Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Jaime pokes at the newly exposed skin behind his jaw, “I thought to look presentable for tonight, but now my neck just feels cold.” At least this complaint makes sense, unlike the muttering about lemon juice.

Gendry has hooked a bite of inky triumph and written Baratheon under their careful tutelage. He’s celebrating by examining their swords. He’s paused, with the smithy still smeared on his face and incalculable wealth in his hands. Brienne's feet are stretched out towards the dancing fire and Jaime is slumped against the foot of the bed beside her. She's grown quite comfortable with holding these lessons on the floor. She's comfortable.

“Well,” says Pod, scrubbing at his eyes, “that’s the mending done. I don’t know what I’ll do now.” He's been sitting in the chair, shuffled close to the light of the fire, and now he wanders over to place Brienne’s spare and most disgraceful shirt back in their chest.

Gendry tips the blades in the light. He whistles appreciatively. He’s too old to learn to joust, but perhaps one day he could fight for sport with the other young lords.

“You fight with a hammer?” says Pod.

“Like my father,” Gendry says, his voice thick with pride, “Everyone says I look like him.” Brienne rotates only her eyes towards Jaime. Jaime blinks at her slowly. Gendry asks her, “You knew him?" Behind her Pod climbs onto the bed and lies down. Gendry catches the motion, looks between the three of them and then flushes, awkwardly clearing his throat.

“Very little, my lord,” she tells him, sorry to see his bright face fall. “Even my father rarely travelled to Storm’s End. But I served Renly during the war of the five kings. I was one of his Kingsguard.”

“You said, Rainbow Guard, before,” says Jaime quietly.

“Rainbow Guard,” Brienne agrees.

“Did you like him much?” says Gendry, and he turns back to examining Oathkeeper, so she doesn’t have to worry about keeping her face clear while she decides how to answer that. Jaime’s amusement is hot on her heating cheek.

“Was he any good at having a Rainbow Guard?” Jaime prompts, which is a much easier question to answer. He bumps her with his elbow.

“Yes,” she says and Gendry turns to narrow his eyes at Jaime. “He was-.” She stumbles. Gendry gives up on the swords, watching her patiently. He does have Renly’s bright interest in his eyes. “Stannis killed him,” she says, because as the memories have faded, that is what she thinks about when she remembers Renly; the last thing that she did for him “It was Stannis in the shape of the red woman’s magic.” Gendry nods. Then he puts down the swords and shuffles back further to put his back against the wall of hot air coming off the fire.

“Don’t you wish there was more wine?”

Brienne says briskly, “He was an honourable man. His people loved him. It was my pleasure to serve him.” Gendry nods some more, looking down at his boots. That’s not a full song and it’s not the shape of a person you can love. Gendry should love him. “He was gentle,” she says, slower, “and brave. Clever when he wanted to be. Not always serious when he needed to be. He was only ever passable with a sword.” Jaime abruptly covers his mouth with a gloved hand. Brienne turns to narrow her eyes at him. That’s part of the story.

“Stannis seemed a miserable old tosser,” Gendry says, with a pantomimed type of humour. Jaime keeps his hand over his mouth. Gendry balls his fingers into fists and then flexes them wide. “They hardly sound like they could have been brothers.” Gendry’s eyes turn towards Jaime and hold. Jaime sighs.

“Consider whether this is something you particularly want to hear about from me, my lord,” says Jaime.

“You’re here aren’t you,” says Gendry.

“Fine,” Jaime says. “They shared a sickness in wanting to be king. That’s more than they had in common with your father.” Gendry’s hands stop moving.

“My father-,” Gendry says, voice lilting cautiously upwards.

Jaime crosses his ankles and situates himself even more casually against the foot of the bed, still close enough that Brienne could dig him with an elbow in return.

“-always wished there was more wine,” says Jaime. Gendry’s face folds like a tent with it’s pole knocked out. Brienne can’t feel any movement from Jaime beside her. She watches Gendry consciously fight against the drowning weight of closely watched anger. She thinks Gendry had begun to like Jaime, before this.

“That bad?” Gendry asks. Speaking lightly looks effort-full.

“Well, he didn’t like me much either,” Jaime concedes. Gendry fixes his eyes very deliberately on Jaime.

He says, “We had peace while he was King. That’s not nothing.” That shuts Jaime up pretty effectively. He just blinks back at Gendry with a perfectly pleasant expression painted over his face. Gendry’s scowl deepens the longer he looks back. “Everyone says you and your sister killed him,” says Gendry, all in a rush, “because of your-.” He looks at Brienne and up where Pod must be lying and purses his lips. Brienne supposes she appreciates the consideration. Jaime blows a dismissive little puff of air, answering quickly, apparently prepared.

“How? Did we take on the shape of a boar? Conjure it from our wishing? Are you attributing to us the powers of that red woman?” He twitches his hand in his lap. His eyes flicker briefly to Brienne. “Did we drive him to drink?”

“But she did kill him,” says Brienne, to shut him up.

“Well, not directly,” says Jaime, “and you must understand that he really was quite unbearable to live with. Particularly as his wife. Robert himself wouldn’t have disputed that.”

Gendry, tight faced and pale says, “That’s no bloody reason to ruin it for everybody else! When you’re little you think, Oh, they must know what they’re doing, with all the titles and the reading and writing to each other, but you’re all incompetent! Everyone knows it. No one will trust any of you lot - any of us - after all this shit.” He sets his jaw.

“I can’t dispute that,” says Jaime. “It does make one wish that here was more wine. How different is a good stupor from peace.” Brienne thinks thats really quite enough of that.

“Not everyone is incompetent,” says Brienne. Gendry looks at her dolefully, but there is a flicker of interest in there. “Lord Stark is remembered with love by his people and his family. My father was-.” Brienne swallows sparks from the fire. “My father is very well respected.” Jaime is already talking again.

“Lord Stark knew to stay out of it,” he says. “Your father knew to stay out of it. When Stark allowed himself to be dragged to court, he immediately fell over his inflated sense of self importance and onto the-.”

“Sansa says that he was trying to be decent!” Brienne interrupts, aware that she is speaking more loudly than his proximity merits. “She thinks he wanted you sister to have a chance to do the right thing.” Jaime turns both his hands up.

”Incompetent,” he says, like he’s won a game. Gendry is watching Jaime narrowly. Brienne leans in to pull his attention.

“Acting with honour — allowing others the chance to behave with honour — Gendry,” Brienne says, “my lord, all we can do is try.”

“Yes,” Gendry says. “I can see that. But that’s only any good so long as all the other idiots with great fuck off armies - excuse me, mi’lady, my lady.” He articulates the last carefully. Breinne watches frustration bloom across his face - “My lady. It’s only that no one has explained what I’m expected to do if any of those ravens come back. Because if they write back, it’s not just me any more, is it? The things we promised them-. If I trip over my own cock - pardon me. It’s just, it’s more trouble to be given a wife than a kingdom.” Gendry wipes at his upper lip. “No one made me swear anything.” Brienne gathers herself. She has one of her father’s favourite musings prepared for presentation.

“It’s the same thing as always but on a grander scale,” says Brienne, “you look after your people wherever it is within your power to do so. You try to be brave, to give them justice and set dutifully about whatever needs to be done. It’s just service. You hope that the crown is just and seeks to serve you in turn.” Gendry seems caught off guard by that.

“Well, I can hope,” he says. He blows a long stream of air out through his mouth. “She seems-. She has been very kind to me.” Jaime sits forward and mirrors her crossed legs. It presses their knees together again.

“Have you ever heard the little speech that is given in response to a knight swearing service?”

“No,” says Gendry. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard how to make a slake tub or set a forge fire.” Jaime rolls his eyes.

“They swear, in exchange for service, to give you a place by their side, in their home and at their table, and they swear not to ask of you anything that will bring you to disgrace.”

“Dishonour,” says Brienne. “Nothing that will bring dishonour.”

“Right,” says Gendry, “so if these lords and ladies write back and don’t laugh me out of Storm’s End once they see me, I might need to know these words as well as all the others?” He passes his fingers over the stained skin under his eyes. “Will I have to know how to write them down?”

“It’s only spoken,” says Jaime. “But it gets forgotten. I’m trying to say-. The whole thing is full of traps, but the basic structure of it — if a person must give something of themselves to you, then you owe them a part of yourself in turn. That’s… well.”

“Obvious,” says Gendry. Jaime pivots, still tipped forwards, to try and pass the whole thing back off to Brienne. “Trouble is,” Gendry says, “There’s quite a lot of people in the Stormlands.”

Jaime says, “And that’s why I never wanted much to do with the whole thing. Very demanding. Almost unreasonable. Takes a certain type of person.”

“Maybe your sister got to them and there’s less of them that needs bits of me now,” says Gendry. Then he looks at Brienne. “Sorry,” he says. “That’s not very funny, is it?” Brienne knows he didn’t mean any harm by it. She tries to look encouraging.

“You’re not a pond that will dry up,” she says, now in unrehearsed territory. “Time is an issue. You have to hear all these petitions that go on and on, but you don’t run out of…” She can’t quite think of the word for it. Energy. That feeling of obligation. The desire to do your duty well.

“Devotion,” says Pod, from the bed.

Gendry squints, like he’s thinking about it very hard. Jaime thumps his head back against the wood at his back.

“That makes some sense. Maybe the queen should make Podrick Lord of somewhere,” says Gendry.

“No,” says Pod. “I’d only like to be a knight.” Gendry perks up, willing to be distracted.

“Oh, I wouldn’t have minded that,” he says. “I was going to-.” He turns back to Jaime. “You know, I was going to take revenge on your family. It’s been a bit underwhelming running into you and your brother all over the place.”

Brienne sizes him up instinctively. She wants to say, you can’t take revenge, he’s going to be yours, but maybe then he will think of it as justice, and only a change in key.

“Well,” says Jaime, “I am sorry for you father’s reckless approach to hunting and drinking.”

Brienne says, “Gods sakes.”

But Jaime is already frowning: “Look-.”

“What about for almost killing me?” interrupts Gendry. Jaime sits forward.

“When?” He says, “You could have brought it up before now. We’ve been perfectly civil for days.”

Gendry puffs up, “You don’t-? When your lot came to kill all my father’s bastards,” says Gendry. ‘After he was dead. You Lannisters hunted me before I even knew why.”

“Oh,” Jaime says, “I see.” Brienne wipes her hands on her knees, agonised. He’d run off and wasn’t in the city. There’s always some mitigation she wants to offer. Beside her, Jaime rearranges his hands on his knees a few times before straightening. “Yes, I can apologise for that,” he says, still sounding a little flippant. “Look, I really do like to think that if I’d-.” He cuts himself off. “But I can’t deny what was done. I do apologise then. It was an awful thing in a long line of fucking awful things.”

Brienne stares at him. Pod shifts noisily on the bed, sitting up, Brienne thinks. Gendry starts bobbing his head slightly and then intensifies the movement.

“Well, it’s not even your name anymore, after tonight,” says Gendry, a little cruel and red cheeked with it. “So I suppose that’s going to have to be alright. Or, I mean, it will be alright.” He’s consciously softening his voice. Brienne watches him with interest. Tension seems to blow out of him with a few gentle gusts. “You’ve been more than decent to me.”

“Right,” says Jaime. “Wonderful.” He leans back against the bed and thunks his head against it again softly. Brienne widens her eyes at him, trying to catch his attention. “Thank you,” he says, and he’s not even gritting his teeth. “Thank you, my lord.” Gendry recoils.

“Should we-” says Pod.

“I wasn’t actually in the city anymore,” says Jaime, to Brienne, eyes intent until she nods. Then he looks away. “I’d like to think they wouldn’t have felt they needed to do it if I was there. I’d like to think that.”

“-go?” says Pod. “Should we go?”

“Yes,” says Jaime, getting up. “Can’t skip this one really.”

“Wait,” says Gendry, “No one has anything to say to me about my father, that isn’t about his drinking habits?” He looks desperate. The parts of Renly Brienne won’t share are all the ways in which he was loved.

“Eddard Stark loved Robert Baratheon,” says Brienne, “and Eddard Stark made Lady Sansa and Lady Arya.” Jaime wanders over to put his sword back over the desk. Brienne buckles hers back around her waist.

Jaime says, “During his war, his men loved him to distraction. And he had enough sense to like the late Catelyn Stark. There. That will have to be enough for now. There will be many that knew him before King’s Landing and you’ll find them when you go south.”

The queen sits at the centre of the high table looking down over the gathered men. The hall is just as crowded as ever, but now, at the end of one of the long tables, there is a cluster of quiet, grim-faced Dothraki, too few to be truly representative of even the slight number still camped outside the walls. Perhaps Jon was right, and they hadn’t wanted to come. There is a larger group of unsullied men, all in their inadequately warm gear, sitting mostly straight-backed but similarly quiet at the head of the same long table. Between them, a group consisting mainly of Bear Islanders and Night’s Watchmen is riotously falling over their meals. They are at least pretending that they have noticed nothing unusual about their new neighbours. Some more of the westerosi must have been shuffled out to eat in the guards hall and passageways to make room, but Brienne couldn’t say who is absent.

Tyrion sits up at the high table in Jon’s usual place. Jon is nowhere to be seen and Arya is similarly absent, but that is not unusual. Tyrion meets Brienne’s eyes and raises a glass to her, she nods Jaime towards him, and Jaime pivots quickly on his bench, momentarily betraying his tension before he sees Tyrion’s raised glass. He turns back to her, gives her a reassuring grin and goes back to his meal, returning to the pretence of ease. Brienne’s stomach turns on his behalf.

Gendry is sat next to her. Samwell Tarly and the woman, Gilly, have joined them.

Tarly says, “They made us come. I’m Lord Tarly now, and they noticed I’d been having meals brought to me in the tower.” He says it like he wants them to laugh at him, or with him, Brienne isn’t sure. Gilly meanwhile looks delighted by all the noise and movement around her. Or maybe she’s just pleased to be away from the child for a moment. She’s sitting next to Pod with her back to the majority of the hall, and she cranes around between bites of food to watch the Dothraki, Bran, the queen and a scuffle that breaks out among some of the younger northern gentry. Brienne thinks they should have been the ones demoted to eating in the guards’ hall or the corridors.

When the clatter of plates dies down enough that Brienne can hear the wind beating the castle walls, the queen stands, and Jaime turns again, clearly quite ready to get on with it all.

“Tomorrow the first of us to march south will leave to reclaim Casterly Rock and the Westerlands,” she announces. There is no shout of triumph as there would have been if Jon Snow had said it, but there is an excited murmur. The queen looks out over all of them, seemingly untroubled by the lack of response. “I offer to you all, my people, a motion;” -Brienne can see Tyrion jerk up at the table - “an attainder of Jaime Lannister, named Warden of the West and Lord of Casterly Rock by his birthright and again by his sister, the tyrant who sits on my throne. I would denounce him and strip from him his rank and titles, for the crime of breaking his sacred oaths and killing his king, my father. What do you say?” Jaime had stood as soon as she said his name. Brienne can’t see his face, just the relaxed hand held behind his back and that almost every eye in the room is now turning towards him.

“Yes,” shouts one voice from the back of the room, cracked with age, and men stamp their feet under the shouts that come up from the rest of the room. It’s more restrained than Brienne might have expected if she had known it would be a public choice, but it’s only as loud as it is quick. She mouths her own agreement almost silently, wishing it wasn’t to his back.

The queen turns to him, eyes bright and intent, even from so far away. “Jaime Lannister, I strip from you and any of your descendants, the Lannister name, the west and all attendant lands, titles and holdings. I offer you mercy and leave you with your life.” She keeps her eyes on him for a little longer. Brienne thinks the queen hoped to see him humiliated. Hurt by this. He gives her a little bow from the neck. Brienne can not tell if the queen is disappointed.

The queen turns back to the hall. “My father forgot his love and his duty to his people. I will not. I offer all these confiscated titles to my loyal servant, Tyrion Lannister and charge him with the task of returning to Casterly Rock, which he has already conquered for me by force. With Winterfell and the Rock looking to a true queen, we will, at last, have the beginnings of our peace. I will drink to our soldier’s success and to our coming victories. Join me.”

She raises her glass, Sansa stands to raise her own - she get the kind of response that Jon might hope for. Brienne watches the queen inhale it all, tilting her chin up to disguise the curl of her mouth. Men are always happy to drink, and Brienne thinks it wise to have buried Tyrion Lannister’s name in the middle of that speech. Jaime gives the perfunctory twitch of an inclined neck to Tyrion who nods back at him, hand on his chest, and then he turns to sit down at the table.

The hall around them quickly goes back to its usual hubbub. No one here is particularly interested in Lannisters. Their little group watches him covertly. Jaime smiles very brightly at Brienne and bounces his spoon just above the rim of his empty plate.

“Where are you lord of?” says Gilly to Gendry who is staring up at the high table.

Gendry turns back, blinking, and casts a guilty look at Jaime.

“Storm’s End, but only just recently, honestly,” says Gendry, “so it’s all a bit-. Well. Before that I was a blacksmith, and mostly I’m a blacksmith still.”

“Are you a Baratheon?” Gilly says, “I’ve read all about the Stormlands, but nothing about being a blacksmith. Someone should think to write a book about that.”

“I have been learning to read and write,” Gendry says, “But only for two days, so you might have to wait a little while for a book.”

“There are plenty of books on smithing,” says Tarly. Brienne grits her teeth. Jaime twitches his head up towards him, narrows his eyes consideringly and then flicks an amused look at Brienne. Tarly stammers.

“By blacksmiths?” says Gendry, doubtfully.

“My lord, your cousin - Shireen - she taught Gilly to read. She taught the Queen’s Hand, Ser Davos too,” - this does cause Gendry to brighten - “You’ll be writing anything you want in no time,” he says, very earnestly.

“Oh,” says Gendry, “she-.” He comes to an abrupt halt, staring down at the table furiously. He puts one elbow up on the table. He puts it back down, his hands in fists.

“She was so lovely to me,” says Gilly, gently, “and I’d like to help, if there’s any way I can. There’s not much for me to do up in that tower that concerns people not on a page. It would be good to pass on her lessons to her family.”

Brienne looks at Jaime. For the first time tonight, his shoulders are drooping. A gangly young woman with red braids comes by to bash a jug of water down between them. Pod flinches uncharacteristically so Brienne scowls after her. Jaime pours himself more water. There isn’t any more wine this evening. Brienne looks about and can’t see the rodent faced spy anywhere.

“When I can spare the time…” says Gendry.

“It sounds like an excellent idea,” Jaime says, and he tops up Gendry’s cup as well. He waves the jug vaguely at the rest of the table, waiting for someone to proffer a glass.

“My lord?” he says, and Tarly flushes.

“Oh I’m no longer used to all this,” he says. “Sam, all of you, please call me Sam.” Jaime puts the jug heavily back down. Brienne looks up at Sansa, who is still turned attentively towards the queen.

“It’s a very thoughtful suggestion,” she says to Gilly, “Thank you, Gilly.”

“Could I still ask you two questions about the business of actually being lord of somewhere like that?” Gendry says. “I’ve not got much time to myself until the armies move out, but that’ll all be over soon and I don’t know what I’ll do then with…”

“Of course,” Brienne tells him as warmly as she can. She steps on Jaime’s boot under the table. He blinks back into himself.

“Of course,” he echoes.

After a moment, Pod leans in and quietly says, “I’ll go with you if you…” He jerks his head toward the doors. Jaime shakes his head in a dismissive little twitch.

“Then tomorrow? We’ve been meeting after the sun goes down, working until dinner,” Gendry says. “Would that work, my lady? In your tower?”

“Oh I’m not a-,” says Gilly. Then, “Yes, of course. Come and find me.”

Jon strides in with Varys bobbing along at his heels. Sam and Gendry are discussing how crowded the sleeping arrangements in the castle are, but Gendry turns right around and stares at the doors when he catches sight of the two men, dropping the conversation cold. Arya does not follow, but the wolf does, loping in slowly and heading up to the high table to stand across from Bran, entering into what has to be the most disturbing staring contest ever seen in the whole of the seven kingdoms. Varys has coiled parchment clutched in his hands and he hands it to the queen. Sansa subtly tilts her head to get a good look - Jon is speaking to both of them - and then Sansa’s head snaps towards their little group. Brienne is half out of her seat before she quite knows what she’s doing. It might be Tarth. But Sansa gives a placating twitch of her chin and turns back to Jon. Brienne subsides, and in turn passes on a calming look to Jaime who has bolted upright at her sudden movement. Jaime bumps his elbow to Pod’s and Pod goes back to the conversation too.

It might be the Stormlands.

The four of them attempt to refocus on Tarly’s concern that still more men have moved into the stairway of the maester’s tower. Gendry, still with half an eye on the door, reveals that he has been sleeping in the smithy. Brienne stews in guilt, thinking of all those men, outside in their summer tents, in their summer leathers. Evenfall and Winterfell. Rain and Snow.

Gendry begins to gravel about how he only mentioned it because he would have shared any room allotted with other blacksmiths, who are working all hours and who all need a break from the noise and the smoke.

“All the bloody lords and-,” he cuts himself off. This pronouncement makes the situation unbearable to Brienne. His hair may be cropped, and perhaps he doesn’t look like Robert to Jaime, but to Brienne, he is like Renly. A kindness about the eyes with a stubbornness about the mouth. They were all angry men, in their way, but Gendry actually has cause.

“You should take Jaime’s room,” Brienne says, without any further thought.

Pod and Jaime still. Jaime is already looking at her, the burst blood in the corner of his eye is suddenly very obvious with how wide and white his eyes are otherwise. Her gut rolls with mortification. She knows her own face is transforming into a blotchy pink proclamation of her embarrassment. What’s particularly galling is that she still hasn’t achieved anything to warrant shame. She’s just been lying there, next to him, with Podrick as an inappropriate chaperone.

“No,” says Gendry. “I couldn’t. Lady Sansa wouldn’t throw you out of your room, my-,” lor- his voice skates off the word and now he’s flushed too - “just because they… oh,” he says, looking at Pod and then Brienne. “Right.”

Tarly makes a strangled noise that Brienne finds so annoying it shocks her out of her paralysis of internal recrimination. It doesn’t help her come up with anything to say. She’d decided to be done with this. To be past embarrassment.

“I’ll stay with Tyrion,” says Jaime, mildly, already having returned to pouring yet more water, “he won’t mind. I’m quite sure. He’s only here one more night.” She has never seen Jaime humiliated. In the Stark camp he was afraid. When they took his hand, after the screaming, he was just gone. She cringed at his decay and depression, but there was nothing there for the men to beat shame into. He’s just stood and had everything stripped from him without a single blush. He’s not successfully lying to anyone in this little group, that much is clear. Gilly, perhaps, until she asks Sam about it. It’s all so ridiculous. What a lot of nonsense over something that’s none of anyone’s business. It annoys Brienne that she is calmed by his dissembling.

“Hello, Sam,” says Jon Snow, “Lord Gendry.”

The wolf appears at Brienne’s shoulder. Brienne does not look at the wolf. Jaime does not look at the wolf. He just stares back at her across the table. All the concerns Brienne had are gone in a moment, replaced by utter stillness.

“Hello,” says Gendry to Jon, and then he gets stuck as Brienne alway does, on the title. “My lord,” he tries, then lamely, “Hello,” to the wolf. Jon puts a hand around the wolfs head and tugs the enormous weight of it into his side.

Jon says, “Would you join the queen?” Jon inclines his head towards Brienne, “If you don’t mind giving him up for a little while, ser.” It’s odd to have the teasing formalities you would direct at a woman appended with that title.

“Not at all,” says Brienne. She very carefully looks down at the wolf, half convinced that it’s red eyes will be fixed on Jaime. Jaime steps on her foot. Jon is tugging it about by the fur, so it is difficult to be sure, but she thinks it’s looking at their empty plates. Its tongue lolls out. And there are it’s teeth.

“Gilly?” says Jon expectantly, as though she might object.

“Of course,” says Gendry. He gathers up his cup. “I’ll see you in a bit?” and he trails off after Jon, only turning around to look back at the doors, where he is immediately chivied along by the wolf.

“It’s only a big dog,” says Brienne to Pod, mostly to reassure herself, “You saw how he touched it.”

“I do think it might be hungry,” says Pod.

“Wonderful,” says Jaime tiredly. “Hungry direwolves and dragons. Did you ever think: where’s my lion?”

“Or my stacks of gold,” says Pod with a grin.

“Brienne already has both the moon and the stars,” says Jaime, smiling beatifically. Pod hides a grin behind his cup.

Brienne says, “Oh, do shut up,” but finds that she can’t quite let it pass unchallenged, even though her face is heating again. “There’s a sun as well,” she says.

“That too. The moon, the stars and the sun,” says Jaime immediately, “all belonging to Brienne.” He’s attentively tracking whatever nightmarish thing is happening to her face, still showing her his teeth.

Gilly says, “Oh! I see now,” and she smiles at Brienne and she curls her hand around Tarly’s across the table in full view of anyone who passes by. Tarly’s complexion begins to match Brienne’s. “That’s lovely,” Gilly says.

Brienne cranes her neck back to Sansa, alone with Tyrion at the high table, but she’s smiling. She can’t help it. If it is the Stormlands, perhaps it will be good news.

In the passageway outside their room, Podrick suddenly announces, “I might stay with Lord Tyrion, my lady.” Pod is paused with his heels hanging over the last step, hand on the turning wall of the staircase. “I’ll find Gendry too.”

That would be… extremely welcome.

“Tyrion’s leaving tomorrow,” says Brienne, “He’ll have women with him, surely.”

“Tyrion has given up women,” says Jaime, with his shoulder already to the door, “at least for the moment.” He shoves his way into the room and lets the door fall closed behind him. This seems exceptionally suspect. Tyrion had said he’d given up drinking while drinking. Pod watches her placidly.

“He will have women. You’re quite right. I’ll stay here.”

“Well,” she says, “if he’s given them up. Perhaps you should say goodbye.”

“I could stay and help him ready his things in the morning,” says Pod, “If you don’t mind sparing me, my lady.” He’s smiling at her again now. Brienne meets his eyes and wills herself not to blush. Brienne is fond of Jaime and Jaime is staying with his brother, all very polite fictions. Now she is sparing Pod. She’s perfectly capable of lying her way past strangers, but Brienne will have to get better at this type of dissembling or marry him soon.

“Very good, Podrick. Yes. Well done.” She shoves her thumbs into her belt which makes her elbows stick out. She can’t remember ever thinking about her elbows outside of her early training, back when she had to learn not to overextend them and strain the joint. Pod’s elbows have always been very well balanced. He’s been a good squire. “Goodnight then, Pod,” she says. Then she has to free her hands to open the door to the room.

“Goodnight, my lady,” says Podrick, warmly to her back. Then he leans forward and yells “’night!” past her into the room at Jaime.

Jaime is poking at new wood on the fire. He stops to come and take her cloak from her, looking very pleased with himself at having remembered. He throws it over the desk, picking up his sword to do it. He hasn’t carried the sword today, but then he’d barely left their room except to be disgraced at dinner. It probably wouldn’t have been diplomatic to arrive armed.

“We’ve neglected to give Podrick his evening lesson,” Jaime says, perching back on Brienne’s cloak to examine his sword. Trapping the sheath between his thigh and his gold hand, he draws the sword a handspan. The nakedness of his neck is strange. “Would Sansa see me?” he says. Still staring at the sword.

“What? When?” she says.

“Whenever.” Brienne honestly doesn’t know. She can only ask.

“Are you going to be alright?” Her voice is gruff, not sweetly caring like Sansa’s could be, even when she didn’t mean it. Brienne means it.

“Yes,” he says, “of course. The dragon queen has granted me a great mercy. How are you, Brienne?” Brienne frowns and jams her thumbs back into her belt. She tucks her elbows. Perhaps it would have been better to keep Pod here. “Sorry,” he says.

“You could go and say goodbye to Tyrion as well,” she offers. He drags his gaze away from the sword to look directly at her for a moment. Then he leans back on the desk, tipping her a smile.

“Do you want me to go and say goodbye to Tyrion?” Brienne watches him, trying to read every twitch of his face, trying to decipher the way his hand is tracing the sword in his lap. He sighs and lets his face collapse into something more genuine. “Don’t look so worried,” he says. His hands don’t stop mapping the sword. “Cersei never officially restored any of it to me after I was out of the Kingsguard so it’s only a public show for this queen to have stripped it from me.”

“Your name,” Brienne says.

“Lannister,” he says, blows it with so much air out of his mouth. “She could have Lannister if it was up to me, but she can only stop people saying it in her hearing. It’s the knighthood; to have it taken from me for that particular crime and not the others, it’s a little different, that’s all.” He unsheathes a little more of his sword. “Now you’ve given me this, do you want to practice?” he asks.

Brienne watches his hand on the hilt. She does want to practice. But the last aborted attempt sits like stale bread in her throat. He’d wanted to refuse and hadn’t.

“Come on, Brienne,” he says. Brienne takes a step closer. The first time, with Pod, practice had gone well.

“I had a thought: with a beat parry, have you tried driving through with your right wrist over your left?”

Jaime draws the sword, discards the sheath and she takes a couple of healthy steps backwards so he can mime the suggested motion for her.

“Again, it will make me a broader target, expose my right side, and my left arm really isn’t that much weaker, not anymore. It’s only a lifetime of instinct all reversed, when no one else has swapped with me.” He moves away from the desk, swinging the sword in a lazy arc and Brienne moves back again, instinctually. He moves and she moves. They should clear the furniture first. Brienne puts her hand on her sword, keeping her eye keenly on his face. He only looks anticipatory. He’s tracking her expression carefully too, not looking at the sword. She still hesitates. “You’re never going to get to fight the two-handed, unchained Jaime Lannister,” he says. He keeps his sword low, his grip reversed, unthreatening. “I’m sorry.”

Brienne draws Oathkeeper - against her better judgement, the tourney swords are in the corner - and rolls her weight forwards onto the balls of her feet.

“Don’t apologise for that of all things. Try it,” she says, and she steps forwards and cuts the sword towards him, without nearly as much force she could bring to bear, giving him time.

He flips his grip, brings the sword up and beats Oathkeeper away with just his left hand - the force of it successfully knocks her arm away - and he moves aside and quickly bringing his sword up to her chest. He grins.

“Again,” says Brienne, backing up, there’s not enough space to keep going forwards. They should move the furniture.

This time when his sword meets hers she absorbs the beat and drives into the parry, pressing quickly back into the line of engagement. It doesn’t seem to dampen his spirits at all. He shakes his arm out, eyes bright.

“Again,” she says, backing up once more.

This time he throws his right wrist over his left and the ringing noise of her blade being knocked just off path resounds. It might work. His right side is too exposed. It would be no effort at all to come up over his guard. She tries it, loathe to prove him right but feeling the necessity of it. He moves against the flow of the fight. Reversed. When she presses in close he swipes at her with the gloved gold hand and laughs. When she steps away he follows through with his sword instead, bringing it arcing towards her neck. Rather than step back again she brings her sword up two handed, catching his blade. She frees one hand as she drives him away. She mimes punching him in the face, snaking her leading leg out although she’s going to be too late to snag his retreating step. He clearly knows what he’s leaving open, and it’s new enough to her in its left-handed arrangement that she’s concentrating on countering efficiently and documenting weaknesses, so she only notices the brilliant flash of his teeth when he lets her extremely pulled punch push slowly into his jaw. It’s barely an affectionate nudge. She lets it linger.

“I’m sorry it took me so long to tell anyone about the letter,” he says. She drops her fist from his face and retreats, stomach fluttering unpleasantly. Frowning, he touches his gold hand to his jaw.

“Has anyone made sure Pod knows how to throw a good punch?” he asks. Brienne hasn’t checked. Surely that’s the kind of thing all little boys learn.

“Tourney swords,” she says. It’s senseless to play like this with swords like these. Jaime sighs.

She doesn’t bother to hold herself back at all. She goes at him like she’d go for Arya, out in the courtyard with Clegane watching. It takes three tries for him to hold her off for long enough that he hits his legs to the desk in retreat. He drops his guard, sitting on the desk again, smiling still. If he’s got energy to smile, then he’s not giving her the same courtesy.

“Seven hells,” he says appreciatively.

He walks straight past her to move the chair by the fire back to the wall. He turns back to her in the expanded space, bringing his blunted sword up again. She recognises that this is part of his problem. This kind of work is only useful if drills precede it. She’s going to let him do it despite herself. She’s going to be part of the problem.

She moves in fast. Too fast. He manages to parry with more strength than she was expecting, just enough that with her momentum he comes up inside her guard again - it’s not a bad strategy; kill quickly while the opponent is still struggling to compensate for the left-handed approach - but he can’t free his sword. He mimes stabbing at her with his dead right hand.

“I beat so many confident men with my off hand and a dagger,” he says, nostalgic.

Brienne lets him back away. This time they engage carefully, testing his dexterity until he fumbles the angle bringing his grip up and almost walks himself into her sword. For the first time he looks frustrated. He circles about her, so they swap places again, Brienne with her back to the desk.

“I knew what I wanted to do,” he says. He mimes the motion, then again, then again. Now his arm co-operates. She chews her cheek.

“Again,” she says. He crashes in close again and she twists, grabbing for his wrist and ripping his sword out of his grip with a twist of her own - the sword thuds to the ground. His eyes are wide and immediately delighted, he’s flushed already. His eyes flicker to her mouth. Brienne drops his arm.

