nobodysuspectsthebutterfly:

O, what a tangled web we weave / When first we practise to deceive!

Well, how did a no-name sellsword like Bronn get involved with the Stokeworths in the first place? Because Cersei bribed him not to testify at Tyrion’s trial or fight as his champion, by offering him to a difficult-to-marry youngish noblewoman of limited intelligence and looks, who needed a father for her soon-ending pregnancy. And when Bronn told Tyrion about this plan – noting that the girl’s lady mother was elderly and her only older sibling was married ten years and childless,

Tyrion wondered whether Cersei had any notion of the sort of serpent she’d given Lady Tanda to suckle. And if she does, would she care?

No, I don’t think Cersei had any idea, figuring Bronn to be a simple man operating by simple greed. Nor could she predict how this would eventually backfire upon her.

Nevertheless, when Lollys’s child was born, and Bronn named the baby Tyrion, combined with his hiring of sellswords for his household, Cersei began to believe that Bronn was hiding Tyrion, or just building up a rebel army against her close to King’s Landing. (She later thinks she had never really believed that Tyrion was hiding at Stokeworth, but it’s most likely just her covering herself when someone else pointed out the flaw in her logic.) She convinced Lady Falyse’s husband Balman Birch to take out Bronn, hoping he’d kill him in a “hunting accident” or some such.

Unfortunately, and most likely because Cersei had praised Balman’s skills in jousting when buttering him up for this task, he instead challenged Bronn to single combat with lances, a knight’s weapon… and Bronn killed him like a brutal sellsword. But not before he made Balman confess, that Cersei had put him up to this attack. And then he tossed Falyse out of the castle, while his men called him “Lord Stokeworth”.

Someone hammered at the door.
Again? The urgency of the sound made her shiver. Have another thousand ships descended on us? She slipped into a bedrobe and went to see who it was. “Beg pardon for disturbing you, Your Grace,” the guardsman said, “but Lady Stokeworth is below, begging audience.”
“At this hour?” snapped Cersei. “Has Falyse lost her wits? Tell her I have retired. Tell her that smallfolk on the Shields are being slaughtered. Tell her that I have been awake for half the night. I will see her on the morrow.”
The guard hesitated. “If it please Your Grace, she’s… she’s not in a good way, if you take my meaning.”

And so Falyse, dispossessed of husband and castle and possessions, her elderly mother dying of pneumonia brought on by a broken hip, flees back to Cersei with this wild tale… and arrives in the middle of the night, no more than a few hours after Margaery had awakened the court in the middle of the night with word of the ironborn attack on the Reach. And Cersei, suffering from too much wine and too little sleep, her head whirling with triumph that she’s managed to separate Loras from the court and his job protecting his sister, whirling with triggered memories of Robert and his sexual assaults… sees this hysterical woman, blabbing all kinds of details, this stupid woman whose stupid husband couldn’t do the job right, told all her secrets, sparked a fire right on the doorstep of King’s Landing… and she panics. Cersei needs Falyse to be silent, to not tell anyone anything, to be somewhere she can’t talk… oh, who’s good at making women disappear? Qyburn, right. Out of sight, out of mind. Solved! I’m so clever! And back to bed, finally.

What rumors could Falyse spread? That an insolent treacherous sellsword is building up an army only a few days travel from King’s Landing, in lands that provide half the food for the capital… that the queen foolishly placed said treacherous sellsword right there and made him just two short steps away from the lordship of the domain… that the queen decided to kill this new upjumped bannerman for no real reason… that she convinced one of her other bannermen to do this murder, putting the lady of the house in danger if he failed… oh, how did the queen say the murder should be done, again…? “An arrow gone astray, a fall from a horse, an angry boar… there are so many ways a man can die in the woods”… No, Falyse knows too much. She knows too many things she doesn’t even realize she knows, but that other bannermen would understand to be a betrayal of the feudal contract, that would place doubt on the “accidental” nature of King Robert’s death.

If Cersei wants to convince other champions, a bigger army to go to Stokeworth and take out Bronn for good (though they’re going to have to go through Rosby, and the queen fucked things up there too, with Lord Gyles’s ward in residence but the lands forcefully donated to the crown), sure, she can tell them all kinds of things to put herself as the wounded party and urge them on. But she certainly doesn’t need Falyse hanging around and whining about her clothes and messing things up with facts lies confused misunderstandings. Heck, Falyse missing, believed killed by Bronn, would just make things easier. Or so Cersei thought at the time, at least…