Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

They drag each other up the steps of the maester’s tower. Brienne feels too light without her armour. She might not have left footprints in the snow outside. Dead perhaps, after all. Except the dead are so heavy. Jaime is light. She has his wrist clutched in her hand. The sweeping currents of her exhaustion drag them onwards and not under.

Jaime presses his forehead to the door they find at the top of the icy grey steps. Brienne turns a little, to guard his back. She has to release his wrist to do it. He knocks.

“Ser Brienne of Tarth needs to send a message,” he calls.

His voice is somehow smooth. Brienne’s throat is raw. Jaime doesn’t wait for a response, he simply shoves the door open, ducks through the low frame, staggering, and then he bows her through.

“My lady,” he says, and Brienne glides past him, increasingly disconnected from the reality of his presence, stunned by the warmth of the room.

Samwell Tarly is sat alone by the fire, wiping furiously at his face. Brienne steps backwards into Jaime.

“We don’t have ravens to use frivolously,” Tarly says, and Brienne observes the heave of his shoulders with distant sympathy. Pod had cried, silently and furiously, tears smearing the gore ground into his face, before he had fallen asleep curled up against Tyrion’s chair. Seeing it had carved out what remained of her desire to sleep.

“My lord,” says Jaime, tiredly, and Tarly jerks around, surprised to be confronted with Jaime Lannister or unaccustomed to the title, Brienne cannot tell. He softens when he sees the two of them pressed together, taking in their stained clothes. They surely stink. Brienne can’t tell. Tarly is clean and fresh. He must have been one of the first into the hot springs.

“You were in command, out there at the front,” he says to Brienne, scrubbing at his face and neck again. It’s not a question.

Brienne nods and grates out, through her aching throat, “Yes. But we were both there. Yes.”

Jaime had been shouting commands to the archers. A man from the Vale had taken the initiative to begin dragging injured men into one of the towers. Likely that was normal in a full scale battle. She can ask Jaime, if she still cares, on some other day. But yes, she had readied the men and commanded them.

Tarly’s face cracks and he jerks his head towards a desk with a stack of carefully cut sheets of parchment.

Brienne falls on them. Father, she writes, and the rest comes spilling out of her.

Indistinctly she hears Jaime lightly ask to send something of his own and Tarly’s low refusal. He comes to slump to the floor against the desk and she feels the faint weight of his gloved gold hand over the ankle of her boot.

Brienne writes, her hand too clumsy to keep her letters elegant like her father taught her. She fills every available slither of the scroll. Afterwards, it feels even more unreal. She hasn’t allowed herself to think about home in such a long time. That this letter will find a way to the place she remembers as Tarth feels as unlikely as their having survived the battle. She blinked herself into a dream when they found Sansa alive in the crypts.

“Will you be able to sleep now?” Jaime asks her, tilting back his head to look at her and pulling back his hand. “Could you try to sleep before the feasting?”

She looks down at his grubby face and the red exhaustion shot through his eyes.

“Who did you want to write to?” They’d found Tyrion next to Sansa.

He hesitates and then says, “An aunt. Although I’m not certain I know where she is.”

Brienne doesn’t even know if her father is alive. Her clothes are filthy where rotting men tore at her. Her head pounds with tiredness. How absurd, not to have written sooner.

“Let him send something,” she says to Tarly, watching Jaime’s face fall open for her. “He fought for us. What harm could it do?”

Tarly hesitates, but he nods jerkily again when she looks at him, wet around the eyes once more. Brienne is seized by the impulse to tell him to go to the woman and child she’s seen him with, here in Winterfell. Maester’s shouldn’t continue their families. They take vows. But he’s not wearing robes, and it’s a strange world where men you commanded to their deaths climb heavily back up onto their feet and come at you with their hands.

She looks back at Jaime, dragging himself up. They clutch at each other, swapping places, Jaime scratching deliberately at his slip of paper and Brienne sitting on the floor, awkwardly manoeuvring the length of Oathkeeper on her belt and picking at the ruby red eyes of the lion on the pommel. She doesn’t read over the letter in her lap.

“Do you need to see this?” Jaime asks her. Brienne imagines him reading her still wet words to her father with a sick tilt of her stomach.

“No,” she says, and lets herself bask - just in this warm little space outside of the world - in the wide gratitude in his green eyes. No one has taken his sword again after the battle. She can let him write private words to some beloved aunt. They stay to watch the ink dry, silent and drifting in the heat. She doesn’t want Samwell Tarly glancing over her letter as he seals it.

Outside they have to pick their way past so many dead men to reach the Great Keep. She thinks there is someone singing, in the godswood or Lady Catelyn's sept. Some unfamiliar northern song. Yesterday the clumsy buildings inside the walls had not felt so small against the boiled bone wash of the sky. She relies on Jaime’s guiding presence under her arm. Warm in her northern cloak, she still wishes for the brilliance of Tarth in summertime, the sky mirroring the sea, not all this dirty snow. Two black shapes dart overhead and she drags Jaime to a stumbling halt, staring up at them. She blinks away the inky silhouette of dragons and watches their ravens fly.

When she looks at Jaime, he’s slipping away from her. Slightly absent in the way he had been immediately after the battle. Brienne had been so present them, dragging him and Podrick with her as she searched for the girls.

She touches the gorget still locked around his neck, saying, ‘Why is this not better fitted?” She is the only one armoured properly by the Lannister coffers, though his eyelashes are gold in the muted light. She wishes he would go back to talking incessantly. This isn’t how she had remembered him. She doesn’t know how to respond to all this watching. He only smiles at her, brittle and small, when her fingers curl inside the metal. She had laced Renly in and out of his armour, but she would never have reached out and touched him like she thinks Jaime might let her touch him now.

Very slowly, in this afterlife where they all lived and her feet don’t have to touch the dead ground, she tilts her chin down and touches the side of her face to his. His arms come up immediately inside her cloak. Tight. She cradles him in return. She hasn’t held someone like this since she left Tarth. He’s sharp in her arms. She gasps once into his hair, not a sob, dry and inelegant, and then she manages to swallow everything back down and crush it into the frozen ground. Jaime has turned his face into her and she can feel his breath, steady and warm against her freezing neck.

“Do you find the north hospitable?” asks Jaime in the fading light, four days after the battle. It’s the closest thing to a complaint she’s heard from him since he followed her out of the gates. It’s cautiously phrased, almost innocuous. She’s been waiting, as he drifts quietly in her wake, still wide eyed and watching, for the currents to change. She’s found herself struggling to reconcile, since he came to Winterfell, how similar he is to her sweetest imaginings, how different he is to her harshest.

“My lord,” says Pod, with quiet disapproval. Pod has shoved his gloved hands under his arms as he carefully watches Brienne demonstrate a particular stutter of her feet and the flex of the blunted sword in her hand. The air is biting, even protected as they are from the worst behind Winterfell’s squat walls. They’d been loath to remove their cloaks to practice and now they’re a tempting mass bundled in Jaime’s arms.

He and Podrick have been out in frozen fields, collecting and clearing charred bones and the ash that hasn’t been stollen by the winds. That first day, on the other side of the darkness, it had felt as though the men she had commanded would be clearing the dead until spring, but last night they lit the last of the pyres, sending black plumes of smoke up into the clear, star spotted sky. In the freezing courtyard the ground is clear of everything but snow covered stone debris. There are plenty of living men, their breath ghosting through the air.

