The fifth episode of Game of Thrones Season 7 was full of bombshells and blasts from the past, but one of the most shocking moments had everything to do with the future of House Lannister. Cersei is pregnant, and she plans on letting the world know that Jaime is the father. However, according to a major and (so-far) accurate prophecy, there’s no way that Cersei’s going to actually have that kid.
Mild spoilers for Game of Thrones Season 7 are below.
Thanks to Bran’s Three-Eyed Raven powers, we’ve seen plenty of scenes from the past, but Game of Thrones has only ever featured one true flashback: Young Cersei’s run-in with the fortune teller Maggy the Frog. In the creepy scene, which kicked off Season 5, Maggy tells Cersei about her ominous future:
You’ll never wed the prince, you’ll 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.
The last part of the prophecy is the most important for our purposes. Maggy foretold that while Robert Baratheon would have 20 bastard children, Cersei would only have three — Joffrey, Myrcella, and Tommen. All three of her children with Jaime died before their mother, just as Maggy predicted.
Given Maggy’s sterling track record so far (she was right about the first two parts of the prophecy as well), it seems like a safe bet that Cersei’s would-be fourth child with a golden crown won’t make it — either because Cersei dies before giving birth, or because of some other pre-natal tragedy.
There’s one, tiny wrinkle in Maggy’s prophecy, but it’s most easily explained as a mistake on the show’s part. In Season 1, Cersei mentions [a black-haired son who died in infancy](http://gameofthrones.wikia.com/wiki/Baratheon_(son_of_Robert). The unnamed child, presumably the only trueborn son of Robert and Cersei, does not exist in the books, and the show has ignored the dead baby in subsequent seasons. Cersei referred to Joffrey as he oldest child in later seasons, and the baby isn’t included in Maggy’s prophecy. But, even if the unnamed Baratheon son hasn’t been quietly written out of continuity, it’s still not looking good for Cersei’s latest unborn child. If Maggy only counts kids who live past infancy, Jaime Jr. is still not long for Westeros.
Game of Thrones Season 7 continues on Sunday nights at 9 p.m. Eastern on HBO.**