“You would have beaten me, I think. If we’d met in a tourney or on some battlefield. I was in a spectacularly bad state on that bridge in the Riverlands, but I really think-.”

“I don’t care.” Brienne tries not to look at how bright his eyes are.

“I think you do,” says Jaime, “just a little. Come on.”

She does like to win. It just doesn’t mean much here. He picks up the sword again, tests the balance of it and then executes the exact kind of showy flourish her father had refused to allow her to attempt when she was a child. Jaime has spent time learning to do it left-handed. A waste. It looks good. She forgets that there’s no space and lets him too close, watching the clever twist of his wrist. He feints low then brings his right arm up to support his left wrist driving through against her hastily raised sword. There’s no room to retreat and engage properly. The desk is at her back. She waits for the momentum in his thrust carry him just too far, except it doesn’t, until she helps him along with a two handed jerk of her arms, and it’s easy, she only has to hit him. Or tip him. Her gut flips as she twists, grabbing him by the side of his neck and shoving him into his own forward motion. He stumbles past her, trying to bring his sword around but she turns her own to keep it low and trap it against the desk. She keeps her grip to shove him down into the swords.

“I yield,” he says.

He’s not smiling anymore, breathing hard beneath her hand, white and pink between his lips. She could shift her grip and drag him back up into her. She’d like to put her hands in his hair and pull.

“Practice is over,” she says. She drops him and the sword.

“What?” he says, sounding honestly confused, but she’d known this would be a mistake. “We’ve only just begun. Finally. Brienne?”

She drags the chair back out to sit in her place in front of the fire and she tugs her boots off, placing them very carefully under the chair. Behind her she can hear him dumping the swords over the desk. He comes to stand in front of her, sighing again. She crosses her arms over her rolling insides.

“This has been a strange evening,” he says, apologetic and understated. This morning he was a knight. “And you don’t want to-?”

Brienne goes scalding my hot. He knows. Jamie’s eyebrows go up.

“No,” she says. “Not now. Do you?”

He looks her up and down sceptically.

“Fine. But come and sit on the bed anyway,” he says and holds out his hand, “Or I’ll sit by your chair and then you’ll feel you have to sit on the floor too.”

She takes his wrist and lets him pretend to pull her up. They sit together on the edge of the bed for a while, knees pressed together, staring at the swords on the desk. Then Jaime starts fumbling to pull his boots off. Brienne moves back to sit on the other side of the bed, crossing her legs. Bootless, he pivots to face her and mirrors her.

“In an extremely unvarnished way, legitimate children are rather the point of me if we continue with this,” he says, and Brienne isn’t done with blushing and now there is a rising heat behind her eyes that means something else. She blinks it away. She opens her mouth to object. He interrupts. “I’m happy to do that, Brienne. I’ve given children to the Baratheons and I thought I’d given a child to the Greyjoys. I can give you a child for Tarth. But not yet, I assume?”

“Of course not,” Brienne says, flushed and sick.

“Of course. We can be careful,” he says. “But perhaps you could talk to that Gilly girl? I don’t know anyone to ask in this castle.”

“Of course that’s not the point of-.” Brienne stops and tries to frown away the prickling sensation in her eyes. That was supposed to be the whole point of her. That’s the duty she couldn’t fulfil and the crushing obligation she had refused. It’s not the whole point of him for her. It’s an accompanying possibility, barely an excuse. She’s sticking this out even if she stays at Winterfell and there’s no anchor weight of a title anymore to pass on to some unsuspectingly heir. “Is that what else was in that letter,” Brienne asks, following, like with Tyrion, the sideways revelation. “The lack of a Greyjoy child?” He nods at her, watching carefully.

“The way she told me-. I think I already knew it was a lie. But perhaps there just wasn’t a child for very long. People tend to assume the worst of her, not without cause it must be admitted.” Brienne twists her mouth.

“Will you want to kiss me now?” he says. Brienne will, is the awful thing, although not in any way that necessitated sending Pod to sleep elsewhere. She leans in slowly, just a gentle brush of lips against his cheek. It’s a relief when his hand strokes at her ankle. Brienne wants to be gentle. She hasn’t had much chance to be gentle. She pulls back.

“Do you want me to go and say goodbye to Tyrion?”

“Do you want to go and say goodbye to Tyrion?”

They’re friends again, Brienne thinks, Tyrion and Jaime, or perhaps they’re just family.

“Why would I go? When we could be having conversations like these?” he says, beginning to smile again.

“Let’s just go to bed,” she says.

With the fire screened, and the candles out, he unbuckles his hand and tucks it away over the side of the bed. They curl into each other under their furs and Brienne sleeps.

She wakes to darkness, strangely alert with no nightmare on her heels. Jaime is sat up next to her, half curled against the headboard. Her head is next to his hip. She clears sleep from her throat.

“You really can go,” she says, again. Although, she doesn’t know if his rooms are in the inner castle, so perhaps he can’t. Or shouldn’t. Perhaps she could-.

“Sorry. There was a storm,” he says. She doesn’t think anything would stop him if he really wanted to go. She doesn’t think. She reassures herself that all evidence suggests that he will do whatever he wants. She hears rustling but he doesn’t get up.

“It’s good you made up,” she tells the dark room. She hears his head hit the headboard.

“Do you want to know why we fought?” Brienne is quiet, waiting for eyes to adjust. “No,” he says. “Quite right. It’s another dirty Lannister secret.”

“He forgave you for whatever it was?” Brienne asks.

He reaches across his body to lightly touch her hair with his left hand. She blinks up into the gloom. She can see the white of his eyes now and the vague shape of him.

“I assume so. Apparently he’d already forgiven himself.” She climbs out of bed to light a candle from the mantle, blinking at the sudden glare. She brings it back to his side of the bed and looks down at him, sitting with his arms crossed over his raised knees. She brings the candle close to his face, watching the fanned gold of his eyelashes as he screws his eyes up against the light.

“Brienne, please put the candle further away.” She puts the candle down beside the bed. She doesn’t get back in.

“Tell me then,” she says. She smothers a yawn. “Let’s get it all out in one night.” Jaime huffs and doesn’t speak. Brienne clears her throat some more.

“He married a common girl when he was sixteen. Our father found out and had me tell a lie-. When we survived that night, I confessed. That’s why we fought.”

“What did they do to her?” Brienne asks, flat. Jaime turns his hand over.

“They were cruel. After that, I don’t know.” Brienne sits and picks her feet up onto the bedding. She swallows down sickness.

“My father wouldn’t care,” she says.

“What.”

“If he is alive. He would never have suggested I marry anyone without some title, but if it was already done it wouldn’t occur to him to object, so long as they knew how to behave at meals, dance and ride well.”

Jaime tugs at the sleeve hanging over his stump and stares at her for a while longer. She climbs back under the furs beside him even though she is no longer tired.

“I can ride well,” he says eventually, “but he’ll know that. My reputation precedes me.” Brienne glances sideways at his sullen face.

“When he did speak of you, he did call you Kingslayer,” she confesses, not that he had spoken favourably of much that happened on the mainland. “But he didn’t know you. I could tell him what you did for me, what we did together. You could explain to him now what happened with the mad king. Not much bothers him.” Not much that was already on Tarth. He turns to her, right shoulder against the headboard.

“He wasn’t the sort to object when you wanted to learn to fight?” She shakes her head.

“He encouraged it. Treated me like a son. He taught me himself until I outpaced him, and then his master-at-arms did little else but work with me some days. He had me taught riding and ruling as he would have taught a boy. It all suited me better than my septa’s lessons ever did.”

She sinks down into the comfort of the bed. Sometimes she’d wished to be other than she was and a lady in truth. Sometimes she’d dreamed of the freedom of truly being a man. When people saw her, they sometimes assumed, and it was only when she opened her mouth that they laughed and she had to own herself. The murals on the walls in Evenfall showed beautiful women dancing high on grassy hills, and knights charging on horseback, all small and lovingly rendered. She might have fitted, if she had kept her helmet on and her mouth shut. Jaime looks like he could have walked out and shaken off the cracking paint.

“But he still tried to marry you to some unworthy-.” Brienne arrives abruptly, angrily in the room, the heat back again behind her eyes again.

She turns to bite out: “That’s how things are done.” She breathes through her frustration. She won’t have him speaking ill of her father. Especially not when he might be dead. She glares up at the beamed ceiling. Jaime’s silence has the quality of intense disagreement. She ignores it.

“What was he like, the master-at-arms who trained you?”

“Goodwin. He’s been dead a long time.” Perhaps the steward is dead too. The women in the salt pits. The retainers and craftsmen. The families from the mines. Everyone from her dreary childhood and the fraught, empty days of early adulthood gone. She’ll find out. They’ll find out together. “He was a knight.” He swallows audibly. Winterfell is as quiet as she’s ever heard it, not even the constant wind beating against the window.

“A great knight, to have taught you.” She jerks her head in agreement, distracted now, at last, by a flush in her cheeks instead.

“I learned to dance,” he says with teeth shiny in the candlelight. “Do you want to dance, my lady?” She can’t cope with that.

“It’s the middle of the night,” she says, gripping onto a fur at her neck.

“That’s a yes then.” He shoves the covers away from his legs and gets up on his knees.

“No,” she says, sitting up, grabbing his sleeve and pulling him back against the headboard. He falls easily with his shoulder against the wood. He looks across at her, untroubled. He really is exceedingly beautiful. Handsome, is the word she might dare to say aloud. She doesn’t think it’s the fading beauty that men admit to seeing in women, or that girls see in comely boys. She had seen a shadow, in King’s Landing, of what people must have seen when he was a shining golden youth living out a fireside story. Reassuringly chaste in his white cloak, or at least unassailably occupied with family.

He brings one knee up to match her, both curled into each other against the headboard. He reaches out to brush his fingers admiringly across the outer curve of her shoulder. She tries rubbing her eyes.

“Did you ever train with a great sword?”

“Yes,” she says, baffled.

He nods, again, closer, “I thought so.”

He maps the muscle at the top of her arm. Then, quite suddenly his hand is hovering in front of her face.

“How did you get the scar on your lip?”

“Raider,” she says, automatically, blinking down at the hand, feeling slightly cross eyed.

“I’m sorry. Like a pirate?” He’s stilled.

“Yes. He hit me in the face.” Obviously. Gods.

“Did you kill him?” He’s watching her avidly.

“No. I fell off the pier.” He looks slightly hysterical now. Something strange and manic in his eyes. He’s not stopped staring down at her mouth. Hope could wear a person down. She wants to push her mouth to his fingers.

“Are you finished confessing now?” she asks.

“Yes.”

He must be able to feel her quick breath on his hand. Very slowly, he shifts and pushes his thumb to the scar. She doesn’t move, not even when his fingers land lightly on her jaw. It all feels delicately made. Like someone could knick the earthen container and let the precious water all drain away. She puts a hand on his side, feeling his breathing, as fast as hers, as deep as when she’d had him over her sword.

She struggles to close her lips against the pressure of his thumb so she can swallow. He slides his hand further back, the curl of his mouth, not smiling.

“You really trust me.”

She nods savagely at him. He pushes in to kiss her, knocking her head back against the headboard. His hips are turned against her, thigh creeping over hers. He’s sharp ribbed and sharp toothed against her until she shoves back against him, turning into him. He pulls back to stare at her.

“Of course,” she reassures.

“Of course,” he repeats. He wrinkles up his eyes in a strange smile. “I dreamed of you,” he says.

She wets her lips. Every breath dries her mouth.

“What did you dream?”

She hopes he doesn’t mirror the question. She’d dreamed of the feverous wreckage of his body bound in her lap. She’d dreamed of his eyes gone flat as Renly’s had, his head cradled against her stomach. It shivers through her, cold constriction in her chest. She slides further down the bed on her side and looks at the bounce of blood in his neck and the way his eyes are bright and watching her in turn.

She’s never heard the question when it wasn’t a joke and it wasn’t a threat. Brienne has always had to say no. Brienne has always wanted to say no, but now Brienne wants to say yes, so long as he wants to ask. Brienne doesn’t know how to ask. Even the wildling has never actually worked his way up to that, determined as he is. Perhaps because he knows she will say no, and he prefers the possibility; the excitement of it, this extended moment of wanting. The stretching hope.

Brienne gathers herself to break it.

“Do you still-?”

He sits up abruptly, tugs off his shirt and slides back next to her.

“Let’s not talk anymore. This is where we stopped, before. You were-.”

He traces a hand over her clothed hip and stomach. Then he passes his hand, as she had, up and over the curve of her ribs, still through her shirt and then, new, higher still to push his palm, exploratory, over the muscle that makes up her breast. She swallows again, throat creaking, as he brushes her nipple tight. Somehow, she can feel the touch echoed at the backs of her knees. His wide reverent eyes flicker on her face. She sits up. She strips out of her shirt. She lies back down next to him.

The flutter of his ribs and stomach is slower now. She reaches out to feel them again, then she glances up at him, waiting to see if he’ll say anything terrible this time. He’s looking at the knotted scars arcing from her neck, over her collarbone and down onto her chest. They’re mostly pressed into the bed. And he’s quiet. So warm under her hand, he shuffles closer on his side, his right arm sliding away under his head and under the pillow. He has the same lye washed hair as her under his arms. Which she knew. But when she touches him there, he starts to grin again, twisting and trying to do the same to her. She catches his hip. The air is so still and warm. She wants to see. She pushes down at the loosened fabric around his waist, revealing arched muscle and bone, sandy hair, then a slither of bare pink skin again, spring leaf soft under her fingers. The movement of his chest turns deliberately measured. She stops there and lets the material fall back into place. She glances back up at the wide greenery of his eyes.

“We stopped before,” she says.

“Only because I can’t stop saying things,” he says. He puts his arm around her waist and pulls himself against her, the warm curl of his cock against her stomach as she pulls the covers back up. The hair on his jaw gives as she drags her thumb across it. She holds him harder, trying to keep the moment.

“You can say things,” she says.

“But then we’ll have to stop.”

He pushes through her grip to kiss her again, running his hand experimentally over the exposed muscle in her stomach, his hand pulling free the ties around her waist, his fingers tangling with hers, scratching down through hair, then suddenly delicate, so much lighter than she has ever been with herself. She’d once thought that this was one of the ways in which she was strange, until she’d deciphered enough vulgar comments to realise that no, she was ordinary after all. Jaime catches her teasingly between curled fingers, pulling back from the hold she finds she has on his hair, enough to keep eyes on her face with his arm twisted. He’s watching her greedily. It’s too much. She tugs him in against her, embarrassed at the scrutiny, and closes her eyes, curling around him, his hot mouth against her neck and then her chest and his soft hair against her cheek. He’s pushing against his wrist, and her stomach. She holds his hip to help his do it. She screws her eyes up against the candle light, thinks that they should be saving it, as he reads the rhythm from her hips, his thumb firmer than the pads of his fingers, nearly as much pressure as she wants. She brings her leg up, gathering him in.

His curled fingers are seeking, where she’s wet. She holds him against her war drum heart, clenching at nothing. He moves with her for an endless, breathless while, heat curling as gentle as his hand had been on her sides. She thinks he’s smiling against her. Then he slides in, enough to be distracting. To douse the building heat. Would this count? For the Septons and maesters? Would someone know if they looked? She tries not to open her eyes.

“Irritating,” she says, twisting her hips and his fingers fall easily away.

The light insistence of his fingers build in her a familiar wave. He noses against her and kisses at the bones in her chest. She stutters forwards into him, the flutter of pleasure washing daintily through her, a delicate trembling through the bones of her jaw and the extremities of her smallest toes, unexpectedly tender. She feels the shocking heat of his cock against the back of her wrist when she slides her hand over his, gripping him close, finally pressure as heavy as she wants. She feels the abrupt end of his arm bump against her hair as she curls inwards and groans, trying to match his silence and the quiet of the castle. She pushes her face back into his hair and makes herself take her hand away, and then it’s just the stroke of his long fingers against her, as she fights to still her hips, gentling. She could push forwards. She could chase him.

He pulls back, hair in disarray, flushed red and grinning triumphantly. He tucks his right arm back under the pillow, absently wiping his fingers on his hip, watching her as she lets the cool night air fill and fill her wide open chest.

He opens his mouth to speak.

“You can do the same for me, or,” he says, pushing down a little on the covers and pulling loose the ties at his own waist, “if we move these you could watch-.”

She grabs hold of the blankets, and with her other hand she reaches forward and puts her hand flat over his cock. He stops talking. A neat trick. He closes his eyes. She doesn’t quite dare to curl her fingers, although she’s seen plenty of men make the motion. She keeps her touch gentle, mindful of how soft his touch had been, terrified by how vulnerable this skin feels. She tugs at material until he kicks everything away.

Brienne says, “I don’t think-.” She takes her hand away and his eyes blink open.

“Really? I thought-. What if I turn away?” he says, caught half in outrage, half in laughter.

She’s not sure how to say it. It feels like it would be possession. Final. Inexorable. That he would be inviolably hers. Nonsense of course. Only men and young maids believed such tales and she was hardly particularly young, hardly even a maid.

She says, “Jaime.” He brushes his hair back into place.

“I wouldn’t want to irritate you further, Brienne,” he says, with some type of smile, but he’s shifting back into her, hand on her hip, encouraging when she pulls away the last of what she is wearing, then back behind her thigh.

“Be sensible,” she says, moving her thigh up and out where his hand pushes at her.

She can’t work out how to touch him suddenly, nerves prickling in her hands. The wetness when he bumps against her. It’s neither a joke nor a threat. She does not have to say no.

“You’re quite right,” he says, “I should set reasonable goals.”

“No,” she says, “be sensible. If you’re sure.” It’s not a joke, so he can’t treat it like one, even if it would be easier. He kisses her.

“Alright, Brienne,” he says, “Sensibly, it’s supposed to go a little like this, in the kinder songs. What do you think?”

He shifts her leg back up over his hip; she had done that correctly then. But then how difficult can it be when she’s seen idiots who couldn’t swing an axe talk about all manner of things? He rolls into her, over her, hand moving to the fold of her knee, up between her legs. Her hands go back to his hips, sharp against her. He holds himself up on his elbow, severed end of his arm still awkwardly reaching towards cover. He’s watching her. She holds her leg in place, and he pushes up on his hand to kiss her again. There is only so much kissing she can manage while still breathing. Then he falls away to reach between them. Parting, setting, slick, curious pressure. She can’t see. She lifts herself up and still can’t see. It’s only her body learning something in practice that she already knows in theory. He glances up at her, quick and green. She closes her eyes against it, too much sensation. Her heart doesn’t beat so painfully when she learns new footwork.

“It felt too profane to imagine this,” he says, forehead pressed into her chest again. She twists her leg up tighter, trying to move through the stretching moment. She’s well past the amateur’s instinct to retreat.

“You did not think of it?” She tangles her hands in his hair. His septa was right. She wouldn’t say that it hurts.

When the sheets are damp against her shoulders and he’s lying heavily against her, stump pressed uncaringly behind her neck, Brienne doesn’t feel particularly altered. She’s able to find her way back to herself, although the strangely bright moonlight makes the room feel a little like an extended part of the kindest dream she’s had in years. The words of those men around campfires were as empty as their boasts of swordsmanship. She’s humming with life. Her muscles happy and sated. She’s pulled back from the warm depths by the rhythm of his knuckles against her stomach, unexpectedly slick between them, then suddenly, slicker. She’d expected the stickiness to be stickier; something binding. He’s wiping his hand on his hip again, She tries idly to sit up, wishes that she’d thought to push him over. He’d said she could watch.

But he’s fumbling behind to tug covers back over them. Her bones will be boiled clean. She immediately fights their way free of the furs again, cold air pleasant on her naked skin. She thinks perhaps it will make him complain.

“Seven hells. Really?” says Jaime, curving even further into her for a moment. She warps her arms tightly around his shoulders, hungry for the sensation. His voice is hoarse although he has not made a sound. He puts his teeth to her neck - she jumps - then sits up. It’s only fair she looks at him in turn; that she get to see that warm, quiet watching.

He meets her eyes briefly, soberly, before he touches a gentle finger to the wide white pool of nerveless skin at the very highest point, closest to her jugular.

“It’s soft,” he says, marvelling. It hardly feels like anything to her. She does not touch them herself, a habit from when they were healing. He adjusts to trail his fingers over each grove and that sets off needle pricks under her skin, like the blood is rushing back. She manages not to shrug him off. “You didn’t even cry,” he says. Brienne puts her hand up to his ribs and lies down again.

“There was no time. A bear was trying to kill me.”

He drops a kiss to the point of her collarbone. She can feel his cock against her as she tugs him up towards her mouth. She shifts her thighs together as he licks at the old scar on her lip.

“Again?” he says, pulling back and grinning at her. “Let’s not sleep. What did you think? Let’s-“

He shoves a leg between her thighs, more confident now, dragging his hand down her side as he sits up on his knees. She shifts a leg up to accommodate him, crooking her knee and letting her foot rest on his hip. Then he shifts down. Kissing the deep lines of her hips, pressing her leg out sideways, cheek to the scratchy hair at the juncture of her thigh. She knows what he’s doing. She was chaste, not a fool. Brienne jerks her leg back in, using her foot to press at his hip. Men had bragged about this. Sang dirty songs about this. The bear and the maiden fair. Summer honey. She knew the Bolton men had sometimes meant her the bear and Jaime the maiden.

She pushes him back more determinedly. He looks up at her, surprised.

Men liked to boast about how wet they could make a woman. The conquest of devouring, making some faceless body want them so. It had all sounded very improbable. Mostly they fantasised about the other way. She knows. Their cock in someone’s mouth. A dirty everyday domination. Cheaper to buy than fucking.

“I won’t do the same for you,” she says, although his breath is hot against her in the cold air. She doesn’t want to tell him no. He laughs outright, his hand casual at the crease of her thigh. She rearranges her face into a frown.

“This isn’t a market trade.”

“Don’t put your belly to the bed,” Brienne says, mindful of the mess that seems to be growing somehow messier.

“Yes, thank you, Brienne. Any other advice?” Brienne has no other advice. He parts her, looking, and her blood stagnates. Her breath catches, burning unpleasantly, hot in her cheeks, her neck, her chest. She is so wet, like the men had said. She’d prefer the red heat blur of closeness. It’s too much like examination, for a moment, before he touches her, firm. She curls her feet and carefully relaxes into it. She examines him in turn. He’s pink too, high on his cheeks. Shiny where the light catches him, dark between his legs. She throws a foot onto his shoulder as he bends. He kisses her, mouth cooler than she feels, thumb seeking lower. Flat tongue moving the other way. She laces a hand into his hair to hear him sigh again, not anticipating the feel of it against her. She arches and he moves with her.

It’s all less improbable than she had thought. Summer honey. She’d thought it was poets being fanciful about the taste. She’d worried maybe other women did taste of honey. She thinks maybe it’s the texture of the moment. The slow pouring time. The grit of crystallised syrup. She’s so hot, with the candlelight showing her rushing pink blood through her closed eyelids.

Jaime passes her Pod’s cleaned under shirt to ring out over the side of the bath. It’s more mending than shirt now, but they’ve treated it carefully. Hot water cascades out from between her hands where she bunches the well used material.

“That was an unenviable first command,” Jaime says.

“The queen says what comes is to be the last war, so perhaps the gods will be kind and it will be my only command.”Brienne lays the shirt out in its proper shape on a drier bit of stone and pokes it flat.

“If you dealt with that you could manage men through anything.”

“You think I managed then?” she slides back into the water. She’s not really thought about it much since, but she’d worried at the time, the dissolving hold she’d had on her understanding of how many men she had and where they were.

“Yes,” he says, ‘Of course. None of them ran. That’s extraordinary. And men who insist on having control over every little thing die quickly.”

He drifts over, moving low in the water, to sit next to her on the lowered bench. He pats her thigh encouragingly. Then he slides down and shuts his eyes. Brienne finishes scrubbing under her ams and after a moment, slides down next to him and does the same.

They are flouting the rules separating use of the baths. It might be late enough for men, or early enough for women. Brienne idly asks, “How did you break your nose?”

“What? I didn’t-,” he says. He sits straight up in the water and turns towards her. “What’s wrong with my nose?” Brienne splashes around, looking for a new cloth.

“Nothing is wrong with it. Your sister’s is-.” She dumps water over her face. “What about the scar on your leg?”

They had intended to sneak away as quickly as they’d come, but now the warm steam has curled about them and dulled their minds entirely to the possibility of discovery. Brienne keeps thinking about getting out and going back to bed. She keeps thinking about it. They have time.

Jaime sits back with a huff.

“Rock I think. A horse fell under me. Raked the whole leg open. Lucky really,” - he touches his fingers to the faint scars on his face - “You know these,” he says, although the wounds had been there when she met him. Then he twists his arm trying to look at his shoulder. “Here, I’ve actually something from a sword,” he says, craning around to look. He pauses, feeling the skin with his fingers. “Oh, I haven’t thought about it in years. I think it might be gone.” He slumps down dejectedly, blocking Brienne’s view of whatever it is. She certainly hasn’t noticed it.

“What happened to your toes?” he says. Brienne brings her right foot out of the water so they can observe them together. They are bent, but they do not interfere with walking or running, and that’s what matters.

“Crushed,” she says sullenly.

“Horse? Man?”

“Boat,” Brienne says. “You can swim?”

“Yes, of course. I grew up by the sea.” He sinks further into the bath, water up to his chin. Steam reddening his skin. “Is that a necessity? For Tarth? Like riding and good manners, dancing and height.” Brienne shrugs. She could teach him, but as it turns out, most things are much harder to learn as an adult.

“Do you think Pod can swim?” he asks. Brienne contemplates this. There won’t be any learning here. The water is shallow.

Brienne yawns widely, feeling very accomplished. All that worrying. Although she does think that she now understands why people get themselves into quite such a state over this sort of thing. She’s quite sure she’s never felt about anyone, what she feels for Jaime right now. This unfortunately verdant sentimentality. The bubbling stream of silly possession when she looks at him. She doesn’t have to hide anything when he looks at her, what would be the point. She yawns again.

“Don’t you think we ought to be going?” Jaime says, and he drifts out in front of her, chin still submerged in the water, his hair and eyelashes and ears all wet and shiny. He’s sharp again, she thinks, with his hair pushed back, but she can put her toes on top of his on the bath’s stone floor, an entirely different intimacy to the churning anxiety of their last shared bath.

Brienne asks, “So you don’t have any more confessions?” She wants him to feel the same; like he doesn’t have to hide a thing.

“You know,” says Jaime, looking only slightly strained, “I think you must know every terrible thing. Do you wish to unburden yourself of anything? As a girl, did you ever steal from the kitchens. Or did you once think something very cutting about-.”

“This is not a confession,” interrupts Brienne, “but you should know for practicalities sake that I killed Stannis Baratheon.”

Jaime puts his hands in over his hair, pauses, and carefully submerges himself up to the very top of his head in the water. Brienne pushes down more firmly with her toes. He comes up again, moving his arms slowly under the water to keep his place.

“You said you would.” He turns his head to examine her from a new angle, like he’s enjoying himself.

“Well?” she says.

“I’m trying to work out why you don’t look pleased about it.”

Brienne has no desire to run through it again, having inflicted it on poor Grey Worm, but she does feel much better for having said it aloud. She tacks differently. She admits to herself that she might have to care what people think about this.

“Everyone in the south already believes me to have murdered Renly,” she says. “Now I have killed Stannis in truth for a crime no one will believe. We should keep this in mind.” That is the practicality of the situation. The rest will dissipate. The rest is floating away like steam whenever she has the time to sit and time to sleep.

Jaime says, “No one who knows you will think you a liar or a murderer, Brienne.”

“They do not know me,” she says.

“Did anyone like Stannis very much?” he says, a little amused. “Will anyone really notice that he’s not still brooding on Dragonstone?”

“They like me far less,” says Brienne, “and we shouldn’t laugh at him. Jon says he came north to fight against the dead.”

“So it’s alright to kill him but not to continue a reliable tradition of laughing at him,” says Jaime. “They will all know about the army of the dead by now, and the queen will fly through with her dragons. No one will doubt the existence of a shadowy assassin.”

Brienne crosses her arms. She suspects that believing in one magical thing will not predispose people to believe in others when it is easier to doubt. When people saw the dragons, the dragons become real. The red woman has vanished, leaving Brienne without the possibility of providing proof.

“Jaime,” she says, as gently as she can, “I don’t think people will believe anything they can’t see for themselves, and that includes our dead men.” It still comes out a little short.

It takes Jaime longer to speak this time. He looks honestly upset by the idea.

“Alright,” he says, “so if people won’t believe you, you can get the Starks to back you. Jon will presumably be legitimised and made into a king again. Who else could stop you?”

Brienne supposes that is the heart of it. It’s not so much about belief as it is about the balance of power. It’s so different to Jaime and his king - she had sworn nothing to Stannis, owed him nothing but his death, and there was no urgency, no lives saved, he had nearly been dead - and yet it’s all flattened and made part of the same game. Jaime moves back to sit beside her, their knees bumping.

“How about this?” Jaime says. “I didn’t know you had done it. No one seems to know it. You do not want accolades for it, obviously, so you can simply tell no one. The blood is long gone from your sword. Is this what you want me to say?”

“I don’t want you to say what you suppose I want to hear,” says Brienne, “I don’t know what I want to hear.” Stale bread is caught beneath her breast bone. “I won’t lie,” she says.

“It’s not the same as lying,” says Jaime, exasperated. “You know that. I know you know that. I’ve seen you lie reasonably fluently when it was practical. This seems like the practical choice; sometimes bringing certain things to light in certain circles is politically expedient, and sometimes it is not.” She glares suspiciously at the appeal to practicality. “What?” says Jaime, “that wasn’t what you wanted to hear.”

It’s not what she’d like to tell Gendry if he asked her advice on the same issue.

“That’s not how I was raised,” she says. “That is not how I have tried to live. Back in Tarth-.”

“It’s how you have been living. Did you leave when you were a child?” he asks.

“No,” Brienne says, and she lowers her eyebrows deliberately. She doesn’t want to be patronised.

“Then you should know better than that,” he says. “I know for a fact that you do know better than that.”

“It’s quite simple,” says Brienne, “there is lying I disapprove of, and lying that I consider to be necessary.” Jaime’s face creases into amusement.

“I forgot you were so…” He laughs.

“But,” she says, and he rolls his eyes, “honesty and decency are not childish scruples, I-.”

“There are fathoms between decency and bone headed stupidity,” he snaps. “I’m not saying that you lie to your father, if by the-. If you find him well. I’m suggesting that the Storm Lords will never know to ask who killed Stannis. Perhaps the Bolton’s killed him. Perhaps the Wildlings. Maybe he fell in a pond and got frostbite.”

“They will ask me to account for Renly. One brother follows from the other.”

Jaime says, “They really did not like you? Are you sure?” Brienne tightens her crossed arms. Jaime reaches across to touch a finger to her elbow. Then he lies back and shuts his eyes again.

“Well then,” he says, “we go back to the Starks and the queen and we hope she’s not hacked off that you’ve set me up in Evenfall, if anyone does stir themselves to object to you all the way off on your island. Your blacksmith will back you even if she doesn’t.”

“Gendry will need to look after himself.”

“Well, who is to stop you from doing the same,” he groans. “It’s only inaction. Not telling a little part of the story. Refuse to tell anyone anything about anything; that’s what I’ve always done and obviously that’s worked out brilliantly,” - he indicates the warm bath and his extended legs - “Isn’t that what your father did? He came out of that last war with his reputation undamaged and no blood on his hands by very studiously doing absolutely nothing.”

“Well it’s too late for that,” says Brienne, and Jaime’s mouth pulls up again. She basks in it for a moment. “My point is that if you brand the desire for transparency as simple mindedness, I think it makes it very easy to never try for decency at all,” she says.

“I’m trying for decency,” Jaime says, “maidenly honours aside.” Brienne turns her head very slowly to look down at him. He cracks open one eye to look up at her. “I’m trying,” he repeats, very sincerely. “Think about it, please.”

“Obviously I’ll think about it,” Brienne says. “I wouldn’t have bothered to have the conversation otherwise.” Jaime breathes out a laugh.

“Let’s go before someone comes in and finds us. It must be nearly time for the castle to wake.”

Brienne hastens out of the water, scrubbing herself as dry as she can manage with the steam sodden cloths. Water cools quickly between wool and skin and it’s deathly cold in some of the corridors.

Brienne says, back turned, tying herself back into her underthings, “Sansa knows how to use honesty. Sansa doesn’t lie.”

“Sansa doesn’t lie to you.” says Jaime. Like he knows what Sansa does. “You know, you’re doing a lot better than I ever did with all this nonsense. Perhaps you know best.”

“I do know best,” says Brienne. “I’m going to tell everyone the exact truth and then go to Tarth and ignore them all.”

Jaime stamps his way into his boots.

“Very sensible,” he says, “What do you bet that none of the Storm Lords even know how to swim. I can tell that you’ve really thought this through.”

“Thank you,” says Brienne, lacing up the neck of her shirt so she looks put together.

Jaime takes an absolute age tying knots so he just hides all his untidy layers under his jacket and his cloak. No one is expecting him to look respectable.

He gathers up the few items of clothing that they’re not wearing between the three of them from where they’re lying about sopping wet on the floor. They’ll dry soon enough. They’d be ready to pack.

