A Feast for Crows ÔÇö Cersei II
Cersei stacks her council with lickspittles and debtors and calls it strength; she will rule better than Tywin ever did, she tells anyone who doubts.
The chapter retold
Cersei's second chapter shows her regency in action, and it is not encouraging. She fills the small council with men chosen for their pliability rather than their competence ÔÇö flatterers, debtors, relatives she can lean on ÔÇö reasoning that a council of weak men cannot conspire against her the way Tywin's strong ones might have. She dismisses warnings, overrules Jaime's caution, and privately congratulates herself on ruling more wisely than her father ever did, mistaking the absence of open opposition for the presence of a plan.
The chapter is a portrait of a woman finally handed the power she always believed was rightfully hers, discovering ÔÇö or rather, refusing to discover ÔÇö that competence and confidence are not the same thing. Every choice she makes here (Harys Swyft, Aurane Waters, Qyburn's quiet rise as the council's pet alchemist-turned-something-worse) is a small brick in a structure that will collapse spectacularly by the book's end. Cersei believes she is building a fortress; the reader can already see it is a house of cards stacked by someone with no architect's eye.
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.