Brienne had walked out to collect Pod and Jaime from the work, to act as escort but also because once Sansa had retired to her rooms she found could not bear to be alone. It was the first time, she had realised once she saw the dull bones of the naked trees in the distance, since she ordered the retreat that she had been beyond the walls. She had been expecting some greenery. There was none. Even the evergreen ivy and forest scrub has fallen away into greys and browns.

“They treat you generously,” she says, “You feast and drink with them. Keep your voice down.”

Jaime shows her all his pretty teeth.

“I did not mean to insult your Lady Sansa, just the dismal grey land she has had the misfortune to inherit.”

Brienne stares at him narrowly, but he does not elaborate further. It’s nothing she has not thought herself - she does not remember thinking Winterfell so grey before the battle - but she has better manners than to voice such a thing aloud. He widens his eyes at her. Brienne nods to him and swings the sword sharply through the air. She has to consciously relax her grip so as not to teach Podrick poor habits.

She turns to engage Pod, “Here, Podrick,” she says, sliding her blade along his and twisting, shoving into his space, “feel how you lose control of the sword?”

Podrick stumbles back, gathers himself and runs the drill back at her. Brienne shakes her head and demonstrates again. His movements are sluggish, his eyes are tired and his face is still bruised. Neither of them is sleeping well. She had thought about knighting him in the wine-soaked hours after the victory feast. It would be a shaky chain of legitimacy. Knighted by a woman-knight who was knighted by the Kingslayer. It would be better if she could have the queen do it. She wonders if he will feel he must leave once he has the honour; some of his house must still be alive out there, even if they end up on the other side of this next fight. She wants him to be as prepared and equipped as it is in her power to make him when he goes. They repeat and repeat the drill. She’ll have him safe.

Jaime is shifting his weight in rhythm with their steps. It’s an almost invisible swaying. He’s reversed the pattern, she sees; mirrored, left shoulder tilted forwards. Pod’s movements grow increasingly confident, and Brienne lets him bask in his own cleverness for a few turns before she catches his sword early and trips him as he continues mindlessly, completing ritual steps in the dance. She catches him before he hits the frozen mud.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” she warns and she turns away from Pod’s rueful smile to catch Jaime’s laughing eyes. He’s watched them every day since the battle, finding them in the mornings and then remaining with Pod when she leaves to find Sansa. When she returns in the evenings leaving Sansa occupied with larger politics, he’s still there. He’s waiting. He’s softer than she remembered.

“You could train with us,” she offers, trying to stand casually, pretending to look at the blunt sword in her hand. When she is frustrated, she likes to train. It is a practice that has followed her from home. It's a good one. She would share it.

Jaime’s eyes dart immediately towards the nearest cluster of men. They’re muttering to each other as they sort through piles of recovered weaponry and armour. A not inconsiderable number of the north-men turned to watch them when they began. Brienne will concede that the attention had not been friendly, but it had been silent, and really that is a blessing not to be dismissed.

“I think not,” he says.

“We could find somewhere quieter,” Pod says hopefully.

Jaime should train. His sword work is so much smoother than Brienne had expected. Based on her admittedly muddled memories of the battle, he’d understood her, anticipated her. She’d had someone at her back. It had been unlike any other fight. Jaime needs to be drilling. They all need to be drilling. They’re all alive and she’d like them to stay that way.

“Podrick could use a fresh perspective in his training.”

Jaime quirks a skeptical eyebrow.

Pod rushes in, “You were trained by Ser Arthur Dayne, yes? And Ser Barristan Selmy.” Jaime has been with Pod almost every waking hour since the battle. She understands that Jaime has been telling stories.

“You are trained by Ser Brienne of Tarth,” says Jaime, narrowly.

Pod, half amused and half affronted, reassures, “Just variety. That’s always good. Not better or anything.”

“No,” says Jaime, “not better.”

“He really could use another eye,” says Brienne, coming closer, so that he can answer without the possibility of being overheard, “we should all do our best to help each other.”

Jaime is looking at her again, she can tell. Renly and Loras used to gaze at each other sometimes, on and on, it sometimes became a little annoying. She is quite determined not to make such a spectacle of herself without better cause than that which she currently has. She watches her own grip on the poorly balanced blade. It will be the look he wore when she named the sword. The look he wore when he knighted her. Her face is already flushed from the cold.

“Not out here in the courtyard,” Jaime says, wary, and Brienne feels victory warm in her gut. It’s not a bad idea to be cautious. No one has taken his sword from him again, but even Brienne feels as though perhaps somebody should. The agreement had been that he would join them in the fight against the dead, nothing further had been broached. Today, the castle’s activity turned back towards preparation. The war he came to fight passed in a night. Thoughts are turning south. She can’t quite catch the quick flutter of wings in her throat.

This morning Sansa had discovered that the castle guard have been determinedly manning each of the gates and leaving the gaping hole in the walls entirely unattended. Jaime has been outside the walls and all over the castle every day with Pod, moving the fallen to their pyres. He’s not been going to Tyrion after Brienne retires at night. He’s no one's responsibility except maybe hers. He must have known. He could have left easily in the chaos. Sansa had put her head in her hands for a moment after the reporting man left. Brienne had felt she might do the same.

“We could clear enough floor space in my quarters for some simple drills,” she offers.

“Your-?” he begins, his eyebrows climbing. She barely has time to twitch into a frown. He swallows whatever it was and blinks at her apologetically.

The dragons start screeching distantly. They like to fly and scream at first and last light like monstrous, safeguarding songbirds. They all turn their faces up, sunset streaking what feels like the first colour she’s seen in days through the sky. The dragons don’t pass above the courtyard.

“We’ll begin tomorrow?” says Podrick, attention wandering back to the keep. Soon there will be food in the main hall.

Jaime nods to her. She thinks there’s something like anticipation in his eyes. The sky might be red, but the light is staining him softly pink. He’s shivering.

“Put one of our cloaks on if you’re just going to stand there doing nothing,” she tells him.

She turns back to Podrick who is rubbing at his eyes, shoulders rounded.

“Let’s make the most of the last light,” she tells Pod, squaring up. Pod rotates his shoulders and raises his blunted sword.

After the first pass, Brienne separates to let Pod strategise again and circles him. Jaime has Oathkeeper gathered under his right arm and is battling fur with the other.

She steps quickly and knocks Pod’s sword efficiently from his hand. He stares down at it, utterly dismayed.

She waits a moment and then hisses, “Help him,” as quietly as possible. Pod glances over at Jaime. He’s going to drop the sword or, more importantly, the cloaks. The ground is not dry or clean.

“If you want to put your cloak around him, my lady, you shouldn’t ask me to do it for you,” he replies. Then, worse, he looks like he’s going to die of remorse at her flush. The bruising on his face looks ghastly when he screws his face up like that.

“Just hold Oathkeeper and the cloak,” she snaps, “please, Podrick.”

“Alright,” he says, “I’m sorry, my lady.” He tips slightly on his feet for a moment. Brienne reaches out to right him, concerned, but he catches himself.

“These furs weigh as much as I do,” Jaime says, when Pod takes the extra burden from him, quiet frustration in his voice. He swings the remaining cloak around himself easily enough and throws the extra back over his arm. He takes Oathkeeper and her sword belt back and tucks them away inside the fur.

“Let’s get on with it,” Brienne calls, trying not to look at Jaime. She watches Pod instead, intently, but he seems steady enough now, moving assuredly to catch up his sword. He’s just pale and tired. They’re all that.

She glances sidelong at Jaime. It’s her cloak. Pod’s is darker around the neck and shorter too. Jaime is looking at her again. He nods his thanks. Pod is scrutinising her with his kind eyes. Brienne flexes her sword arm. She’s only been standing and walking behind Sansa all day. She’s done far more with far less rest and comfort. It’s Pod who has really been working. Still, he squares up, looking determined.