In the corridors they pass an early rising woman. She’s scrubbing at her face and her grey streaked hair is escaping wildly from the knot at the nape of her neck. The woman bobs her lead low as they stride past, but her eyes follow them speculatively.

“Just in time,” says Jaime, grinning, picking up his pace and weaving out in front of her. He’s leaving an incriminating trail of dripped water from fisted bundle of wet clothes he’s holding away from his body.

By the time they get to their staircase they’re almost running, bouncing into each other and for some reason, she fights him a little over who turns the handle on the door. They slam it closed behind them and immediately, in the room above they hear the muted thud of feet hitting the boards on a path towards the fire. Brienne presses her mouth thin, feeling laughter now, partially a result of the needlessly panic ridden dash up the stairs, rising in her throat. She thinks that this is childish, but she didn’t much experience with childish companionship. Jaime laughs easily and Brienne takes the bundled clothing from him, to start laying it out flat by the fire.

Jaime puts his nose back to the window again.

“The light is strange,” he says, “the moon must still be bright. You should be able to open these windows.”

Pod wakes them with bowls jewelled with bright peas, light floods in and Jaime’s hair is still all sticking up on one side of his head.

The dragons are screaming, but really it’s very faint through the walls.

There’s no meat, but there hasn’t been for days.

“Thank you, Podrick,” she says, smiling at him.

Pod shrugs.

“Bad news,” he says, “but Lord Tyrion is here for another day at least.”

They find an angry lord of somewhere or other kicking the barely slitted door at the bottom of the tower.

“Excuse me, my lord,” says Jaime, “I think you’ll have to go about.”

He glares at them. “My lady,” he says, and stalks off.

There’s snow half-way up the minuscule crack in the door, but the sky she can see is blue.

Pod throws his shoulder at the issue.

“Yes,” he says, dusting himself off. “I agree. We’ll have to go about.”

Jaime wavers at the doors of the great hall, but Brienne tugs him out with them. It’s not so bad, Brienne thinks: the wind has whipped the snow all against one side of the courtyards. Many of the wagons need digging out, but there are men all about and most of the two wheeled carts are already free. They attract perhaps a little more attention than Brienne would like and Sansa, Gendry and Tyrion are staring down at them from the external walkway.

They find their door and contemplate it. It’s looks almost new. Finding no spare shovels about, they set to kicking at the snow until they have compacted the bottom layer down and heaped the top up on either side ineffectually. It still can’t be opened. They regroup. They look speculatively at all the northerners with new shovels.

“Gendry hasn’t been working for nothing,” Jaime says. Brienne had been there when Sansa and the steward had commissioned all these shovels.

Pod snags two from someone in an unusually improvised furry head covering and Brienne and Pod make short work of it then. It’s good work too - warming and satisfyingly simple - although stomping down snow won’t be a mistake she repeats.

“Look up there,” says Jaime, once they’re finished, she and Pod breathing great blooms of white air out of their mouths.

There is a door up in the wall, the lip of it above even Brienne’s head. She squints at it sceptically, glad at least not to see any external hinges. It’s older.

“Well,” says Podrick. “It’s good they thought to put that in. I’m glad.” Brienne glumly adds this to her list of concerns for Sansa. She and Tyrion are gone from the walkway.

Behind them, the sickening crunch of wood breaking skitters through the courtyard. The door opens abruptly outwards, hitting Pod. Brienne steps forward.

Pod says, “Watch-! Oh. Excuse me, my lord. Lady Flint. Good morning.”

Brienne relaxes her grip on the shovel. It’s the woman from the baths with the hair, now all coiled up, following after a reasonably tall man who inclines his head just barely to Brienne. Jaime rolls his eyes behind the man’s back, ignored. The woman glares around at them. She had seemed friendly enough two days ago.

“You see, it’s not right,” she says, hurrying to catch up with the man. “It’s not right to send me back. It’s alright for you. Going south. I won’t…”

“Where do they come from?” says Jaime. “They multiply. Lord Flint. I thought he was terribly old and all his sons had curly hair.”

“All dead,” says Pod. “But there’s still a few of them about. I don’t know what relation he was but they’ve got the old man’s room under us.”

The man with the fur piled on his head comes by to take his shovels back - his mood to the tune of the man shrieking about axels behind them - and presumably hears the end of that. Pod fidgets until the man has gone away.

“Jaime,” says Brienne, finding that she’s been looking at Jaime looking at her for a little while now. She can see blond pin pricks of hair in the sun in the places on his neck that he had shaved. He’s got his arms crossed and his shoulders up. Inadequately dressed.

“Yes?” he says.

“You’re not supposed to be out here,” she realises.

Sansa and Tyrion aren’t in the great hall, but there is a suspiciously familiar child under the far end of the nearest table, rubbing it’s face with small fists, putting it’s fingers on the floor, snatching them away, and crying silently with it’s mouth wide open.

Brienne says, “Littler Sam?” and casts about the hall. There are a group of southern men rolling their shoulders and comparing blisters by the fire. Jaime says, “Right, let’s get this over with,” and is already half way across the room towards them.

Podrick bends down to get a better look.

“Think that’s a different one,” he says, “But all the same…”

Brienne doesn’t want to investigate. She wants to see Sansa. She looks about again desperately.

“It will be alright,” she says, but then a particularly harrowing gust of air blows through the open doors. “We can keep an eye on it from here,” she tries. If children died at a little cold wind, there would be no Wildlings, she reasons. No Free Folk. She sighs. She heads over.

Reaching under the table she gathers up a handful of blanket and drags the child’s unresisting weight across the floor.

“Oops,” she says, without knowing why: she’s absolutely doing this on purpose. “Oops,” she says, picking it up. Gods, it’s her Septa, rising up unbidden out of her mouth. She crushes that back down.

The child whines, but its too small for that too matter. How awful to be so helpless.

“Don’t cry, Littler Sam,” she says. “There’s no use crying. Don’t cry.” That’s her father. That’s not so bad.

“What are you doing?” says Jaime, swooping back in. “Careful,” then more calmly, “Brienne, it will cry.”

It was already crying. Brienne holds the child away from her body, sat in the crook of her elbow, with it’s legs on either side of her arm. This is a strain, and unstable, but good because they are face to face. She presses her other hand to it’s tiny chest so that it can’t fall off and says, “We’ve met before, I think.” It’s looking at her with it’s bulbous eyes, shocked - she thinks - into closing its mouth and swallowing its tears. It’s definitely the same face.

Then the child whispers, “No,” uncertainly and Brienne nearly drops it. She’d never forgive herself, but she hadn’t known it could speak. She thrusts it at Jaime who fumbles it on to his hip and cranes away from it.

“It’s Gilly’s,” says Brienne, in explanation.

“Right,” he says. “Pod?”

“No,” whispers the child when Podrick takes the child under the arms and hurriedly sits it on the table, gathering the ragged blankets it’s draped in into place, it tries, querulously, “What?”

“What’s what?” Podrick asks.

“Don’t confuse it,” Brienne says. “Should it be on the edge like that?”

“Where’s your mum?” Pod says. “How old are you?”

“Old,” says the child, albeit indistinctly, and beats it’s fist on it’s leg. Brienne shrugs off thoughts of Bran. It tries some manoeuvre that fails on the polished wood. Pod shunts it back into the middle of the table and retreats again.

“If it’s this big,” says Jaime, making the approximate height of the child between his hands, “it must be over two summers at least by the old way of things, so it should be able to tell us.”

Snot emerges from the nose and just - stays there. They all pretend not to notice. Brienne decides to focus on the lack of shoes and the bare hands. It’s sniffing theatrically, more interested in lifting it’s socked feet up in it’s fists and sliding them on the polished wood than in their hovering presences.

Brienne leans down. “Where are your shoes?” she says, concern making her voice sound more accusatory than she had anticipated. The child doesn’t seem to care.

“Feet, feet, feet,” says the child, which is practically conversational, like this is a common question. “Oh no,” it sighs. It pulls at the wool on it’s feet. “Oh no. Where-?” it starts. It sniffs again. Then again. It’s cheeks are becoming redder.

“She’ll be back very soon,” says Brienne, and this time her voice is smooth and calm and comforting. She feels very accomplished. The child bursts into wet little hiccups of despair. Jaime puts his hands out, vindicated.

“Can’t,” it says and it looks up and makes terrible eye contact with her. “No, oh no, no, no.”

“Oh no,” Podrick agrees, as it slaps it’s fist down onto the table and begins to pull itself back towards the edge.

“Littler Sam,” says Brienne, “could you please not do that.”

People are looking at them now. The crying isn’t silent anymore. Jaime picks it up and tries to indicate that she take it . The child pushes itself as far from his body as it can, fills it’s little body with all the air in the hall and wails. Jaime winces.

“Come on. Womanly something or other,” Jaime suggests.

Brienne tells him to fuck off and then regrets it.

“Sorry,” she tells Littler Sam.

“Absolutely not,” says Podrick, fending the pair of them off. “I’ll go and find someone,” so Jaime puts the child against his shoulder and stands there glowering while it grizzles into his ear.

“How did this happen to you?” he says. “I told them not to. I know I’m horrid. I’m horrid and strange. I’d put you back under the table if everyone wasn’t watching. I would, I would, I promise, I promise. Straight back under there. No hesitation; I’m so horrid,” and on and on.

“Alright, I’ll have a turn,” says Brienne, unable to bear it. “It’s my fault.”

“Do you want him to make that noise again?” he says.

Brienne tries to stand authoritatively so that everyone one knows that she is in control of the situation and that Jaime hasn’t taken up torturing babies.

Jaime is saying, “I’m nasty and horrid. I know,” over and over again, and surprisingly, this does appear to be quieting to the child, if not to Brienne.

“Can you stop saying that about yourself?” she says, “It understands.”

“That I’m horrid?” he tips away from the child so it can see his face. “I could insult you instead?” he says. The child does pause at that, and then it snorts - more snot, applied to its fists - and it’s seamlessly back to the hiccuping whimpers again.

“So long as I don’t have to listen to that anymore,” says Brienne. Jaime raises his eyebrows at her over the child’s head.

“Back under the table,” Jaime tells Littler Sam, getting into it now and bouncing the child about a little. “Would those Northern busybodies over there come and deal with this if we both got under there? They think I’m horrid but maybe they think you’re worse. Oh no.”

Pod comes back with Gilly eventually. They’re both a little more white-faced than normal and the child gets louder the moment it sees her, reaching desperately. Brienne looks away until he’s back in her arms.

Gilly takes Littler Sam and presses her nose into his ear and his hair and his little snot covered hands that she gathers up to kiss.

“There was a dead man on the step,” she tells them, wiping his blotchy face with her sleeve. “I’m so sorry. There was boy here,” she looks about. “I couldn’t let him see. He was frozen, I think, while he slept. Not the boy. He said he’d hold Little Sam. I don’t know why I’m so-.” She tells the child, “Oh no, oh no.”

“It was no trouble,” says Brienne and Jaime coughs.

“I should go,” says Gilly. “I don’t know why we’re like this. It was just a normal dead body. I asked those nice crows to fly him away. You’re too old to cry, hush now. Hush now. They’re moving it right now so we can go back. They’re going to burn it up.”

“It was nice to meet you,” says Podrick, waving, “Bye bye,” but the child is completely silent now it’s wrapped up in Gilly’s arms.

“A conversationalist,” says Jaime, gesturing. He’s too far away to elbow, but Gilly just laughs.

“Sam said his brother was slow to speak, and he grew up to die well.” She laughs again. “There that’s better,” she says. “I don’t know what came over me. Just another dead boy. We’re a bit sorry, but we’re not scared, oh no,” she tells the child, wandering off.

After they’re gone, Brienne experimentally puts her bare hand down on the stone floor. It’s cold. It’s really cold.

“Littler Sam should have shoes, shouldn’t he?” she says, “At that age? In this weather? And proper clothes?”

“I’ll start sewing immediately,” Jaime says, “but in all seriousness, he’ll be twice the size before you’ve found anything.” Brienne does not know any women except Sansa and Arya to ask. Sansa has enough to do, and she can’t imagine that Arya would be particularly interested. She frowns. She should know someone in this castle who could help, but it’s like Tarth, she walks quickly and she keeps her head down.

“No one likes anyone else’s children,” Jaime says. She realises she has been glaring at the open door. What could a helpless child do to make you dislike it? Everyone who isn’t awful likes children. She glares at him.

“I don’t dislike a child,” she tells him. Jaime pulls a face at her. “Besides, I have to see Lady Sansa,” she says and makes to sail off.

“I’d like to see Lady Sansa,” he calls after her. She knows, so she ignores him. Then she doubles back, remembering those stupid peas for the horse in his belt.

“You have to go back to the room.”

“Oh, but the queen has made her grand pronouncement,” he says. “Your lady Sansa already saw me out there. What does it matter now? I could help-.”

“Remember the moral boost? The galvanised stone throwing mob?”

Jaime says, “Stop remembering the things I say.” Self-consciously, she reaches out and puts her hand on his shoulder. She knows what that feels like without his cloak and all his layers between them. She takes her hand away again quickly.

“Just for a little while longer,” she says, taking a couple of steps backwards to keep him in sight. He doesn’t look convinced.

“I know, I’ll go and lie in bed all day. The horror. The unfairness. The things you ask of me.” Pod smiles and rolls his eyes. Jaime goes. She jerks her chin to direct Pod after him.

“Just see him to the room?” she says.

Pod shrugs.

“Of course,” he says. “I’ll be with Lord Tyrion if you need me.”

Clegane is leaning next to Sansa’s door.

“Hello,” he says. Brienne looks him up and down. He’s armed. He’s at her post.

Brienne says, “Don’t start,” which makes him laugh, but he knocks, opens the door and announces her.

“Brienne,” says Sansa, arms full of cups and plates, a moment before she drops them all on a sideboard. “I was just leaving. Today’s pyre. No Dothraki so we can have it earlier. Jon’s worried the wind will pick up again and-.”

“Let me-” starts Brienne, but Sansa snags the one rolling cup and adds it to the pile, turning crisply to block the collection from Brienne’s reaching hands.

“Ser Brienne,” she says, with the air of someone attempting to start a conversation from scratch. “I have Clegane with me today. What can I do for you?”

Brienne says, “I’m sorry about earlier. He’s back in keep. I came to see what I could do for you, my lady.” Sansa wilts immediately. Brienne watches her with concern.

“Thank you,” Sansa says. Then she stares into nothing, eyes moving like she’s reading, blinking occasionally.

“A moment by the fire?” says Brienne eventually, gently, and Sansa nods but doesn’t actually move. Brienne puts out a cautious hand, light on the very edge of her shoulder, to try and nudge her towards the chairs there.

“You could select a new guard,” says Sansa, coming back all at once. “You could begin selecting new men for the guard in my name. I can’t delay. I’ll miss my opportunity.”

“Yes,” says Brienne immediately. “Of course.”

“No southern men,” Sansa says. “No Night’s Watch.”

Brienne nods smartly.

“You’ll have two days,” says Sansa. “I think.”

“Let’s sit down for a moment, my lady,” says Brienne. “By the fire, my lady. Just for a moment. Sansa?” Then inspiration hits. “Was there news from the Stormlands?” She puts her hand back just besides Sansa’s shoulder and herds her a little. Sansa shrugs her away, but goes. So maybe not back all at once.

“Yes,” says Sansa. “From Storm’s End. Just the steward, but it was positive. Well done.” Brienne wants to sit down now; the relief hits her hard. “He wants to go south,” says Sansa, sitting and scowling. “That’s a problem. If I could have held him here—. But-.”

“South. When?” interrupts Brienne, without thinking. Sansa blinks at her.

“With the queen.” Brienne sits down.

After a little while, Sansa starts looking about herself. “But what am I doing sitting here?” She gets up, and Brienne automatically rises too.

“I’ll replace the guard,” says Brienne and she goes to collect the stack of plates and cups.

“Thank you,” says Sansa again and then she visibly gathers herself into a woman with a wolf on her shoulder. And Brienne remembers that she does have a request.

“My lady…” she starts. Sansa pinches her mouth, like she can anticipate the direction of Brienne’s request. “Jaime wants to speak to you. I don’t know why, but-.”

“No,” says Sansa, walking past her. “I don’t have time.”

Sansa has to open the door for Brienne because Brienne’s arms are full, which momentarily dents her terrifying Lady of Winterfell affect, but then she locks her door and marches off with Clegane at her heels, and it’s doubly restored. Brienne is pretty sure she sees a flit of mousy hair and pointy features when she turns towards the kitchens, but she ignores it.

Arya appears the moment she’s discarded her armful on the long tables outside the kitchens.

“Come hunting with me,” she says, around a mouthful of bread. Brienne blinks, not yet recovered from the last Stark. Arya tears off more from the crust in her hand and then offers the rest to Brienne.

“No, thank you,” says Brienne, even though it looks hot and like the crust will have some hint of salt. “I already ate. You should have it.” Arya jerks her head towards the hall. “Come hunting with me,” Arya repeats, walking away. Brienne is helplessly pulled along in the face of whatever new disaster this is. “Want to hear when they last caught something?” says Arya.

“If I must,” says Brienne tonelessly, as they arrive in the great hall, and Arya turns to laugh where Brienne can see her. Brienne lets herself smile back, trying to shift the weight of the water skin settling her ribs. Walking backwards, popping the last of the bread into her mouth, Arya says, “Nothing since before that night.”

Bran is in the hall. Someone has positioned him by the fire so he can watch the scraggly collection of north men and Free Folk being corralled by Jon Snow. They are all wet and exhausted looking. Red and shiny now they’re out of the cold. There is Tormund. He waves. Brienne does not.

Arya takes up position next to Bran.

“I’m not a hunter,” says Brienne. Arya ignores her. “And what are the wolves eating? There must be something.”

Jon Snow turns all the way around to stare at her. The men behind him only increase their volume.

“Be quiet!” he shouts. It’s very effective. To Brienne he says, “You can hear the wolves?” She is aware that Bran is staring up at her now too.

“No,” she says. He loses all interest in her again.

“Wolves can survive for a long time without eating,” says Bran, as Jon Snow picks up his encouraging speech.

Brienne eyes Bran sideways, still unsure as to whether this is all some extended joke of the variety she doesn’t understand. Arya always seems amused by his proclamations.

“No they can’t,” Arya says.

“These wolves…” says Bran, trailing off portentously.

“How often do they need to eat?” Brienne asks.

“They won’t die for a few weeks,” says Arya with complete confidence. “They can eat the grass if the snow stays light enough to dig. They like to dig.”

“And it’s already been… nine days,” says Brienne. Nine days since she wrote to her father.

“Maybe ten,” Arya says. “No one hunted the day the king approached.”

“We could eat the wolves,” says Bran, slowly. Brienne looks sideways at him again. She does wish he would stop. But they could eat the wolves.

“That’s not funny,” Arya says. “Shut up.” When the men disperse, Arya jerks her head for Brienne to follow.

“Arya, there’s something I need to do for Sansa.” Arya looks around, honestly surprised.

“She didn’t tell me that,” Arya says, but then she keeps going. Brienne doesn’t move. She has Sansa and Jaime to think of. She can’t wander off.

“You know I can’t spend the days we’d need out there, and there must be-.”

“We won’t even go beyond the walls,” calls Arya. “Come on. Let’s hunt.” Brienne goes.

Brienne drags herself back up the stairs of the keep in the dark. There’s a flicker of fire-light spilling under her door and it warms her even before she enters the room. Jaime is lying on his front, with his left arm hanging off the bed, spinning a knife. He sits up slowly as she dumps her cloak and arranges her boots under the desk.

“Alright?” he says.

Brienne needs to oil her boots. It’s the last task, and then all her affects will be ordered and ready for travel. She gets her supplies out of the chest.

“Wait. Wait,” says Jaime, coming over and taking them from her. She looms suddenly close and then turn away. “I’ll do that. I can do that. I forgot about your cloak.” Brienne sinks down onto her comfortable bed. She watches Jaime wet a rag in the depleted bowl by the fire and wipe the boots down. He opens the grease by holding the pot between his legs.

“We caught a man trading meat stolen from the stores,” she says. Jaime pauses only for a moment. “There are no animals to hunt,” she says. He places one boot under the desk and picks up the other. “Every man who eats in the guard’s hall is a dangerous fool.”

“But otherwise a good day?” She blows something like a laugh out of her nose.

“No Lord Blacksmith,” he says, and she looks at him sharply, wondering if he somehow knows that Gendry is leaving. Tyrion might have been saying things he shouldn’t again. “I suppose he’s off with Gilly.” Then he holds his hands up at her continued glare. “My apologies,” he says. “Blacksmith Lord Paramount.”

“I haven’t seen him,” says Brienne truthfully. She has nothing to tell Jaime about Gendry, when Gendry hasn’t asked anything of her yet. She finds that she does not like sitting and watching him do this work. “I’ll sharpen my sword,” she says, even though she’d polished it up the day after dead. Jaime puts the other boot under the desk and frowns at her as she heaves herself off the bed. “What?” she says.

“You don’t need to do anything to valaryian steel,” he says, “That’s part of its appeal.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says, but then she thinks back over the condition of the sword, the way she’s gradually given up on more than showing it the stone. Brienne sits down again. She’s been caring for that sword for years. It has given her something to do with her hands. Jaime looks like he’s enjoying seeing the revelation on her face.

“Here,” he says, picking up their swords. “Fight me.”

Brienne blinks at him.

“No,” she says. Then, “Podrick is with Lord Tyrion.”

Jaime shrugs.

“I believe so. I haven’t seen them.” He puts the swords back down. “No storm tonight.”

“No,” she says. Jaime has left the rags and the pot under the desk. He catches her looking and heads back over guiltily, stashing the grease back in the chest.

“You look… tired,” he says, gently. “Did you ask Sansa if she’d see me? Here.” He crouches in front of her and starts picking at the ties on her jacket.

“I asked,” she says, pushing his hands away. ”I don’t want to go to bed.” She’s not tired. She takes the jacket off anyway. “She said she wouldn’t.”

“I see,” he says, still crouching. “And the other thing?”

Brienne wrings out her memories of last night, trying to remember the other thing. They are detailed memories. He taps her leg.

“I can carry a message for you,” she says. He shrugs. “Or Pod could.” If it’s a secret from Brienne. The skin of water that settled in her ribs this morning is still there. She examines him and tries to remember what else he’d asked for. Nothing. She’s sure. She remembers the things he says. She remembers that he’d said that.

“What’s wrong with you?” he says eventually, peering at her somewhat accusingly.

“Nothing,” says Brienne. Then, more truthfully, she says, “The man we caught. They had to cut off his left hand.” All those other northern men had been happy to see it. A galvanised mob.

“Ah,” says Jaime, looking down. He puts his elbows on her knees. “Well, they won’t be able to march him south now, will they.”

“What was the other thing?” Brienne says. “I’m sorry.” Jaime keeps his eyes down and rubs at his face.

“How can they stay, if the animals are gone?” he says, question for question. “What do the Wildlings think is happening?”

“Free Folk,” corrects Brienne, because she doesn’t know.

“Free Folk,” he repeats, and stands up and drifts away.

“We could practice with the blunted blades,” she says.

Jaime immediately starts jamming his feet into his boots. She suspects he has been very bored.

He picks up a sword only for himself and sets up in the first form she’d taught Pod. She turns on the bed to watch better. He moves back and forth, side to side, holding position, basic footwork. Drilling.

“There,” he says, dropping the position. “Criticise me.” He looks inappropriately amused; this is definitely somehow a joke. Brienne frowns.

“It looked fine,” she says.

Jaime says, “Gods this is dull,” and walks in a circle weaving his grip casually on the the sword, blade spinning. He looks at her speculatively for a moment and then turns back to work through a few more basic parry and recovery combinations, gradually escalating in complexity. His grip is light and his elbows are correct. There’s none of the impractical showiness of last night. He hasn’t tightened his outer shirt at the neck. His jacket is finely fitted. Sometimes she wants so much her hands hurt. Brienne decides to watch his footwork. Most of it is reversed. Some of it is strange to her, but it all makes sense and it all looks deliberate. He stops and looks at her again.

“No?”

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” she says.

“I know that,” he groans. “Participate, Brienne.”

She gets uncertainly to her feet, crosses the room to pick up the other practice sword. She stands across from him, resigned to the heat she feels. She’s really not happy with this flavour of wanting. She doesn’t trust it. They should fight with swords. Put them down. Then, entirely unrelatedly, they should take each other to bed.

“Alright, let’s try something else,” he says, and then he starts tugging his boots back off. “Did you never play at fighting when you were a child?”

“What?”

He hooks the chair on his elbow and clears the rug. He comes back quickly, working his bare toes into the weave and then shifting about, getting ready. Brienne puts the sword down hurriedly.

“Really?” she asks, him, as he dances about. It would be less galling if she didn’t think the ridiculousness looked good. This is… sillier. This makes her feel better.

“Yes,” he says, “I want to do something I might still win.”

She sighs. He isn’t going to win. He’s going to get flustered and it will distract her and then when he gets stabbed by a raider on Tarth she’s going to feel terribly guilty at all the hours they spent not practicing. She takes him seriously anyway. She does want the sweet flush of victory.

They circle each other. He’s not brash here, testing occasionally, getting a feel for how she moves. If this was real, she’d let him tire himself out, but it isn’t so she responds in kind, admiring the way he reacts to her. It’s a strange kind of dancing. She hadn’t played like this as a child.

She gets lost in the rhythm of it, watching the long lines of his feet and the curl of his wrist as he turns his hand about. She blinks it away, focussing on his grin. He’s slow to retreat from her feint. She snags his wrist to yank him forwards. She brings her other hand up to thump him in the chest with the side of her fist. He’s pink already - she knew he would be. If it was real she’d snap his chin back on his neck and that would be the end of it.

“Alright,” he says, retreating.

This time he lunges for her quickly. She has his arms, for a moment, but he’s new catch quick in her hands, free with his wrist coming up at her neck. She ducks him, aiming under his ribs with her shoulder, but now his arm is around the back of her neck. He throws his weight towards her. She lets go of his wrist, partly because she doesn’t want to jar it, partly from shock. She falls backwards over his leg. She lies in a pile on the rug.

“Yes!” He shouts, “Gods, yes!” She glares at the ceiling. “I’m so sorry, Brienne. Are you alright? I didn’t think that would work.” She kicks out his ankle, careful to avoid the delicate joint, careful to distribute the impact, and sits up fast to grab his other leg. It dumps him onto his side. He laughs.

“Alright,” he says. He doesn’t look flustered now. “Again? I really haven’t done this since I was a small. Did you do this on Tarth?”

“No,” she says.

He tries to kick her next. He doesn’t put any force behind it, so she’s not sure what the point of it is. He seems to be enjoying himself anyway, and she is beginning to feel a strange bubbling urge to laugh, every time she dances away from his toes. When he aims too high at her hip, she catches his ankle and holds his foot against her leg while he balances precariously, barely pretending to scowl at her. She shifts one foot back, as if she will step away, still holding onto him, and he wobbles desperately, hopping after her. She has to drop his foot to keep from outright laughter.

Next, she manages to get her arms around him, holding his back to her as he twists away, only escaping long enough for her to grab an arm, twist it behind him and bear him down onto the rug. With a grip on the back of his neck and his gold hand uselessly batting backwards against her ribs, she wins. She puts a knee to the soft curve of his lower back and watches, fascinated, as his face flushes the familiar shade of pink. He laughs breathlessly.

“This is indecent,” he says.

She doesn’t disagree. She leans down to press her forehead to the serrated edge of his spine. He swears softly. That’s enough. She doesn’t know what to do next and he’s no help at all, lying there, still except for his heaving sides.

She sits back, increasingly dismayed, the more distance she gets from him. She can just imagine herself, hulking and red faced, curving over him. She puts her hands into fists, rather than putting her arms around her chest. He rests his forehead against the floor for a moment, and then he comes up beaming. That is until he sees her face. He twists his mouth at her.

“I thought you wanted-.” She doesn’t not want. She would prefer not to want. This was all very complicated and not like the kinder songs.

“I don’t want to hurt you. Look for punishment elsewhere,” she snaps.

“I’m not looking for punishment,” he says, sounding genuinely disgusted. She burns, worse than before. He looks very disheveled as he glares down at his hands. “I’m sorry, Brienne. It’s like with your reading. I can hardly remember beginning.”

“I know things,” she says, offended. He looks up at her. She already told him that her Septa was apparently worse than useless, so she has to admit, “I hear soldiers talk.” He scoffs.

“Well, most of it will have been nonsense, if it’s any comfort. Did you find any of it particularly inspiring?” She pulls a face to that makes him swallow his smile. “I grew up with those same men and have spun the same lies,” he says.

“Well?” she says,”What do you know then.” And she waits for him to explain it all to her. The best way to become proficient is to repeat something until your body remembers it, but guidance from others is invaluable. He smooths a hand over his hair and squints at her. “You have no idea what you’re doing either,” she says.

“Brienne, truly I am a man of the world and you should listen to me.” He gets up and turns away, shaking out his arms. She drags herself to her feet. Surreptitiously she shakes her arms too, in case it helps.

“Alright,” he says, coming back towards her. She sets her stance, brings her arms up again, still feeling sweaty and red. “No,” he says, “could you show me how you turned me around like that?” She can. She does, dropping him quickly when the manoeuvre is complete.

“Could I try?” he asks. It’s good he’s given in and accepted the importance of continued drilling. He has it immediately and he only runs through it once more, just to be certain. “Perhaps that’s enough of that,” he says, “ It’s not the middle of the night anymore. Let’s dance.”

“With swords,” she says, although regrettably she understood him perfectly. He laughs. He’s closing in on her again and she stands there and lets him come. He draws himself up as tall as he can and takes her hand, turning to stand shoulder to shoulder. His grip is warm and tight. He keeps shifting about.

“By ourselves?” asks Brienne, despairing, as though he is going to produce a party of revellers from the chest.

“Yes. I’m not sure if this will work. I didn’t do it much,” he says. “At court I mostly liked to mope.”

“There’s no music,” she tells him; an extraordinary display of common sense in the face of this performance.

“I’ll sing,” he says. “What songs did you have in Tarth?”

“You can’t sing,” she says, meaning it. She’ll have to kill him, after all the agonies of keeping him alive.

“How can you possibly know that? I’ll have you know that when I was a squire, I was much lauded by the knights for leading songs and,” he doesn’t stop talking as she comes around to stand in front of him. His eyes follow her closely, but his mouth keeps moving.

“Here,” she says, leaning in to kiss him. He surges up to meet her. She tries to keep a soft mouth. She could shake him, and his breath would come quick, and the heat would rise up into his face. He wouldn’t be worried. He’d smile.

She tugs at his shirt, and he tips into her, hands at her lower back, one heavier than the other, his chin tilted up, clearly trying to be more careful with his mouth. Then he bites her.

She is quick and rough with his leathers, dragging them off his shoulders, determined, now she has decided. When he shifts forwards into her, she pushes back against him to feel the grin against her mouth and his laboured breath against her chest. His hands are inside her shirt and tugging at the fastenings at her wrists, but she bats him away to drag his layered shirts over his head. She reaches, helplessly for the angularity of his ribs, the curve of his hips. He reaches up to the back of her neck, still moving backwards.

“It’s so bloody cold. The fire,” he tells her. He loses his footing on the discarded shirts, and Brienne crashes down with him, halting herself painfully on a knee. He looks up at her in unbridled delight and Brienne scowls automatically in response.

“Embarrassing. We should work on this,” he says and sits up to kiss her again. She holds his smile against her and between her lips until she finds herself unable to stop her mouth curving in answer. He pulls away to grin at her. It’s difficult to be concerned with blushing when he’s meeting her eyes and easing his hand delicately around the healing skin on her calf, the naked honesty of his desire against her. That seems like it should be embarrassing for him, but of course that would never occur to him. He picks open the ties around her waist. The slight upwards press of his hips shudders. He cups her ribs, stroking her sides, a little like she is a horse, then brushing down her stomach. He loosens the neck of her shirt enough to push his face up into the scars reaching down from her neck.

She should participate. She unlaces him and lets him tug everything down to her thighs, she lets her hand be pulled with his, between her legs, his gliding thumb, firmer and faster, when she presses her fingers over his. Is this quick? She isn’t sure. She sits up, she reaches down to catch his cock against her where they are wet. She holds him, concentrating, mimicking the memory of last night, the catch and the pressure. She rolls into him, through tenderness, driving her body down, faster than he had moved last night. Riding, men call it, maybe women too - she knows plenty of things. She breathes through it, curls away to look down at him.

He’s pink cheeked and there’s tension in every line of his body, his eyes closed, he drops back on his elbows. She shifts her hips, experimental. Her gasp is audible, touched with her voice. He stutters against her again, his hand hard on her thigh now. She moves again. Prepared this time, to watch it shudder through him, just as it moves through her. Maybe more so. He can’t open his eyes, clearly. Their rhythm stutters. He gets the gold hand awkwardly under him, driving up to meet her, and that’s better, fiercer. His stomach flutters and cramps against her wrist. Against her chest, he makes the first noise she’s heard from him, strained and quickly swallowed. Pain. She knocks him back onto his elbow, to blink down at him, hands on his shoulders. He brushes his knuckles against her stomach again.

“It’s fine. Come down here then,” he says, voice ragged.

