by beds; he was, his mother had eventually admitted to her in a wine-soaked late-night confession, not yet a man in that way, which was the politest description of the thing Margaery had ever heard. And Joffrey did not whisper. Joffrey shouted.

What Joffrey responded to, Margaery had learned, was flattery so extravagant it bordered on parody, combined with the careful management of his physical environment. If she praised his cleverness lavishly enough, he was civil to her for an afternoon. If she made sure his food was the food he liked, his servants were the servants he had not yet hit, and his audiences were arranged so he never met anyone he had not been told flattering things about in advance, he was, by his standards, manageable. He had not hit her. He had not yet tried to do worse than hit her. She was, she thought sometimes in the long quiet hour before dawn when she could not sleep, very nearly grateful for the war: the war kept Joffrey distracted, and the war kept Cersei desperate, and Cersei desperate had been, against all odds, an ally — Cersei needed Margaery to keep the boy from doing something catastrophic in public, and Margaery needed Cersei to keep the boy from doing something catastrophic in private, and the two of them had reached, over a year of careful unspoken negotiation, a kind of working alliance. They did not like each other. They did not pretend to. They worked together anyway.

Margaery embroidered another petal.

The raven from Highgarden had come that morning. She had read it three times in her chamber before coming out to embroider. Her father had finally — finally — been forced to acknowledge what Margaery and her grandmother had known for two moons: the Reach was gone. Not in battle. In silence. House after house had simply stopped answering Mace Tyrell's ravens. Half the Reach lords were now openly in Daenerys Targaryen's camp; the other half were neutral, which in practice meant that when the war reached their gates they would open them. Highgarden itself, which Margaery's brother Willas held, had declared neutrality six weeks past. Margaery's father had received the news and had, according to her grandmother's letter, spent two days in his chambers and emerged thinner.

Olenna's letter had not minced words.

Granddaughter, it had read. The Reach is lost to the Lannister cause. Your father has, at last, comprehended this. He has not yet comprehended what it means. I will spell it out for you, because you are cleverer than your father and you will be required, in the coming months, to act on what your father cannot. The Lannister cause is finished. Tywin knows it. He has sent his second son to the Targaryen queen with terms. The terms will be accepted; we have it on good authority. Your husband will be deposed within six moons. Your goodmother will be sent to a small estate. Your goodbrother Tommen will be married to one of your cousins, almost certainly Megga or Alla, and will be a small honourable lord somewhere in the West. None of these things require your action. They will happen.

What requires your action, dear, is yourself.

You are fifteen years old. You are wed to a boy who will not be king six moons hence. Your marriage will be annulled — easily; everyone south of the Wall knows it has not been consummated — and you will be, at the conclusion of this war, a fifteen-year-old widow-not-quite-widow with a Tyrell name, the goodwill of the new queen if you have earned it, and the entire rest of your life ahead of you. The next six moons, dear, will determine whether that life is spent in a corner at Highgarden growing roses or at the right hand of the new queen as Mistress of Coin or some equivalent. I would prefer the second. Your grandfather, were he alive, would prefer the second. Highgarden's future depends on the second.

Therefore: the new queen lands within three moons. You will, before then, find a way — quietly, plausibly, without compromising your husband's safety, because we are not animals — to be useful to her. I do not yet know how. I am thinking. I will write again in a fortnight. In the meantime, dear, keep embroidering on that balcony. It plays beautifully in the city. The smallfolk love a calm queen. The new queen will love a queen who kept King's Landing from burning while she rode up to take it. Do not stop the embroidery.

Your loving grandmother.

Margaery had read the letter three times and then burned it in the hearth, as instructed. Then she had come out to embroider.

She had been thinking ever since.

— Sansa —

She heard the news from the same washerwomen.

The wall behind the wardrobe had been her library, her newspaper, her single thread of contact with the world that was happening beyond the walls of her tower; she had pressed her ear to it almost every afternoon for a year, and she had, in that year, become one of the better-informed people in the Red Keep. She knew before the Small Council did, on most matters. She had known about the Targaryens at Dragonstone the day after Brenna's boy had seen the sails. She had known about Stannis's flight from the Blackwater the morning after it happened. She had known, that very morning, that something called Lord Tyrion had ridden out of Casterly Rock under safe conduct three weeks earlier and that a raven had come from somewhere southern saying he had reached the Targaryen queen's camp.

She had known what that meant within an hour of hearing it.

She sat now on the edge of her bed, with her hands folded in her lap and her shoulders very straight, and she was, beneath the perfect stillness, trembling. Not from fear. From something else. From the slow tight unwinding of a thing that had been wound too tight for too long. The Targaryens were going to win. The Targaryens were going to win and she — Sansa Stark, the traitor's daughter, the king's reluctant betrothed, the broken little bird of Cersei Lannister's court — was going to be rescued. By people. By actual people. With swords. Riding up from the south.

She had stopped praying for this six moons ago because it had begun to feel like a cruelty to herself.

She started praying for it again now.

She prayed to the old gods, in the Northern way, because her father had prayed to the old gods, and she was running short on people whose gods she could trust. She prayed silently. She did not move her lips. She said: let it be soon. Let it be soon. Let it be soon. Let me see Robb again. Let me see Arya again. Let me see my brothers. Let me — let me see anyone who knew my father, please, please, please, anyone who can tell me he was a good man and meant well and did the right thing. Please.

She did not know it yet, but the answer to one of her prayers was at that moment riding in a small honoured suite of tents at the heart of the Dornish camp four hundred miles south, drinking Dornish wine and writing his father a letter, and would arrive at the gates of the Red Keep within six weeks under a Targaryen banner.

