Chapter Text
Once upon a time, a rich man named Tywin lived in a great house by the sea.
He called his house a castle and likened himself to a lion, but all that did was make him so widely disliked that no one, rich or poor, in that duchy or the next, would allow Tywin to court their daughters. The lion’s heart, never soft to begin with, hardened against his fellow men and their womenfolk.
One day, while hunting in the forest, Tywin’s hounds found a hidden pool. He saw a beautiful woman bathing in it. She had hair tawny as a lion’s mane and eyes the green of spring leaves. Her name was Joanna, and she was unashamed before his scrutiny, completely free in her naked skin.
She had no money or lands, but she was mercifully free of meddlesome male relatives. So Tywin asked for her hand in marriage, and she accepted.
Her one condition was that Tywin must not enter her chamber on one day of the week. Amused by a woman’s fancies and eager to wed her, Tywin accepted.
For seven years they were happy. Joanna bore Tywin two children. Twins, a boy and a girl. They had their mother’s wild beauty, their father’s proud temper, and were much loved and coddled.
But a doubt kept gnawing on Tywin’s heart. He did not meet or care for many people outside of his family, and so did not understand that contentment in marriage and still feeling love for his wife after seven years were not gifts to be put aside lightly. He kept wondering what his wife did on the one day every week she spent shut up in her chamber.
One day he could bear the gnawing feeling in his chest no more. He found his wife’s door unlocked and, not pausing to consider what this meant, he marched right through it.
Joanna was bathing, as she had been when Tywin first saw her in the forest. Unlike that auspicious day, he now saw that she had, not the long, white legs of a woman, but the coiling, scaly tail of a snake.
“I trusted you,” Joanna said sadly. “You broke my trust. Now I must leave.”
“Yes, leave,” Tywin replied, “or I shall chop you into pieces and feed you to the dogs. Devil. Whore. Liar.”
Salt water and sweet mingling on her skin and scales, Joanna wept, but she did not plead. “You will miss me.”
Tywin did not understand that she was not the one who should be pleading. “I have already forgotten you.”
Joanna vanished from the great house that day. Tywin made of his heart a stone that nothing could ever gnaw on again, and forbade the servants to speak her name to his children. But servants loved to gossip. The cook described Joanna’s green, scaly, serpent’s tail in lurid detail, but the children’s old nurse thought that story too unsavory, and so told the twins that their mother had had, not the tail of a snake, but that of a fish.
The boy, Jaime, did not care either way. The only animals he was interested in had four legs and could be ridden or chased with hunting horn and spear. All Jaime understood was that his mother was gone, and that his father’s hard heart was to blame.
The girl, Cersei, cared very much. She thought her nurse a foolish old woman. Lions disdained even to eat fish, let alone mate with them. Cersei agreed with her brother that their mother’s disappearance was their father’s fault. She decided that, if she could not be a lion, she would rather be a snake than a fish.