Chapter 5: Queen Cersei Receives the Starktons

The drawing room into which Lord Tyrion conducted them was everything that a drawing room in King's Landing-upon-Thames was required to be, which is to say that it was large enough to intimidate, furnished with enough art to suggest cultivation, and warm enough, despite the season, that one wondered briefly whether the fires had been lit in anticipation of guests or merely in anticipation of making guests uncomfortable. The Lannisford taste ran to gold in its decorative appointments — gold thread in the curtains, gold leaf on the plasterwork, gold in the frames of the portraits that watched the room's proceedings with the complacent interest of ancestors who had done very well out of life and saw no reason why the present generation should not continue the trend. It was a room that had been assembled to produce an effect, and it produced it with the smooth efficiency of a mechanism that had been well maintained.

Queen Cersei Lannisford was already in it.

She was seated near the far window with the composed ease of a woman who had arranged herself there some time ago and intended the appearance of casual occupation. A piece of needlework lay across her lap with the pristine aspect of something that had been placed rather than worked, and she looked up from it with the expression of a person interrupted in the middle of something charming by the arrival of something she had been expecting all along.