A Dance with Dragons — Cersei I

In her cell beneath the Great Sept, Cersei bends at last: confession of the smaller sins buys her daylight — at the price of a walk the High Sparrow will not describe.

The chapter retold

In her cell beneath the Great Sept of Baelor, Cersei Lannister finally breaks under the High Sparrow’s patient, relentless pressure and confesses — not to the incest, not to the parentage of her children, but to a curated list of smaller sins: adultery with her cousin Lancel, deceptions, the kind of guilt she can survive admitting. The confession buys her freedom from the cell and the promise of daylight, at a price the Sparrow declines, ominously, to specify in advance.

The chapter is a study in a proud woman calculating exactly how much dignity she can afford to sell, and getting the sum wrong — Cersei believes she’s negotiating a clean transaction, sin for sunlight, and the reader, primed by the Sparrow’s implacable calm, understands long before she does that nothing in this arrangement is going to be clean. What she agrees to walk, sight unseen, is the last and worst humiliation the septs of King’s Landing have to offer a queen who spent her whole life terrified of exactly this kind of exposure.

This movement: The Harpy's Bargain

• Dany weds Hizdahr zo Loraq to still the knives; the fighting pits reopen with a queen presiding.
• In Daznak's Pit the locusts are poisoned and the crowd screams — for Drogon, descended on the sand. Dany mounts him and is gone.
• Quentyn Martell tries to steal a dragon with a whip and burns for the family words.
• Barristan Selmy takes the city in hand, arrests Hizdahr, and readies Meereen for the Yunkish war outside the walls.