MILD SPOILERS IF WE’RE WRONG, MAJOR SPOILERS IF WE’RE RIGHT.
Alright, so everyone has been pretty convinced that Cersei Lannister is going to die before this whole epic tale is up, and clues in the Season 7 premiere hinted that it could be happening sooner than we think.
That episode gave us a tension-filled scene between Cersei and her brother-lover Jaime, atop a beautifully painted map of Westeros.
They were discussing the usual – death, deceit, their increasingly shaky plans to seize control of the entire known world – but it’s where they were standing on the map that is the most telling.
If you watch the scene again, it’s very choreographed and stilted, almost like a play; there’s no natural movement from either Cersei or Jaime, breaking briefly when the latter starts to grief their third dead child, Tommen.
Basically: where they’re standing is important as hell.
This very, very pointed placing – and the multiple shots we have of the two of them standing there – is some solid as hell foreshadowing that Jaime will turn out to be the valonqar who kills Cersei.
When Cersei was a small child, she met a maegi in the woods who predicted she would marry a king (correct), have three children to his 16 (also correct), and that she would be killed at the hands of the “valonqar”, a word that in High Valyrian means ‘little brother’.
“Gold shall be their crowns and gold their shrouds,” the maegi tells her, referring to Cersei’s three children dying before her. “And when your tears have drowned you, the valonqar shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you.”
Cersei always assumed this referred to her younger brother Tyrion, who is little to her in both age and stature. But as she told Ned Stark towards the end of ‘A Game of Thrones‘ (the first book, not the series), Jaime is also her younger brother.
“Jaime and I are more than brother and sister. We are one person in two bodies. We shared a womb together. He came into this world holding my foot, our old maester said.”
There’s also the fact that it just makes poetic sense for Jaime, not Tyrion, to kill his sister. The two illicit lovers, whose entire lives have been defined by their relationship to one another, finally exiting the world in murder. It seems like something that would appeal to George R.R. Martin‘s poetic yet deeply twisted mind.
And Tyrion’s storyline has already gone dark as hell. He’s murdered his father and his lover, said goodbye to his brother, and is now the Hand of the Queen (Daenerys, that is).
There’s also – and we hate to bring it up here – the song Ed Sheeran sings to Arya. The lyrics, taken from ‘A Storm of Swords‘, refer to Tyrion’s ex (and secret) lover Shae. The last two lines are particularly telling.
Photo: HBO.