She taps her sword to Pod’s. She loses herself in movement and the puzzle of giving Pod a challenge and not a beating.

“I see you’re finding yourself at home here,” Jon Snow says, voice emerging from the darkness that has fallen. She turns and finds him eyeing the fur around Jaime’s shoulders.

“Lord Snow,” Jaime says, tightly. Jon Snow’s face twitches at the title.

He says flatly, “I can’t say I wouldn’t have preferred never to set eyes on you again, but I do respect that you came north to die with us.” Jaime - Brienne gives thanks to all the gods - keeps his mouth shut. “But, my sister and I, we’d like to speak with you.”

Brienne wants to interrupt, but she doesn’t quite dare, unable to follow it up with any title, still not knowing what would be right. Sansa only calls him Jon. Lack of deference would feel strange, but he’s neither king anymore, Sansa says, nor Eddard Stark’s heir until the queen legitimises him, when presumably she will marry him. He’s not even straightforwardly alive; he was brought back by the woman whose magic Stannis used to kill Lord Renly.

And who is she, to demand information about Jaime. She vouched for him, yes. But her command ended with the night king’s death. He’s neither her soldier, subject, lord, nor her family. Jaime has had a disagreement with Tyrion. She cannot imagine what could have made them want to be apart after that night, but she has not missed his knowing looks. Now she wishes he was here. Her heart is beating fast from the fight. Jaime half bows his consent, turning his eyes towards her.

“It will be now,” says Jon Snow, addressing her instead. Brienne draws herself together. “My sister requested I fetch you as well, ser, if you don’t mind waiting for your meal.”

She hurries to wrap her sword belt back around her waist and she takes her cloak from Jaime as well. Jon Snow watches the performance without comment. The fur is warm. Her cheeks are hot. Pod bunches his hands into his cloak and nods at her. She leaves the tourney swords with him.

The room Jon shows them to is not the room Sansa and the Starks have been using for their audiences. They climb up to the top of the keep, through the oldest, draughtiest staircases to Sansa’s own chambers. Brienne has seldom been here. It’s not like being Renly’s knight. Sansa has a woman here to help her with her hair and clothes and she’d looked after herself when they were at Castle Black and on the road. It’s not a knight’s place to help a lady with all that.

Jon ushers them into the unguarded room.

“Gods,” says Jon Snow, “why are we all here? That wasn’t what was agreed.”

Sansa twitches her mouth into a disappointed little line. The queen is standing by the fire with her unsullied commander, the spymaster, and the young woman who advises her by her side. Arya is reclined in one of the rickety chairs by the ornate table Sansa sits behind.

“Where is my brother?” Jaime demands, throwing up his chin, and then he struggles to compose his face.

Brienne tries to stand a respectful distance back from the rest of them while keeping both his and Sansa’s expressions properly in view. She tries not to crowd the Queen, feeling twice her height. Brienne has never been this close to her before. She has a vicious red graze running the length of her jaw. She looks like a person who rides dragons. She walks smartly forward to consider Jaime who suddenly lengthens his spine, rearing up. He hasn’t a scratch on him.

“You’re still here,” says Daenerys Targaryen, “Why?” There is a very long nervous moment in the close room where Brienne watches Jaime’s chest heave through fear, straight into anger. “I once thought that Drogon had burnt you right out of the world. It was rather satisfying. I have been idly imagining the inevitability of catching you on the road south.”

“Only idly?” asks Jaime.

“You charged him. With a spear.”

Brienne jerks, physically. She hadn’t known that. The queen’s spymaster folds his hands. The queen adds, explanatory, “I consider my dragons my family. My children.”

She sounds so hyperbolically severe that Brienne expects a joke to follow. Brienne tears her eyes from Jaime’s stupidly climbing eyebrows to see Sansa watching the two of them intently.

“A failed attempt,” Jaime says, through bared teeth, “age comes for us all.” Then he pinches his mouth closed.

Daenerys’ eyes light with triumph. Brienne wants to reach out and put her hands around his neck, finish him off before anyone else gets the chance to do it. This whole thing is a blatant attempt to throw him off guard, and he’s falling for it. She can really see, for the first time, that he spent all day sorting through the burnt bones of dead men.

“I said that I would wait until after the battle with the dead, and I have. Tomorrow I expect you to face me properly.”

“There will be a trial?” Brienne asks. Jaime’s eyes are wide as he glances up at her. She hadn’t meant to speak. She can feel the thickness of everyone’s attention. “Your grace,” she adds belatedly, mortified, somewhere underneath the rising tide of fear. She lets herself glance again to Sansa again who is avoiding her eye. This isn’t like before, there isn’t a clear recourse.

Daenerys doesn’t look at her, giving Jaime a smile that could almost be pleasant.

“Of sorts,” she says.

Jaime huffs his breath out of his nose, says imperiously, “I’ve lived through Targaryens before.”

“Is that a threat?” Jon Snow asks, suddenly present in a way Brienne has rarely seen from him, “You’re really in no position to be making threats.”

“Jon,” Sansa interrupts, finally rising from her chair, “Jon, the people need to see the two of you at dinner and we agreed that tonight we would just pose questions, not look for answers.”

“Jon asked him a question,” says the queen, but Jon steps back and acknowledges, “The people do need to see us.”

It looks like the thought of going to his people brings him no pleasure at all. Brienne’s father had always looked forward to visitors and feasts, to their bannermen, such that they were, being made welcome in their home. Jaime is their guest. They can’t just kill him.

“Thank you, Jon,” Sansa says, and she reaches across the table for him. He squeezes her hand, face lightening while he looks at her.

“You have tonight to consider how honest you wish to be with us.” Daenerys says to Jaime, before she dismisses him entirely.

She turns to catch Jon’s hand in hers for a quick moment too, stepping close to him before she sweeps out of the room with Jon and her carefully expressionless general and advisors following behind them.

Jaime swallows and, once the door has closed behind them, he says to Sansa for reasons Brienne cannot begin to comprehend, “My lady, you remind me of my sister.”

Sansa regards him coolly, but Brienne can see her hands flex in her lap. Arya who has been so still as to completely escape notice, suddenly puts a hand on the knife at her hip. Brienne sees Jaime’s right arm twitch reflexively.

“Arya, you get out too.”

Arya smirks and rises. She nods to Sansa from behind Jaime’s shoulder before she too slips from the room. Brienne is left alone with the two of them.

Jaime flicks his eyes towards her, chest moving only slightly, but still unnaturally quickly, and looks back to where Sansa is repositioning herself, straight-backed and alert in her chair. She’d seemed so tired when Brienne left her this afternoon.

“Take a seat,” Sansa says, and Jaime collapses into the chair Arya had vacated.

“Wine?” Sansa asks, already pouring him a cup.

Jaime takes it and looks at it skeptically. It’s not poisoned, thinks Brienne, insulted; Sansa wouldn’t.

“If I wanted you dead tonight, I would have allowed you to keep talking.” Sansa says dismissively, “I can’t say that it would be any particular tragedy to me if Jaime Lannister were to be eaten by a dragon,” - Jaime drinks the whole cup in two swallows - “but Jon and I agreed that you might be useful.”

Jaime’s face closes down, finally reaching composure and he sets the cup precisely back on the table. He’s not going to give them information that will hurt his sister, Brienne realises. He’s going to die for her after all. He consciously relaxes into the chair.

“I don’t need to tell you what we’ll ask,” says Sansa. “Think carefully tonight.”

