Warning: This post contains spoilers for season seven of Game of Thrones.
Game of Thronessaw Cersei Lannister may have pledged to send troops north with Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen to defend Westeros against the army of the dead. However, after finding her brother Jaime strategizing for the war, remember that she made it clear she had no intention of keeping her word.
“I always knew you were the stupidest Lannister,” she scoffed before revealing that she had sent Euron Greyjoy to hire the Golden Company — a famous mercenary group in Essos — to take back the Seven Kingdoms.
Jaime was shocked by her declaration, leading to an argument that culminated in Cersei threatening to give the Mountain the order to kill him. It was at this moment that Jaime seemed to finally shake the hold his sister had on him.”I don’t believe you,” he told her before storming out of the Red Keep.
“She seems more or less willing to kill him, and he finally realizes that whatever he feels for her, it doesn’t go both ways,” Nikolaj Coster-Waldau — who plays Jaime — told HBO’s Making Game of Thrones blog. “That whole thing of ‘We’re in this together,’ well, we’re not quite in this together — because you’re not. We’re not playing the same game.”
Some fans have been waiting for the final break between the Lannister twins for a long time, as it could end up playing a major role in Cersei’s ultimate fate.
In a flashback sequence in the season five premiere, we saw a young Cersei having her future told by a witch named Maggy the Frog. “Everyone wants to know their future, until they know their future,” Maggy says. “You will never wed the Prince, you will wed the King…You’ll be Queen, for a time. Then comes another — younger, more beautiful — to cast you down and take all you hold dear…The King will have 20 children, and you will have three…Gold will be their crowns, gold their shrouds.”
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The majority of these predictions have already come true. Cersei was promised to Prince Rhaegar Targaryen as a young girl, but ended up marrying King Robert Baratheon following Robert’s Rebellion. He went on to father many illegitimate children while Cersei’s three kids — who are all dead — were a product of her incestuous relationship with Jaime. The only ambiguity is the mention of the younger, more beautiful queen, who some believe was Margaery and others think will prove to be Daenerys.
But in A Feast For Crows — the fourth novel in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series — there is a final line to the prophecy the show did not include: “And when your tears have drowned you, the valonqar [High Valyrian for “little brother”] shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you.”
While Tyrion may have long seemed more likely to be Cersei’s murderer, the events of Sunday’s episode seemed to foreshadow Jaime — who was the second-born twin — eventually killing her. And if the prophecy is correct about Cersei’s children, then her current pregnancy may indicate her death will take place in the not-too-distant future.
However, for the final season, it looks as though Jaime could be in Winterfell to meet up with Tyrion and company. “I pledged to ride north,” he told Cersei. “I intend to honor that pledge.”
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Write to Megan McCluskey at megan.mccluskey@time.com