She curls over him to kiss him and then when that becomes impossible, she presses her cheek against him and pushes her nose into his hair. Very gently, she feels him brush the edges of his teeth against her again, between one languorous roll of their hips and the next. She could not bear to do the same. She has to put her palm down for balance. It would be easier to roll her weight back onto her feet, to readjust. Instead she leaves his fingers to their rhythm and laces the other hand through his hair, holding him against her. Pressed everywhere against him there is only the awkward curl of hips keeping up with her, the nearby fire and the rasp of their breathing, the burn of her thighs that travels up her back. She doesn’t have to look for the sparkling pleasure. She grinds down. It rushes up; it drags her under.

“Brienne, let me go,” he’s saying, quiet and urgent, mouth against her neck and the heel of his palm insistent against her hip. She gasps her way back into clear air. She collapses sideways, sticky and strange without him, letting go of his hair.

He rolls with her, reaching down for his cock, panting breath still not nearly keeping pace with her thundering heart. He cradles his head on his curled arm, golden hand against his hair. As he moves, the muscles in his arm and chest jump. Brienne watches, wide-eyed. She’s heard endless talk from men about this. It’s always sounded so undignified. A hasty, grubby affair. Jaime’s skin is soft and golden, where it isn’t pinked from exertion and her hands. She’s never seen anyone look cleaner. The sound. Heat licks at her again, unable to look away, though his eyes are pinched shut. The tip of his cock is dark, slick. In his just open mouth, his tongue is pink. She watches her thumb push between his teeth, searching for water. He grazes her again, a happy snarl of teeth and a quick flash of hazy eyes on hers before he tips his chin forwards. She presses her thighs together, strokes his sharp teeth until he chases her thumb away, twisting his neck. She carries on watching until he blinks at her. She’s hot but cooling.

“Let me just-” he says, and he drags himself up to scrub his hand clean again.

Sleep curls through her body as her heartbeat fades from her ears. She kicks her legs a little to disperse the work that sits from her thighs to her back. The fire’s heat laps at her skin. The rug scratches her when she flexes the pinching muscles. The slightest curl of cold air reaches for her from under their door.

He comes back to her, tugging his southern cloak down and laying it over their legs. Hers would be warmer. He lies on his front, pushed up on his elbows, and he fumbles with the straps to his hand. He has to pull hard to get the thing off. Underneath the leather, there is a broad, angry red band around his wrist. He places the hand standing straight up from the ground, and considers it as he rubs at the abrasion.

She watches. He twists onto his back, glancing at her sideways.

“It’s just compacting pressure. He mimes a punch into his left palm, and then knocks the inside of his severed wrist against the side of the whole one. Backhand is fine.” He stretches and grins. Brienne just touched those teeth. She flushes. “I can show you if you like,” he says. He’d tell her if that was strange. Brienne pretends to scowl.

“I’ll show you,” she says darkly. He looks so pleased.

“I know you can throw a punch,” he says. And there is the water weight in her chest, rushing back. She sits up. The evening is over. It’s time to sleep. Something terrible occurs to Brienne.

“Did you eat? Tonight?”

“No,” says Jaime. “It’s fine.” Brienne glares. She hadn’t thought. How could she not have thought? If she had thought of it she’d have assumed Podrick would have come by.

“It really is fine,” he says. He pushes up to press his lips to hers. “Brienne,” he says, almost into her mouth.

“What?” she says, still angry with herself.

“I want to say goodbye to my brother.”

Brienne blinks at him, so close and warm, the queasy addition of guilt to the water in her chest.

“Do you know where he sleeps?”

“He’s in the newer tower,” he says. “With the queen’s retinue. I know I’m not supposed to be out there-.”

“I’ll take you,” she interrupts and she gets up, hitching everything back up around her waist. She starts dressing. Not allowing him to go would be arbitrary cruelty. Sansa’s decree should have sensible limits. Jaime stays down.

“I don’t like how that went,” he says.

Brienne pauses in shrugging into her jacket. She watches him stand. If that was manipulation then it’s not something she can guard against, because it’s so alien to her understanding of him. He mostly looks confused by it. She tries not to think about what Sansa would say. Someone expecting the worst. The moment in the songs when the distance dissolves and everything else goes with it.

“Do you want to go or not?” This time they keep quiet in the corridors, Jaime walking a little behind her shoulder, aware that they are doing something they shouldn’t. The incompetent guard posted by the hole in the wall ignores them as they make their way across the second courtyard. Brienne does not look at the Sept.

Tyrion himself answers Jaime’s soft knock, and he holds his finger to his lips. Pod is asleep at the table.

“Ser Brienne,” Tyrion says. “Stay for a drink. My preferred guest passed out without partaking.”

That’s a succinct way of insulting both her and Jaime while letting her know that Pod isn’t drunk. She can appreciate it abstractly.

“I’ll see you before first light,” she says, to see Jaime swallow a laugh at Tyrion’s disgust. As if Tyrion doesn’t have to be up then anyway.

“Goodnight,” Jaime says, and Brienne hurries away before Tyrion can say something terrible about his tone and the way his eyes are warm and quiet.

It’s strange to be alone again at night. It’s colder. She wakes twice, thinking the bed is weighted by a body beside her. Remembering how heavy the dead are. She drifts again easily enough. She’s practiced at sleeping alone.

Jaime drops to one knee to embrace Tyrion in the empty great hall, lit only by fire-light. He pulls away quickly to smooth Tyrion’s hair back from face, tucking it behind his ears where it has grown longer than Jaime’s. Tyrion tolerates this silently.

“Try to get along with Aunt Genna,” says Jaime, sitting back and thumping him on the shoulder.

Tyrion says, “I am a diplomat now.”

“She really won’t hold it against you,” says Jaime. Tyrion’s laughter is painful. “She loved him, but she wasn’t blind to the way he was.”

Tyrion echoes, “The way he was.” with some real amusement. “Gods, it’s going to be fucking awful,” he says, “hopefully Tully has died and there will be no one to object if I pack her and her Frey husband off to the Twins.”

Brienne strongly disapproves of this sentiment, but Jaime smiles at Tyrion, with teeth, big and beaming. It looks completely genuine. Brienne hadn’t known that was a possibility here in Winterfell. She covets it, suddenly.

“She’ll be useful to you. She’ll respect that you want to be there,” says Jaime and he produces a purse clicking with what Brienne suspects represents every bit of money he has. He’d only added loose coin from the bottom of his saddle bags to it when he was fiddling about with it last night.

“Oh no,” says Tyrion. “No, I told you. I’ve given up money.”

Jaime holds it out until he takes it.

“The freedoms that independent wealth brings,” Tyrion says. It’s not that heavy a purse. He grabs at Jaime again, falling into him and crushing his face into his shoulder. Jaime rocks them jerkily with his eyes screwed tight. Brienne looks down at them, experiencing some terrible transference of unfamiliar pain. Her father isn’t writing back.

They stage another little farewell out in the freezing courtyard in front of Tyrion’s southern soldiers. It’s snowing again, dreamy snowflakes that melt away as soon as they touch Brienne’s shoulders and that catch in the breaking morning light. Jaime drops to the wet ground to embrace Tyrion, quickly but just as fiercely. He kisses Tyrion’s hand and his cheek, old fashioned manners. Then he takes off to walk through the milling ranks of southern men. A few of them have acquired appropriately warm gear. The rest are going to be very cold, but they’re eager to go. Some of them are glancing up nervously. If the light is coming, then the dragons should be here too. Brienne watches Jaime. He spends a long time with two silver-haired men near the front of the undisciplined formation. They are among those who have been given horses, and one of them reaches out to clap Jaime on the shoulder. He wanders further back. The men turn to him, seeking approval, seeking attention and he gives it, somehow engaged but removed. Sansa has the same trick. Brienne thinks she was still holding herself too tightly with them, before the battle.

On the other side of the courtyard, Sansa and Jon are going through the motions of saying goodbye to the Bear Islanders. The group is small enough that it makes Brienne feel desperately sad. She understands why they would want to go home. She looks away. Gendry and the queen are watching from the walkway. Gendry is looking back at her.

“He was always good at this part; good with the men,” Tyrion says, still watching Jaime, “but I’ll be better with the Rock.” Brienne examines him. He has his hands balled into fists. “I do believe that,” he says.

Brienne considers Jaime, tall and easy to pick out in the mass of men. She imagines him sat in a grand office day after day, year after year, dealing with the endless anonymous problems of a great house and all the grand scope of its peoples and lands. Jaime had said Tyrion wanted that.

“You’ll be better,” she tells Tyrion.

Tyrion turns up to her, the gratitude on his face quickly sliding behind a grin.

“I always did like you, ser,” he says. Brienne chooses not to reply.

The dragons start up, which seems to delight Tyrion. Brienne hunches her shoulders and endures.

Out in the press of men, Jaime glances back at her, just for a moment. Tyrion spots it; of course he does.

“What do you two talk about holed up in that room of yours?” he says, and she hopes her face is too flushed from the cold to give her away. She had just assumed that Jaime had told him. Tyrion is still looking out at his men. “Tourneys legend and exciting advances in mace wielding technique?” he prompts teasingly.

Then he looks up at her again, and she sees when he reads it on her face. She looks away, steeling herself for whatever jibe he is concocting.

“My lady,” he begins, so much softer than she expects, and then waits until she meets his eyes again, “Take something for yourself and keep him safe for me while you’re at it.”

Brienne can’t formulate a response. She doesn’t need his permission. It’s what she almost has. Possession and safety. Selfish desire. Certainly nothing on Tyrion’s account.

“Look after yourself, my lord,” she says, as is proper — sincerely and sincerely hoping to put an end to the conversation. Tyrion smiles at her with authentic crookedness.

Jaime picks out a wiry young man with scrupulously clean gear under a thick northern cloak. He has tidy red hair and a fading black eye. Jaime brings him back to Tyrion. Tyrion accepts this tribute with minimal interest and sends the boy off for his mounting block from the wagons. He moves forwards, trying to draw the attention of a couple of the men.

“He likes to pick a strange one to talk at,” says Jaime, lowly in explanation to Brienne, “I thought I’d save him some time.”

“He looks a little small to be useful,” says Brienne, eyeing the boy’s diminutive, retreating form. She indicates her eye where the boy is bruised, “and a troublemaker, too.”

“No, it’s a moving tale. Tyrion likes the sorry ones. And I saw that one kill a mounted Dothraki horse from the ground,” Brienne looks back at the boy with renewed interest, “Sticks in the memory.”

Pod comes back with the mounting block, clutching it fiercely and leading Tyrion’s unusually saddled horse, even though the new boy is following along and scowling behind him.

Tyrion’s party has wagons full of what Sansa probably couldn’t spare and a man to look after a few ravens. He has Sansa’s words with him, the queen’s words, Jaime’s and all the reassurance of his aunt will surely follow. He has under three hundred men. He’ll need everything to go right, but he’s been lucky before.

He rides out to the front of the assembled men, and Brienne does feel for him. It won’t be safe to stay on horseback, despite all his preparation, not with the ground covered beyond the edges of the camp. He’ll have to sit on one of the carts. The men stare back at him doubtfully, more than a few of them keep looking to Jaime. Men have looked at her that way.

“Let’s all go home!” Tyrion shouts into the snow dampened courtyard, and suddenly, at least for this moment, they’re his. Even the Bear Islanders shift in interest. He makes a bow up to the walkway at the back of the courtyard, and Brienne turns to see Jon, Sansa, and the queen all assembled to see him off. Tyrion smirks at Jaime all the way through the gate. It’s a long way to where they will be met by the Iron Islanders. Some of the men still look mournfully at Jaime as they pass by, but there is already the scattered beginning of a marching song.

Jaime watches until the last of the men are gone, the few wagons creaking slowly out through the main gate. The bustle in the castle is hardly diminished around them. As the men file out more flood into the courtyard and wagons that had been cleared aside are dragged back out again. Jon Snow is already amongst the men. He’ll be leaving next.

“Well. What now?” says Jaime. Pod has finished all the mending and everything they own is clean and sharp.

“I still have jobs with the saddle maker,” says Pod, finally turning his eyes away from the gate. “I don’t know about you.”

They get out of the way, walking up onto the deserted ramparts at Jaime’s request. From up here, Tyrion’s party is becoming smaller and less impressive by the moment as it weaves through the encampments around the castle walls. None of the other men had mounted their horses. Their progress is slow. The wind whips the snow into Brienne’s face and whines past the towers.

When Tyrion gets to the last tent and sets out into the fresh snow without dismounting, Jaime pulls his cloak around himself and turns his back to the wind, watching her instead. It’s warming, at least to her. His nose and cheeks have pinked up in the wind. He crouches down with his back against the parapet, out of the worst. The stones are too wetly icy to sit down.

“How long did it take you to become accustomed to this cold?”

“I’m not sure anyone gets used to it,” she says, “I just acquired warmer clothes.”

He nods at this like it’s a jewelled wisdom he’s grateful to have received from her. After a moment more of stoically enduring the flurries of snow, she joins him, gathering her massive quantities of fur and the awkward length of Oathkeeper out of the way before she crouches. They press together, shivering, listening to the tumultuous carrying on of men on both sides of the walls. Jaime tucks his hands under his arms.

“How do you think that southern boy just now got hold of a cloak like yours? Do you think he took it from someone who died in the battle? He turned the question I almost asked aside.” Brienne thinks that sounds very likely.

“I’ll ask Sansa for one.” Jaime grimaces.

“You probably shouldn’t do that, Brienne,” he says.

She’ll do what she likes.

“I should take you back,” she says, apologetically. But neither of them actually move.

“Nice face,” calls a man’s nasal little voice, almost snatched away on the wind.

Brienne starts into weary insult, assuming it’s aimed at her. She looks up to find Sansa’s spy leaning on the inner wall, looking across at the two of them. He does seem used to the cold, his furs lying loosely on his shoulders. He’s looking at Jaime. Brienne doesn’t know what to do with that. She’d decided they shouldn’t grab him.

“Thank you,” says Jaime. “But whatever you’re offering, I don’t have any money.” Brienne turns to glare at him.

“I’m not soliciting,” the boy says, voice drenched in amusement. “I’m threatening.”

Jaime settles his arms on his knees, leaning back into the wall.

“Well, have another go?”

The boy smiles.

“If you’re sure,” he says.

He reaches up to put his nails to his hairline. Brienne surges to her feet, hearing the noise she makes as though she is underwater.

Arya holds the boy’s thin, dead skin casually between her fingers. She doesn’t take her eyes off Jaime.

“Nice face. Useful face,” she says. Brienne looks down at Jaime. He’s blank-faced and calm. Gone away. “This one died in the battle,” she says, “I didn’t want them all to go to waste.”

“Arya…” she breathes.

She doesn’t know what to say, but Arya doesn’t look at her anyway. It takes Jaime a while to speak again. Arya looks down at him hungrily the whole time.

“That would be an unconscionably cruel thing to do to her,” Jaime says, voice liquid.

“Unjust?” Arya says curiously, “To Cersei? Really?”

“Unnecessary.”

Arya pushes it - the skin - down the front of her jerkin. It shudders through Brienne as the ripping motion had. Arya leans in.

“I’m not going to do it like that,” says Arya, “because of Brienne. You’d do well to remember that.”

“Arya,” she repeats, trying to swallow her horror, “this isn’t helpful.”

Arya frowns up at her. Then, quite clearly, so that even Brienne can hear it over the sound of tens of thousands of men, there is a wolf howling somewhere in the distance. Arya tracks the sound, turning her head, her eyes narrow and unseeing. Another call goes up; she turns towards it. Jaime is looking up at Arya, curiosity making his face a little more human, puzzled at her distraction.

“I’ll remember, Arya Stark,” says Jaime.

“Valar dohaeris,” Arya says to him, briefly giving him her attention again. “Your choice was lucky. Let it stay that way.” To Brienne, she says, “We’ll spar again sometime,” grinning like she knows this is incongruous. Then she takes off, purposeful in a new direction. Brienne watches her flit out of sight, into the nearest tower and away down the stairs.

Helpless, she sits down next to Jaime, never mind about the dirt and melting snow on her cloak. Jaime shuffles to push their shoulders back together. Then he reaches down to grab her hand. Brienne’s stomach is rolling like she’s on the deck of a delicate skiff in a thick storm.

“I do need to speak to Sansa,” Jaime says, “Only for a moment.”

“There’s no use complaining to Sansa about it,” Brienne tells him and regrets it immediately. He snatches his hand away and stands, glaring down at her, clearly hurt by the assumption.

“I don’t want to tell tales,” he says. He flinches from a particularly sharp gust of snow. “Can we walk outside for a little while, Brienne. Or ,ride. Can we ride?” He’s looking out above where the trees begin, where the hills roll away from them. “I don’t think I can go and wait by the fire again quite yet. I can. But not quite yet.”

She takes in his unhappiness. She tries to decide if she’s relieved to see it so openly. She hadn’t meant to insult him.

“If we go back to the room I can ask Pod to walk with you, if you need some time,” she tells him.

“No. If Sansa doesn’t need you, I can hang on your arm.”

Brienne flushes, uncomfortable with that. She glares down at the grey flagstones. He drops heavily into a crouch in front of her and tries to turn her face back up to him. His gold hand bounces clumsily off her jaw, a gentle fumble cushioned by his gloves.

“I don’t know why I said that,” he says. “You never hurt me.” It would have wounded her at some amorphous time in the past that isn’t now. Now, it burns differently. The embarrassment means something else.

When she looks up at him, he looks tired again, slouching like a paper puppet left out in the rain. She doesn’t like to see him defeated and she doesn’t want to defeat him. She reaches out to pull his wrist, very gently, into her hand. It’s a question, she supposes. She shifts her grip so she can lift his arm awkwardly into the air. He lets her, although his eyes flicker confusedly over her face before clearing into a speculative kind of amusement. It’s an answer of sorts, she supposes. He’s not worried. He doesn’t tense. Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to him. She doesn’t understand where the playing at being a prisoner comment came from if that is really the case. She left him alone with no food and old washing water. He’s not wearing his sword.

“That’s one of the most revolting things I’ve ever seen a living person do,” he tells her, his arm hanging loosely between them, still in her grasp. “Terrifying, quite honestly. You didn’t know she could…” he gestures with the gloved gold hand, without words for what Arya can do.

Brienne doesn’t have words for it either. It makes sense of how Arya was able to kill all those Freys alone. She supposes that if someone has to have that skill, she’s glad it’s Arya. She doesn’t have anything to say about it. She strokes at his wrist with her thumb.

“I suppose I could suffer being seen with you on my arm,” she says, and then she folds his hand properly into hers and tugs it in, quickly pressing a kiss to his knuckles. She hopes the castle will feel less suffocating when the men making all this noise have gone.

Jaime’s eyes light up. He glances back and forth along the empty ramparts and leans in to kiss the side of her mouth.

“Come on,” he says, patting her thigh encouragingly and standing up, “It’s awful up on these walls. Why did you bring us up here?”

While she beats out her cloak and repositions her sword belt, he leans against the parapet to look out again after Tyrion who must well over the second hill and out of sight by now.

“Isn’t it nice that Arya Stark has given us her blessing,” he says, bemusedly, voice almost snatched away.

Then his face sharpens. She whirls and narrows her own eyes against the wind. At least the snow has stopped again. There are two men running in at a fair clip, already past the edges of the camp. One of them is leading a horse. The other, Brienne realises with a start, has the distinctive red hair of the young man Jaime had picked out for Tyrion.

“Is that Bronn?” says Jaime.

Brienne squints at the dark-haired rider. They both tilt their heads to listen to the howling, carried to them in a brief break in the wind. Jaime shifts nervously.

“That wolf of Snow’s is nearly as bad the dragons,” he says, feigning disinterest while he’s still unsure, but he grabs her belt and starts walking them towards the nearest tower. By the time they reach the bottom of the stairs, they’re both running.

“My lady. Ser. Er-,” calls the guard on the gate as they approach. He’s a tall, decent, dull fellow from the castle guard, who Brienne had interviewed for Sansa. He clearly doesn’t remember her name. Then, noticing Jaime coming towards him at some speed, his expression shifts to alarm.

“Just you wait there a moment, ser,” he says. “I mean, Jai-. Jai-.” he doesn’t seem to be able to push the informality past his teeth, working his hands around in circles by his side.

“Kingslayer! Please come back here,” he pleads as Jaime tears straight past him. The queen hadn’t technically stripped Jaime of that title Brienne supposes. Brienne slows to reassure the poor man.

“Do get a grip, Harlon. Stay at your post.” Then she lengthens he stride to catch up.

It feels good to run. Brienne feels so light-footed without her clanking armour. It will be terrible trouble for Sansa’s plans if Tyrion has managed to get himself eaten by wolves as soon as he was out of sight of the castle, but they categorically can’t make Jaime go in his place now. Jaime had said there was a positive plague of distant cousins. The cold air tears down her throat and a long graze on her calf pulls with every stride. Maybe she’ll have to fight Bronn. On the one hand, it will be something to do other than pick out slightly less stupid men, on the other, it will really be rather a lot of trouble by all accounts.

“Where’s my brother?” shouts Jaime as Brienne catches him. “You, boy. Where’s Lord Tyrion?”

The young man opens his mouth in speechless outrage.

“He’s just over those hills, holding forth to anyone who will listen,” calls Bronn. “Don’t get so excited.”

Brienne tries to dig her heels into the slippery, partially frozen mud of the path and stumbles out of her sprint. Jaime slides and slithers to a more gradual halt.

“Good,” he pants. ‘Well done. Are you alright to go back alone?” he asks the boy. “Ser Brienne could find you a couple of men to go with you. There are wolves about.” Brienne will likely not be able to find him men. She’d have to ask Sansa or Jon Snow.

“I’m not scared of wolves,” the boy says. “Lord Tyrion said to deliver Ser Bronn back past the Dothraki’s guards. He told me to do it and come back quick.”

Then he wheels around and stomps away, back into the wind. Bronn is already speaking.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes, I’ve been on the road from King’s Landing nearly fifty nights.” Brienne scowls down at him. “I took a slightly circuitous route. I am surprised to see you wandering about unchecked,” - this is directed at Jaime - “I’ll tell you that. But I hear you vanquished the army of the dead. Everyone south of the neck thinks it’s all a Stark conspiracy, just so you know. But it’s wonderful news. Never a doubt in my mind.” He adds,“I have useful reports from the city.”

“Which city?” says Brienne, because she is feeling churlish. Then she speaks over his answer, because she really doesn’t need to be told. “I’ll find Lady Sansa,” says Brienne to Jaime. “Don’t let him too far into the castle. Or, I’ll find the queen or Jon Snow,” she adds guiltily a moment later.

“Please remind that guard that he doesn’t need to call for reinforcements,” says Jaime. He needn’t worry. Harlon the guard isn’t going to have the wherewithal to call for anything.

Brienne finds Sansa in her private rooms, a cluster of women, two of them wildlings, sat around her desk. Sansa says delicately, “Brienne, can I help you?”

“A Lannister sellsword is here saying he has news from King’s Landing,” Brienne says.

Sansa sighs and stands. The northern women stand with her. One wildling stays seated, the other stands part way and then awkwardly lowers herself again when the other raises her eyebrows.

“Jon just left by the Hunter’s Gate. Who is he with now? How good a sellsword?”

“I could almost certainly take him,” Brienne says, “Jaime and the guard posted to the main gate are with him.” Sansa’s mouth tightens. Brienne remembers that Jaime is not supposed to be as far as the main gate. The trouble is, Brienne is no longer sure why and that’s making it difficult to enforce.

Sansa says, “I’ll try to have the Queen found if she’s still inside the castle. Perhaps it would be best if you hurried back.” Brienne flushes. She can see that Jaime and Harlon don’t make a particularly reliable sounding pair in this particular instance.

“Right away, my lady,” she says. Sansa sighs again, and all the women sitting around the desk with her shake their heads in sympathy.

“What friendship? Neither of us has any friends.” Bronn’s voice carries loudly out from the Gate House, where Harlon has tucked them away next to a hearty fire. Now no one is watching the gate. She shoos him back out.

Bronn calls, “Hello, Podrick Payne!” when they enter, looking delighted. Brienne ran into Pod hanging around dejectedly in the courtyard and brought him along in case he wanted to see an old friend, but apparently she needn’t have bothered. Bronn looks Brienne up and down and opens his mouth, then visibly reconsiders.

“Hello again, Lady Brienne,” says Bronn, with a polite nod. She wishes he would look less amused by everything. Jaime is amused by very slightly fewer things and that’s now more than fine. She is aware of her own inconstancies.

“Ser Brienne,” she corrects, trying to keep how pleasing that is from her voice.

Jaime puffs up as well and turns to smile at her brilliantly and with something she has no choice but to interpret as adoration. For some reason, Bronn turns immediately and triumphantly to Pod, who only stares blankly back.

“Bronn was paid to come and kill Tyrion and I,” Jaime tells them.

“Ser Bronn,” says Bronn patiently, “was partially paid…”

“Oh,” says Pod, “Lord Tyrion’s only just left. You’ve missed him.”

“Yes. Lord of Casterly Rock again, lucky little bugger. I ran into your Lannister men on the road, and I hid, but that weaselly red headed one spotted me. Qyburn gave me a crossbow to kill you both so I could have got his nibs if I’d spotted him a little earlier, but I didn’t, and besides that, I sold the crossbow before I left the city. Beautifully made thing. Bloody heavy though.”

Brienne observes this outpouring with distaste.

“What’s with that maester who isn’t a maester and all his fucking projectiles anyway. Did you tell them about the truly obsessive number of scorpions he’s building?”

“Yes, ser,” says Jaime, pretending not to enjoy himself. Bronn’s eyebrows jump and drags his chair in closer.

“You’re much improved, you are. Well done, Ser Brienne. That’s lovely. Say it again.” Brienne clears her throat. He’d helped Jaime learn to fight again. She should be polite.

“Ser Bronn, who paid you to kill Jaime?”

“And Lord Tyrion,” Pod adds.

Jaime sits back in his chair and crosses one ankle nonchalantly over the other. Then he crosses his arms too. Brienne looks between them. Oh, of course: Cersei. Bronn pulls a comically exaggerated grimace. Brienne doesn’t think this is particularly funny.

“So, Podrick, have you been knighted as well?” Brienne does think he is a most objectionable man.

She leaves to wait outside under the thick stone arc of the main gate with Harlon, who has become distracted chatting with a woman who has brought him a warm bowl of something. Brienne stands at attention - even if Harlon doesn’t - and observes the pair until the woman catches her looking and scuttles away. Harlon starts standing on one leg and inspecting the sole of his boot, unconcerned by her observation, still eating. The other guards had almost universally been mean spirited and inflated with petty power, but this man isn’t even looking at the passing throngs. Women carry covered baskets back and forth. Not that Brienne ever wants to catch another thief.

Jaime comes out to stand next to her, immediately huddling back into his cloak and bundling himself back against the wall. She lets him alone. Not sure what she can say to comfort him in this instance. Interest in Jaime does seem to have been renewed by the publicly issued denouncement, but it’s an idle interest, subsumed by the work of getting thousands of men ready to leave. They look at him and their eyes for once, slide right over her. Although, with the Free Folk about, Brienne is less of an oddity anyway. Jaime either doesn’t notice or doesn’t particularly care about the curious looks; he glances at her briefly and twists his mouth unhappily.

“The south does not believe after all,” he says. “There will be no convincing them now.” Brienne observes his sulking profile. She had thought he was upset by his sister’s attempted fratricide. Jaime hits the side of his fist against the wall. Brienne has been turning it over in her mind too. “Oh well,” he says. “It’s always a mistake to expect thanks.”

“You didn’t do it for thanks,” Brienne says. Jaime hits his hand on the wall again and shuts his eyes.

Harlon wanders back over to them, slurping gravy from his bowl, steam curling up and making his face shiny.

“That was the most exciting thing to happen in an age,” he says. It’s is such an absurd statement that it seems to snap Jaime out of his glumness. They stare at Harlon, amazed. The walls were overrun by walking corpses just ten nights past. He can’t possibly have forgotten. Jaime turns away, hiding the beginnings of laughter. She feels that perhaps it is too cruel to send such a man south, but he is clearly monstrously unfit to guard Sansa.

Sansa arrives with Clegane and a severe collection of unsullied men who all have new fur sticking out of the tops of their boots. The russet and rabbit-brown colours are a strange disruption of their austere uniformity. Clegane brushes past them into the Gate House when Brienne indicates. Sansa is looking tiredly at Harlon who is attempting to hide his bowl behind his back and fade into the grey walls. She tips an eyebrow at Brienne. Harlon will have to go south.

Clegane herds Bronn out, having confiscated his sword belt. Brienne should have taken his sword belt.

Bronn sees the wolf head peering over Sansa’s shoulder and says, “Fucking hell.” Sansa tries very hard not to look pleased with herself, but Brienne can tell she’s preening a little by the way she tips her face into the wolf’s fur. Clegane shakes him about a little by his twisted arm.

Bronn corrects himself. “Hello, Lady Sansa,” he says with a surprisingly respectful little bow of his head. Then he turns to Jaime, slapping him on the shoulder heartily. “You needn’t worry about Tyrion; I’ll be riding off out after him when I’m done here.” Jaime tries to incline his head to both Sansa and Bronn at once. The effect causes Sansa’s eyes to skitter over him and back to Brienne.

“Oh, will you,” Clegane grumbles, dragging Bronn back again. “Where are we taking him?”

“He’s a useful man,” says Jaime. Everyone ignores him.

“We’ll be visiting the Queen out in her tents,” Sansa says, and she sails off, her dress dragging along the ice with the unsullied flanking her and Clegane trying to make it look as though he is manhandling a completely unresisting Bronn along behind.

Jaime says, “Good double act,” and watches them go. Pod wanders over to stand shoulder to shoulder with him. “Should we go back?” he asks.

Brienne turns to them; they both look up at her, waiting. She jerks her head significantly away from Harlon, and they all shuffle out of immediate hearing range, Jaime looking deeply entertained by the subterfuge.

“We’re going to find Sansa some better guards,” says Brienne. “I found seven yesterday. That’s not nearly enough.”

Jaime stares at her.

“I absolutely shouldn’t be involved in that,” he says. “Brienne.” Brienne ignores him. Sansa had said no southern men. But Brienne has had the thought that perhaps, if he stays at Winterfell for a while, he could join. She will concede that it is not yet appropriate.

“Well, do you want to go back and mope around in bed?” she says.

She’s more than doubled her collection of likely men before there is any trouble at all. Pod is very useful; he knows more of the men by name than Brienne, and certainly more of the men who aren’t technically Royce’s. They’d been good to her, or as good as she could have hoped, but equipping Winterfell with a guard entirely from the Vale seems foolhardy.

Jaime stands silently at her shoulder or by various doors, looking like he’s pretending very hard not to hear anything being said. She still needs more men, and is down to the last four candidates their collective could come up with, when the current guard crashes onto the scene.

A man slams into the wrecked tower room they are currently in and shouts “Out!” at the current prospect. The prospect runs away, which immediately disqualifies him. Brienne sizes the guard up. She can’t remember his name, but she knows she does not like him. He has his hand clenched on the pommel of his sword; as she had assessed, he is a dangerous fool.

Brienne says, “Lady Sansa has asked me-.”

“It’s not your fucking place!” the man shouts, coming so close that it’s truly moronic. She could put him down easily, but then he’ll be a problem for Sansa, wandering around with stories of injustice carried out in her name. He veers wildly away. The man has brought an audience, she notices, gathering by the door.

“We won’t have it,” he says, even though the other men are only peering in worriedly. “And I’ll be damned if I march off to die in the south while boys from the Vale sit pretty in Winterfell-. ” Pod heads towards the men at the door with his most amiable face on.

“Get out of here,” she says, “I’ll not say it again.”

“You southern bitch,” says the man. She re-considers hitting him. But would that be authority humiliating an underling, or a woman humiliating herself? She no longer has command over a system that could see him whipped and he has to march soon, like he says, and swing a sword for Jon Snow. She could grab him by the scruff of his neck and throw him out. Except she thinks he would bounce back at her. Jaime wanders a little closer. She rolls her eyes at him. The man crowds in close again. He puts his finger in her face.

“You bear fucking freak.” So that story is going about. She cannot slap him.

Brienne says, “Consider what you are doing,” and finally, reluctantly, puts her hand on Oathkeeper; just as a reminder.

The man actually tries to draw his sword.

Jaime grabs him by his sword hand, throws his weight so the man hits the floor on his back and punches him with his right. The man’s face thuds dully and neatly. He makes a familiar choking noise. Jaime pops up, turning his back - he has a sword at least - and says, “Fuck,” tucking his left wrist under his right arm.

“Fuck!” echoes the man, twisting like an a landed fish. “You’re both fucking dead!” His nose is gushing profusely. It makes his speech difficult to follow.

“He was asked to leave,” says Pod mildly, to their audience. Jaime throws the sword down at Brienne’s feet and heads back over there. The man scrabbles backwards.

“Dead. Your sister too,” he slurs, braver than he looks. “If I have to go south I’m killing her myself.“

Jaime stops. He holds his arms out away from his bare belt, and says, “Who’s dead? Jaime Lannister?” which makes him sound positively insane.

“I’ll get Jon Snow down here and then we’ll...”

“Both of you shut up,” says Brienne. The man looks triumphantly at Jaime, pleased to have got someone else into trouble with him. He scrabbles up onto his knees, then his feet, spitting blood.