Jaime does not straighten, Sansa does not bend.

“Is this the end of the puppet show? It was very good.” He jerks his head almost towards Brienne. Now his anger is turned inwards. Good. It has been poorly played on his part, even Brienne can see that. Sansa raises a discreet eyebrow at Brienne.

“I’m curious,” says Sansa, “what advice would you give to people wanting to survive Targaryens?”

Brienne’s breathing stills. Sansa is fixed on Jaime, who has brought his head up again.

“Trouble with your queen already, my lady?” he asks. Sansa waits him out. Jaime exhales, sinking back into his chair. “Charge her and her dragon with a spear?” he says flippantly. “Truthfully, I’ve no head for these things. Ask my brother, wherever he is.” There are teeth in that.

“Your brother loves her.”

“Not like yours.”

Sansa is sharp eyed. She pours him more wine.

“Why are you so afraid of her, specifically?” she asks.

“I’m not afraid,” he sneers, twitching in his seat.

“I’m as likely to pronounce you guilty of crimes against my family and order your death as she is,” Sansa says calmly, Brienne observes her carefully, and it occurs to her, that she does not know if Sansa has spoken with Bran. “Is it just the ghost of her father?”

Jaime rotates the cup against the table.

“I spoke to some of my men who are here at Winterfell.”

“They are not your men,” Sansa warns.

“They knelt to your queen, that’s true enough, after she burned Lord Randyll and Dickon Tarly in front of them, on the very same day that they were captured.”

Brienne had not known that either. The southern men do not speak to her, the northmen neither, not even these past days after the battle. She learnt long ago that if she goes about very quickly, with a hand on a sword, then no one can say anything unpleasant to her. It also means they never say anything at all. From Sansa’s careful expression, it seems likely that she had also been unaware of this.

Jaime picks up the cup again, “Do you know what her father did to your uncle and grandfather?”

He should just tell her about the wildfire. It will transform the way she sees him, Brienne knows it.

“Yes. My lord father said they were unjustly beheaded by a mad king,” says Sansa, Joffery’s frothing ghost suddenly in the room doubly, with his sword at Jaime’s hip.

“No,” says Jaime. “There was a trial by combat. You grandfather against the king’s fire. He boiled in his armour. They made your uncle watch with a long leash tied around his neck and a sword just out of reach. He died choking. They were not good deaths.” Sansa absorbs this information. “You didn’t know about the Tarlys. What has made you afraid of her?” Jaime asks.

“I don’t fear her,” says Sansa.

“Well,” says Jaime, “then neither do I.”

Sansa considers and then pours two more cups of wine. She nods for Brienne to sit, and passes her the cup. Brienne takes a cautious sip.

“I want names,” says Sansa, “who told you about the Tarlys.”

Jaime’s lips pinch. For the first time Sansa looks openly offended.

“I’m going to talk to them. Reassure them. Find out exactly what happened.”

Jaime lists the names, maps out the power structure of the few hundred surviving men.

“I’m surprised more of them haven’t slipped away in the night.” Sansa says, turning cold eyes up from her note taking. “Although they would only be abandoning us to die of exposure; once you’re this far north it’s difficult to hide and the cold is only going to get worse.” Jaime tips his untouched wine to her in acknowledgement.

“They see the dragons flying overhead every morning and evening. We all saw what they did for us during the battle. Who knows if the Queen is up there, looking.”

Sansa considers him again. “You are afraid. And I will acknowledge that there is sense in that. But she need not be her father. None of us are our parents.” He puts his cup down.

“That’s true enough. I am no Tywin Lannister.”

“No,” Sansa, with a pointed sweep of her eyes. It sounds like an insult. Jaime just smiles. “Ser Jaime, I must ask you to give me Joffery’s sword.”

He’s smooth and practised unbuckling the sword belt one handed and he lays it carefully on the table where Sansa does not touch it.

“I must also ask you to stay in the inner castle from now on. Please ask Brienne’s squire to accompany you on my behalf when you must leave your living quarters, particularly tonight. The men are going to be restless - there are to announcements this evening - and your presence will not help with discipline.”

Jaime bows his head to her again, his mouth thin, although this request will make no difference to his days.

“Finally,” she says, “I must thank you, for your courage in the battle and your service afterwards. I urge you to think carefully about what you are going to say tomorrow. You should share everything you can.”

He won’t lie, Brienne knows that with complete certainty, but he might just say nothing and burn for no practical reason at all: Varys’s birds never stop coming and going and Sansa gets more correspondence every day. He sets his jaw. She remembers the weight and warmth of Renly’s corpse in her arms. Jaime’s face replaced Renly’s in those nightmares long ago. She wishes she was less of a hopeful fool.

Jaime murmurs, “My lady,” and looks worriedly back at Brienne before he opens the door. She wants to go with him and lie down next to him and sleep.

She turns back to Sansa.

Sansa says, “I know you’re… fond of him.”

It sounds less like tact and more like a euphemism. She vouched for him, and now he feels like her responsibility, or rather just hers, for court if not in fact.

“Brienne, would you tell me, if there was anything I needed to know?” asks Sansa.

Sansa looks icily composed but underneath that Brienne thinks she has prepared for disappointment. She must know Brienne will not lie to her. She never swore to keep Jaime’s council, only Sansa’s and besides, this isn’t his secret. If he gets through tomorrow and it all comes tumbling down the very next day because they deceived Lady Catelyn’s children she won’t be able to stand it. She does not like to think herself a coward.

“My lady,” says Brienne into the quiet of the crackling fire, tearing it from her chest, “Ser Jaime pushed your brother from the tower window.”

Sansa screws her eyes closed and breathes out something that looks strangely like relief. The blue under her eyes has been a constant, but it’s more noticeable when she pinches them closed.

“Why did he admit this to you?” she asks.

“He confirmed Lady Catelyn’s accusation before she released him, years ago. I believe he wanted your mother to kill him: he thought the men of your brother’s camp would be coming for him that night. It did not change your mother’s determination to get you and sister back from the Lannisters.”

It looks as though every one of her words is draining vitality from Sansa’s face.

“Thank you, Brienne. It’s better to know than to suspect.” says Sansa, “Bran saw him with his sister then.” Brienne stares miserably at her tired, closed face.

“He’s spoken with Bran about it,” says Brienne, wavering suddenly on the edge of something that does feel like a breach of trust, breaking Jaime’s confidence and making an embarrassing play to mitigate his actions all at once. Sansa’s eyes snap open.

“Bran knows?” Now she looks betrayed. “He didn’t tell me.” Brienne feels too sick to speak again. Sansa pushes the ruby-studded sword away from herself. It’s so obviously the sister to the sword on Brienne’s belt.

“If they had been discovered then and King Robert had killed every last one of them, it would have spared my family so much pain,” Sansa says, fingers still hovering over the scabbard, “Yes, there were their children, but Joffrey was already a little monster. I was too trusting then to see any of it.”

Brienne frowns at her.

“You were a child, too,” she says.

“Yes, with stories of queens, their golden knights, and pretty princes in my heart,” says Sansa derisively, “They all looked the part.” Sansa looks the part now, Lady of Winterfell, regal, icy and dire wolf fierce.

“I grew up with the same dreams,” Brienne says, strangely exposed by the admission next to Sansa’s contempt for her childhood self. It would be simpler if Brienne had spent the early, fuzzy days of her childhood dreaming only of knighthoods and horses. Sansa tilts her head, curious.