She did not know it. But she had begun to believe it, in the careful guarded way she had been learning to believe in things.

She was sixteen years old, and she had survived a year of the Red Keep, and she was — not whole, not yet, but harder than she had been when she had arrived. The court had thought it was breaking her. The court had been wrong. The court had been forging her. She had been allowing them to think the first thing because she had needed to survive long enough to be the second.

She was no one's broken little bird. She was Eddard Stark's daughter, and her sister Arya — wherever Arya was, gods let Arya be alive somewhere — would have liked who Sansa had become this year, and that was more than Sansa would have said about herself a year ago.

She rose from the bed, smoothed her gown — pale grey, the closest thing to Stark grey she dared wear in this castle — and went to her wardrobe, and pressed her ear once again to the wall.

The washerwomen were saying Tyrion Lannister has bent the knee.

Sansa Stark closed her eyes and let the words settle into her bones.

— Cersei —

Her father's raven came at sunset.

Cersei Lannister read it standing by the window of her solar in the Tower of the Hand — which was no longer the Tower of the Hand; the Hand was empty, had been empty for moons, but Cersei had moved into it anyway because it was the largest set of rooms in the keep that wasn't Maegor's — and she read it three times, very slowly, with her wine cup forgotten on the windowsill, and when she got to the end the third time she sat down on the floor.

She did not cry.

She had not cried in moons. She had not cried since the night Robert had died and she had realised, with a small cold clarity, what she had become and what she had done it for, and she had decided then and there that crying was a thing for women who were not Cersei Lannister, and Cersei Lannister was a woman who acted.

But her father had written to her.

Her father had written to her — to her, personally, in his own sharp clear hand, not the dictated official Lord Tywin script she had received from him over the past two years — and he had written, in essence, that he had surrendered. That Tyrion was even now in the Targaryen queen's camp negotiating the surrender of the West. That the surrender included his own retirement. That she, Cersei, was to read this letter and understand, and that her sole remaining task as regent was to keep Joffrey from doing anything irrevocable in the next six weeks.

He had written, at the end, in the same small clear hand:

Daughter. I have done what I can. I have bought you and your children your lives. I have purchased these lives with the only currency the new queen would accept, which is mine. You will, if you have any sense, accept what I have purchased. You will not fight her. You will not poison her. You will not arrange any of the small clever things you have been considering. You will receive her terms when they come, and you will accept them, and you will retire to your uncle Kevan's estate at Darry — yes, Darry, I have already written to Kevan — and you will live, and your children will live, and that will be the price your father bought for you. Spend it well.

I will see you again, perhaps, when the queen permits. I will not write often. The new queen's ravens will be reading our mail.

Your father.

Cersei sat on the floor of her solar with her father's letter in her hand and she did not cry.

She thought, however. She thought for a long time. She thought about her father, whom she had hated and feared and revered in roughly equal measure for her entire life, and who had now, at the end, done the one thing she would not have predicted: he had folded. Tywin Lannister did not fold. Tywin Lannister had not folded at the Trident, had not folded at the Sack, had not folded through forty years of holding a kingdom together with one hand. He had folded now.

That meant something.

That meant — she made herself look at it — that her father had read the situation, with the cold honest eye she had been raised to fear, and had concluded that the situation was unwinnable, and that the best play available was to hand her his head in exchange for her life and her children's. And that meant — and this was the harder thought, the one she had been refusing to think for six moons — that she, Cersei, had been wrong about this war. She had thought the Targaryens were a problem of months. They were a problem of weeks. She had thought Stannis had been the threat. Stannis was a footnote. The threat had been silver-haired girls in Essos, whom she had dismissed because they had been girls, and she had dismissed them because she did not believe girls could do what she had spent her life trying to do. She had been wrong.

She had been wrong.

The thought was almost comforting. It was, in its own way, clarifying. She had been wrong, and her father had been right, and her father was offering her a life — an actual life, in a quiet estate, with her children, with her uncle Kevan, with no court, no crown, no daily knife-fight for survival.

She was thirty-three years old. She had not had a quiet day in a decade.

She thought, almost in spite of herself: what would it be like.

She thought about Tommen, who was eleven, and who liked his cats. She thought about Myrcella, who was nine, and who was going to be married to some Stormlands lord under the new queen's hand and would, almost certainly, be happier for it than for anything Cersei could have arranged. She thought about Joffrey, who was —

Joffrey.

She closed her eyes.

She loved her son. She had always loved her son. She had, however, been told by her father in plain language that her son was going to be deposed within six moons, and she had been told, in implication, that Joffrey's behaviour in those six moons was the variable that would determine whether the new queen sent him to a sept on a quiet island, or sent him to Sansa Stark at Winterfell, or — and this was the unstated third option, the one her father had not put on paper but had certainly been thinking — quietly arranged for Joffrey to die of a small accident on the road to wherever he was being sent.

If she could not control Joffrey for six moons, she would lose him.

She had not been able to control Joffrey since he was nine.

She rose, slowly, from the floor. She picked up her wine cup. She drained it. She put it down. She walked to her writing-table, sat, took out a fresh sheet of parchment, and dipped her quill. She did not allow herself to think about whether she was doing the right thing. She had spent her entire adult life thinking about whether she was doing the right thing. Her father had just told her, in a letter, that thinking about the right thing was over now, and that her job for the next six moons was to survive.

She wrote, in her own hand, to Margaery Tyrell.

Goodaughter, the letter began. We need to speak. Privately. Tonight.

She sealed it. She gave it to her most trusted maidservant. She poured another cup of wine.

And she sat by the window, and she watched the sun go down over the Blackwater, and she waited.