Chapter 155: The Throne Changes Hands

The Red Keep, once the symbol of the Iron Throne’s majesty and the seat of the Baratheon-Lannister dynasty, which had been, in its last years, simply Cersei’s dictatorship wearing the old name, had become a landscape of burning, collapse, and dying struggle. On the Blackwater the wreckage of the royal fleet and of Dragonstone’s ships still burned, staining a lead-grey sky with smoke. The city walls had gone down in a dozen places, baptized again and again by the fire of Balerion’s descendants; Drogon and Rhaegal, wounds unhealed and might undiminished, had left the stone scorched, melted, and scarred. In the streets, the iron phalanxes of the Unsullied ground through the last and bloodiest of the fighting against the remnants of the Golden Company, the Lannister guards, and the handful of desperate men still loyal to the queen, and every alley and every tower was a mill fed with the lives of both sides.

Daenerys Targaryen rode Drogon above her burning capital, silver-gold hair whipping in a hot wind thick with smoke and blood, violet eyes alight with vengeance, victory, and beneath both a thing harder to name, watching the ancient city of her house reduced to scorched earth. None of it slowed her. Viserion’s death and desecration, the years of exile, Slaver’s Bay, the sacrifices below the Wall in the North: all of it had been spent for exactly this hour. “Forward! For the queen! For Targaryen!” Grey Worm’s roar rose from below, and the Unsullied spears came on like a torrent of steel, while the Second Sons, the Stormcrows, and Dothraki screamers freshly arrived across the narrow sea tore at the flanks like wolves.

In the deepest part of the Red Keep, the throne room held a different scene. The great hall stood cold and nearly empty, littered with dead guards and torn banners, and on the dais the Iron Throne kept its ugly shape, the melted swords of conquered enemies throwing back a dim, ominous light through the ruined dome. Below it, slumped against the steps, sat Cersei Lannister, once queen of the Seven Kingdoms by her own proclamation. The heavy crimson velvet worked with golden lions was fouled with dust and blood and holed by drifting embers; the careful golden curls hung wild, strands pasted to paper-white cheeks by dried blood; and the face that had bent nobles and frightened enemies for twenty years was twisted now around despair, madness, and a hatred that went down into the bone, the eyes burning and empty at once.

She had lost everything there was to lose. The Golden Company had bled out its elite in the long attrition; the last Lannister strength had been annihilated under the walls; Euron Greyjoy and his Silence had vanished in the chaos of the sea-fight against Dorne and Dragonstone, into the deep, for all anyone knew; and the quiet understanding she had built with Petyr Baelish, the northern plan she had funded with her own dwindling gold, had evaporated with the bad news off the ice. She was alone, in a castle about to fall, that would shortly be her tomb.

Footsteps came from the hall’s entrance: not soldiers’ boots, not the Unsullied’s metronome, but a slightly dragging, entirely steady gait, a scholar’s walk, or a strategist’s. Cersei’s head snapped up, bloodshot eyes finding the source, and the sound that came out of her was an animal’s, venom and disbelief together: “You. Tyrion.”

Her brother came slowly up the hall in plain dark traveling clothes with a white cloak at his shoulders and no helm, one hand on an ebony cane, the other loose at his side. He was thinner than she remembered, weathered and tired, and the mismatched eyes were as sharp as they had ever been. He met the gaze that wanted to eat him alive without hurrying, and stopped a few steps short of the dais. In the whole vast room there were only the two of them and a few cooling corpses in the corners; the shouting and the dragon-thunder outside seemed to recede behind the dead silence between them.

“Dear sister,” Tyrion said, calm, with something in it that might have been weariness and might have been pity. “It seems the queen’s dream has run out.”

“You monster! Traitor! Kinslayer!” She fought to rise and could not, whether her strength had gone or her gown had trapped her feet, and so she fought with the only weapons left. “You killed Father! You killed Tommen! And now you bring that Targaryen back to destroy my kingdom! You carry Lannister blood and you have lived like the lowest cur! Why won’t you just die?”