“I learned to dance as well as fight,” says Brienne and then when Sansa’s face falls she says, “Sword work is better.” She does not want that old pity she’d seen on Lady Catelyn to wash Sansa’s face. It’s even true. She likes to win. Sword work is expansive in the way dance never had been.

“Arya would agree with you,” says Sansa, “She wanted to be a boy, always tearing her dresses getting into mischief. Our mother despaired.”

Brienne’s father had simply had suitable clothing made for her to wear. She wants him to write back to her. She wants him to be alive. If Brienne had really been a boy she might never have wanted to leave Tarth. How sunny and small that mirrored life would have been, absent of all these people and all her strange victories.

Brienne says, “I’m sorry I didn’t think to tell you about Bran sooner,” and Sansa blinks at her

“Brienne,” - she gathers herself - “you realise that if someone were looking at this with a cruel eye, expecting the worst of people, they might question your judgement, your previous reputation and maybe even your loyalty when it comes to this man.”

It hurts.

“I swore my service to you, my lady. The only thing I promised him was to find you and your sister and to fulfil his vow to your mother.”

Sansa comes around the table to sit with Brienne. She reaches to take Brienne’s hand in hers. Her touch is gentle and her grey eyes so very kind. Brienne feels far less at ease than she had with Sansa on the other side of the table. Sansa leans in.

“Jaime Lannister is a handsome man. And a golden knight, once upon a time,” she says. Brienne immediately wants to be able to deny and dismiss it. He’s been a fantasy and a wish. She falls in love with the beautiful and the unobtainable, she knows this, and she’s becoming aware - with every day that Jaime is within reach, soft eyed and attentive - that there had been a simplicity in that distance. Sansa’s gaze is unrelenting. “How could you vouch for him, knowing what you did?”

Brienne struggles. Part of her is angry at the framing of this question next to the word handsome, that Sansa has seen a debt balanced and taken it for such a petty weakness. She hopes she’s not a fool. She hopes that’s not all this is. Brienne walked behind Sansa with Theon Greyjoy, who everyone says burned children and hung them above the gate claiming they were Starks. Of course the poor man died with honour and considerate tidiness while defending Bran.

“It felt like it might be within my power to keep him safe. We have kept each other safe,” she says, as Sansa’s eyes flicker searchingly over her face.

She can’t lay out the bear pit, or his hand; her life or maidenly honour or any of it against Sansa’s brother so directly. She certainly can’t lay out the terrifying hope she feels when she looks at him now. When she’d decided to grow up, she’d tried to cut that out of herself.

Sansa squeezes her hands, “You believe he’s a changed man?” she says, failing but at least trying to suppress the condescension in her voice.

“I believe that he’s the same man in changed circumstances,” says Brienne, “He changed his circumstances. I stand by what I said.” Sansa sits back, considering Brienne carefully. “This does not change that my duty is to you, my lady. You have my loyalty, my love, and my sword.”

“Ser Brienne,” Sansa says “Sometimes I think you walked out of the songs I loved as a child.” She props herself up straight again. “What happens to him tomorrow will matter deeply to you.”

Brienne nods her head, sharply, although it was hardly a question, a familiar heat creeping into her cheeks. Sansa softens. Brienne wouldn’t have noticed the transformation if watching Sansa and admiring her fierceness hasn’t come to take up so much of her life.

“Tell him to control his tongue,” - Brienne nods again - “and tell him that no one can help him unless he helps himself.” Her head is still moving. “You needn’t come at first light tomorrow. I have no need for you. Sleep. Take some time to convince him to speak frankly with us. We need information that he has.” Brienne nods vigorously again. Sansa smiles at her. “Brienne, I want you to know how much I value your loyalty, your service, your integrity, and courage.” She’s terribly sincere and her gaze is unflinching. Brienne knows she’s been thanking everyone who comes before her, she’s watched it happen. It’s still nearly as breathtaking as the sword touching her shoulder while Jaime’s voice intoned the vows.

Brienne walks out through the falling snow, boots crunching through the fresh, new covering on the ground, careful not to turn an ankle on hidden debris, to the bottom of the First Keep. She circles it until she can look up at a high, arched window and the remnants of climbing ivy. The little clinging tendrils are curling brown where they aren’t burned away. This must be the place. The grey stone is scorched black with more recent violence.

She doesn’t wish that she could visit the bear pit. In a song, a good, true knight loves deeply, chastely and distantly. It’s how she had tried to love Renly, pouring that love into service. Loras had loved him truly and intimately. Neither love had kept him alive. In the songs, that distance eroding is always when the real story starts. Everything after that is always a tragedy. She walked into battle with his colours on her belt and they crawled back out of the nightmare together. Distance is impossible when all his heroism and horror is right there in front of her, asking to be of service, or pressed up against her and Podrick at every meal, talking about horses. It had been impossible even when she had been returning him to his sister.

“Tyrion was telling us about the fighting pits in Essos, where slaves die for glory in front of enormous baying crowds,” says Jaime, tapping the food a little further towards her when she just sits staring at it. She doesn’t understand why Tyrion is here if he wasn’t there earlier when they actually had need of him. She doesn’t know how to talk to Jaime with him here.

“It still just sounds like a tourney,” says Podrick.

“No!” says Tyrion, “Even worse!” He has, Brienne realises, conscious of the still unfamiliar taste lingering on her tongue, had quite a bit to drink.

“Clearly it’s worse, Tyrion. What’s wrong with a good tournament?” asks Jaime, as Brienne reluctantly scrapes sparse meat off the boiled white bone. It’s good that they are speaking to each other again, she supposes, although Tyrion has never sat with them before. Family should be brought together by crisis.

“Ser,” says Tyrion, and it takes Brienne a moment to realise that he’s addressing her, “weren’t you entered into servitude to Renly after your victory in his tournament?” Brienne deepens her frown.

Jaime plucks Tyrion’s cup from his hands and holds it out of his reach with an apologetic look for Brienne, saying, “Service in the Kingsguard is a great honour, not a subjugation.”

“The Rainbow Guard,” Brienne corrects automatically; her cloak had been blue, chosen from Tarth’s banners of sun and moon on sea blue and rosy pink.

“Jaime,” says Tyrion sadly, “You of all people-. Who could possibly be worthy of that kind of service?”

Jaime catches her eye for a flushed moment. Unwarranted guilt churns her stomach.

“Tyrion, you used to be much better at drinking,”

Brienne cannot bear it.

“I have given up drinking,” says Tyrion.

“I told her,” Brienne interrupts, her voice louder than she had intended.

The next gathering on the long table turns brief unfriendly looks upon their huddled group. Brienne does not know them by name - some of Royce’s loyal sons of minor lords from the Vale. Jaime’s eyes go wide as he takes in her distress. Then he jerks towards her across the table.

“About the pyromancer?” he hisses.

He looks wounded. Brienne squares her shoulders. That knowledge feels too much like holding him liquid in her hands. She won’t betray that confidence, not even to save his life.

“Not that,” she says.

“Oh fuck,” says Tyrion, snatching his cup from Jaime’s slackened grip. “This is why tonight is for drinking.”

Podrick is looking between them, frozen over his meal.

Jaime looks strangely relieved. “Oh. It was inevitable, I suppose.” He scrubs a hand over his face, leans his elbows on the table and puts his hands behind his neck, his hair falling down over his bowed head. “It’s alright, Brienne.”

Tyrion turns to him, “Really? It’s alright? First Varys starts whispering disloyalty, now the honourable maid is at it. This will give Sansa time to sleep on it at least. Fuck.”

Brienne smarts at being compared to an apparently traitorous spymaster for her sensible honesty. She knows Sansa better than he does. Sansa doesn’t need time to sleep on it.