“Jon Snow will-.”

“He’ll what?” says Brienne. “Very well, I’ll find you Lady Sansa. I’m sure she has nothing better to do,” and she turns to the door.

“Wait,” says the man, spitting again. “Wait.” He won’t look at her when she hands him his sword. He shoulders through the onlookers he brought, shrugging of worried hands. Brienne checks the stairwell, tells the three prospective guards who promisingly haven’t fled to wait and shuts the door.

“Nice bluff,” says Jaime. “Thank you.” Brienne ignores him. It was like for like, by her count.

“We should move,” she says.

Pod widens his eyes. “That was wild enough that he won’t tell anyone, I’m sure.”

Brienne thinks it’s prudent to assume the worst. Shame sits and festers in a man like that. At least he won’t have to say that a woman that hit him.

“Maybe somewhere more public,” Jaime says. “I’m happy to do it again.” She eyes him dubiously. It had worked. It had been useful. She hadn’t brought him along for that.

He stays at her shoulder all the way down the stairs and across the courtyard, back to being a silent bodyguard again.

“Stop it,” she murmurs, when he comes to a halt just behind her at the brazier she’s picked out for it’s isolation. She surveys the three bundled men who have followed her.

She tries talking to them all together. They all seem adequate.

“Two, I’m not stupid. Ser,” says the youngest, in response to the question of how many men should be at each post, so he’s already better than most of the current crop. The little daylight they had is slipping away from her. Soon it will be time for the dragons again.

Podrick says, “My lady?”

“What,” she snaps.

Out of the corner of her eye, she spots the incoming Tormund. Podrick’s mouth tightens in sympathy. Jaime is standing slightly apart, closer to the flames in his too light cloak, silent and fallen back into brooding again. His head snaps up as soon as she looks at him. He follows her flicking her eyes and spots Tormund approaching. If anything he looks cheered. Brienne supposes that last time he saw the man, he came out with that story about milk.

Tormund calls out to her: “We’re hunting again. Want to come with us? I could teach you-.”

“I’m busy.” Her voice is loud and carrying. It’s more awkward than if she’d let him finish. Brienne glances at the northern men and finds them all watching avidly, except one who is averting his eyes. She feels a surge of gratitude to this one man and his very large eyebrows.

“You’ll enjoy yourself,” Tormund promises, “Once, when I was hunting beyond the wall I-.”

“Would any of the Free Folk remaining in Winterfell be willing to join the castle guard?” Brienne cuts through. “They would have to be vetted by Lady Sansa, of course.” Tormund stops to frown, digging a gloved hand into his beard.

“There’s some that would be suited,” he says. “The Free Folk will do our part.”

“Are there any women suitable?” Brienne asks. She likes looking at the wildling lines and seeing the weathered women with their weapons on their backs.

“Maybe. I can ask.” He says, “You want women?” He’s frowning, considering. He raises one eyebrow and leans in. “Would you go hunting with a woman?” He eyes Jaime again, who blinks down at him pleasantly. Brienne wishes Tormund would stop coming back around to the same question.

“If you could send them to me by tonight,” she says gruffly, “Lady Sansa will appreciate your aid in this matter.”

“It’s not Lady Sansa whose appreciation I would-”

“My lord, your hunting party is waiting,” says Podrick.

“I’m no more a lord than you are,” says Tormund, insulted, “but,” he adds significantly, looking back at Jaime, “I could shave off my warm beard and spend all day sitting in the hot springs getting pink and pretty if I didn’t have better things to do.” Jaime flashes all his teeth.

“I’m flattered that you think of me so-”

Brienne says loudly over him, “I’d appreciate it if you’d go and get on with those better things. Thank you.”

“They really are going,” says Pod, “look.” Tormund looks out of the corner of her eye. He shakes his head sadly.

“This would never have happen beyond the wall. But I don’t need to be told twice,” he says, beginning to retreat. “I’ll send you the best women. The best men.”

“Wonderful,” says Jaime and Tormund pivots to glare at him, walking backwards.

“When we all walk out of this castle, up on snow that’s above these little walls here, then we’ll see who can provide a-”

“I’ll look forward to your guidance, my lord,” calls Jaime.

Brienne can hear Tormund muttering, “Prissy, southern idiot.”

“They used to raid our village,” says the man who averted his eyes. His enormous eyebrows are draw down. “I don’t know how you can ask us to stand alongside some wildling girls. Dirty like that but a woman. I have my dignity.”

“You’re dismissed then,” snaps Brienne, “You’ll be marching south.” The man gapes. He’d been respectful towards her. To have misjudged him so stings. He stomps away, throwing angry looks over his shoulder. Good riddance.

“Tormund Giant’s-milk,” says Jaime. “What a man. Did you believe all that? Tyrion swore to me later that he believed it, but I think he was teasing.”

“I’ve heard stranger things that turned out to be true,” says Pod.

The two men remaining at the fire nod glumly. Perhaps the whole castle has been treated to the story.

Brienne says. “Thank you. Lady Sansa will see you soon and she will want to thank you herself.”

“Try it,” says Jaime, stepping forwards, bringing up his sword. Pod steps forwards determinedly and the swords clash and then scrape, when Pod starts forcing Jaime’s sword down, two handed grip against one. Jaime twists his sword around and above and Pod looses his advantage and has to hop backwards sharply.

“No,” says Brienne, from the end of the bed, “again.”

They run it twice more. Pod manages to press his advantage both times. Batting Jaime’s sword this way or that, as he runs repeatedly through the same parry. The scrape of steel is uneven, pitted edge against pitted edge.

“Good,” says Brienne, “again.”

Pod’s sword catches on Jaime’s, he keeps his advantage, the sword skitters, catches on the broken edge and bounces, clipping Jaime’s chin as he jerks backwards.

“My lord!” says Pod, dropping his sword and stepping forwards. “Gods, I’m sorry.” Brienne fists the furs she is sitting on. Jaime is already huffing out a little laugh, pressing the back of his hand to the underside of his chin.

“Are you alright?” Brienne asks.

“Yes,” says Jaime. “He barely touched me.”

“I didn’t mean to…” says Pod.

“Well maybe one day you’ll be good enough to do it on purpose,” Jaime says. He sticks his sword under his right arm and pokes at his face, checking a finger for blood. “Or better yet good enough to not do it at all.”

“Accidents are inevitable,” says Brienne to Pod. “This is why we train with blunted swords. This is a good sign.” She’s not entirely sure that it is - it’s certainly not a negative reflection on his abilities - but she wants to soothe the distress from his face.

“Oh yes, fantastic,” says Jaime. “Again?” Pod slides his eyes back to Brienne. She can see the lurking shadow of the exhaustion she’d seen in those first days after, even though, by his own admission, he’d found nothing to do today.

“No,” she says. Pod tidies the sword and pulls the chair back to its place by the fire.

“Podrick…” says Jaime.

“I know I shouldn’t call you ‘my lord,’” says Pod.

Jaime holds the sword out to him by the blunted length. Pod grabs the grip, and while he puts it neatly in the corner, Jaime tugs his boots off and unties his jacket and climbs past Brienne onto the bed.

“I’m going to sleep then,” Jaime says, which seems quite final.

Pod comes to sit besides Brienne, carefully avoidant of Jaime’s extended feet.

“I’m glad you think I’m improving,” he says, which isn’t what Brienne had said, but does reflect what she thinks.

“You’re a good swordsman,” she says. “You’ve been a good squire, Podrick.” Pod turns towards her.

“I am still your squire, my lady” he says, mimicking her suddenly formal tone with gentle teasing.

“I had hoped the queen would find time to knight you,” she says, and she misses his reaction, because Jaime kicks her. Or, he digs his toes suddenly into the small of his back. She jumps and turns about to glare. “Jaime would have done it,” she says to Pod. Pod looks down, pursing his lips.

“Thank you, my lady,” he says. “I think I’ll go to bed as well, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course not,” says Brienne. There’s nothing else for either of them to do.

She leaves them and goes out into the courtyard. The wet air caresses her face. She can’t see Jon Snow anymore and the work is winding down. It all looks more chaotic than it had this morning. She wanders out to the gate - there is a new old guard there now, he folds his arms and glares at her - and looks out at the battlefield covered over with tents. She back walks through the wagons with the tide of women, dashing across to the main hall and the kitchens.

“Ser Brienne,” calls Jon Snow, from the raised walkway. “Do you have Lady Sansa’s men?”

Brienne checks about her for the wolf and squints up at him, against the grey light and the odd flurry of dislodged snow.

“There has been an altercation,” she calls. “I-.” Jon Snow is looking down as if he already knows.

“How many men do you have? If the Free Folk send more than five, do you have enough?”

“Yes,” says Brienne. “Lady Sansa will need-.”

“I’ll tell Sansa,” Jon Snow says. “I’ll speak to the them.” He taps one of the struts that hold the roof up. “Thank you, Ser Brienne,” he says. “We all thank you for your service.” He strides off, and there is the wolf, pealing out from the shadows and butting up against his steps.

Brienne goes back to her bed.

She dozes in fits and starts. There’s no lesson to collect Gendry for and a small selfish part of her wants to put off seeing him anyway. She told Jaime he’d know if anyone asked her to go south. Jaime’s hand is cooling on her back and then gone. The muted light from the window fading in what feels like otherworldly leaps until they’re lit only by the glow of the fire.

She wakes with a start to loud banging. Podrick is already unsteadily upright and blinking. Jaime just turns his face into his hands. The noise condenses itself into a polite knock on the door.

“Get up!” hisses Brienne, and she heads to the door while they throw on enough to be somewhat presentable.

A large number of Free Folk are packed around the corner and down the stairs. “If you’re the Maid of Tarth, we’re here to help with the watch,” says the woman at the front. Brienne is painfully aware of Jaime and Pod throwing boots at each other behind the cracked door.

“Wonderful,” says Brienne, as though she herself is wearing shoes, “Please come in. Tell me your names.”

They make her luxuriously sized room feel small, and they look around it with interest. Now she’s glad that it obviously isn’t just occupied by her.

“Were any of you going south with Jon Snow?” she asks. There are as many people as she had already selected again.

“No,” says the woman. “Tormund told us what you wanted. And like Jon Snow said, we’ve all been on watch rotation before.“

Then there is a loud knock at the door.

“Ser Brienne, I’m coming in,” says a familiar voice.

Clegane tries to open the door. Several wildlings impede his attempt by not bothering to move.

“You’re supposed to wait to be invited,” calls Brienne.

“For fuck’s sake,” he says, squeezing in.

“Will we have to work with him?” says someone loudly. “He’s not so bad.” Clegane manages to look even more offended.

“Yes, you’ll have to work with him,” says Brienne. There are too many of them. Maybe this will put some off.

“What are you all here for?” Clegane asks the room. They all stare back silently.

“What are you here for?” someone counters.

Clegane says, “The Lannister that isn’t. He’s coming with me.” Jaime’s head appears above the rest. No one seems quite able to pull off calling him Jaime alone.

“Alright, give me a moment,” Jaime says.

Brienne sizes Clegane up. He’s got his sword but he doesn’t look particularly tense. Her boots are by the fire.

“Sansa asked for him,” Clegane says. He’s watching her in return.

“I’ll come too,” says Pod, pushing forwards until he emerges from the group.

“Why not?” says Clegane.

Jaime follows Pod, buckling on the sword she brought back to him. At any previous moment it would have been a relief to see him wearing it again. He pauses in front of her.

“I’m going to give them back the sword,” he says, “if she’ll have it.” If he’s looking for approval or objections, she can muster neither. Pod makes eyes at her like he has no idea what’s happening now either, all the way out of the room.

One of the Wildlings slams the door shut on them.

“Anyway,” he says, unconcerned, “most of us will stay until winter hits the castle.” Brienne looks at the battered wood at the bottom of the door and the gap where the draft comes through. The man clears his throat. “We’ll stay until it gets bad enough that we’ll all have to head south again.”

Brienne swallows and swallows again.

Brienne says, “I don’t think Lady Stark has any plan to leave. We’re looking to set up a permanent guard here, in this castle.”

“What does it matter?” says a man from her left. “We’ve all noticed the watch at night is incompetent. Only one man on each gate! We don’t mind helping out. We’ll sleep better for it.”

There is a general murmur of agreement.

“It matters if you wander off when there is no one else to take up your post,” she says. “If you can’t commit to staying unless Lady Sansa tells you to go, then thank you, but you can’t be part of the guard.”

“I won’t be part of the guard then,” says the man. “I’ll not go back to being beholden to some girl for no reason but her name.”

The woman behind him hits his shoulder. “She listens,” she says. “We want to stay south of the wall, yes? We don’t want war. There’s a hot spring we can get at when the castle empties. This is where it’s safest. And she’ll listen when we tell her it’s not.”

“She won’t listen when it matters,” says the man. “You were born beyond the wall. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“She listened when we told her how to bury the meat,” says a girl so short Brienne can’t see her in the press. “She’s uptight but she’s fierce. She’ll look out for us.”

“We look out for ourselves,” says a previously silent woman from directly behind Brienne’s shoulder.

The room descends into loud argument.

“Enough! Enough,” she shouts, only adding to the volume. She draws herself up. She is at least a head taller than almost everyone in the room. “Be quiet!” She shouts. “Will you all please shut up!” She clears her throat in the silence. “Thank you,” she says primly.

“We’ll work it out if you leave us to it,” says the small girl, emerging from the middle of the pack. Brienne does not want to leave anyone to it. This is her room.

“The Free Folk have been so generous that there are too many of you. Lady Sansa will be so thankful. But please don’t feel obliged to stay if you can’t commit to the castle.”

A little less than half the women and more of the men leave again. They won’t outnumber the northern guards now, if you count the Vale. The Vale is northern to her and Winterfell is southern to these people.

Brienne tries to smile with sincerity. “Thank you, all of you. Lady Sansa will welcome you to the guard very soon. If you could tell me your names again?”

Once they are gone, Brienne sits down on the bed and puts her elbows on her knees until there is another rattling knock on the door.

“Yes?” Brienne calls, without moving. Gilly opens the door.

“Sam has the raven men in our rooms,” she says.

“The crows?” says Brienne. At least she knows what that means. She eyes the ragged child in Gilly’s arms.

“No, the raven men,” says Gilly. “Gendry said you might let us work here?” Gilly eyes the desk piled with things and the chair by the fire. Gendry takes the initiative and sits down on the rug, facing Brienne.

“Thanks,” he says, although Brienne hasn’t said anything. “So. How are you, my lady?” He takes in her bare feet and looks around the room again. He places books and supplies neatly in his lap.“Where’s Podrick? Where’s… um?”

“We heard Jaime punched a castle guard,” says Gilly, settling down next to him and depositing the child in it’s bundle of blankets. So maybe only people who had previously heard of him can’t bring themselves to the informality of his remaining name.

“There were mitigating circumstances,” says Brienne. Gendry gives her an oddly sympathetic look.

“I don’t like those men,” says Gilly. “I’m glad you’re sending them away.”

“I doubt Sansa cares,” says Gendry. “No one likes that lot.” Brienne, having suggested getting rid of them, can’t bring herself to vocalise agreement.

Instead, she says, “What about Harlon? Harlon… the guard.”

“Who’s that?” Gendry says. “Anyway, Ser- er- he’ll be back. Nothing sticks to him.”

Brienne can’t really dispute that, except, “They cut off his right hand,” she says, with too much in her voice. Faint heat hits so high on her cheeks that it feels as though it is behind her eyes. She frowns the sensation away. Littler Sam struggles up to his feet, more confident on the rug than he had been on the polished table and sheds blankets in a sad, obstructive ring about himself. He falls over them.

“Oh no,” says Gilly, mildly, after a pause in which they all wait for him to cry.

“Get on with your lessons,” Brienne says. Gendry blinks up at her, surprised. “My lord,” she adds. He moistens his lips, staring.

Gilly takes the papers from him, shuffling through and setting everything about. She keeps everything out of range of Littler Sam’s reaching fists as he props himself up again.

“I have decided to go south,” announces Gendry. Gilly pauses in taking the stopper out of the ink. Brienne swallows and straightens her shoulders. “I’m supposed to ask you, my lady. I think. I am asking you.”

He looks hopeful. Brienne does not want to hurt him.

“My lord, I made a promise to Lady Sansa,” says Brienne. “I mean to see Winterfell safe after the army leaves.” Gendry’s face falls.

He says, “But I thought-” and cuts himself off. “Sansa told you to help me.” This is similar to what Brienne had told Gendry, because it is what Sansa had asked her to tell him, when Brienne suggested she might write his letters for him.

“Lady Sansa allowed me to help you, yes,” she corrects.

“But your people are in the south,” he says.

Brienne can not answer this. There are more people on Tarth than she has here. That a number of those people were likely happy to see the back of her, does not make them undeserving of her help. Littler Sam sets off towards the fire and Gilly expertly snags the ends of material he trails and, like a horse on a lead line, he keeps going about in a wide arc until he is released in the direction of the desk. He falls again. Gilly twitches towards him and glances anxiously up at Brienne. Littler Sam lies there stunned for a moment, and then he starts climbing back to his feet.

Gendry sits forwards with new determination. “I’ve been thinking,” he says. “about service. When Podrick said it was devotion, I was thinking about love. But, it’s time I grew up. Maybe it is like being given a wife. A real marriage. Not some fantasy. What protection can I give them out here, pissing about learning to read and write and mooning after-. The queen has dragons. I’m a good fighter and you’re better. We can make a real difference to those people. I can make someone else do the reading. Come with me.”

He looks lit up with purpose, but he’s not really commanding, only suggesting.

Brienne says, “Who did you ask to marry you, my lord?” Gendry flushes and shuts his mouth. Gilly fusses with her papers.

“What would you say makes a real marriage?” Gilly asks him, without looking away from Littler Sam, even though she must know better than any of them. Then with another glance at Brienne, she adds, “My lord.” Gendry’s flush is deepening.

“They were saying last time, about a lord and a knight, my master when I was learning, a man and a woman. Obedience for protection,” he says. “For a roof over your head and a little of what they have.”

“Oh,” says Gilly, “Well… and your person, they didn’t need protection?”

Gendry snorts.

“That’s not what I offered,” he says. He rubs his arms. “I don’t have anything to offer you either,” he tells Brienne. “I can’t order you to come. That would be a joke.”

Brienne pushes her toes into the floor. Authority had come easily to Renly.

“You could,” she says, “You could tell the queen if I refused.” Gendry blinks at her. Brienne repeats herself anyway, “I have a duty to Lady Sansa and the people staying at Winterfell.”

Gendry says slowly, “But your father answers to Storm’s End.” Brienne does not tell him that she thinks her father might be dead. Then, all in a rush, he says, “I want to see it. I want to see where I come from. Find the people who knew my father before he went to King’s Landing.” He looks very young. She waits for him to decide.

Gilly decisively opens a book, possibly to distract from Littler Sam, diverted from the desk, tugging a long thread out of the edge of the rug.

Noticing Brienne watching, she asks, “Would you like to hold him?” She begins to push the ink towards Gendry. Gendry takes the ink, looking more than a little lost.

“No thank you,” says Brienne and she takes her chair on a careful route where it can’t somehow collide with Littler Sam and sits on it, where it should be, back at the desk.

Jaime comes back with a thick northern cloak under his arm. Gendry watches him, part frustration, part amusement. Brienne stands next to Jaime as he lays it down on the bed and stares at it bemusedly.

“At least I won’t freeze to death watching you and Pod practice,” he says. His sword belt is bare.

“I told you she’d find you something warmer if we asked,” Brienne tells him, still feeling the waves in her stomach. Jaime looks a little flustered, glancing at Gendry and Gilly.

“I didn’t ask for it,” he says, then he deflates again. “It felt a little like I traded for it?” He looks confused again. “I gave Sansa the blasted thing and she made it all very elegant and not at all like I was returning the tainted half of her father’s sword years after my father butchered it. Then she invited me up into the solar and had a woman bring me this cloak. I think the damned thing probably belonged to some dead Stark, so I’ll be unable to leave a fireside thinking of anything else until it’s spring, even if we do ever leave this awful castle.”

Brienne stares down at the cloak.

“The castle isn’t awful,” she says.

He passes a hand over his face. On the floor, Gilly and Gendry start scrambling around collecting their things.

“No, I suppose it’s not,” Jaime says.

“What are you going to do for a sword?” Pod asks. Jaime continues to stare down at the cloak.

“What is Sansa supposed to do with that sword?” Brienne says. She’s formed romantic notions while she sat by the desk and stared at Oathkeeper, about two swords from one, joined in defence of Winterfell. She would prefer to never speak them aloud. She’s had time, now it’s too late, to formulate her objections.

“Perhaps Lord Gendry will be able to make it into a weapon not named Widow’s Wail of all things,” he says, looking again at Gendry who is now standing, clutching Gilly’s books like he is waiting to be dismissed. “Ned Stark’s steel shouldn’t have been used to terrorise little girls.”

Brienne says through gritted teeth, “You fought for the living. Fought for his daughters. You could have renamed it. Your left hand is weaker; its lightness and its strength will have been compensating.”

“I understand that perfectly well,” says Jaime. “I’ve been training with tourney swords for years now. I’ll adjust as best I can.”

“Without that steel’s power against those things you would be dead,” Brienne tells him. “I’d be dead. Podrick would be dead.” He looks up at her, jaw set. “You could have sworn it to her.”

“I do have some shame,” he says.

“Thank you for letting us use your room,” says Gilly, loudly from behind her. Brienne turns her back on him.

She makes her face pleasant. “It was no trouble,” she says, “We’ll see you at dinner?” Gendry doesn’t seem to have anything further to say, but Littler Sam stares back at her around Gilly’s shoulder as they leave.

“The things from that night are gone,” Jaime picks up, as soon as the door closes. “We’ll never see their like again.” This seems bizarrely optimistic to Brienne and he must see her doubt. He redirects. “I’ll find a sword, and unless we run into someone more than half as brilliant as you, I can do my part, and if we do,” he says, visibly attempting to compose his face into something lighter, “won’t you protect me, Ser Brienne.”

She will. She grits her teeth. She doesn’t know why she’s arguing. It’s already done.

“Gendry wants me to march south,” she says. Jaime drops his teasing expression.

Pod says, at an unexpectedly high volume, “He wants what?”

Brienne waits for Jaime’s face to wipe itself blank, but he just keeps staring up at her. Brienne turns to Pod.

“I can make you a knight,” she says. This seems to compound his shock. He looks at Jaime and back. “I should have done it before Lord Tyrion left.”

Pod frowns. “Why? I didn’t want to go with Lord Tyrion. I want to go with you.” Then his eyes flick back to Jaime, who is silent behind her. “Unless you ask me not to,” he adds.

She looks down at him, feeling pride blossoming expansive and lush, pressing out against her ribs. She would trust them to look after each other.

“I might ask you not to come,” she says, “I won’t command it, but I might ask.” She hears Jaime sit down on the bed.

Podrick smiles. “Thank you,” he says. He casts another glance past her to Jaime. “Thank you, my lady. If you’ll dismiss me now, I’ll see you at the evening meal.”

Brienne widens her eyes at him. “But we should…” she says. Oathkeeper is over the desk. She feels that the moment is wrong somehow. Perhaps because she isn’t wearing boots. But then maybe the moment won’t ever be right.

“No,” he says. “I’m going to the Sept. Not all night. Just to look in for old time’s sake. And I hear there is a glasshouse here that grows those peas. There’s someone who says-. Well, I’d like to see it, just in case.” He doesn’t actually wait for dismissal.

“Why would he want to see that?” asks Jaime from the bed. Brienne can see the attraction; warmth and greenery in this endless grey gloom.

“Perhaps it’s beautiful?” Jaime is still frowning, doubting.

“Do you think we should try to see it?” he asks, “If the hot springs feed it, it’s probably humid like it is beneath the castle, but it might be better smelling.”

Brienne tries to muster offence on Winterfell’s behalf. It isn’t foul smelling. It is only that there is little air flow by the springs now the castle has been built over them. Jaime sighs.

“If you’re angry with me about the sword, I’d appreciate you telling me why.” She wants to protect him, but part of that is making sure that he can protect himself. He’s dispensed with all his titles, his money, his sword, and broken whatever loyalty he had to Cersei all in a rush. She’d thought they were being sensible. “Once the army moves out, this won’t be the same castle. I’m not a knight. I have no military position or task to perform that would require a sword.”

“We might all leave,” she says, then she drifts closer. “And you need to be prepared to be here alone.” He looks up at her.

“I still have my knives. I’ll be ready.” He tugs off and throws down his gloves. “Do you honestly think it was the wrong thing to do?” he asks, shoulders tilting.

She’d just felt better with the steel on his hip. They were closer to being balanced. Fighting next to him on the battlements, there had been a symmetry she’s never felt before. She puts a hand to the phantom weight at her hip. Jaime’s eyes follow.

“No,” she says. Her throat clicks. “If you felt it was the right thing to do and Sansa was willing to take it, there was honour it, I’m sure.”

He takes her hand and pulls her down beside him, so she doesn’t have to tilt her chin down to meet his eyes.

“I’d tell Pod to go with you,” he says. “Sansa and I are great friends now.”

“He’ll do what I tell him,” says Brienne.

“That he will,” says Jaime. Then, “Let’s not talk about that.” Brienne shifts back to lie down on the bed, over the northern fur.

“What should we talk about? Tourneys past and exciting advances in mace wielding technique?”

“Why not?” he says. He lies down next to her. “Tell me how you defeated Tyrell?” Brienne doesn’t know. That was so long ago.

“With a mace,” she says.

Jaime says, “Be serious,” amused like he thinks she’s playing with the words. He slumps onto her shoulder.

“I did,” she says.

“Oh,” he says. “The mace again. You were careful not to break anything of his, I’ll bet.” He reaches across to put his hand over her ribs. “Why don’t you still use it?”

She tries to think it through in retrospect. She had wanted to scare people, she thinks. She hadn’t wanted people to approach her back when she was training in Tarth. She had wanted to stop all their laughter. “I wanted to show that I wasn’t a girl playing at fighting,” she says. “Then I wanted to show something else. A sword is better to carry.” A sword had the glamour of Jaime riding at a dragon with a lance. You could paint a tall, broad figure with a sword onto a wall in miniature. Women and children didn’t flee from a helmeted figure with a sheathed sword, or at least, not unless you gave them a reason. Brienne hadn’t thought it through in this way at the time.

He’s idly stocking the plate between her ribs, following further down, though there is nothing to touch with her lying on her back. The stroking is getting to her.

“Jaime,” she says quietly, and he looks up at her, curious, propping himself up on an elbow.

“Oh,” he says and he collapses away onto his back, grinning a little. “Sorry.”

She follows him over and puts a cheek to his chest, slowly relaxing her weight into his warm side. He brings his hand up to comb fingers through her hair, following the lay of it, back against her skull. She traces the stitches in his clothing. She can feel the slow rising and falling of ribs she can’t see. She can hear his heart beat, steady and loudly distant, percussion beat through the surface of the water when you’re down swimming along the sandy bed.

She twists to look up at him. He has his eyes closed. He flutters them open when she pushes up onto an elbow and his hand falls away. There is something about it, the simple fact of him sprawling under her. If women talk about this as they march and work, she wishes suddenly, that she had heard those stories too. Perhaps she shouldn’t have turned away from all those camp followers who teased and clucked at her. She smooths his hair back from his forehead and she can see the furrow between his brows that deepens as he tips his head to look at her better. She settles herself lower on her elbow and gathering her courage, she slips a hand around to cup the back of his head. She bunches a gentle fist into the back of his hair. His eyes widen.

“Tell me to stop,” says Brienne.

He swallows as she tightens her hold. It looks like he’s struggling to keep his mouth closed.

“Stop,” he grates out.

Brienne snatches her grip away.

“What?” he says. The dark centres of his eyes are wide and black. “Oh. No, Brienne. I thought it was part of it. A dance,”- she feels her face spasm - “Carry on. I’ll only say it if I mean it. If you carry on I’ll stop talking.”

He catches his grin between his teeth and shuts his eyes, until her heart has slowed again and she has her hand back in his hair. Then she watches as he tenses and all the tendons in his neck stand out as she tips his neck back. She watches, desperately, for discomfort. She thinks maybe, if she pulled harder, he would make a noise. His chest shakes, and there’s a spreading bruise of pink blood high on his cheeks. It looks like he’s struggling to keep his mouth even partially closed. She swallows and slackens her fist, smoothing the angry tufts of hair she can feel back into order. He crack his eyes open, looking at her curiously.

“What was that?” he says. Brienne despairs. She certainly doesn’t know. He pushes up to catch her lip between his teeth. That thrills though her. He softens it into a long scratchy kiss. She knocks him back down into the fur.

“Do the same to me,” she says, and she lies down.

“What?” he says, again. “No.”

She frowns up at the ceiling.

“It’s only fair,” she says, and listens to his stillness.

“It’s not,” he says.

Eventually he snorts out a dubious breath, but his hand comes around to cup the back of her head, fingers searching through the shortness of her hair. His face comes into view above hers. She shuts her eyes, clenches her teeth together, ready, aware of the ridiculous nature of her apprehension. It won’t hurt her, even if he tries, which seems impossible. Very slightly he tightens his grip. She doesn’t understand it: there’s no pain, it doesn’t feel much like anything. She moves against him, trying to find the thrill. He gathers her up, arm around her shoulders and tightens his hold, trying to pull her neck back as though for a sword. Now it is uncomfortable. She feels large and lumpen like this. His eyes are serious and wide when she gives up and opens hers.

“This is stupid,” she says. She doesn’t understand why he’d let her do that to him. Why she’d done it. He unclenches his fist from her hair. He looks down at her, strangely fond.

“It wasn’t my idea,” he says and he dips in to kiss her, gentle again. She puts her arms around his waist, she pushes up into him, rolls with him, onto him, the heavy weight of his hand is crushed between their chests, so she moves it aside, up and out of the way. His eyes go soft. It makes her chest ache.

She presses the side of her face to his. She turns her consciously steady breathing into his neck. She bites him, very deliberately at he hinge of his jaw.

He starts to laugh. She bites him more sharply and he stops. He kisses her back onto her side. Time sticks again, it’s quality like sleeping outside in the summer, with the air from his nose warm on her cheek.

“Food,” she says, feeling the hollowness in her belly and stretching the blood back into her legs. “Pod will be expecting us.”

“You go,” he says, “They’ll be singing to the march south.” Brienne does not want to come back to him listlessly lying in bed again. She doesn’t want to feel like she’s keeping him up here and coming back to argue with him and pull his hair.

“No one is singing,” she repeats. Then, sensibly, “You’re already dressed.”

Jaime groans but he obeys.

There is singing. Jaime sits next to her, icily composed in his new cloak.

Until he mutters, “Well, I didn’t think it was possible for the food to be any worse but here they have managed it.”

“We can leave,” says Brienne.

Jaime looks up at the high table and says, “No we can’t.”

Podrick talks about the glass house, projecting deliberate cheerfulness at them across the plates: “So green and warm like summer, my lady. How it survived the battle when the glass looks so delicate…”

Brienne will ask him to show it to them. She stays, listening to the chatter rising and falling in the great hall. This reminds her of Tarth; the candles, the wine and lifted voices, sitting here in the corner feeling outside of the merriment. But there is still a chance that the Queen will stand again and announce that she will bestow honours earned in the battle. Surely she will legitimise Jon Snow, or honour him in some other way. Sansa has put the thought of Pod in her head, even if it hadn’t immediately taken.

There are so many toasts to the coming war, to victory over their enemies, to the great deeds to come and the songs that will be written of them. Bran is dreamily occupied with staring at the wolf and Arya is watching out of the corner of her eye, feigning indifference. There is more singing. It is better Tyrion is gone, although Gendry looks a little wide eyed to have been given his seat at the high table. It wouldn’t be decent for him to preside over this.

As the feasting breaks down into more determined drinking, the men start to drag tables out of the way. Brienne feels as cheerful about this development as the queen’s unsullied look. She grabs Jaime’s wrist as they scramble off the benches and out of the way. Gilly and Pod look guiltily thrilled, while Sam becomes increasingly red.

“Now we can leave,” Jaime says, as the musicians start matching pitch.

Brienne watches the queen’s advisor, Missandei, float down from behind the high table towards Grey Worm, as the young men from the Vale start clapping and scuffing their feet over the floor to get the musicians to pick up their rhythm. Grey Worm leaves the other men behind to meet her.

Sam is saying, “Oh, I don’t know,” to Gilly who clearly wants to pull him into the thick of things. Brienne thinks he will give in easily.

“I’ll stay, my lady,” says Pod, with his eyes fixed somewhere in the moving mass on the opposite side of the room. “See you tomorrow,” he says.

“Where will you sleep?” Brienne calls after him, too late.

“There’s nothing to stop you staying for a dance,” says Jaime, which is rank stupidity. Gendry stands up from the high table and sets his shoulders.

“You shouldn’t walk back alone,” she says, which is practical. This is when she would duck back to her rooms at home too. They have to walk single file through the press of people moving against them towards the music.

Jaime throws his cloak over the chair and doesn’t come back for hers. He tugs his boots off and tosses them under the desk. He leaves his jacket on the floor. He sits down on the far side of the bed with his back to her.

