Maggy the Frog's Prophecy

Three questions answered for a frightened girl, and a lifetime spent trying to outrun the answers.

The prophecy

It began as a dare. Cersei Lannister was about ten years old, the daughter of the most powerful man in the Seven Kingdoms and entirely used to being obeyed, and there was an old woman living in a tent in the woods near Lannisport whom the servants were frightened of. Cersei rode out with two companions, girls of her own age from lesser houses, on an afternoon when nobody knew where they were. The old woman was called Maggy, which appears to be a westerlands corruption of a foreign word for a wise woman, and she was asleep when they arrived. The children woke her.

Maggy was not a priestess of anything and had no temple, no order and no doctrine. She had come to the west from the far east as a young woman, married a trader of Lannisport and grown old there, and the country people said she had a gift and preferred not to use it. She refused the girls twice before Cersei made a scene, and when she gave in she asked for blood. Cersei cut her thumb and let her taste it, and Maggy said she would answer three questions and no more. Everything about the scene argues that the woman knew she was doing something ill-advised and did it because a lordÔÇÖs daughter would not go away.

The three answers came back short, flat and unwelcome. To the first ÔÇö whether she would marry the prince she had been promised to ÔÇö Maggy told her that she would never be that princeÔÇÖs wife, but that she would marry the king. To the second, whether she would be queen, the answer was yes, for a time: queen until another came, younger than her and more beautiful, who would pull her down and take everything she loved. To the third, about children, Maggy divided the count between them: the king would father children by the score, and Cersei herself would have three. Then came the line that has followed the character ever since, and it is arithmetic rather than metaphor ÔÇö their crowns would be gold, and so would their burial cloths. Gold at the beginning and gold at the end, three of each.

In the books there is a fourth clause, offered unasked as the girl was leaving. When her tears had drowned her and she had lost everything else, something Maggy names with a High Valyrian word ÔÇö the valonqar, meaning the younger brother ÔÇö would put its hands around her throat and choke the life out of her. Cersei was not given a chance to ask which brother, and the word she was given does not specify. The screen version of the scene cuts this last clause entirely and ends on the gold shrouds, which changes the character it produces: the readerÔÇÖs Cersei is a woman living under a specific and personal death sentence, and the viewerÔÇÖs Cersei is a woman living under a general one.

Where it comes from

There is no institution behind this prophecy at all, which is part of what makes it frightening. Westeros is full of hedge witches, woods witches and village wise women ÔÇö the kind of practitioner who delivers babies, sells charms and is consulted quietly by people who would deny it in daylight ÔÇö and the maesters regard the whole class as fraud dressed up as folklore. Maggy belongs to that class, or would if she had stayed in it. What sets her apart is the blood. Tasting a drop of the questionerÔÇÖs blood is a technique out of the eastern traditions rather than the Westerosi ones, and it puts her closer to the shadowbinders and the blood magic of the Ghiscari and AsshaiÔÇÖi worlds than to a hedge witch with a bundle of herbs.

She has no stake in the answer. This matters more than it sounds. Every other prophet in this collection is selling something ÔÇö a god, a king, a cause ÔÇö and Maggy is selling nothing; she is an old woman who wanted to be left alone and gave three answers to make a child go away. Nobody in the westerlands appears to have taken her seriously as a seer during her life, and no record of the encounter existed anywhere except in the memory of the girl who forced it out of her.

That is the second unusual feature: for most of the story, this prophecy exists only inside one head. Cersei told nobody, and for decades it worked on her privately, the way a diagnosis does. Its influence on the politics of the realm is therefore entirely indirect. Nothing Maggy said ever became a cause anyone raised a banner for. It simply sat in the mind of a woman who eventually acquired the power to act on it.

How it has been read

CerseiÔÇÖs own reading is the one the story spends most of its time on, and it is worth taking seriously as a reading before judging it as a psychology. She treats the prophecy as a list of enemies rather than a description of a life. The younger and more beautiful queen becomes, for her, a person to be identified and destroyed before she can arrive. The gold shrouds become a reason to keep her children under guard and under her hand. The valonqar becomes her brother Tyrion, whom she has hated since the day he was born, and whom she has therefore been arranging to have killed, in her own mind, for most of her adult life.

The obvious objection to her reading of the last clause is the same objection that wrecks the promised-prince prophecy: the word does not say what she thinks it says. Valonqar means younger sibling and does not specify a sex, so it need not be a brother at all. Even if it is a brother, Cersei has two, and Jaime ÔÇö her twin ÔÇö was born after her. Many readers regard this as the most carefully laid trap in the whole series: a woman who has spent her life fearing the wrong twin, with the right one standing beside her the entire time. Others argue the word is a deliberate red herring and point out that hands about a throat need not be literal, since the prophecy has already used one figure of speech about drowning in tears.

The younger and more beautiful queen is the most contested item, because the field is crowded. Margaery Tyrell is the candidate Cersei herself settles on, and she fits: younger, better liked, and installed beside a king Cersei needs to control. But Sansa Stark has been a queenÔÇÖs heir and is younger still; Daenerys Targaryen is younger than Cersei, has an army and is coming west; and one reading holds that the queen in question is not a rival at all but CerseiÔÇÖs own daughter, whose betrothal made her a future queen abroad. The prophecy does not say the woman will be a queen. It says she will be more beautiful, and that she will take everything Cersei holds dear ÔÇö which is a description of a consequence, not of a title.

There is also a strong minority reading that the prophecy is not supernatural in any interesting sense. On this view Maggy read a spoiled, frightened, intensely competitive girl accurately and told her exactly the things that would ruin her ÔÇö that she would lose her place to a prettier woman, that her children would die before her, that her family would finish her ÔÇö and the woman then spent forty years making those things true. The counter-argument is the arithmetic. Vague fortune-telling does not produce specific numbers, and this one did.