“She already knew,” says Brienne, “But I told her that you told Lady Catelyn, so now she knows with certainty that it is true.”

“She should confirm it to Jon tonight,” says Tyrion, “I’ll talk to her. Or-. No. She’ll make the best choice.”

“Should I leave, ser?” says Podrick.

“Not unless you want to, Podrick,” says Jaime, and then very quietly, “It may be of professional interest for you to know that I threw Brandon Stark from the window at the top of Winterfell’s First Keep, oh, many years ago now.”

“Will you please shut up,” says Tyrion.

“Gods,” says Podrick. Brienne watches his big brown eyes find Bran up at the high table. Bran is watching them, his face completely untroubled. Brienne shivers. Pod turns to Tyrion, “My lord, I don’t think this is the kind of thing they’ll feel better about in the morning.”

“Thank you so much, Pod,” says Tyrion. Jaime puts a cautious hand on Tyrion’s shoulder.

He says softly, “Tyrion, I don’t know why you’re taking this so badly. You knew this was likely coming. We talked about this before the battle, before I-,” he looks unwillingly nervous when he says, “Isn’t this your gladiatorial arena?”

Tyrion drains his cup and nods determinedly, clasping Jaime’s hand briefly with his own.

“Quite right. This is my moment: I’ll be your champion,” Tyrion says. “We should discuss strategy and what they might want. Didn’t you once try to save me from Father with a promise that you’d-.”

At the high table, Jon Snow scrapes his chair on the stone as he stands. The great white wolf, previously lolling between the Starks and the assembled masses, picks up his head and whines like a puppy. The hall slowly hushes itself without Jon needing to shout for quiet. Sansa is watching tensely and, Brienne flinches to discover, the queen is staring vacantly down at the back of Tyrion’s head where he’s dropped it into his hands. Jaime looks at Brienne and mouths into the quiet rustling of the hall, “It’s alright.” Brienne’s jaw hurts.

“Winter is here,” says Jon Snow, and he raises his cup high, “but we will live to see spring.” His voice breaks but the people crammed into the great hall erupt anyway.

Jaime watches her, a quiet smile on his face and his cup barely raised to head height. Brienne looks to the queen.

Usually, when Jon Snow makes a pronouncement, the queen will follow up with one of her own, but this time Jon Snow continues. “If we want to live,” he says, loud and rough, “we will have to look after each other.” The substance of the matter is, a soft kind of rationing begins tomorrow. Those in attendance will need to speak to their men.

The mood in the hall turns sombre after that. It’s much too quiet to talk. A dutifully blank-faced boy with a messy shock of mousy hair brings them another jug of water and then almost seems to hover. Tyrion is drunk enough that it’s comically exaggerated when he eyes the boy suspiciously for a moment before affecting disinterest. Without his reaction, Brienne wouldn’t have noticed. She takes note of his face. She thinks she recognises him from the scurry of battle preparation in the smithy, but there were too many grubby, dark-haired northerners with unfriendly faces to know.

“Let’s go back to your quarters, I’m not done talking to you,” says Tyrion.

“We’ll go to my room,” Brienne hurries to say. She needs to be part of this discussion.

“I would make a lecherous comment, but I’m currently very angry with you, ser,” says Tyrion.

Jaime tells him to watch his mouth and drags him from the bench. Glaring at them some more makes Brienne feel much better. As she leads their little party from the hall, everyone at the high table is turned to watch Varys, who has brought a scroll for Daenerys to read. She’s glad to have fallen back beneath their notice.

The four of them trail along the draughty, low ceilinged passageways still lined with raucous men and women eating and drinking. Either the news of the rationing has not spread this far, or the more common folk have decided to enjoy their last night of plenty. There are too many to fit into the Great Hall and the Guards’ Hall, even in shifts and almost anyone without a highborn name or a significant military position has now been relegated to collecting food and jostling for the least draughty corners of the castle or eating out in the camps.

Back in her room, with Podrick stationed outside by Tyrion to ward of imagined eavesdroppers, Tyrion wants to talk about practicalities only. Brienne had hoped he might offer insight into the queen’s position. Her voice must surely have the most relevance.

“The issue is that you have absolutely no clear political motivations of your own but just enough strategic potential to be dangerous in the right hands,” says Tyrion. ‘If you had been a bigger failure as a military commander that would have helped you now as well.”

Jaime says, “It’s not going to be about politics, it will be about-”

“Of course it’s about politics. This is my arena, like you said. We’ll argue that you’re a hostage,” Tyrion says, “and a valuable one.”

“He’s not a hostage,” says Brienne.

“I’m a deserter who either murdered or crippled family of every person at that high table tonight.”

Tyrion makes a gesture like he’s considering murder himself.

“There were only two families represented,” he says, “although, I am impressed that you have found a way over dramatise your current situation.”

Jaime hovers over the end of her bed until Brienne nods to him, and then he collapses to perch on the edge of it.

“I’m not a useful hostage. She won’t bargain for me now.” Brienne crushes her teeth together.

“I know that, but they don’t.” says Tyrion, annoyed, and he glances at the door, “keep your voice low.”

“I do think it would still hurt her to watch me die,” says Jaime, morosely.

Brienne sits heavily in the chair by the fire.

“Do not tell me that,” says Tyrion. “It’s my job to advise on how to hurt her.”

He paces, twitching his hands, off in his own world. He looks like he’s practicing a speech. Then he casts around the room.

“Why did you invite us here when you only have one chair?” he asks, unaccountably outraged.

“Tyrion,” Jaime warns.

Brienne hesitates and then levers herself to her feet, offering him the seat. She’d moved the chair from the desk to the fire as soon as Sansa had given her the room. She hasn’t needed another. Tyrion waves her away.

“No, I’m going to talk to Sansa before the council meets tonight. The two of us will work something out.” The implication being, Brienne supposes, that she and Jaime are of no use in his scheming after all. Telling Sansa was the right thing to do, she feels that with unwavering certainty. It won’t have hurt him - quite the opposite; Brienne is confident. Or she had been. Tyrion pauses, “His survival is still important to you, this - tonight with Sansa - this wasn’t you backing out.” It’s not really a question. Still, Brienne shakes her head, steeling herself not to be embarrassed, she already committed herself in the great hall before the queen and all the northern lords and tonight, again with Sansa. It's not a matter of any clear obligation or vow. It's a debt, she supposes, that she's not interested in weighing out on a set of scales. Jaime sits back up on the bed, says Tyrion’s name lowly. Tyrion looks very satisfied. Brienne scowls at him.

“Podrick, come protect me from the drunks,” Tyrion calls as he throws open the door and he flicks a speculative look between her and Jaime on the bed, “Lady Brienne can be relied upon to supervise.” She nods poor Podrick along after him when he hovers, propping the door open with a shoulder. Someone is concerned with her maidenly innocence apparently.

“Brienne,” says Jaime, into the empty room, “I am sorry.”

It sounds like defeat and looks as bad. She doesn’t want to hear that with him still sat at the foot of her bed. His hands are resting in the furs there. He let Tyrion strategise. They should do the same.

“Sansa says to watch your tongue.”

He glances up at her, suddenly sharp again.