Brienne starts to unbuckle her sword belt. Then she pauses. He sits forwards to put his elbows on his knees. She could go back to the feast. She could stand in a corner until someone gets drunk enough that they dare ask her to dance, and then she could refuse them and give them a marvellous anecdote for the morning. It would be just like home.

“Go and dance or come to bed,” he says. “You can do whatever you like.”

She pops the buckle on her belt and hefts the great cloak over her head. She walks around him and leaves them both over the desk. She doesn’t lock the door when she leaves him; Lady Catelyn’s touch is everywhere and there is an indoor lavatory in this keep, the baths beneath, the staircase that Pod says he caught him running up to stretch his legs. She turns back to him.

“It wasn’t right to make you come,” she says.

Jaime looks up at her. Then the tension shifts within him and he slumps.

“You didn’t make me,” he says, annoyed rather than angry. Brienne studies him. He doesn’t think she made him. Surely that is enough.

“When I said you could stay here,” Brienne says, “I didn’t mean to cast myself as a jailor. I shouldn’t have offered Gendry your room.” He’d given up the sword and the money and there wasn’t anything she could do about his name.

“I thought I wasn’t a prisoner,” he says. “After all, Brienne, they let me feast and drink with.”

“They do,” she says. “Sansa gave you a family cloak.” Jaime seems to think this is funny. He puts his face down into his hand.

“Am I complaining?”

Brienne says, “Yes,” although he hasn’t been complaining very much. She might feel better if he complained more.

“Then you know all is well,” he says, like the matter is settled, but it isn’t, because she doesn’t feel like she can sit on the bed with him, and at this point it might be ruder to set up and sleep on the rug.

She tries, “It will be better once the men are gone. One way or another.”

Jaime says, “I hope I can keep this room. It doesn’t smell nearly so much up here,” and he looks up at her expectantly. Brienne seizes on this.

“I’ll make sure,” she says. Just in case they make her go. It will be good to think of Jaime and Pod here, where she left them. Jaime tosses his head.

“Gods, don’t do that. It doesn’t actually smell.” Brienne stares at him for a little while, caught between a frustration that catches in her throat, and frustration that makes her want to crash about alone with a sword until she has exhausted herself. She fills her lungs carefully and stays where she is. “Brienne,” he says, “your skills as a jailor have atrophied severely in the time since we first met.”

She doesn’t feel like a fool now. She feels like the worst things she has ever been called. Beastly. If he feels that she is keeping him here, locked up in a keep, then she cannot even be angry with him for thinking it, because he is being kept here. Even if it is politically impossible for him to be anywhere else.

He’s looks worried again now.

“I wouldn’t want to go back to my room even if I could,” he says, “Don’t look so worried. It seems likely that Sansa will fight to keep you.”

Brienne says, “I’m not worried about myself

“Well, you can’t be worried about me,” he says. “I’m perfectly fine” He can’t possibly be fine. He’s shedding brothers and swords and Brienne is-.

“I’m not worried about marching into another war,” Brienne says - Jaime tries to interrupt, but she rides over him - “I’m worried about leaving you here. I’m worried about Tarth. I’m worried about Gendry going and the castle starving and the changing guard. I’m worried that I’m keeping you here like some…”

He screws his face up and sits back up, the laxness gone in a moment. Brienne stands straighter and shuts her mouth on the upturned tumble of words.

“That’s a lot of worries,” Jaime says. He doesn’t tell her that she isn’t keeping him here. She can’t make him go to dinner - even when she can - but she can keep him here.

“They all said that this was beastly,” Brienne says, gesturing between them. Marriages are cruel. “That I was-.”

“You’re not beastly,” he says, as if the notion is ridiculous, “What kind of idiot said that to you?”

“You said it,” she says. Men always say it.

Jaime says, “When?” Then he scrubs his hair flat and stands up. “Surely I didn’t. You’re the furthest thing.” He doesn’t seem to know what to do once standing. “I forgot your cloak again,” he says.

“I do not care,” says Brienne. That does not feature in the bag of worries. “That was all your idea anyway.”

He pauses, “I do think I called you a man.” He comes closer, snags the chair out from the desk and carries it back to place it in front of the fire.

It’s likely. Man and monster feel like the same things in this conversation.

Brienne says, “How is that better?” Jaime cuts a smile back at her.

“Poor Podrick,” Jaime says. “Ah, I would have made a terrible wife to a household knight, but maybe I can wave you off,” he says. “Sob into my sleeve.” He turns to wince at her. “Sorry,” he says, “That was in bad taste. I know I should be sensible.”

When she’d left Tarth, her father had not cried. He’d accepted her decision calmly and had not attempted to have her chained. He had not come out to watch her ride away, as Jaime had, even back at King’s Landing.

“I told Gendry that I had a duty to see Winterfell safe after the queen had left.” Jaime turns back fast.

”Brienne,” he says

“I didn’t do it for you!” she says, meaning and hoping that she hasn’t done it for herself, “Sansa-.”

“I know” he interrupts. “What did he say?”

“Nothing yet,” she says. “He’s not going to throw his weight around lightly.”

“Who put the idea in his head? The queen? ” Jaime asks. “He sat near her tonight. Why would the queen want to take you from Sansa? Gods, we need Tyrion back for this. ”

Brienne says, “I think it was us. We convinced him that going was his duty.”

Jaime sits down on the chair he’s returned to the fireside.

“Shit,” he says.

Brienne takes her boots off and picks up his jacket, throws it over the desk. She sits down on the edge of the bed and puts her right ankle on her left knee. She grabs her toes and starts pulling out the tightness from the injury that is lingering. It’s been ten days. The surface abrasion is practically healed.

“I really called you a beast?” Jaime says, “Well, fuck me, then. Really. I used to be angry about how wonderful you are, but I’ve made my peace with it.” He shuffles the chair to face her, rucking up the rug under the legs. “You’re the best person alive,” he says, “And if he’s picked up ideas of noble responsibility he’s learned them from you.”

Brienne says, “I’ve liked coming back to you here.” To have the fire high and him beside it. She hasn’t had enough time to begin to anticipate it, but she thinks she could begin to look forward to it. Even if she is only coming back to argue and pull his hair. Jaime ducks to try and meet her eye.

“You think I make a good wife to a household knight?” She avoids him, because she doesn’t want it to be a joke. He sits back and watches her. He stretches out and crosses his legs. “Cersei would have been happier if they had let her be a man,” he says. She can’t help but jump. Her instinctive response is to snap at him and shut him up. It seems so unlikely. Brienne has seen Cersei, and Cersei has delicate features, court sharp manners and elegant dresses that sit naturally on her body. “It was easier when I thought we could be both, and neither, one in two,” he says. “I think she always knew that was impossible.” She takes over her reply, and he looks more uncomfortable every second she waits. "We used to put lemon juice through our hair," he says, "and plot about how perfect we would be."

She can see the appeal in separating the mess of it into two neat and discrete parts. When she first left Tarth, she would have seen the appeal in that idea of perfection.

“I am glad to be a knight,” she says. The knighthood makes it all even stranger, but much easier to explain. He looks like he might be parsing something in that, and she’s not sure she wants him to manage it. She jerks her chin at him, calling him back.

She dares to ask, going back to working her leg, hoping not to spook him back into flippancy, “You said you dreamed of me. What did you dream?”

“That we fought side by side.” She looks up to devour the sincerity on his face. She presses her fingers underneath the long ropes in her ankle. That’s not a dream she ever conjured while asleep. For her that was a waking wish. “You were naked,” he says, casually and she pulls back, too shocked to be affronted.

“Oh, do piss off,” she says, but she can feel the smile tugging at her lips.

“It’s true,” he says, “You were magnificent. You would splash out of the water and try to save me.” That’s familiar. Violence and care all braided together.

“It was a happy dream?” she asks, searching his expression. What did Jaime Lannister need saving from once returned to King’s Landing? She had no ability to save him from his own poor decisions. The minute he’d decided to leave, he had.

He shrugs, insouciant and then when she continues to watch him, he twists his mouth.

“I dreamed you and Lady Catelyn came to chain me again, for my neglected oaths. I dreamed you were a coward, like me, gone back to your father; happy and safe. I dreamed we found you dead in the Riverlands, full of water. I dreamed-. Did you dream of me? Was I naked?”

“You’re not a coward,” she says, automatic, still caught in the bombardment. “And I didn’t.”

“You needn’t drape yourself in white with me,” he says.

She’s supposed to tell him to shut up. That’s how the rhythm goes. Instead, Brienne swallows hard and says to the fire behind him, matching his confession, “You’re always dying.” The levity is gone in an instant from his face. “I take off Renly’s armour - your armour - in his tent.” She can feel the burn behind her eyes and the pounding canter of her heart, “Stannis kills you, gone into smoke and I hold you while you’re drowned in fever back in Harrenhal.” Her waking dreams are better but harder to admit.

She realises she has fallen into a trap. They are both naked at the end of that dream, but Jaime is dead and she is sick with horror. He gets up and comes to sit next to her.

“Do you sleep peacefully here?” he asks. “I’ve slept well, since I came to Winterfell. Better since you invited me to stay.”

Brienne can’t remember the last time she slept through dawn, until these last few mornings. This far from that long night and with so many luxuriously good hours of sleep behind her she does not know if she can blame battle exhaustion. It has been nine whole nights now. Ten days since she sent the letter. Seven nights since she has slept alone.

“You’re awake at night sometimes.”

“So are you,” he says, defensive. “Neither of us has enough to occupy us. The horrors take a little time to slip from the surface of the mind when there are no new ones to exhaust it; it’s the way of things.” Brienne doesn’t know that she has much experience with that idea. She can’t remember the last time there was no new oncoming horror, even now, there is Tarth, and now perhaps another last war after all. “But you sleep better here?”

“Yes,” she says. He gathers himself.

“I can find out who has the key to that greenhouse. I can learn to lay bricks and remember how to mend clothes. I can be so trustworthy they think nothing of me riding out beyond the walls alone.” He smiles. Brienne frowns.

“We’re going to Tarth,” she says. “They would let you ride out now, I think.”

“Yes,” he says, but Brienne knows him now, and he trusts her, but he thinks she’s wrong about that. “In the meantime,” he says, “I will sleep well here, even if I shouldn’t.” She reaches out and takes his hand.

“What was the second thing?” she asks, bumping his shoulder with hers. “The second thing you wanted me to ask Sansa. Did you ask for yourself?”

Jaime makes an incredulous noise of amusement and squeezes her fingers.

“There are limits to my shamelessness. It doesn’t matter now. Let’s not talk about that.”

“You were embarrassed to ask?” she says. She does not believe it.

“No,” he says shortly, and she immediately feels better. She pats his hand and lets him go.

Jaime pulls of his gloves.

“How’s the wrist?” she asks, remembering the thud of contact with that poor idiot’s face.

Jaime pulls his shirt sleeve back, flicks open the buckles and drops the hand into his lap. Underneath the little leather cap, his improbably well healed skin is only a little red. He gives the skin a quick rub and screws up his nose at whatever the sensation is.

He says, “Perhaps someone would take the hand in payment for work on a sword worth having. That’s a lot of gold if you know how to make it into something anyone else would want.”

“You don’t need to give it away,” Brienne tells him. It is gaudy and ridiculous, but it’s beautiful. It’s useful. She’s grown used to looking at it. It really prickles at her, this sudden throwing off of everything. Jaime watches her with his eyes slitted. She casts about in case she needs better words. “There needs to some of you left,” she tells him, “I want there to be some of you left.” His face falls open for her, and then he stretches his arm over her shoulders and tips the two of them together. Brienne soaks up the heat and shuts her eyes

“Alright, Brienne,” he says quietly.

In the morning, Brienne finds the woman with the curly hair and the husband sitting on their staircase. It’s still dark and the castle is very still until Brienne nearly charges into her. The woman jumps up as Brienne clatters to an abrupt halt.

“Lady Brienne?” says the woman, like it’s a question, several steps below and at least a foot shorter anyway. She’s speaks quietly. “Could you keep it down above us? I’ve been meaning to ask you.” Brienne finds that she is not embarrassed. This is finally beyond what she can bring herself to care about. She has left Jaime sleeping well and she has other concerns this morning. She does not know who this person is. “Your crashing swords. The stamping feet.” - oh - “On and on. So many visitors. I’m very sorry, my lady, I’m sure the old man didn’t care - he was deaf as anything - but the sound of fighting goes straight through me now. I hope I’m not unreasonable.”

It’s not unreasonable. The castle is returning to order, gradually, and you aren’t supposed to train with swords in private quarters. Before Jaime, they were keeping to the courtyards.

“Yes, we’ll be quieter in future. I apologise Lady…”

“Lady Rhoda, please. Let us be friends,” she says, with a glance back at the door to her own room. “I’ve been running up and down the stairs when I can’t sit still a moment longer. If I had a sword I would-. Well, I sympathise.” Brienne takes another step, hoping to slip past, still a little lost. Lady Rhoda puts her arm across the stairwell and pretends to lean on the wall. “You seem to lead such an exciting life, Lady Brienne. Will you be staying here, when the men travel south? I see you with Lady Sansa so often, and I would like to remain here too, if only my husband will get it out of his head that someone needs to check on the old man’s land. Our land. What will I do if it has been overrun by the goats? Well, eat the goats I suppose, but I-”

“I am a knight,” says Brienne, suddenly, “and I will not be staying here for much longer. I’m sorry, Lady Rhoda.”

“Oh,” says the woman, she puts a hand to her chest, calloused fingers brushing her collar. “Of course. Forgive me, ser.”

“It’s quite alright,” says Brienne. “I suppose you will be pleased to hear the last of the stamping feet.”

“Not at all,” says Lady Rhoda. “Imagine who they will give us instead.” Brienne finds herself smiling down at the woman, even as the sweet smile she is answering dims.

“Who they will give me,” the woman corrects.

“Do you have any particular skills to recommend you?” Brienne says, giving up on getting past. “Lady Sansa will certainly want you to stay, but perhaps if there was a practical use that you had here, so that your husband could not object?”

The woman looks a little wild eyed at this.

“The usual things,” she says. “I can wrap small wounds now. I can read, my mother thought for a better match, but look how that has worked out: we have titles and land, for all the good it will do us. I can capture a fine figure in an embroidery, but I haven’t any samples here, and oh, of course, they won’t be needing any embroidery and I don’t think I-”

“It’s fine,” says Brienne. “Your safety will be the issue. The Stark’s can overrule him. He’ll be leaving with Jon Snow, yes? Once your husband is gone, how will he make you go?”

The woman drops her arm.

“I suppose,” she says. “But I can’t lie to him. Not when he might never come back to scold me for it. I just thought if Lady Sansa could speak to him for me-.”

“Lady Sansa has too much work. He rides out today,” says Brienne, “There is no time.” She tries to take another step, but the woman does not move. She has begun to look very red above her cheeks.

“I would have asked earlier if he had told me earlier,” she says. “He heard the Bear Islanders were going and it occurred to him all of a sudden. I see you with her. Could you not speak to her? Please.”

Brienne softens.

“I’ll do my best,” she says, “But I can’t promise.”

”Thank you” says the woman, with a fervency that is upsetting. “If I can do anything for you…”

Brienne pauses. She’s made it to the bottom of the steps finally, the woman folding elegantly backwards once she had what she wanted. Jaime had suggested she speak to a woman. About not having children. But they have been quiet and it’s only the swords disturbing their neighbours so Brienne needn’t confirm any rumours. The castle is returning to order. Brienne does not know her. As best she understands it, he knows what he is doing.

“Are there any spare clothes about for a child of at least two summers, maybe more,” Brienne says. “Something for his feet and his hands?” She makes the shape of Littler Sam between her hands, spread surprisingly tall for someone so small. The woman nods the whole time. Then she smiles, relieved perhaps, to have a task.

“I saw your visitor,” she says, conspiratorially, “He runs up and down the stairs too. My husband does not like him, but I do.”

“Good morning,” says Brienne, and she flees.

Clegane isn’t outside Sansa’s door, but the large group of Free Folk are.

“She’s not here yet,” one of them tells her, sounding more than a little annoyed about it.

“Lady Sansa is very busy,” says Brienne. A man makes a rude noise somewhere behind her and mutters something about kissing hems. “But I’m sure she will apologise if she has kept you waiting.” They stand about. The Free Folk either don’t like idle chatter, or they are uncomfortable in her presence. Unable to leave, Brienne starts telling them everything she knows about the pattern of the current guards.

Sansa sweeps in when they are in fierce discussion over the allocation of archers on the walls. She has her wolf draped on one shoulder, Clegane at the other and a retinue of Northern women who disperse behind her and take off in all directions. Sansa very carefully does not at smile the Free Folk, but she gives them a pretty speech. She avoids thanking them for service. She does apologise for keeping them waiting.

She says, “Brienne of Tarth and Sandor Clegane will be assisting you.” She does dismiss them, and they do seem to collectively leave when prompted. Brienne isn’t sure how much their proclaimed freedom is going to translate into not following orders, and feels very responsible for the idea of recruiting them, and as she is also very aware that she essentially refused Gendry’s implicit order only yesterday. She shuts the door, firmly leaving Clegane outside.

“Do you need anything this morning?” says Brienne.

“No. You’ve done well,” says Sansa, pulling scrolls out of her sleeve and placing them in the sideboard draws. Brienne eyes them. “There’s no news from Tarth, I’m sorry, Brienne.”

“Has there been anything else from the Stormlands? Any news from King’s Landing,” she adds. Sansa turns back to her.

“I have spoken to the new Lord Baratheon. He understands that you will be staying here.” Brienne feels cool relief flood up through her hands to her chest.

“He asked me to go with him,” she says, in the interest of full transparency, “only last night.”

“And now he understands why that is impossible. He is also committed to seeing Winterfell safe after the queen leaves. You’re more useful to us here.” Sansa heads back to the door. It is as Brienne had thought. She has Sansa, or Sansa has her. No one can make her do anything. She doesn’t feel particularly comfortable with having this quite so explicitly performed, but she wouldn’t give it up for anything.

“There is a woman in the keep, Lady Rhoda. Lady Flint,” Brienne remembers. Sansa turns back to her. “Her husband wants to send her back to wherever it is they came from. She asks for your intervention.” Sansa’s mouth thins.

“Idiot men,” she says. “They want their children to die for empty hills. I will have Jon speak to the lot of them.” She looks genuinely annoyed as she ushers Brienne out and locks the door.

Brienne drifts after them to the courtyard, where Sansa hitches up her skirts and marches out onto the ice. The courtyard is awake and there are many more horses than there were in the stables. The sound of an army getting it’s feet under itself seems to rise up over the walls and sweep through her, jarring her bones. There are more men than Renly ever marched with. Even now.

Jaime is sitting up in bed, flipping a knife in fingers that lack their usual grace. She leaves their breakfast balanced on the end of the bed. She can’t see anything of the preparations from their window, but she can hear the great roar of moving men, hardly muted. The stamping of thousands upon thousands of feet is pounding through the walls and still lodges itself in Brienne’s chest.

“Are you going or not?” he says.

She shakes her head. “Sansa wants me here.”

Jaime sets the knife down beside the bed and sinks back into the covers.

“I’m going to lie here and let them ride off to take the last of it from her,” Jaime says slowly.

“Yes,” says Brienne.

“What are you going to do?” asks Jaime, pushing forward to put his arms across his folded knees. Really the best thing to do would be to keep out of everyones way.

“Whatever is asked of me,” Brienne says and Jaime rolls over and pulls their pile of furs over his head. Brienne has to grab for the food. The mound on the bed that is Jaime sighs deeply. The dragons have been louder today, crying longer and more frequently.

“What else?” he says, still muffled by bedding, “I’ll do the same.” Then he heaves himself out of bed to duck his face into their bowl of water.

There really is nothing to do. Not even for Pod, who drifts back to see them as the light begins to harden. Respectful of Lady Flint, they pick up their blunt swords and slip into the deserted godswood to play at fighting.

Jaime eyes the tree, but he only says, “It’s good to see some colour.”

“The tree doesn’t mind if we fight here,” says Brienne, trying to repeat the joke, “Arya checked with Bran.”

Pod laughs, even if Jaime doesn’t.

Standing up on the walls with Sansa, Arya, and the northerners remaining with their carefully set faces, it feels strange to have been rehearsing death so lightly when all the wide stretch of people before her are truly going off to war. They watch until Brienne’s legs lock up in the cold as the slight party of Dothraki snake out of sight over the hills, leading teams of horses slowly through the snow. The Unsullied march en masse behind.

The northmen and Free Folk make a poor show in comparison, milling about while Jon, Royce and a few other heavily armoured men ride among them, issuing last minute encouragement. She can’t pick out Gendry. She didn’t get to say goodbye. When Jon reaches the front, urging his horse to begin to follow, a great shout goes up amongst all the assembled thousands and around Brienne. The licence to make noise seems to break something loose in the northerners and scattered weeping begins to have a voice all along the wall. She recognises, with a guilty lurch, the woman who had brought Harlon the gate guard his stew. Brienne watches, the cold stinging her eyes as the woman covers her mouth with her sleeve. Lady Flint, who had spent this morning outmanoeuvring her husband, is now wet eyed and looks furious about it. Sansa turns and begins to walk the wall, stopping to murmur quietly to everyone who turns to her.

Jaime, standing rigidly besides Brienne, is ignoring the people around him, staring out after the army with his jaw set. He begins, for the first time that Brienne has noticed, to attract attention which feels truly hostile. He’d refused to go back to their room when Pod suggested it and now, it as though everyone has suddenly realised, here stands Jaime Lannister. His eyes are slitted even though the wind comes from behind, trying to drive them off the wall and south with the rest.

Then, he’s clutching at her, dragging her down, the air suddenly absent and the light almost gone. The dragon sails on. Brienne can hear the whooping encouragements of the men below. There was no warning beat of wings. They’re crouching. The second flies by above them, higher up, until it rotates its wings and it feels as though they will all be swept off the wall. Jaime’s hand is tight around her wrist, her grip is fisted in the ruff of his furs. They stand hastily. Brienne looks frantically for Sansa, who she sees, shoulders high, trying to smooth her hair out of her face, then she looks to Harlon’s woman who is looking up open mouthed, no longer crying at all as the dragons cut lazily over the lines of men. Jaime has turned to kneel besides the elderly woman who had fallen next to him and who is swearing liberally and inventively. The cheering of the soldiers is still being carried back to them on the wind. Arya catches Brienne’s attention and then rolls her eyes, but Brienne turns back to watch the dragons against the slate sky. She might not see them again.

An increasingly loud group are attempting to shoo Jaime away from the now standing woman, who is clutching his arm and looking up at him with something very appreciative in her eye. He looks to be on the verge of laughing. Normally he’s better at keeping himself blank in front of other people. This isn’t the moment to give up on that.

The crying is starting up again, perhaps knocked into a looser and more desperate tone by the shock of the dragon. Brienne bullies her way past the glaring group to collect him, deciding that perhaps it would be kinder for everyone if they didn’t have to look at any Lannisters Who Aren’t for a little while.

“Where’s Pod?” Jaime asks. The courtyard is almost deserted but he twitches his head about as though he’s expecting Pod to be behind them somewhere. A few serving girls are passing through, all moving more leisurely than Brienne has ever seen. They all seem to have purpose.

“They’re finishing up Tyrion’s saddle for Bran now the workshop is clear,” Brienne says, even though she’s repeating herself. Jaime nods agreeably.

“We could find Podrick’s greenhouse,” he suggests. “I’d prefer not to go back and lie in bed yet.”

“It must be behind the other courtyard,” Brienne says. He glances quickly around and then reaches out to brush his knuckles against hers, where she has her hand on her belt.

The second courtyard is empty. Jaime walks closer, arm brushing against hers. Most of the rubble they walked through the morning after the battle is still there and now the camp is cleared too. It looks dismal. When they reach the spot where Brienne had stopped them, back then, after they’d sent their letters, she stops again, looking across at Lady Catelyn’s battered Sept. There is a fresh broken tent pole thrown across the old rubble on the step. Jaime’s arm comes up around her waist. She jumps and looks down at the unfamiliar gesture. He’s pointedly not looking at her, surveying the wreckage.

“We can help with this,” she says. They should do something about the sept at least; they are the only people here beholden to the quiet gods of their childhoods. He jerks his head in agreement. One handed brick laying, he’d said. One handed sewing.

Above them, hinges creak. He steps hurriedly away. Brienne looks up at the window, to see Gilly’s friendly face, small like a high moon, looking down at them from the maester’s tower. Gilly waves, calling out a cheerful greeting. Mercifully she doesn’t seem to have the child with her. It’s a long drop. Brienne waves awkwardly back. Gilly says something, snatched away on the wind.

“What?” yells Brienne, back at her.

Jaime’s hand is light on her arm. “She says she can still see the men from up there.” Gilly shouts down much the same again, louder this time and Brienne can hear perfectly.

“Oh,” says Brienne, turning her face back up. She waves again as Gilly suddenly disappears from the window.

“You needn’t be so jumpy,” Brienne says, setting off towards the servant’s quarters when Gilly doesn’t reappear. “Everyone knows.”

Jaime follows after her, picking up his pace to draw alongside again. She glances at him sidelong, to see his blank profile.

“How would they know that you mean to marry me?”

“No, not that,” she says, flushing.

They push their way into the empty building, and he cranes his neck to look up the staircase disappearing up into windowless gloom. Brienne has to take a moment to consider what she knows of the castle’s shape. She heads for the closest door. It reveals a tiny nook filled with gardening equipment and broken spades.

“Do you have the faintest idea where we’re going?” Jaime says beginning to sound amused again, peering over her shoulder. She slams the door and opens the next one along. It opens onto another little courtyard, older looking with uneven little rocks making up the walls. Brienne pulls the door open wide, victorious, and bows him through.

Any garden that was is now buried under icy capped, barely disturbed snow. Footprints lead to the glass structure. It’s as strange as promised; greenery is pressed against all the windows, the condensation thick. There are actual green bushes planted around the base, the smallest dusting of snow surviving on the delicate, darkly vibrant leaves pushing out of the snow. They walk together, reverent and silent to the door. Brienne tries the handle. Then she tries again. It’s locked. Beside her, Jaime sighs and turns away. Brienne pulls off her glove and puts it to the window.

“It’s not warm,” she says. He’s at her shoulder immediately, tugging off his own glove with his teeth and dropping it from his mouth into the crook of his arm. He puts his hand up next to hers. Then he presses his face close to peer through the foggy, rippled glass. Brienne leans in too, feeling very ridiculous, staring so closely that her whole vision is a strange green fog. Condensation is thick on the inside. She touches her cold nose to the glass. Maybe it is a little warm.

“I don’t think your Lord Blacksmith or the Tarlys would have spread anything they think they know about us around,” he says quietly. She can see his breath on the glass. “Arya wouldn’t set out to hurt you.” Brienne sighs and steps away.

“Everyone knows. Someone made a comment in the courtyard, days ago, before we’d really begun.”

He says lightly, “Which idiot?” He tucks his glove into his belt. When she avoids his eyes - she won’t give him Clegane’s name - he starts to look worried. “Who?” he says, “I can-.” He stops abruptly, hand on his bare belt, rueful.

“It’s done. It doesn’t matter,” Brienne says, obstinately. People have always talked about her. This is such a novel type of gossip that she doesn’t quite know what it’s effects will be, or how it will stick to her reputation. They had hardly thought of her as a respectable lady before. Jaime turns his back on the greenhouse.

“Brienne, the whole of Westeros knows you as the Maid of Tarth.”

“I’m a knight, not a maid,” she clenches her jaw around something that might be triumph, “we agreed this already,” she adds.

“We agreed,” says Jaime. ”Us. It can’t just be us. You’re actually respected here, and if you do mean to have Tarth, no matter how you downplay it’s significance, I do still think this is going to matter.”

He turns away to try the handle again. It is, unsurprisingly, still locked.

“Sansa-” Sansa Stark will let her do whatever she likes. She’s finally free. Men can say what they like about sins she never committed, but she can stop trying to cling onto their slippery ideas of virtue. She can’t make herself into a different shape, but she has a good arm, a Valyrian steel sword, and Sansa Stark, who won’t ask anything of her that would bring her dishonour. It doesn’t matter if people think her disgraced, so long as she knows it isn’t true.

“That might be enough so long as we never leave,” says Jaime. Brienne doesn’t see who on Tarth would be able to object. Plenty of people on Tarth had objected to her before. Besides, they’ve heard nothing from the Stormlands and there is going to be work to do here. She should see the girls safe, the wall patched, the guard trained. Lady Flint could be given a sword. She has purpose here, even if it can’t last forever. Besides she thinks it’s a question, like his offer to take up mending.

“We will leave,” she says. “I just don’t know when.”

Jaime says, “The queen never actually made me swear loyalty to her. Don’t you think she would likely have thought to ask me if she knew I would turn up at her court one day having acquired new colours as soon as she stripped me of the last? He glares down at the handle and shakes the whole door. They had this argument days ago.

“Stop that,” Brienne says. Jaime stops and turns to glare at her.

“Did you ask Sansa if we could marry?”

“Yes,” says Brienne. Jaime makes a gesture with his hands that reminds her of Tyrion.

“Brienne, you are not as transparent as you might think,” he says. Brienne’s is briefly so deep beneath the waves that her lungs hurt.

“I’ll never lie to you.” It’s a struggle to get the words out.

“I know,” he says, dismissively. “That’s not what I said.” He reaches out to catch her wrist, grimacing. “When did you ask?” His calluses skate down her palm.

“When I asked you.” She no longer wants to blush at the memory of that, but she’s self conscious now of the delay. She hadn’t had an answer to give him. She’s not in the habit of reporting private conversations.

“So she had time to tell the queen?

Brienne says, “The queen has concerns other than Tarth and you, Jaime.” Jaime drops her hand.

He says, “I’m not worried for the queen.” He’s staring at her with his eyes widened exaggeratedly in frustration. She can’t really see who he is worried for. The dragons and the men are gone and he’s still here, alive, bound to her and safe. Everything keeps swimming along as she had hardly dared to hope. It’s not something she has much experience with. Perhaps the eyes of the seven turned to her when he knighted her. It’s not the most comfortable thought. He says, “Brienne, I’m trying to be practical.”

“I am being practical,” she says. She hasn’t thought about it until now, but: “We’ll marry in the godswood,” she says. She likes the shape of that. “We can skip the septon, the father and the feast.” Thank the gods they can skip the spectacle of the feast and surely, as a knight she can give herself away. Who will tell her no?

“Kneeling to the tree?” he says, consideringly. Brienne begins to suspect that this has been a somewhat persistent worry. “We could do that.” Now he looks cautiously pleased with the idea. Brienne hadn’t known about any kneeling to trees.

“Have you seen a northern ceremony?” she asks.

“No. I’ve only heard stories, but men say…” He reaches for her wrist again. Men always have something to say about these things, she’s found. “Men say that a northern man carries his wife to the feast.” He pulls her arm up in slow motion, moves his right shoulder forwards.

“Don’t!” she says, panicky and hot, her arms coming up to catch his collar automatically, holding him easily at arms length.

“Alright,” he says. He leans his weight against her hands.

“I don’t mean to keep arguing with you,” she says.

“What about the part with the cloaks?” he says, apparently determined to continue. “They still do that. We’d have to swap places for it to have any meaning.” Brienne flushes, annoyed at her own predictability. She tugs him in slowly, until she can her cheek against the cool ends of his hair. He’s trying to drape flippancy over the bite in his voice. “Besides, I left all my old whites behind and everyone has seen puppet shows about my maidenly virtue.” Brienne decides to ignore that entirely.

“We don’t have anything in my colours.” It’s the practical thing, when the sensible thing to say would just be no. The more she thinks about it, the more she wishes she could avoid it all. He cranes away from her for a moment, speculative, trying to get a good look at her face.

“It feels like a mockery for me fumble some brown fur over your shoulders,” he says. She steps back, keeping her hands on his arms. He looks quite sincere, his chin tipped up, only the slightest tension around his eyes. “Would it insult them? You’re a knight, not a maid.” She won’t do it. People would gossip about it. They would see it as a humiliation of them both, even if Jaime wouldn’t notice; even if she’s decided not to care. She can’t imagine suggesting such a thing to Sansa.

“Do men talk about what words are spoken?” she asks, without much hope.

“No,” he says, laughter slipping quickly back into his voice. “Strangely, they never speak about their vows.” He sobers again in a moment, reaching up to grip the wrist of her hand on his arm. “Whatever the words are, I can speak them,” he says. “I can promise.” He should know the vow before he makes it. She doesn’t know that she wants a promise given so lightly.

“I don’t want easy words.”

“This isn’t easy,” he says, very serious, jaw set like he’s still watching the queen’s army lead their horses over the hill. It’s what she had wanted him to say - she drops her hold on his shoulders, though he keeps hold of the wrist he has - but it’s simple enough for her. Tarth and Sansa are tangled responsibilities, while he is clear, separate and constant through both. He says, “I’ve given my word when it felt easy. This will be better.” She turns to look back at the plants, pressed green against the glass and so close. He swings her arm to call her attention back. “The castle will return to more conventional rhythms now the men are gone,” he says. “There will be servants coming and going.” Brienne glares at him. He smiles, perhaps a little wild, after all. “We should make the most of our freedom from propriety. Practice,” he says.

“The woman in the room beneath us complained of the noise.”

“We were quiet,” he says, stricken. “I know we were.”

