A Feast for Crows ÔÇö Cersei I

Tywin lies in state with painted stones for eyes; Cersei takes the regency in her fist and hears an old prophecy breathing down her neck: valonqar.

The chapter retold

Cersei's first chapter of her own book opens over her father's corpse ÔÇö Tywin Lannister lying in state in the Great Sept with painted glass eyes and a stench the embalmers cannot quite mask, dead by his own son's crossbow bolt though the official story blames an unnamed assassin. Cersei watches the mourners file past and takes hold of the regency for her boy-king Tommen with both hands, savoring a power she has wanted her whole life and never quite been allowed. Woven through the grief and the funeral logistics is Maggy the Frog's old prophecy, unspooling in memory: three children dead in gold shrouds, a queen younger and more beautiful to cast her down, and a valonqar ÔÇö a little brother ÔÇö whose hands will close around her throat.

The chapter establishes the engine that will drive Cersei's entire arc: real power, finally hers, filtered through a mind that trusts no one and reads every ally as a future betrayer. Tywin's death (having occurred at the close of the previous book) leaves a vacuum Cersei is determined to fill on her own terms rather than share with Jaime or any council of steady hands, and the prophecy that has haunted her since childhood is reintroduced here as the lens ÔÇö increasingly paranoid, increasingly self-fulfilling ÔÇö through which she will interpret every threat, real or imagined, for the rest of the book.

This movement: The Crows Gather

• The war winds down and the scavengers move in: the riverlands starve, the Faith arms, the Citadel schemes.
• Cersei rules for Tommen and stuffs the council with flatterers; Jaime refuses to be one of them.
• In the Iron Islands, Balon's death calls a kingsmoot ÔÇö Aeron Damphair means to drown the succession in salt.
• Brienne rides out with Oathkeeper hunting a girl of three-and-ten with auburn hair.