Maggy

"Everyone wants to know their future... until they know their future."

- Maggy

Maggy is a character that appears in the fifth season episode "The Wars to Come". She is portrayed by Jodhi May. Maggy is a woods witch and reputed fortune teller living in a hut in the woods near Casterly Rock.

Season 5
When she was a teenager, Cersei Lannister went to visit Maggy at her hut in the woods, accompanied by Melara Hetherspoon, because she had heard that the witch could read people's futures. Cersei entered Maggy's hut uninvited, but when Maggy woke and demanded that she get out, Cersei arrogantly pointed out that Maggy was on her father Tywin Lannister's lands, and threatened that she would have her eyes gouged out if she refused her. Maggy relented, and asked for a taste of Cersei's blood - by having Cersei prick her finger with a knife, then literally letting her taste a drop of her blood, as part of her blood magic. Maggy agreed to read Cersei's future, but mocked the prideful young girl that she wouldn't like the answers.

Maggy let Cersei ask three questions. First, Cersei's father had promised that she would wed Crown Prince Rhaegar Targaryen, and she wanted to know when they would marry. Maggy responded that she wouldn't marry "the prince" but she would marry "the king" - which Cersei at the time mistook to mean that she would simply marry Rhaegar after he succeeded his father to the throne. Worried, Cersei used her second question to confirm that she would indeed be queen some day. Maggy confirmed that she would, but that in time she would be cast down by another, younger and more beautiful queen, who would take all she held dear. Third, Cersei asked if she and the king would have children. Maggy cryptically replied that the king would have 20 children, but Cersei would have only three children. Cersei didn't think that made sense (not realizing that a king can have bastard children), but Maggy continued to say of her three children that gold would be their crowns - and gold their burial shrouds, implying that all of Cersei's children would predecease her.

Cersei remembers meeting Maggy (via a flashback sequence) right before her father's funeral, after he was murdered by her own brother Tyrion. Cersei is disturbed because her eldest son Joffrey has already died, poisoned at his own wedding to Margaery Tyrell, who will now marry her younger son Tommen and become the new queen. Cersei fears that Margaery is the younger and more beautiful queen that Maggy warned her about.

In the books
In the A Song of Ice and Fire novels, Maggy - often called Maggy the Frog - is not simply a Westerosi woods witch, but an Essosi fortune teller living in Lannisport, the wife of a spice merchant who brought her with him from Essos. This spice merchant was the founder of House Spicer and grandfather of Sybell Spicer, the mother of Jeyne Westerling, who later married Robb Stark (Jeyne was changed into the character Talisa for the TV series). The nickname "Maggy" is conjectured to be a slurred mishearing from the foreign word "Maegi".

In the novels, Maggy looks much like a stereotypical ugly fairy tale witch: very old, squat and warty, with no teeth, crusty yellow eyes, and pale green jowls.