“The swords. The stamping,” she says. She had made the same mistake, but he seems to be struggling with it more. “I don’t think she-. It won’t matter soon.”

“Because we are to be married,” he says. Or, because they will leave. Or, because apparently Sansa will allow her to do whatever she likes, and this is a small private gift that she has decided to allow herself to want, as long as she is wanted in turn. Here, they might never have to push themselves into some shape of man and wife, for a brief moment of public scrutiny. He lifts his hand as if he means to try the door again, and just manages to stop himself. He pulls his glove back on, and Brienne does the same.

“I’ll go back to the room now,” he says.

Their room has already been swept through by those relived of managing the men. The bed has been tidied, the fire built up and new water fetched. Jaime looks around dolefully. Brienne refuses when he awkwardly offers to take her cloak. They’ve made it strange by talking about it too much and besides, Brienne needs to see to the new guards. Sansa kept her here to see the castle safe, not to lie about in bed with Jaime.

“I’ll be back soon,” she says.

“Well,” he says, “I’ll be here.”

Brienne wakes as the sun is going down, curled against him on the bed. Her arm is thrown over his hip, her face against his spine. She finds that she can fit her chest, her stomach and thighs all along the back of him. It’s the absence of dragons, she realises, that has woken her. There’s no birdsong in their place. Brienne tries to unobtrusively remove the arm wrapped around him. He shifts onto his back, already awake. She blinks at the dull and darkening window.

“There will be feasting again,” he says, mouth tight, but he gets out from under the covers and goes to wash up in the fresh water the castle staff has fetched.

In the great hall they find Bran by the fire, Arya perched on a table nearby, holding a rather one sided looking conversation. She gestures them closer and they join her, putting their feet up on the bench next to hers. Shortly afterwards Sansa and a group of northern noble women file into the hall. Pod comes too, supporting a northern Lord whose leg was broken in the battle before the dead.

“What we need,” says a round faced woman who must be at least seventy by the grooves in her neck, “is some reason to celebrate. Something to drink to.”

“We will no longer need to post guards at the wine stores. I can celebrate that,” says Sansa.

“But will we still be limiting servings?” grumbles the northern man. Podrick tries to catch her eye, amused.

“I have something we could celebrate,” says Brienne and then she swallows as all their eyes come to rest heavily on her. She forces herself forwards, climbing off the bench and leaving Jaime behind, calling gruffly, “Podrick?” He understands immediately, but she has to stand there with her sword drawn while he tries to lever his charge down onto a bench.

Actually laying the sword on his shoulders is subsumed in the buzzing awareness of every eye in the room resting on her. She’s soothed by Podrick’s serious face. She plods her way through the first of the words Jaime had spoken, feeling the weight of the ritual on her tongue. The gods she invokes are suddenly taking up space in the sparse room. There’s not enough air. She squares her shoulders and carries on until she’s lost in the rhythm and she can’t think of anyone but Pod, and her voice added now to the history of the words. Pod stares solemnly up at her even though she thinks it would be proper for him to lower his eyes, contemplate the gods and not her.

When Pod stands, beaming, he only hesitates for a second before throwing himself up onto his toes to put his arms around her. They really have lost all sense of propriety. It breaks the spell they had woven and some of the women make cooing noises. Around her she can hear the room filling with noise. She doesn’t know how many stopped to watch; it’s not a northern ritual. She has to crouch somewhat to accept the embrace and it is very awkward.

“I’m sorry, my lady. I promise I’m taking this so very seriously,” Pod whispers.

She puts her nose briefly into his hair. She blinks away the burning behind her eyes and pats his back heavily. Sansa is standing across from them pressing her lips together in a smile.

“That’s a wonderful excuse for a song and some wine,” says the round faced woman. “Well done, dear. I do hope your gods don’t mind us butting in.” The others are moving about, calling for servants who are for the first time in a while appearing in greater numbers than are needed. Some will be able to eat on the same long tables with the remaining gentry tonight, as they should, even with the rather large number of Free Folk remaining. One of the youngest women is talking loudly and excitedly about a song they know that will make everyone weep.

Brienne turns within the milling crowd as Podrick fusses to straighten his clothes. She finds Jaime standing against the dancing fire, smiling at her, small and genuine. He comes to them, although he doesn’t seem to be able to summon any words, instead reaching out to inconspicuously grip her hand, bundled up where their thick cloaks collide. Then he turns to Pod.

“Ser Podrick,” he says, smiling brightly with all his teeth, then he thumps him solidly.

Podrick puts his hands up to grasp Jamie’s shoulders, almost an embrace. He’s doing the desperately sincere widening he likes to do with his eyes. Jaime looks a little unnerved. Pod takes mercy on him and retreats.

“Tyrion will be delighted,” says Jaime. Pod tilts his jaw up and puffs his chest out.

“Would it be strange if I were to write to him? Once he’s at Casterly Rock. So long as we can spare the ravens.”

“Of course not,” says Brienne. If Tyrion finds it strange he can keep it to himself. “I’m sure you could write to your family as well.”

“Oh yes, thank you, my lady” says Podrick, “but Casterly Rock will likely send word along.” Brienne puts her hand onto Oathkeeper’s hilt. She tries to arrange her face into something other than a frown.

“You could return to the Westerlands once we have peace, or before, it’s your choice now,” Brienne tells him, more insistently. “I won’t ask you to stay here now.”

“I’m alright, thank you, my lady,” says Podrick as Jaime’s shoulder brushes against hers. The cups begin to be passed around and the hall further floods with people. Pod slips away to find a jug of wine.

“You did so well with him,” Jaime tells her.

“He did well with himself.”

The look he gives her is half agony, half adoration. She pats him awkwardly on the arm, aware of the full hall around them, he catches her hand briefly in his. No one seems to be taking up their usual seats, instead the whole castle is milling about. Pod is standing quietly as a group his own age, most of them even shorter than he is, prod at him excitedly. She’s glad he has friends here. A couple of northerners have arrived back with instruments. Arya materialises behind them, weaving idly through the crowd towards Sansa who has taken up the chair in the centre of the high table. Brienne goes to sit down in her proper place. Jaime drifts in her wake and sits nest her, pressed up against her side, so they can both look at out the strange mood of the people. Someone passes them full bowls and Brienne applies herself to hers heartily. Food is good for nerves. Jaime sighs and tears at his bread only a little before setting about his own.

“He’ll follow you anywhere, you do know that?” he says, conversationally to his bowl. She nods awkwardly. That is very apparent.

“Good,” he says, emphatically.

Pod joins them. Gilly and Sam too, a little collection of southerners. They make a toast to Pod’s knighting and his good future. It’s loud in the hall. It looks like it pleases Sansa inordinately. The people who had been serving take up places at the ends of the tables to eat. The wine does eventually reach it’s limit, before the mood turns maudlin, which Brienne thinks it could very easily. Sansa comes down from the high table to walk among the people. The songs turn to war and loved ones longed for, tipping the mood in the absence of wine. The girl who had wanted to make everyone cry takes up her flute.

“My lady, let’s sit closer,” says Pod. There are benches opening up near the musicians as those long in the tooth begin to drift away to their beds. There are chairs free by the fire. She demurs. Jaime catches her hand and presses his thumb surreptitiously over her knuckles.

“I’ll be back in the room,” he says, and Brienne lets him go. Earlier she saw him put a knife in his belt. Podrick says he will sing again. Brienne stays. Arya has apparently consented to be part of the strange, almost festivities and they take a seat by the great fire next to Bran, who requires nothing by way of conversation. It is the warmest spot.

In Evenfall, while her father ruled over a peaceful island, they would have evenings like this only rarely, preferring to celebrate outside or in open rooms while it was still light. It did a person good to feel the sun. In this hall you would hardly know if you were wasting away the short stretch of sunlight afforded to you. On Tarth, during the winter she most clearly remembers, they had simply worn more clothes and carried on as they always had. What will Tarth be like, if this winter is as dire as the Starks say and the days grow shorter and colder until there is no more light? The marble will hold onto the cold worse than the rough Winterfell stone. Someone will have to make sure the children can see the great, bright skies painted on all the walls in the oldest rooms.

Arya disappears briefly and comes back with a few cups of illicit wine, that she pretends to reveal with exaggerated drama from inside her cloak. Bran pretends not to notice, so Brienne laughs for her and takes her cup.

“No guards by the wine stores?” says Brienne, as though guards by the wine stores could, or would stop Arya.

“The group you picked are probably the best we could have hoped for,” says Arya.

“Thank you,” says Brienne, then, “I thought you meant to go with your brother.” Arya and Bran both turn to look at her in synchronised consideration. Brienne drinks more of her wine. Arya drinks too and then tops them both up with Bran’s rejected cup. It’s comfortable and safe and Brienne does not mind. She never stayed by the fire when there were songs in Tarth.

“It’s not time to go yet,” says Bran.

“Oh, don’t start that,” says Arya, drinking again, “But no, it isn’t time to go yet.”

“When will it be time?” says Brienne, then hearing her plaintive voice, she puts her cup down very deliberately.

“Not for a very long while yet,” says Bran.

“I’ll go when I won’t have to walk at the speed of the wagons,” says Arya, which means fairly soon.

“What about the wolves; what will Winterfell eat?” says Brienne.

Arya says, “I thought she would come to me when I was home and smelled like myself again.” She’s been drinking the whole time. She sounds worse than Bran. Brienne pats her cautiously on the shoulder and finds that she has to set her cup down to do it. She puts it down again even more deliberately.

“Pod is singing now,” she tells Arya. “Doesn’t he have a wonderful voice.” The pride is up against her ribs again.

“Evenings like these I used to tease Sansa until she cried,” says Arya wistfully. They both watch Sansa listening to one of the women animatedly explaining something involving her legs. “I can’t tease her now,” she says. She drains her glass.

Jaime drops to crouch next to their bench.

“Oh, hello.”

“Save me from the stable boy,” he says. “He’s taken to insulting my horse.”

She puts her hand in his hair. He blinks at her, but he worries about nothing, so she leaves it there.

“That horse is perfect,” she says. “Why is he complaining.”

He shakes his head and dislodges her hand. He slides his eyes briefly towards Arya.

“You could go now, while he is distracted,” Brienne tells him. The boy is indeed sprinting for the doors. Arya is up and moving before Jaime is on his feet. It takes Brienne even longer to start, Jaime tugging her along by her belt.

“Gulls!” a woman is shouting. “Gulls, gulls, gulls.” Brienne can hear them now too. The hall spills out into the courtyard. They all stare up into the black sky, trying to pick out movement. Waiting to see if they are only passing by. Then, very clearly a trio land on the roof of the stables.

“Bow, bows,” comes back the call, much quieter. She isn’t sure who starts it, but all the archers scatter madly across the courtyard. Everyone else stands still as an anticipatory silence falls.

“Storms at the coast,” says Jaime.

“Who gives a fuck!” hisses the red haired serving girl next to him. Back in the hall, Arya is clearly having a very intense fight with Bran while she strings a bow. Then a couple of Free Folk rush into the hall to do the same by candlelight and she scoops her hands along the tables gathering up crumbs into a pouch and hurries back out into night before they can beat her to it.

Jaime sits down near Bran and picks up Brienne’s cup. He holds it out in question. She shrugs. She feels a little warm and like she might like to strip off her cloak and maybe even her boots, even though the doors are open. She doesn’t think she should drink any more wine. Jaime drinks it for her.

“He won’t be at the coast yet,” she says. Tyrion was travelling with wagons.

“I know,” he says. “Are you an archer?”

“Hardly. Did you ever-?”

“Only passable,” he says. “This will be great sport for those that can. It will be nearly impossible in the dark.” Sansa is by the door watching them. Brienne follows her gaze and gets to watch when Bran’s eyes roll straight back in his head. She takes Jaime’s arm and tows him away.

“What?” he says.

“Let’s see this sport,” she tells him and he smiles at her.

The Free Folk win what turns into a bit of a competition. Arya looks sincerely put out by this, and then embarrassed when Sansa makes a show of congratulating her for bringing in three, the largest individual catch.

“More music!” says someone too young to still be awake.

There is more music until there is a wedding. Brienne is drifting a little, her head in her hand and Jaime slightly more alert beside her. They are listening to Pod sing again, and with every moment that no one suggests Jaime goes back to their room, Brienne feels a little sleepier. The wedding has her on her feet with her sword drawn before she’s really aware what she is doing.

The man who has the screaming woman over his shoulder freezes, all the way across the hall and turns to her, without putting the woman down. Brienne puts her foot up on the table, meaning to head over there.

And then the woman says, “Why have we stopped?” in a voice so clearly ringing with disappointment that Brienne understands without really understanding and gets back down from the table. Sansa, who looks a little more white faced than usual sweeps in between them, and then the hall unsticks itself. The song picks up, now even rowdier, the woman’s screaming - so obviously affected now Brienne is properly paying attention - starts up again and everyone stops staring at her at last. She sits down heavily. Jaime, who is still standing, sits down on the table and puts his feet up on the bench next to her. Something very strange is happening to his mouth. He touches her face, seemingly compulsively, and keeps swallowing what she’s pretty sure is hysterical laughter.

What he says is, “Are you alright?”

“Fine,” she says.

It’s only playing. Like their fighting. Like their arguing, sometimes. Except for all the ways in which it isn’t. If she thought it was real, then other people were watching and thinking the same. No one else had drawn their sword. Jaime puts his hand on her shoulder and squeezes until the tension falls out of the muscle. It was only a game. That woman was happy. She should get to be happy.

Sansa comes by to say, “They explained it to me in advance. He’s stealing her, but he had checked to make sure she doesn’t try too hard to stab him. They’re married now.” Sansa shrugs helplessly.

“Oh,” says Brienne, strangely disappointed. She’d thought that - being free - they might have chosen to keep the promising and do away with whatever newly awful variation on a bedding ceremony that was. Sansa smiles at her.

“Don’t worry. You looked very heroic coming across the table. It will add excitement to the re-tellings.” Sansa pauses. “Are you alright?” she says quietly, twisting the two of them away from Jaime.

“I’m very awake all of a sudden,” says Brienne. “Are you alright?” Sansa doesn’t look so pinched now.

“About the same,” says Sansa.

“It was a lovely evening,” says Brienne. Sansa smiles at her, and looks about at the spread out murmuring groups and the mess of plates abandoned at the end of one table with satisfaction.

Jaime walks her back through the empty corridors with an arm around her waist.

“I would say I can’t believe you went up over the table like that, except that I can,” he says. “I’m amazed that man didn’t drop her and run. He must really love her. What a sight!”

“Did I look so very ridiculous?” says Brienne, uncomfortably reliving Sansa describing her as heroic and imagining what those retellings will be like.

“Ridiculous? You looked like something out of a story. Are you really alright?” Brienne is beginning to feel alright. “The way your foot hit that table. The sound of the sword. Were you not aiming for it to look like that?”

“I really don’t know what I was doing,” Brienne says.

“You were brilliant,” he says, still giving all the impetus for their movement. And yes, Brienne is beginning to feel better.

“Where’s Pod?”

“He has friends his own age,” says Jaime, and it suddenly occurs to Brienne, quite what that means.

“Did he tell you? Why didn’t he tell me?” Jaime stops pulling her along, but she keeps moving. He holds out his arms.

“I really don’t know why he told me, ,” he says. They round the corner to their staircase and clamber up it, both a little heady with an excess of sleep and drink that they are both now unaccustomed to and the sheer lateness of the hour.

Jaime flicks the door open and he hefts off his cloak, takes hers, straightens the chair by the fire and presses her into it.

“Sword,” he says, holding out his hand, and she unbuckles the belt and gives it to him. “Boots,” he says, going to dump everything back on the desk. She takes the boots off and stretches he feet out in the rug. The fire needs tending, but it’s still licking heat up her back. She watches him move about the room. The common problem, she realises, in all their arguments, is everyone else.

“We could skip the kneeling and the tree,” Brienne says. Jaime hops to pull one boot off looking at her inquisitively. “The cloaks too.” Avoid the buzzing sensation of everyone looking being directed at him. “We could just tell Sansa that we’re married. Who is to say we aren’t.”

“The gods?” Jaime says. He gathers up her boots as well and puts the line of them neatly by the fire. He pokes the black wood on top about until it breaks apart, and crouches to get everything set for the night.

“Which gods?” Brienne says. He shrugs. The seven, all together in the tree? The one who brought Jon Snow back to life? Whatever Bran says is living in him? There are so many of them now. “They don’t care who we love.” Jaime stands and takes his gloves off, dropping them on the hearth. He doesn’t look convinced.

“When I knighted you, I didn’t feel like I was speaking to any gods. I don’t really think that’s the point.” Brienne understands that. She’s done it herself now, the same number of times that he has. She knows just as much.

“I didn’t kneel to the warrior,” she says, “Not even for a little bit.” Jaime turns back to her, flicks the knife out of his belt and puts it above the fire.

“You knelt to me,” he says. She’d thought he’d like this idea. Surely it resolves all his worries.

“You always said you could do it,” she says.

“Do what?” he says. Even though she knows he remembers.

“You said today that you could lift me,” she says. Throw her down.

“I could.” Jaime looks a little more interested, then he amends, “If I had too.”

“So?” she says.

“You’ve picked up some very strange ideas from the wildlings,” he says.

“Free Folk,” she corrects.

“Free Folk,” he agrees. He does not come over and attempt to pick her up. Brienne gets up, picks up the chair and puts it off the rug. She sheds layers until she’s in her shirt and trousers. He mimics her. She backs up until she’s got room to manoeuvre. She thinks she might also have picked up some very strange ideas from him. As he walks out to match her it occurs to her that he hadn’t actually won any of these fights. Anticipation prickles up her arms.

“You’re looking very prepared,” he says. She has arranged herself so that she’s ready to move. Feet light, and spread for balance. Distantly, she recognises that this may not be a particularly well thought out plan.

“Sansa says they’re only pretending that it’s a surprise,” she says, although, she suspects that can’t alway be the case.

“I did not see this coming,” says Jaime, “You’re getting a very authentic experience.” Then he rushes her. She moves out of his way and kicks his knee out.

“Sorry,” she says, before she realises that he has a hold on her arm and she’s going down with him.

“Oh fuck,” he says, as she lands heavily with her knee on the back of his thigh. She yanks her arm back and scrambles up and away. He pops back up and hops about hitting his leg when he finds her backed away to the other side of the rug. Brienne decides to go on the offence. “Fuck,” he says, again, but then manages to end up on top of her when they hit the ground. From there on out he’s furiously silent. He tries to flip her, she yanks him forward to drive his head into the floor, he catches himself and puts his knee directly into her stomach. It means she can tip him off without too much trouble but it also genuinely hurts.

He grimaces an apology, and then they’re both up on their knees, grappling to get a better grip on each others shirts. Jaime moves on to trying for her hair. Her arms are a little longer, which should mean she has the advantage, but Brienne starts to feel the bubbling hysteria again and it’s making it hard to feel her hands. They must looks so stupid. He gives up and ducks under her swatting hands. He puts his shoulder into her chest and gets up on one knee - she thinks it might be attempt to lift her, or knock her backwards - but actually he’s just helped her to her feet. She drapes her full weight over him and then just, walks away once he’s got her up. She’s definitely not managing to hide her smile. She dusts feeling back into her hands and sets her stance again. He’s got the fond look she likes.

Next pass, he manages to twist her about by the arm, tucking it up behind her back, which is rankly unfair, because she showed him this, and he’s too low when she throws her head back to brain him, which is she realises, now she hasn’t connected, is probably for the best.

“Sorry,” she says, then she throws her other arm back, grabs him by some combination of shirt and neck, drops almost to one knee and drags him over her shoulder. He lets go of her arm rather than dislocate it, which she appreciates. He tries to drag them both sideways, back to the rug, but she has both arms around him now, and all he can do is cling to her hips and make a breathlessly outraged huff of air into her stomach. With a great effort of co-ordination, mostly made possible by the fact he doesn’t actually hit her with his knee very hard, she gets herself back up on both feet. He’s really fucking heavy once his legs leave the ground, although he immediately goes very carefully rigid. It helps. She takes a slightly weaving step, breathes out a flustered laugh, and then stops to hoik him further back onto her shoulder.

He makes a pained grunt, even though it’s his hip bones that are crushing everything in her shoulder. She staggers sideways when she tries to move and then she can feel his stomach jump and flutter against her when he he starts to silently laugh. “This is more undignified than I expected,” he says on a gasp. He can’t see her face so Brienne doesn’t attempt to sort out the very stupid thing happening to her expression. He says, “Should I start screami-. Fuck! Don’t drop me on my head.” That does end on a shout. When her silent giggling takes over again she weaves another step. He’s throwing her off by moving his legs.

“Any other advice,” she says, trying to find the equilibrium to move again.

“We’re already in your room,” he says. “This counts, alright. Put me down. We’ll be married.” Brienne considers fighting him on it. Arguing for the game of it. Bedding ceremonies see both parties deposited on the bed. She tips backwards and lets him push up off the grip he has on her hip. He slides, somewhat backwards, mostly sideways, off her shoulder.

They reach for each other immediately, and she walks him backwards, stroking both hands over his sides, feeling his tight around the back of her neck, until she walks him into the bed. Experimentally, she reaches out to push him down onto it. He doesn’t go.

“Pod might come back tonight,” he says. He puts a hand up to smooth a disordered bit of hair behind her ear. She takes hold of his hips, and ducks to kiss his shoulder, pressing her eyes into his neck. She pushes him onto the desk instead.

With Jaime sat forwards on the edge of desk, kissing at her chest and tugging at her belts, Brienne decides that she wants to learn something knew. Her neck is already cricked from bending further that usual. When she stands back up, he comes with her, a moment before his weight indicates he’s got at least one foot back on the floor. He makes a loudly appreciative noise and then pulls away to press a hand to her mouth, looking at the floor, like she’s the one disturbing Lady Flint, and like they haven’t been stomping about and slamming each other into the floor.

“We’re married,’ she says, feeling more than a little of that old flush. He’s pink too. “Swap with me,” she says.

When she’s sitting, he slides in to press their hips together. She feels that she’s become quite proficient at kissing him. She gathers him in closer, and before she gets distracted by the stroking hand at her hip, she reaches for the heat between his legs. She’s quite sure she isn’t going to do this well, but she’s seen men make the motion - how complicated can it be. She smiles into the noise he makes and reaches up to tug at his hair.

“So, are we really married?” he says, fingers still moving where she’s holding him, carding through the edges of the hair there, where it’s softer and shorter. “Does this count?”

“I don’t see why not,” says Brienne. She lets his wrist go, and he skims lower, tugging experimentally where the hair thickens. “I’ll tell Sansa,” she says. She tries to hold her hips still. It’s too wet, when he touches her. No purchase, no friction. She’s so hot that she feels it wouldn’t take much. She’s barely perched on the edge of the table.

“You could fuck me,” he says. Her hips twitch and her breath comes sharper. He presses the sides of their faces together with a nudge of the gold hair.

“I have been fucking you,” she says. For her septa, the mechanics of fucking and being fucked had clearly been important semantic destinations that she hadn’t been able to vocalise. For the women who followed Renly’s army the distinction had been irrelevant. For Renly, presumably, the difference must have been altered.

“I’ll explain later,” he says, still looking pink.

“I know that men can…” she says. His fingers retreat and he presses his knuckles into the ropes of her thighs. That sings through the beginning of stiffness there.

“You said that was a filthy rumour,” he says. Brienne does remember saying that.

“ You were being foul,” she says. “I don’t want anyone talking about them. I don’t see how it was any of our concern.” He breathes out laughter against her neck.

“I thought you didn’t know.”

“No,” she says. “It’s just that everyone should keep their noses out.” He taps her thigh and runs his knuckles against the lie of the hair there. She puts her teeth against his ear.

“Brienne,” he says, twitching. “You could tell Gendry, when you see him again. I think that’s the kind of thing he wanted to hear. Something that made any of them happy.”

"I'll think about it," she says. He slides his fingers into her, and then when he draws them back out, everything is too wet again. It takes endless, long shivery pulls of his bunched fingers, her rolling into him, too desperate now for embarrassment, and the dulled insistent pressure of him between her legs, to build the sticky heat between them again. He gathers her up with his right arm, and then his hand is trapped between her and his hip, and it’s harsh enough finally, when she snaps down into his stroking. He urges her on with the dull pressure of his hand at her the back of her thigh, and he kisses her and lets her bite at his jaw, and whispers to her that he loves her, and that he’ll tell everyone that they’re married, if she will do the same.

There is a neatly folded cloth by the fresh water and they wipe themselves down; a lick and a promise. It’s good enough when they can bathe tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.

“I’ll tell Sansa when I next see her,” Brienne says, pulling herself back into enough of her things that she could leap out of bed if necessary. “I’ll tell her that we’re married,” she clarifies. Sansa was a child when Renly died and it’s none of her business.

“Tell Gilly,” he says, unbuckling his hand. “She’ll actually think it’s good news.”

The knock comes once she’s already asleep. She feels Jaime sit up besides her, and her neck is at just the right angle, her feet so warm and her hands so cool, that she does not bother to move.

“Should I get it?” he says. Brienne frowns. It’s fine for him to answer her door in the middle of the night, what else is the point of marriage. She hears him grab the knife from the mantlepiece, and the knock comes again. She gives up and starts trying to disentangle herself from the furs.

“Sorry, sorry,” he says, to her or the person behind the door He drops Oathkeeper across the foot of the bed, darting across the room, and slits open the door open.

A woman’s voice greets him, somewhat familiar, friendly and quiet, and not surprised to see him. Brienne sits back against the headboard. She can’t see who it is, but she can see him putting out his arms for something. Jaime murmurs back, equally polite. Brienne gets a brief flash of Lady Flint’s profile, before he closes the door on her with his shoulder. Jaime climbs back onto the bed with a pile of fabric and small leather shoes held between his hands.

“For you,” he says, and awkwardly tips them out onto the bed. Two of the shoes are odd boots that clearly come from different sets. The other two both look a little large. In the hand he had under the pile, his knife is gripped in reverse and pointed inward on his wrist. He shrugs a little self-consciously and goes to put it and Oathkeeper back on the desk. She thumbs through the neatly folded garments. Three whole tunics of various widths, a short shirt, some woollen socks and stockings with the feet cut out and tacked up. On top is a thick shawl with a pink sun carefully embroidered. Brienne runs her fingers over it. Jaime tucks his face into his shoulder and tries to suppress a yawn.

“They were for Littler Sam. I don’t know that they’ll like this,” she says, showing him the sun. Jaime points out the two odd shoes in answer. “Oh don’t start,” she says. “I’m sure she did her best.”

“I really don’t think he’s going to object, it will only be the second littlest Tarly,” by which she supposes he means Lord Tarly. Brienne hopes he isn’t the type to take offence. She’s warmed up to him, seeing the way he looks at Gilly at dinner every night.

Jaime sorts everything back into its pile and then he carries it all over and dumps it onto the trunk. He checks the fire behind it’s guard and then he hurries back to bed. He curls up against her back and sticks his cold feet down next to hers.

He asks, “What did Sansa say when you asked to marry me?”Brienne had been on the verge of sleep again.

“She asked if Tyrion had promised me a large dowry, and then,” she recalls, “she said she had previously thought of me as a sensible person.”

Jaime starts laughing at the first, and then has to bury an undignified snort against the back of her neck at the last. She tugs his arm around her.

“Grave insults to us both,” he says. His smile is wide enough that she can feel his teeth where he’s pressed into the top of her spine.

The second knock comes as soon as she smiles. But the light is different, dark still, but with no moon lighting the window. Jaime’s arm is still around her and he’s a dead weight thrown across her back. She rolls onto her side and nudges him off. The second knock comes a second time. Or maybe she just heard them coming. She clambers out of bed with only the glow of the guarded fire to orient her. Jaime pulls the furs back over himself. He went last time. She pulls the neck of her shirt tighter, but her tunic is buried somewhere in a jumble of all their clothes. She puts her boots on just in case, and when she opens the door, she keeps one foot against the inside of it.

Pod is at the door, Gilly and Tarly behind him. Littler Sam is here, which is good, because she can give him the clothes. She steps back and opens the door for them.

“What’s happened?” She can have her sword on in a moment, but her tunic is buried and her armour is in the trunk.

“You have a letter,” Podrick says.

Jaime sits up in bed and, seeing the lot of them staring down at him, clutches the blankets up to his waist.

“Hello,” he croaks. He looks at Brienne, a little wide eyed, clearly having only just woken. “Hello, Littler Sam,” he says, trying to shuffle his way casually out of bed. “Brienne has some shoes for you.” He stands up.

Littler Sam shrinks away and presses his face in Gilly’s shoulder. He says, “Oh no.” Gilly and Tarly both gape down at him, astonished. “Oh no?” says Gilly. He’s very still and silent. Clearly they hadn’t known he could talk either. Brienne plucks the letter from Tarly’s slack fingers. Jaime has got his tunic on over his shirt, and has retrieved his boots. He looks at her in question.

Podrick heads for the mantlepiece. Brienne passes Jaime and pushes the mess on the desk aside so that the scroll can sit safely. He hands her a tunic.

“Is that--?” he asks, but her head is inside the fabric. Pod brings her a candle, and she crouches down and opens the scroll while she’s still blinking at the light.

My dear child, reads Brienne.

She sets the letter down carefully as the wave of emotion she’d pressed down into Winterfell’s frozen mud twelve days ago shrieks back up through her spine, and she begins, entirely unwillingly to cry strange silent tears. Jaime kneels down beside her, which makes everything even worse.

“He’s alive,” she tells him, “I don’t know why I’m crying.” Brienne gasps out the last of the furiously balled tension and fills her chest with new air. Pod is watching her with sympathetically damp eyes. She wipes her nose on her sleeve. She seizes the letter again, blinking at the letters that swim, even though her father’s familiar writing is always neat. Jaime sits back on his haunches, looking up at her with the small closed-mouth smile she likes on his lips.

She clears her throat. To the assembled room she summarises as she reads; “Some of the Golden Company came through on their way to King’s Landing and he could not reply until they were gone. ” She dashes at her eyes again, feeling abruptly more grounded. There should be no reason for Tarth to fear Cersei’s sellswords. She blinks down at the cheerful continuance in his elegant hand.

“The island had its first snow. An old horse of mine has died, but she had two fine foals.” She blushes a little at the inanity, but it warms her. “The queen - Cersei - has warned that a Targaryen has returned to burn the cites in mad revenge for her tyrannical father. He asks if Daenerys has truly enslaved dragons who breathe fire that burns green and gold.” She smiles down, hearing his doubtful tone. Podrick takes a sharp step backwards. “I don’t think he believes the dragons exist yet.”

“My lady, I think you might need to show this to Lady Sansa,” says Pod.

“I will, but we knew Cersei would say these things. The people will soon see there’s no truth to any of it,” reassures Brienne, but when she looks to Jaime, his face has drained of colour and the smile might never have been there at all. She has to consciously pull her eyes from him, not understanding, wanting to know the rest.

“He asks us to tell Gendry he’s glad to hear there will be a Baratheon in Storm’s End and says that he wishes the boy the best in his inheritance of all his father’s titles.” Brienne pauses to re-read the line. “Well,” Brienne says, “I can’t tell if he knows that sounds treasonous towards everyone.” Possibly she was too effusive in her praise of Gendry. Tarly, now bouncing his child in his arms, blows tiredly through his mouth.

“I’m so glad he doesn’t seem to have any interest in the throne,” he says. It’s a sentiment Brienne shares.

“Does he say anything else about Cersei and dragon fire?” asks Jaime. Brienne observes with trepidation the shocking green of his eyes, so close to the candle.

“No,” Brienne says, “What’s wrong with you?”

“Why would your father think that dragon’s fire burns green?” Gilly asks, “Isn’t it funny how these stories travel.” Littler Sam huffs unhappily as Gilly fusses with his hair.

“I have clothes for him on the trunk,” says Brienne. “And shoes, all from Lady Flint.”

Jaime pushes back into her and snatches the letter from her hands. He stares down at it.

He says, “Mercy.”

She catches his wrist and yanks her letter back, holding onto him. She’s never heard him swear by any of the gods, let alone the mother, except for the moment he knighted her. It can’t be a shock to him that Cersei would lie. Jaime tries to take his wrist back.

“Podrick is right,” Jaime says, “show it to Sansa.”

“I’m going to,” says Brienne. “What’s wrong with the two of you?” Podrick looks actively agitated.

“Please, Brienne, just show it to Sansa,” Jaime says, agonised, and then he manages to rip his arm from her grip and he goes back to putting on his boots. He throws her jacket towards her and then he bundles his cloak, jacket and his knife and slams his way out of the room. Littler Sam stops making noise. Brienne stands up.

“He has a complicated relationship with his sister,” says Pod mildly, but he still looks panicked, and that isn’t actually a placating thing to say. It’s unsettling. Tarly’s face contorts. Pod flushes. “My lady, should we go?”

“And wake her?” says Brienne. Sansa gets so little sleep.

“I’m sorry about your horse,” says Gilly, tactfully ignoring Pod, which means she knows all about Jaime. She’s collected the clothes from the top of the trunk and is waving the shoes in Little Sam’s face. She lowers her voice, “I know the woman who dries the tea leaves here now. I can get you some. To trade for these?” Tarly goes spectacularly redder. Brienne doesn’t know what she’d want tea for.

“Yes, alright. Thank you, Gilly.”