“I can already do that,” he says, reclining back onto one elbow on the bed. He looks like he’s trying to formulate some echo of an invitation in his body. He’s been so terribly sincere with her since he came to Winterfell, she doesn’t want him to try to hurt her with the suggestion. She hasn’t had to say no to him. She doesn’t want an offer like the one he threw at Lady Catelyn, where she won’t be able to say yes, once it’s only a joke and a weapon after all. “If this is to be my very last night-”

She sighs and takes a couple of steps towards him, aiming for the desk on the other side of her bed. He seizes into stillness so abruptly that her steps falter. Jaime’s wide eyes meet hers for a paralysing moment. She pretends to ignore it. She gives him a wide berth. Once she is safely past he rolls to his feet and attempts a casual stroll towards the fire.

“It’s alright,” he reassures, as if she was the one jumping like a startled cat, “Bad taste. Bad habit. I apologise.”

She throws her cloak over the desk and turns back to him. He crouches down to warm both his hands in front of the flames. He’s even turning the gloved gold hand as if he can really feel the heat.

“At least if it ends in dragon’s fire it will make a good verse in a song,” he says. “Although, by coming here, I’ve ensured I’ll be remembered as a villain no matter who wins the next war,” he frowns, absorbing this. Brienne unbuckles her sword belt. “At least we all outlived Robert bloody Baratheon,” he mutters.

“What about a whole song for the man who slew the wicked King Aerys and was disgraced, but came north to fight the dead and swear allegiance to his returning daughter,” she says, laying Oathkeeper over her cloak.

Jaime turns to smile at her shaking his head, “There are more caveats to what I can swear to her than any person knowing my history could accept,” he says, “especially now. I’ve served my last queen.”

He’ll have to serve someone. They won’t grant him exile, of that Brienne is sure. They won’t let him run off to Essos and the free cities. No one would trust an oathbreaker to stay put.

“I’d worry less about what you can’t swear and more about what you can.”

By the fire, he flicks his hand dismissively.

“Have you sworn to her? Has Sansa?” he says, “No. Jon Snow has renounced his claim to a northern kingship but what they have here at Winterfell still isn’t a Targaryen court. She’ll need to make it hers somehow.”

“By burning you? Don’t flatter yourself,” she says, but her guts twist at his quirked smile. She crosses the room to be closer to him, gripping the back of her chair. She’s long reconciled the idea that maybe three hundred men in this castle wouldn’t gather and cheer to see him tried and executed, but she’s not sure they would have the stomach to cheer for dragon’s fire like they would for Jon Snow’s sword. It’s not impossible. If it’s fear the queen wants, then the performance has apparently worked for her in the past. She allows the current to sweep her past that. Sansa wouldn’t be spending her precious time concerning herself with Brienne’s loyalty if she expected Jaime to be dead tomorrow. Brienne trusts Sansa’s judgement.

“I haven’t sworn myself to her directly, but I follow Lady Sansa, who follows Jon Snow, who follows the Queen,” says Brienne, a simple recounting of the world as it is, “She doesn’t need to make it hers. It is hers.”

“You know power is never so simple,” he says. “And you’re no household knight to fetch and carry for the Starks. You are heir to Evenfall. Your house answers to Storm’s End, not Winterfell.”

Brienne breathes through the stinging hurt. It’s a wound she has picked open herself since she handed that little scroll to Samwell Tarly. She’d given Tarth up, or, she had believed that at the time, except she looks at Jaime and suddenly it all seems possible - if only he’d stop being so pig headed and try properly to live. If she could take it up now, couldn’t she have taken it up then? That would have been the dutiful thing, and now her father is likely dead, without ever reading of her love, triumph or regret. She drags the chair out of the way and crouches down on the rug next to him.

She leans into his burning light and says, “Don’t scold me about my duty. You should be Lord of Casterly Rock. Who is looking after your people?”

He looks away from her, abashed. He lays out his gloves to the side of the fire and drags his fine, light cloak over his head. He really needs something more substantial.

“I didn’t plan to die when I came north,” he says, “nor at any moment in all of that nightmare, but I didn’t allow myself to think about an afterwards. I can see clearly enough that death seems rather likely; a predictable outcome of my having come. Deserved, even. I didn’t plan for living, but the idea of my death doesn’t seem real either.”

Brienne hadn’t allowed herself to think about what would come next either, but now it is all she thinks about. He’s watching her, waiting.

“I thought we were all dead,” she can’t quite control the shudder in her voice. She admits, “It hardly seems real to me that we aren’t.”

She collapses back to sit on the rug, and after a moment he follows her. It had been Podrick’s voice gliding over that terribly old song that really made it whole in her hands. A story next to some adjacent, abstract truth of loss and pain. In the aftermath, Brienne walked the walls and looked down at the fields of dead men and felt like she would drown in other people’s grief. Jaime watches her, sad eyed. He has no business feeling sorry for her. She has no right to pain. Everything has worked out very well for her.

She tells him, “My father hasn’t written back. It seems likely he’s dead.” Jaime’s reply had come so quickly that the bird can hardly have landed before it was back in the air. Tarly had given the sealed scroll to Brienne and Brienne had given it to Jaime. He’d asked if she needed to read it over and then disappeared with it when she declined. It’s been too long. A reply isn’t coming. She swallows down the suffocating tide.

“I’m so very sorry, Brienne.”

Jaime puts his hand awkwardly on her shoulder and she jerks her head, not away, just a sharp exorcism of emotion through movement. She wants to get up and walk, but she doesn’t want him to take his hand away. He slides his hand to her neck and brushes his thumb into her hairline and she twists to turn her face into him until she can feel his winter-rough knuckles on her jaw. It’s all so tantalisingly possible and it may be too late.

“Will you go back?” he asks cautiously. “Won’t you need to find out?”

“I gave it up by leaving,” she says. “They might have thought me dead for years now. I’ve no right to interfere or expect news.” If he is alive, she should not have reminded her father of his grief. Not without knowing. Perhaps they hate her. Perhaps they believe that she murdered Renly.

Jaime frowns, looking like he’s struggling to square this new information with his picture of her.

“I couldn’t marry,” she tells him.

“Couldn’t?” he asks, cautious. She clenches her jaw.

“I defeated the last suitor in combat.” She watches his eyes widen. “I broke his collarbone. His ribs. It was an effective end to any future betrothals.”

Jaime’s small smile is slow curling. She doesn’t want to see it or have to reveal that the others had rejected her first. If Sansa has read this wrongly and he really is taken from her she supposes she will go on and live some different life, but this particular hope is a soft lapping wave of scalding water.

“What weapon?” he asks, with poorly concealed delight.

His hand hooked under her jaw-bone casually turns her face back towards him. She frowns at him but she lets him do it.

“A mace,” she says, feeling his warm fingers move with her words. “Jaime, why are you here?”

He takes his hand back.

“I’ve said. I came because I’d given my word. I can hardly leave.”

“Your sister gave her word, you didn’t. Besides, I meant-.”

His face darkens for a moment and then realisation dawns.

“Gods, you’re right,” he says, marvelling. “It felt like it was my promise.”

She looks away from his slack mouth. She’d searched for Sansa to fulfil her own vow and Jaime’s too. He hadn’t fulfilled his sister’s promise, she reminds herself. He’d come alone and not with her armies.

He huffs air out through his nose, “I’ve been repeating that, but-. I needn’t have come then. Although I’m sure you’d all be wights without me.” Brienne doesn’t laugh. Eventually, he says gruffly, into her silence, “This is difficult. Aren’t you exhausted? We should have this conversation only if I survive tomorrow.”

“I’m glad you came,” Brienne tells him. His coming to fight means too much to her for it to be left as a joke. “It was the honourable thing to do.”