What can be said without dispute is that Cersei believes every word of it, that her belief is the single most reliable predictor of her behaviour, and that she has never once considered the possibility that a prophecy might be survivable if you simply do nothing about it.

The problem with prophecy

This is the clearest self-fulfilling prophecy in the books, and the mechanism is not subtle. Cersei is told she will lose everything to a younger woman and to a younger sibling. She responds by making enemies of every younger woman near the throne and by persecuting a brother who might otherwise have been an ally. Each act of prevention creates the conditions for the thing being prevented. Told that her children will die, she keeps them close, keeps them ignorant and keeps them soft, which is not a strategy for survival in this particular city.

The crueller possibility is that Maggy knew this would happen. She gave the answers under duress, to a child who had bullied her, and the answers she chose were precisely the ones guaranteed to poison a life. Whether that is prophecy or revenge is not a question the books answer, and the fact that both readings work is the reason this scene is the one people remember.

How it has played out ÔÇö open at your peril

The prince and the king

This clause resolved before Cersei was grown and both tellings agree on it. Her father intended her for Rhaegar Targaryen and was refused by a king who had begun to hate him, and she was married instead to Robert Baratheon, who took the throne in the rebellion that followed. She was queen at about nineteen and unhappy almost immediately: her husband said another womanÔÇÖs name on their wedding night and never troubled to hide the rest.

The marriage is the seed of most of what follows. Everything Cersei does afterwards is coloured by having been handed the second-best half of a prophecy and told it was a promotion.

Sixteen and three

Robert fathered a long line of bastards across the realm ÔÇö a girl in the Vale, a boy in StormÔÇÖs End, a whole armoury of them in KingÔÇÖs Landing ÔÇö and Cersei bore exactly three children: Joffrey, Myrcella and Tommen, all golden-haired, and all fathered by her brother Jaime rather than by the king. The count came out as Maggy divided it. That the three were not the kingÔÇÖs at all is the private joke the prophecy never acknowledges, and CerseiÔÇÖs efforts to keep the secret are what set the entire war in motion in the first book.

RobertÔÇÖs bastards became a problem in their own right. Ned Stark worked out the truth by noticing that every one of them was black of hair, and paid for the discovery; and after the kingÔÇÖs death the black-haired children of KingÔÇÖs Landing were hunted through the streets on the queenÔÇÖs authority.

Gold their crowns, gold their shrouds

Joffrey was crowned at twelve and poisoned at his own wedding feast in front of the whole court, choking to death in his motherÔÇÖs arms. CerseiÔÇÖs response was to accuse Tyrion, which she may even have believed; the poison in fact came from a plot she was never able to see, involving Lady Olenna Tyrell and Petyr Baelish, and travelled to the feast in Sansa StarkÔÇÖs hairnet.

Here the two tellings separate. On the screen all three children are dead by the middle of the story: Myrcella is poisoned in Dorne by Ellaria Sand in revenge for Oberyn, and dies in her fatherÔÇÖs arms aboard ship; Tommen, after Cersei destroys the Great Sept with his wife and half the court inside it, walks to a window in the Red Keep and steps out of it without a word. That is three crowns and three shrouds, exactly as counted.

On the page it has not finished. Myrcella survives her time in Dorne, though a botched plot leaves her badly maimed; Tommen is alive and being ruled by his advisors; and CerseiÔÇÖs downfall so far has come not from a rival queen but from the Faith, who stripped her and walked her naked through the city. The gold shrouds remain, for the reader, an unpaid debt.

The younger and more beautiful queen

Margaery Tyrell arrived exactly as advertised: young, popular, generous in public, and considerably better at being loved than Cersei has ever been. CerseiÔÇÖs counter-attack ÔÇö arming the Faith Militant so they might destroy the Tyrells for her ÔÇö is the single worst decision she makes in either telling, because the weapon she forged turned on her within the same year and put her in a cell.

On the screen the rivalry ended in the Sept of Baelor with wildfire, and Margaery, who was the only person in the building who realised what was about to happen, could not get the doors open in time. In the books Margaery is still alive, still awaiting trial, and CerseiÔÇÖs fear of her is undiminished. Whether Margaery was ever the woman of the prophecy is still arguable: Daenerys is younger, and on the page has not yet arrived.

The valonqar

This clause exists only in the books, and it is unresolved. Cersei has spent her life assuming Tyrion, and Tyrion has spent his life giving her reasons ÔÇö he escaped her justice, killed their father with a crossbow on the way out, and is now across the sea attaching himself to the one power in the world that can bring dragons to her door.

The reading most often argued for is Jaime, who was born minutes after her, who has already once put his hands on a monarch to save a city, and whose devotion to his sister has been visibly failing since he lost his sword hand. He burns her last letter unread and rides away from her in the published books. Nothing has been confirmed, and it is entirely possible the prophecy means neither of them.

The show, having cut the clause, gave her a different end: the Red Keep collapsing on her while Jaime held her, killed by falling stone rather than by any hand. Readers have argued ever since about whether that was a quiet fulfilment or a deliberate refusal of one. It should be said plainly that the books have not reached this point, and that no one yet knows how it ends on the page.

The girl who went with her

Only in the books. One of CerseiÔÇÖs two companions that afternoon, Melara Hetherspoon, asked whether she might marry Jaime, and was told instead that she would die that night ÔÇö and she did, drowning in a well at Casterly Rock. Cersei has always maintained that the girl slipped. The account the reader is given comes from CerseiÔÇÖs own dreams, and it does not support her.

It is the detail that reframes the whole scene. The first thing the prophecy caused was not a queenÔÇÖs downfall decades later; it was a child pushing another child down a well the same evening, to make sure nobody else could ever repeat what the old woman said.