“What we mean to say is, thank you,” says Tarly. “Would you like to hold Sam? Little Sam, can you say thank you?”

“No thank you,” says Brienne. Stepping out of range. She looks down at her father’s letter. It ends with a question, disguised as reassurance, You will always be welcome and wished for here at Evenfall. She allows herself a moment with the words, brushing her thumb over the ink. They aren’t a demand. She reads back to where she had stopped. There are details about the Golden Company. It does not sound as though they behaved as guests. There were not enough men to send to war, but there were enough men to repel raiders. They should have tried. She glances up to see Pod still watching her, his face pinched, clearly holding himself back from speaking.

The letter tells her that her father expects the sellswords to return, after whatever happens on the mainland, on their way back to Essos. Brienne’s decision is made. The respite is over. They might not have much time; sellswords, even expensively paid ones, might not hold when they see the dragons. They’ll need to pass around the queen’s army.

Pod breaks. He says, coming very close, and speaking very quietly, “My lady, when Lord Tyrion lit the bay up with his wildfire everything burned green and gold.” Her heart turns over. “Perhaps it’s a coincidence,” he says, “But Jaime seemed… with what everyone has been saying about the Great Sept.” Pod doesn’t even know about the wildfire already under King’s Landing. She gets all the way to the door without her sword or cloak. She wrenches the door open. Jaime is sitting on the steps that lead further up the tower, hand in a fist in front of his face.

“Are you going?” he says.

“We’re going,” she agrees.

Pod grabbed her cloak, gloves Oathkeeper, so she’s not frozen when she knocks on Sansa’s door, the five of them gathered behind her. Arya answers, but Sansa is not asleep, and there are other people in the solar; Clegane with his boots up by the fire, a woman taking notes at the desk, and another perched behind Sansa on the bed, taking down or putting up her hair. Brienne can not tell which it is. Perhaps she’s just re-doing it. Only the woman with the hair pins is asked to leave when Brienne produces the letter. Sansa and Arya both understand it without having it spelled out to them.

“I’ll ride after Jon,” Arya says, looking up from her turn with the letter. “I can take the smaller party ahead.” Jaime flinches against Brienne’s back. She turns to Pod and gestures for him to take Jaime out.

“Alright,” says Sansa, discarding the letter she had just begun, “Wait a moment longer at least. I’m writing something for the Queen. We will be telling the lords about her father’s final wish. It will give credence to the claim.”

“It will associate the queen with the wrong type of fire,” Arya says. ”She won’t like that.” Sansa quirks an eyebrow at her.

“If we’ve begun, I don’t see that she’ll have any choice. She should send her own messages. Jaime’s word alone, through my hand, might not carry as much weight as we need. Make sure she sends a rider back with what she writes. Their party can not spare the ravens and the more time everyone has to dwell on it, the better. Perhaps Dorne and the Storm Lords will respond to this.” She turns with satisfaction to her letter.

“Anyone with gold invested in King’s Landing will be very interested,” says Clegane, “I’m not sure about the rest.”

“Well, we’ll give them the opportunity. At least, it's part of a story everyone already knows,” says Sansa.

Podrick slips back into the room. They stand there watching Sansa and the other woman write. Clegane gets up from the fire and walks in a wide circuit about the room, stretching out his back. Brienne thinks he might have been dozing. His sword is lying under his chair. The woman swaps her paper with Sansa, and they both begin to scribble again. Podrick should have gone with Jaime. He’s not supposed to wander about by himself.

“My lady…” starts Brienne.

“You’ll be wanting to travel south to Tarth,” Sansa says, putting the finishing touches to her letter and handing it off to Arya to be examined.

“Yes,” says Brienne. “The Golden Company. I share my father’s concerns.”

“Of course,” says Sansa, “Your family. Your people. It’s only right that you should want to go to them.” She digs a larger blank scroll out of her desk and then spreads another for reference. She and the woman confer over the details. Brienne turns to glare at Podrick.

“He said he'd be fine,” he whispers. Brienne nods. He’ll be sat in her room. She’d just like to check.

The woman gets up from the desk and retreats a little as Sansa digs through a locked draw and produces yet another scroll. She has to hold this one open with unlit candles balanced over each end. She starts writing again.

“I can’t spare you any men but I’ll write you something that will grant you free passage and aid from anyone who loves me in the North and beyond. You’ll take Podrick Payne, sorry, Ser Podrick,” she inclines her head to Pod, who is standing tensely at Brienne’s side, “and Jaime?”

“I’ll leave as soon as we’re ready,” she says, “If you’ll dismiss me for a moment, my lady?” Clegane has come to a halt back by the fire, and he’s watching her curiously. He glances at the door before she moves.

“If you wish. Come back before you go.” Arya walks around the desk pointing out something in the letter for the queen and Sansa is distracted again. It’s for the best.

Pod trails after her back to their room. Brienne grips Oathkeeper and walks very quickly. She doesn’t run. Every time she thinks the worst of him, she only manages to insult him. But this might not be the worst; it is his responsibility. His people. His family. It would just be stupid beyond all reasonable expectations. He had told her he hadn’t meant to die.

Her room is empty, the fire still low behind its screen. The cloak Sansa had given him has been left over the chair. He’s been back to the room. She doesn’t check the chest for his things. She’d thought, what? That he would be in her bed, feeling sorry for himself. She sits down and Pod hovers about her. She should have told Sansa immediately, even if she is over-reacting, and had Clegane alert the men on the gate.

She should at least check the stables. She should have gone there first. Finding a sword will take time, provided he has the sense to take a sword. She’s not entirely sure how long she’s been sitting here with her hands fisted and Oathkeeper awkwardly twisted on her belt. Her father hadn’t had her chained. She’s not used to indecision. When she looks up, Pod is perched on the very edge of the chair by the fire, anxiously working his hands together. She stands and he follows her without question.

It’s snowing. Fat, heavy flakes melt wetly into her hair. She marches through it. It would be impossible to track someone through this. Colourless Winterfell is fainter than ever through the thick blanket of snow. It’s morning, almost, and she isn’t the only person moving across the courtyard. There is a group of shivering women rushing back towards the guard’s hall, crushing a single horse’s path towards the gate, even as the snow obscures it. The gate has already been opened. Maybe there is a hunting party already out there checking their traps. She can hear the wolves beyond the walls in the still air.

In the stables two familiar boys are playing with knuckle bones on the workshop floor. They are unconcerned by her and Pod walking past. The horse is gone. Somehow, this comes as a surprise. She checks the other stalls and Pod goes to check in where the milder tempered horses are housed together. He comes back as unhappy as he went.

Brienne looks in on her own horse, stabled alongside some of Arya’s. She strokes it’s familiar, nameless nose and lets it mouth at her empty hand. It’s an uninspiring beast perhaps, but it’s reliable. It won’t wander off if you leave it untethered. She slams her way out past the laughing boys. She should have congratulated him on his great achievement in befriending them.

She can see the main gate from the eaves of the stables. He wouldn’t lead that horse over the icy wreckage of the wall in the dark and the second gate is locked tight now. She can see two of the men she had chosen standing next to their brazier. They are bundled in their big cloaks, but she’s familiar with them now. They are men who she picked out with Jaime there. They are men who fought besides him. One of them has a grandfather with a title and will have seen him every night at dinner.

“Go, tell Lady Sansa,” she says. Having carefully felt nothing at all, she can suddenly feel only guilt.

Pod says, “Tell her what?”

She ignores him. If Jaime is riding full tilt at a dragon, there’s nothing she’s ever seen in him to suggest that he’ll be able to turn back. He’d come back for her at Harrenhal and thrown his name and his life around for her. She’d needed him then. That’s why he’d done it. She’d have died without him. She can’t say the same now.

“Pod, we need to tell Lady Sansa and let her decide what to do now,” she says as reasonably as she can. “Then I want you to ready our things. I want to leave today. Sansa is safe. Tarth is not.”

Pod says,“If he’s gone, we could go after him. He’ll regret leaving like this, I know he will, my lady. We’re going anyway. We can catch him and kill him and then take him back to Tarth.”

She doesn’t know what she’d do if she found him. Let him go again, she supposes, if that is what he wants. He hasn’t historically, been particularly prone to regrets. Letting him go is what she doing now, standing here, some kind of treason through inaction. He kept stuffing peas and pulses into his belt to dry. He has made her a fool after all. Everyone knew. Everyone knew before the army rode out. It’s as though he has slipped a knife into her side without her noticing and in leaving he has pulled it out. If there is pain, she can’t feel it yet. It’s too soon to tell the damage.

“Podrick,” she says severely and she starts out into the snow. It isn’t until she hits the cold air that she remembers he isn’t her squire anymore. She should pack her own things.

She can go home. She needs to go home. She will have to go to court eventually, provided she survives. She will do her duty by Tarth now she has decided upon it. She can’t give it up, only because he is gone. It’s only a scratch, she decides. She can’t quite process that he’s gone without a sword. Lannister dramatics and never mind the rest of the world. His is the true injury. He’s as good as cut his own throat, if he has really gone.

Brienne stands in the courtyard only a moment longer, hair dampening and falling into her face. She grips Oathkeeper hard. The guards shift anxiously. They take up an extremely formal position on either side of the gate. She’s making them nervous. If she’d been in King’s Landing, watching him hare off from those other eyes, she’d have sworn he’d be dead through stupidity then too, but Cersei had known him. She’d paid someone to make sure.

Brienne turns about, Pod still following her. She raps on the workshop door.

“Did Jaime come in for his horse?” she asks them.

“The left handed one?” the complaining boy says. “He gave that beautiful horse to the little Lady. Poor horse, to be out in this. Poor horse.”

He's sprawled beneath the rough-hewn warrior, his southern cloak wrapped around him. He doesn’t move to stand when she enters. He puts his head into his hands for a moment, before looking back up at her.

She breathes through her light headiness. There are those beautifully tooled leather saddlebags, lying at his feet. She can’t make out their finery in the dark, but she stares at them, rather than looking around at all her old new gods and Jaime, looking smaller than she knows him to be. He’s never shown any inclination towards prayer.

“You’re not a fool,” he says. “I’m sorry. I thought you’d be longer with Sansa.”

“What did you do with the horse?”

“I took supplies from the stable stores,” he says, “I should put it all back before someone notices and they think to take my other hand.” No one is going to take his other hand. His namelessness is nominal and he is tied to her anyway.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says. They’ll need those supplies for the road. “Get up.”

Jaime bobs his head. He doesn’t actually obey. He’s indistinct. When she moves forward, out of the door, morning light slips in around her and she can see the sharp plains of his face. He’s dry eyed, squinting up at her.

“I’m sorry, Brienne; I gave the horse to Arya.” Brienne looks up at the warrior. The warrior has his sword in his big square fist. She loosens her grip on the hilt of her own sword in her own rough hand.

“What were you going to do?” He looks away, down at the gold hand, disguised beneath his gloves.

“You know, I haven’t the faintest idea,” he says. He turns the hand. There’s not enough light in here that it would be anything but dull. “I thought I should die in that city as it burned at last. I thought I should save them all, all over again. Kinslayer: kingslayer: I’ve been drilling.” He snorts. “If she does it,” he says, “I’ve done it.”

“You can’t be so stupid as to believe that,” Brienne says. He tips his head back and smiles at her. She can see his teeth quite clearly in the gloom.

“Did Sansa think it meant wildfire?” Brienne frowns and he squints at her. “Brienne I can’t see your face against the light. Do you think it means wildfire?”

“Sansa thought the same,” Brienne tells him. “I think the same.” Jaime chokes out a breath that might pass for silent if the morning wasn’t so still. He puts his head into his hands and this time he stays down. He’s not crying, she doesn’t think. She crouches down anyway, but she doesn’t know if he wants her any closer. He hadn’t come back to the room yet. The point of Oathkeeper’s scabbard hisses along the floor. He jerks his head up again.

“Does Sansa have some plan? I can’t think of anything more than what I already gave you, what you already had.”

“Yes. They’ve begun already.” He sags against the warrior.

“I let those barrels sit under the city, growing more potent with every passing year of cowardice and inertia. What if some idiot child had slipped down there with a torch?”

“You were seventeen,” says Brienne, “Get up, Jaime.”

Jaime struggles up to match her crouch. He rubs at his legs. The floor is ice cold. He unbuckles one of the saddlebags, produces a skin of wine and levers himself stiffly up to his feet.

“I was a knight, Kingsguard, a Lannister, Lord Commander. I led the king’s armies for a time. It was our city, and now we’ll have fulfilled the Mad King’s last command between us. And all those people will die for nothing, because they say this one really is immune to fire and I believe them. We’ll all just carry on over the ashes.” He flips the wineskin open awkwardly, one handed. “What a beginning to a new Targaryen age. Will you drink to it?” He holds the wine skin out to her. She stands, snatches it, flips the stopper back and shoves it into her belt. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with his empty hands. “He was so alone,” he says. “He was lonely and crueler than Cersei ever was with less cause. He had his sister, almost until the end.”

“She’s killed more of her people than the mad king ever did,” Brienne says, as brutally as she can, “Jaime, she would have razed the Sept if you’d been there. She would have done it with you inside.”

“She didn’t have me killed when she would have had to watch.” He looks revolted, sweeping his foot to kick the saddle bags back into the warrior’s plinth. “Then again,” he says, “I didn’t really betray her until it meant nothing to anyone else.” It had meant something to Brienne, although it isn’t anything she wants to hold up proudly to the light.

“It meant something to Tyrion,” she says. “It will have meant something to Edmure Tully and-.” He waves her away.

“Who is going to push the sword through her back?” he asks. “Qyburn? He’s her pyromancer. The mountain? The last of the knights she kept for their weak-mindedness? That mad Greyjoy? There won’t be any city to sack if the gates fall and she can ensure no one triumphs in her defeat. There’s so much down there.” The warrior looms large behind him, brow furrowed like her own. Jaime drifts closer. She can’t think of anything to say, so he just keeps on talking. “Arya’s taken it all. A mercy. I thought-. Even without Joff’s sword.” He shudders. “We’re both too cowardly to do it. A knight could do it. Someone with any rage. I thought: I’m going to lie in bed giving Tarth children while King’s Landing finally burns. It’s awful. I shouldn’t get to live like this.“ Brienne turns to stare down at him unhappily.

“It’s my decision,” she says, “I won’t have you questioning it.” The twitch of his mouth almost looks like real a smile.

“Tyrion said this was freedom. It feels as selfish as the rest ever did.”

“You’re not free,” she says. “You promised.”

“I’ve promised nothing.”

Disturbed, a tiny creature scuttles away into the gloom. Brienne jumps with her blade half out, like some nervy maid, thinking of severed, scuttling limbs. Jaime whirls about, trying to track the sound. Watching him twist absurdly, she feels true relief begin to settle into her bones. If there are gulls and mice, maybe one of the hunters traps will be closed, and tomorrow, maybe two. She snags hold of his arm as he passes and reels him in. They need to be getting back to Sansa.

“You’re not a coward,” she says, even though she’s repeating herself. She tries out confessing something new: “It meant something to me,” she says. “I don’t like that it did. But it meant something to me. Not only for Riverrun and the girls.”

“Don’t start worrying again,” he says severely. “You’re a ridiculously perfect person, but you’re a person. You made sure the guards knew me. You gave me that bloody sword back.” She hadn’t been priming him to leave, she’d been trying to find the balance of the blade.

“I thought you’d gone,” she says.

“I thought about going,” he says. Brienne steps back from him and puts a hand in her belt, rather than put it on her sword.

“Why didn’t you?” She means, did Arya catch you and was she kind enough not to keep her promise.

“I didn’t want to,” he says, still moving, strangely childish. “I sat in the stall with the horse until she found me.” He rearranges himself and stills. “It wasn’t my place,” he says. “I can’t do anything but fuck it up further. I might actually get to do some good again, so long as you’ll let me stay with you.”

“Jaime,” she says tiredly.

“No guards really saw me. The boys in the stables won’t think anything of it. Arya knows, and you know, so Sansa knows, but this shouldn’t stain your reputation any more than the general association already has.”

“All you did was sit in the stables and the sept,” Brienne points out and his shoulders sag.

“Well I am sorry for it. I’m sorry for all of this. For all the good that sorry can do for something like this.”

She strokes at this shoulders and the side of his face, trying to be comforting. Someone will have to tell Tyrion about Cersei as well. She thinks Tyrion will struggle with it less. Someone will have to tell their aunt.

“Presumably Lady Sansa will be unhappy about this.”

“That you were upset?” He very clearly want to deny it. It is understandable that he would be upset. There’s no shame in it and Sansa will understand. “We didn’t tell Sansa that I thought you were gone,” she says.

”Brienne,” he says.

“I tried to,” she says. “There wasn’t time.”

He steps into her and puts his face into the fur on her shoulder and his hands into the fur at her sides. She wraps her arms over his shoulders and puts her cheek on his hair.

“Are you alright?” he asks. When she doesn’t reply, he says, “Do you need to call any dogs off? It’s cold out there if they bothered to send anyone out.”

“We’ll go to Sansa now,” she says. She thinks Pod might be waiting outside in the snow. She thinks Clegane might have know what she was thinking. He doesn’t query it. He pulls away to drop to his knees in front of the warrior to re-buckle his saddle bag. She didn’t kneel to him before she was knighted and it feels late to do it now.

“What should I say to Sansa?”

“Give her the truth to whatever she asks,” she says. She throws the wine skin at Jaime, gently. He stares at it, sighs and then works the buckle open again under the eyes of the gods.

“I’m glad we didn’t marry here,” he says. Brienne agrees. All the seven stare out at her, tall, for a little northern sept built for one southern woman. With their crude, blocky shapes, each of the gods is still perfectly recognisable, although the father, smith and warrior have all been given the same broad shape and the same beard. In the great septs of the south, it is easy to forget that these are god in seven aspects. Here, close and small, dark wood in a grey room, they merge.

“So am I,” she says. She’s glad there was no septon. Jaime is finished, but he doesn’t get up.

“These statues are riddled with rot,” he says. He turns to look up at her. The stranger’s ribs stand painfully pronounced. The crone is hunched with little care in her carving, curly chunks of the maiden’s long hair trail past her extremely cold looking bare neck. The mother’s face is softly made, as though the craftsman had taken extra time with her. Now Brienne looks she can see the decay. She’ll warn Sansa; even if no one prays to them now, they were her mother’s.

Standing looks easy this time. He looks better than she feels, shaking off the stiffness.

“Your father, what else did he write?” She wants to share this. She’s been holding it to her chest. “He said that I was missed. He said that I’d always be welcome home.” His eyebrows fold up and in, sincere in his relief for her. He’s really smiling, albeit tiredly.

“You’ll go home to them?” He throws the saddlebags over his shoulder and reaches for her.

“I want us to leave tomorrow, first light,” she says. He blinks at her. “Sansa said you could come with me,” she adds. She thinks that’s all the available information. Jaime’s mouth softens, and she remembers that she does have more. “Podrick is coming too, and she’ll give us a letter with her name that will help if we’re stopped. She understood my concerns. The sellswords will pass back through as my father says. If we leave now, we can avoid the queen’s army and be there before they reach King’s Landing.”

“White Harbour?” he says, “It would have been the fastest, before all this.”

“Sansa is going to give me the information she has, but we don’t have any money for a ship.”

“Right.” He winces. He doesn’t look like he’s just been told they can leave. He’s still difficult, she decides. He wanted to be married, he wanted to know when they would go. Although, standing in the courtyard, looking at the fading tracks in the snow, she thinks she’d remembered. She tugs him into movement, wanting to take him out of the damp and into the fresh, cold air.

Clegane is outside Sansa’s door, striding along and buckling on his sword belt, his thick cloak over his shoulders. He stops when he sees them.

“Thank fuck for that,” he says, grabbing the sheath of his sword and letting the belt fall away. “I’m going to eat.” He shoulders between them, forcing Jaime to step neatly aside. What had Clegane been going to do? She doesn’t want to think about it. Surely they don’t think Jaime dangerous enough for it to be worth sending the Hound after him in this weather. She looks back at Jaime, reassuring herself as she hits her fist on Sansa’s door. Jaime is looking after Clegane consideringly. Pod is still lurking behind her, looking sick.

“I know you’re not my squire,” Brienne says.

“No, I’ll do it. I’ll get everything ready,” says Pod, but he still doesn’t actually go.

Sansa opens the door herself, just as Jaime knocks his shoulder into Brienne’s. Sansa’s posture relaxes.

“Someone needs to go after Clegane.”

“He saw us,” says Brienne and Sansa relaxes further.

“Ser Podrick,” says Jaime lightly. He taps Pod’s hip as he passes and leaves him, glaring a little, with the saddle bags outside the door. Sansa gestures them towards the chairs by the fire. Brienne sits heavily. Jaime stays standing. Sansa rolls her eyes at him.

“I apologise, my lady. I was in the Sept.” Something complicated happens to Sansa’s forehead. She turns to look at Brienne.

“He was in the Sept,” she confirms.

“Were you praying?” Sansa says to him, disbelieving. Jaime stiffens. “No,” she says, “I don’t want to know. Brienne, let’s discuss what you will need before you leave.” Sansa settles herself into her chair by the fire, arranging her skirts. Jaime turns careful eyes towards Brienne.

“The letter, my lady?” Brienne asks Sansa.

“On the desk.” Brienne nods him towards it.

“I left Podrick with instructions to ask for supplies,” she tells Sansa, sitting opposite her.

“I can give you some money with my letter. Is there anything else you need?”

“Yes,” Brienne says. “My lady, Jaime no longer has a horse.” Jaime puts the letter very carefully back on the desk.

“What happened to that beautiful animal you came in on,” Sansa says turning to him, consternation on her face.

“I gave it to Arya,” he says, placing the letter very carefully back on the desk.

Sansa says, clipped, “When?”

“Just now.”

Sansa says, “I too like to pray with my horse,” and turns back to address Brienne, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Ask the stable hands to let you look at ours. I’m not sure we have anything quite so impressive but you may take anything except the horses being trained for Bran.” Jaime passes a hand over his relieved face. He thanks Sansa, formally, with a little bow, even though she isn’t looking at him.

Then into the awkward quiet that follows, he says, “I’ll go and help Podrick, if you’ll dismiss me?”

“Yes, of course,” says Sansa. Brienne nods him away. He twitches an tight little smile at her as he passes and when the last flutter of his cloak disappears and the door shuts behind him, Brienne realises she has pivoted in her seat to keep her eyes on him until the last moment. She snaps back to the fire and flushes a little at Sansa’s look.

“I’ll miss you, Ser Brienne,” says Sansa. Brienne nods vigorously.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been much use to you, these last few days.”

Sansa shakes her head and says, “Everything is as much in order as it possibly can be. You’ve been part of that, Brienne. Thank you for your service. Thank you for everything.”

“I’m sorry you needed to spy on me,” Brienne says. Sansa slumps back in her chair.

“I hoped you hadn’t noticed,” she says. “I apologise. After you spoke to me about Jaime, I explicitly told Arya to stop orchestrating that,” she says.

Brienne says, “She told me about the-.” She puts her fingers up to her hairline.

“Ah,” says Sansa. “Then I told her to stop doing that. I forbade her from going through your room.” Brienne feels her heart contract and then relax. She’d made her peace with the idea, but the relief is powerful.

“Does he know?” says Sansa, as though she cannot help herself. “Does Podrick Payne?”

“Only Jaime,” Brienne says. “But it was Arya who told him, not me. My lady, could I write to you from Tarth?”

“Yes,” says Sansa immediately. “I’d like that. I’ll write back.”

Brienne stands quickly, although she couldn’t say why.

“If you ever need anything,” she says. “I know it’s a long way, but I swore-.” Sansa stands too.

“You must know that you’ll always be welcome here. You can always come back.” She reaches for Brienne’s hand and looks up at her very seriously.

“Thank you, my lady.” Brienne grips her tightly before letting go. She steps back smartly and bows.

“Will I see you before we go?” she asks.

Sansa presses her fingers over her eyes. “Brienne, there is so much work still to do. Please sit down.”

Brienne makes her way back out into the courtyard, taking the longest route back to her room. The caress of the cold air is welcome; her eyes ache from poring over tightly written scrolls. She has all the most current information she could possibly retain to help get them safely through Westeros. It might have been more efficient to do it with Pod and Jaime there, but she can fill them in. It’s a still early in the afternoon, the snow stopped and all sound is bright and clear. There’s not enough light left to leave today.

Pod is flat out and buried in the blankets. Jaime is sat by the high fire, boots still on, chin tucked into his shoulder, asleep in the chair. He blinks awake when when she clicks the door softly closed.

“Don’t get up,” she murmurs, holding out a quieting hand and glancing at the still shape of Pod. She can put her own cloak away. He pauses, balanced on the edge of the chair.

“I found a horse and a sword,” he says quietly, looking up at her. “What did Sansa say?”

“We leave in the morning.” He nods seriously.

“The new sword’s over the desk,” he says, eyes shadowing her as she lays her cloak next to his and Pod’s. She goes through the ritual of unbuckling Oathkeeper and laying it out, taking off her gloves so as to get a better feel of the new sword with it’s unadorned, leather wrapped hilt.

She sets it down, carefully straight. It’s a perfectly good, practical sword. It’s well balanced, not too poorly maintained, and newly sharpened. She’s not sure it suits him. It looks strikingly plain next to his knives.

She sheds her jacket, sitting on the chest to pull off her boots. She drifts across to stand over him.

“No one taught Pod to throw a decent punch,” he says. Her eyebrows jump and then she tries to tip his face to check for injury. He waves her away. “He tried to hit me. He tried,” he repeats, quelling, when she frowns. “He swung at me when I wasn’t expecting it, so I moved.”

“It wasn’t any good at all?” she says.

“It was passable,” says Jaime. “It might be indelicate if I try to show him. At least for a little while.”

“I’ll do it,” Brienne says. “He suggested we ride after you and he didn't go to tell Sansa when I asked him to. What did you say to him?” Pod hadn’t meant the part about the killing Jaime, she’s quite sure.

“I told him you could kill me,” he says. He still sounds quite serene about this assumption. Pleased by it, almost. “I said that she’d as good as promised you, but that you wouldn’t need Arya to do it.” Brienne supposes that is a different type of trust. To do for him what he can’t do for Cersei.

“What? If you decide to fire a whole city?” He flinches. The absurdity of it. She drops her hands onto his shoulders and, very gently, she jerks him back and forth on the chair. Brienne lets herself brush a thumb through the ends of his hair. She hadn’t been very effective at stopping him from riding south, but it’s not so difficult she finds, here where it’s all entirely in abstract. She forces herself to look at him, and she thinks about it; his life for all of little Tarth, his life for half a million people she doesn’t know. She’d give up her own life too. Her father’s. She finds herself queasily avoiding the idea of Pod. But that isn’t the question. She thinks she’d be angry enough to do it; it’s so alien to everything she knows about him. Jaime’s eyes widen the longer she worries at it. She can feel the minute drop of his jaw under her hands. “I’m never going to need to find out,” Brienne says, with complete certainty. Jaime’s hand lands warm on her hip.

“Does the sword pass muster?” he asks, mercifully.

“It’s a perfectly fine sword,” she attempts. He grins a little, supremely unconvinced.

They’re careful climbing into bed, but Pod still groans and rolls further away as Jaime slides down next to him. He takes a whole fur with him. They lie, shoulders pressed together, listening to Pod sniff his way back to sleep. Brienne turns onto her side and Jaime mirrors her. Cautiously, he tips his chin forwards until their noses are almost touching.

“We have better swords on Tarth,” she says. They can find him something lighter and finer. He pulls a mock sorrowful face.

“I thought you were pretending to admire it,” he says. Then, “It was the best that I could find. I left Sansa her finest horses and yours still may not keep up. What did happen to the two I gave you at King’s Landing?”

“Pod didn’t hobble them correctly,” says Brienne. Pod shifts behind Jaime. “I didn’t show him how to hobble them correctly.”

“Ah,” says Jaime. “I’ve been in such suspense, but that’s a less interesting story than I had hoped. No pirates.”

Brienne says, “Walking the length of Westeros isn’t very interesting, day to day.”

“Well you’ll have my company to delight you both,” says Jaime. “I’ll be in better spirits this time. Far less foul, I promise.” Pod stops pretending to be asleep and turns over onto his back.

“I asked Sansa about northern marriages,” she says. Jaime swallows and Pod stops moving again, like he’s trying to pretend he didn’t start.

“What do they promise?” Jaime says, immediately.

“Nothing,” she says. “They ask the woman if she’ll have the man, and she says she will. The rest is about the gods. You need both fathers, or something like them, for witnesses.”

“Well that’s nonsense,” says Jaime. “I'm not inflicting anyone related to me on your father, especially when you've already got it all worked out. Pod? Brienne has decided to have me, obviously,” says Jaime. “She's promised to take me with her, back to Tarth. I'm hers. You heard that?”

“Yes,” says Pod, “I’ll witness it. I’m a knight. I’m very respectable.”

“Thanks,” says Jaime, dryly. “You told Sansa too.”

“We aren’t the only ones,” says Brienne. “She’s going to make announcements at dinner. She wants to keep everyone’s spirits up and she’s collecting the names in her writing. It’s mostly wildlings and women left to witness, but they’ll all know.”

“Free Folk,” says Pod.

“Free Folk,” she agrees. Jaime kisses the words in her mouth. Then he rips himself away and sits up. He’s smiling wide, with teeth and no edge.

“Ser Podrick,” he says, leaning over him and grasping his shoulder. “I’ll look after the horses, but let me show you where to put your feet when you want to hit someone.” Pod groans and puts an arm over his face.

“I know it was bad,” he says. “I knew how to do it before all the sword practice.”

“Pod,” says Brienne. “You don’t need to make excuses. It’s a thing many people do poorly.”

Pod says, “We should sleep while we can.”

“Don’t worry,” says Jaime, with some satisfaction. “We’ve got a long walk ahead of us. We’ll find time.”

Two days out from Winterfell, on top of a ridge that makes it very clear they are completely alone, Pod produces a whistle. They’ve stopped, because they’ve been walking since before daybreak, and because they’ve been climbing pretty much the whole time, gradually in the way that wears you down slowly. Brienne doesn’t feel too bad, for day two of a long march. Her feet never had time to soften. She can keep going until nightfall, so long as there aren’t any distractions.

Jaime says, “Where did you get a whistle?”

“It’s a flute,” says Pod. Pod looks at her, before he blows onto it experimentally. Brienne isn’t going to object if he wants to play, but she’s pretty sure that’s a whistle. Pod runs his fingers up and down six notes, adds his thumb to the back and runs down six more at a different pitch. He takes his mouth away and looks at it consideringly. “He said he was making a flute.” He looks less convinced now. He puffs air into it again. Brienne screws up her face and turns to Jaime, who looks equally pained. Pod puffs again.

“Let’s keep going,” she says.

The incline is steep enough on the way down that they’re all quiet, concentrating on the horses. But when the ground evens out and it’s just a long trudge over white moorland as far as the eye can see, Pod hands off his horse to Jaime, gets out the whistle and trails along behind them. Snatches of half familiar, half mangled songs follow them as the icy snow crunches and pops beneath their feet. Brienne thinks that if he’s got the breath to play, then they could be moving faster. She picks up the pace. They’d agreed on the first night to head for the fishing towns past White Harbour, and hope that there are people there who recognise Sansa’s name, still have use for money, and don’t know what Jaime looks like.

Jaime picks up the tune of the drinking song that Pod is fumbling through. His voice isn’t bad, although he’s breathing too hard for her to really tell. It’s not so good that she has to stop and kill him, at least. It’s a little airy, and with too many breaks to breathe in the middle of muddied lines. He can’t manage two lead lines well, because Arya’s horse doesn’t like Pod’s and they snort and sulk if they have to walk beside each other. He’s got one line wrapped around his right elbow and pressed into his chest with his wrist. Brienne disentangles it, takes Pod’s horse and walks out ahead. Pod gives up playing, unable to catch his breath long enough to sustain a note, and starts singing quietly too. Brienne lets her pace drag a little. They’re making good progress today. The song clarifies itself; it’s about drinking yourself to death. The song gallops faster into chaos and sniggering.

“Should we stop?” Pod calls up to her.

“Perhaps something different,” suggest Brienne.

“Any requests?” says Jaime, sounding game enough. All the songs Brienne likes are never-ending ballads about dead heroes or sentimental songs about morning skies and lonely mountains.

“Something new,” she says. Pod scrambles to catch up with her and take his horse back. She can see trees on the horizon, and the sun is sweeping low, behind the clouds, flushing the snow with colour. It will be a clear day tomorrow.

“I know a song for washing clothes,” Pod says. “From the women in King’s Landing. It’s got a good rhythm for walking or working.”

“Will it get us to that tree line?” says Jaime.

“It’s got an optional few verses about stealing your lady’s best underthings and seducing a provincial lord’s jester,” says Pod. Jaime laughs and turns to Brienne.

Brienne says, “Teach us then.” Her singing voice turns out to be scratchy, and even when she concentrates, she can’t get above much more than a whisper without hitting an abrasive tone that sounds horn-like to her own ears, but it’s a simple enough to pick up the chorus. Jaime and Pod both look delighted that she’s deigned to join in, so she can’t bring herself to feel too self-conscious. She’ll get better as she practices. She’ll stay for the songs by the fire, if there are any songs on Tarth.