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Tyrion’s face did not move. He sighed, softly. “Father. Tommen. Yes. Both dead. And was either death separable from your mania for control, your shortsighted scheming, your bottomless appetite for revenge?” He lifted his eyes, swept them across the ruin around them, and let them rest on the twisted chair above her. “Your kingdom was built on lies, betrayal, slaughter, and the blood of the innocent by the thousand. It was falling from the day it was raised. I only hurried the process. Perhaps I even spared the realm some of what your madness had left to spend.”

“What do you know!” It came out a shriek, tears cutting through the madness in her eyes. “Everything I did was for Lannister! For the family! For my children! Father despised me for being a woman! All of you despised me! I meant to prove I was stronger than every one of you! That I could hold it all! The throne should have been mine! That drunkard Robert, that fraud Stannis, the traitors, every one of them earned his death! You forced my hand, all of you!”

“No one forced you, Cersei.” His voice stayed level, and carried an icy, comprehensive clarity. “You walked to this, step by step, on your own feet. You dressed your hunger for power as love of family. You made an enemy of anyone who crossed you and unmade them by the cruelest means to hand. You used the Seven Kingdoms as an altar for a private ambition. Father had his sins, but he understood at least that power is freighted with duty and rule requires wisdom. Not this. Not pure madness and hate.” He paused, took one small step nearer, and his gaze touched the delicate gold necklace at her heaving chest, the great ruby Tywin had given her at her coming of age, one of the emblems of everything she had been. “Look at yourself, Cersei. Abandoned by all, caged in a falling city, your armies erased, your allies gone over, your kingdom burning. Is this what you wanted? Is this the glory of Lannister? No. It is the grave of one woman’s ambition, and it was very nearly the grave of our whole house.”

She heaved for air and glared at him, lips shaking, and for a long moment nothing came. His words worked like cold knives, stripping off the magnificent lacquer she had painted over herself for decades and leaving the small, cracked thing beneath it in the open air.

“What did you come for,” she ground out at last, hoarse as a broken bellows. “To gloat? Or did the Targaryen bitch send you to do the killing yourself, to sweeten her revenge?”

Tyrion shook his head. “Queen Daenerys may wish to judge you in person. I think there is no need. Your ending was written long ago. I came because, before this twisted war of ours, thirty years of it, brother and sister, is finally over, I wanted to see you once more. And to ask one question. For Father. For Tommen. For everyone who died of you.” He looked directly into her eyes and laid the words down one at a time. “Was it worth it, sister? Everything, the house’s future, thousands of lives, for that cold chair made of swords?”

Cersei shuddered. For one sliding instant the hatred in her eyes froze and blurred, and the question fell on her broken defenses like the heaviest hammer in the armory. The girl who had dreamed of Rhaegar; the bride who had despaired of Robert; the joy of Joffrey’s birth and the long fear after it; the brief intoxication of power and the endless suspicion that came with it; Tommen, and the tearing grief that had arrived with its own hideous thread of relief. It all churned once, and drained away into the hellscape around her and her brother’s calm, penetrating eyes.

“I...” Her mouth opened and produced nothing whole. The pillar that had carried her this far, the one named ambition and hatred both, seemed to crack, quietly, under the weight of the question. And in the next second the crack filled with something madder and blacker than before. “Shut your mouth! You damned dwarf! You of all creatures have no right to ask me anything!” She found strength from somewhere, hauled herself up, staggered back until her spine met the cold base of the throne, hands scrabbling at it as if for support, or for a weapon. “I am the queen! I was born to be queen! Dead, I am still the queen of the Iron Throne! None of you will take it from me!”

Tyrion watched the last frantic struggle in silence, and the final trace of pity faded out of his eyes, leaving only a bone-deep tiredness, and release. There was nothing left to say. Cersei’s soul had long since been welded to that chair along with her hunger for it, and no tool in the world would part them now.