Jaime tips towards her at that, eyes bright in the firelight. Excepting the battle, he’s looked strangely subdued, this version of Jaime, with his darker hair and the fineness of his clothing disguised by its muted colours. Even skeletal and in rags, he’d looked more dangerous than he has these last weeks. Now the firelight is cutting the sharpness back into his face in red and gold. She sees why approaching death doesn’t feel real to him: he looks far too alive.

“Whatever happens, I don’t regret it,” he says. “I’ve never knighted anyone before, but you’re it, Brienne: A true knight. Ser Arthur Dayne himself would have been lucky to serve with you.”

It twists in her chest. It’s the highest praise in his armoury, judging by the stories he’s been feeding Pod. She envies the apparently always virtuous Arthur Dayne who has been relegated to mere mortality. She’s not sure she can live, frozen for everyone, into a cycle in a song. Surely he’s seen her. She’s scared and scarred and she wants.

He leans in again, concern at her quiet written over his face, “My lady, ravens get delayed, waylaid, it might-” She cuts him off. She can’t do anything for her father or Tarth here in Winterfell. There’s a chance she can do something for Jaime.

“Focus on tomorrow,” she says, “Worry about the Targaryen Queen and not the Starks. You must tell her about her father. Properly. Respectfully.” He hesitates. “You saved a whole city, Jaime.”

“I won’t grovel,” he says. Brienne shifts to stand, not wanting to be near him after all, if he’s going to throw this away too. He catches at her sleeve. “She won’t believe me, Brienne,” he says, “It’s not a thing anyone wants to believe their family capable of.”

Brienne doesn’t know how anyone could look at him and not think he was telling the truth.

“Sansa will believe you,” she says, although she has no way to convince him of it, “They’ll understand. Like I did.”

“I know you love them,” says Jaime, “but these Starks are real wolves. I’d rather be dealing with plodding Lord Eddard. He’d just insist on taking my head off cleanly. Little Arya is the only one not pretending.”

“Sansa wouldn’t be so interested if she expected you to die. Believe me.”

“I do believe you,” he says. “I trust you. I do.” He runs out of words, staring up at her.

She plunges onwards. “Maybe it’s really like Tyrion says, and it’s about practicality. He understands that world more than I do. Think about how can you serve them.”

His hand is still on her sleeve, curled into the laced fabric, he doesn’t seem to have noticed.

“I think you understand plenty,” he says.” You could do it, so well.” She twitches puzzlement at him. “Rule in Tarth,” he adds, explanatory. Her eyes are painfully dry.

“I couldn’t rule alone,” she says, her heart pounding. He opens his mouth. “It’s not another custom you can wave away because you’ve decided it doesn’t suit you.” He still doesn’t look entirely convinced.

“So you would need to marry anyway,” he purses his mouth unhappily. His eyes catch firelight as they flicker over her face. “Would you even want to marry?” he asks, and it’s like sitting with Sansa’s scrutiny again, a burning exposure, admitting something that feels so much like weakness. She crouches back down to his seated height. Scared, scarred, and selfishly wanting. Fallen out of the songs and the sept and into yesterday’s dirty sheets with everyone else. She meets his eyes as courageously as possible.

“Yes,” she says, “I’d want that.” His eyebrows pinch in concentration and he nods his head, slow movements like everything is happening underwater.

“Someone whose ribs wouldn’t need breaking and who wouldn’t mind if you snapped their collarbone.”

She frowns. That’s nearly it. She can’t tell if he thinks that’s a funny turn of phrase while he’s staring fixedly down at his hands, turning the gold slowly, so it glints.” They’re both breathing shallowly.

“You’ll tell the Queen about the Mad King and his pyromancers,” she says, meaning it as a question, but aloud it sounds like a command.

He tosses his head and avoids her eyes, back in real time.

“I’ll consider it,” he says.

Podrick finds them still sitting glumly by the fire, nothing keeping their hands busy. He closes the door swiftly behind himself and latches it, saying unhappily, “The news of the rationing has spread.”

Brienne stands to get a better look at him, concerned. He looks wrecked again.

“You’ll both stay here,” Brienne decides.

Podrick falls onto the bed easily and without question. They’ve grown uncivilised in the way they share space, out in the cold north. Jaime unbuckles his belt and shrugs off his outer tunic unselfconsciously. He pushes the question back onto Brienne silently as they drag off their boots. She yanks back the covers for them all and Jaime approaches the bed a little hesitantly. It feels far less indecent that sharing a bed with one man. She’s heard endless campfire bragging but she’s never heard a man admit to that. And besides, it’s after the end of all living things, and she’s a knight, not a lady. It mattered because she belonged to Tarth, and now that might not matter at all. All she desperately wants is for them to be safe and to finally sleep. Everyone else in this castle is riding roughshod over all the customs that pretend to make up respectability. They tug the furs up over themselves.

Brienne jolts from sleep as Pod pushes his way back into the room, a tray with three bowls and a pitcher balanced in his arms. She doesn’t know how she slept through him leaving, she’d startled awake more than once in the night. More than once, she’d seen the whites of Jaime or Pod’s eyes in the guttering fire light. Still, she feels warm and the constant twinge of pain behind her eyes has faded. The bruising she knows must still be livid across her back doesn’t pull quite so much as she moves her shoulders against the blankets and furs.

It’s already light outside her little window. The castle will have been awake for hours. The days grew darker as the dead marched closer and their end has not altered the tide of winter. Arya keeps saying with gleeful gloom that their hours of daylight will only get shorter. Jaime is blinking himself awake beside her, sleep-mussed and flushed in the firelight. They’d gone to sleep with Pod between them. He’s scaldingly beautiful. If she really was a man-.

They all sit cross-legged on the bed to eat their rations. To Brienne it appears to be a fair and satisfying amount of food. She picks at it, drawing it out. She’s been living out of packs for a long time and castle life hasn’t softened her so much that she can’t survive contentedly on a little less than she wants. There is a gulf of difference between lean and starving.

“I’ll try to be the one who comes for you when it’s time,” she tells Jaime around a mouthful.

Podrick puts his finished bowl abruptly down on the bed, casting big worried eyes at the two of them. He goes to fetch her cloak and boots. Jaime takes another slow spoonful.

“Eat,” she tells him and he grimaces down at his bowl. For some reason he’s picked out all the precious peas and stashed them in his belt.

“Look to yourself,” he says.

Pod hovers with a filled cup, ready to hand it to her.

“My lady, no one in the kitchens will be happy if I take back wasted food.”

They both reapply themselves to the meal.

Sansa looks purposeful and wolf faced this morning and she has moved back into the larger room behind the great hall that she had been using to entertain guests before last night’s performance of intimacy. Brienne fetches the southern captains whose names Jaime gave to Sansa. Sansa speaks to the soldiers, frankly, clearly and listens to their story. She calls them by name. They’d expected to be dispersed to their homes after they swore themselves to the Queen, but then the Dothraki had just kept moving camp, farther and farther north and the few who had dared to run had been found and cut down quickly. They’d been on a ship twice.

Brienne looks at their grey, sad faces and knows that if these men are marched south again and their homes are within reach, they will all try to slip away in the night, even if it means dragon’s fire. Their principal current complaint is a fresh one: the rationing. Brienne suspects this will be the refrain Sansa hears every day until winter ends or they all die of starvation, but this first time there is a twist. These men saw the Queen burn wagons full of the Reach’s final harvest. Sansa’s lips barely thin at the news; perhaps she already knew. She praises their courage in the battle against the dead.

She says, sincere and precise, “I must thank you all, and your men, for your courage in the battle and your service afterwards.”

The Tarly men among them had respect but no love for their lord who was executed with dragon’s fire, but an affectionate and slightly mocking love for his son who was also burned. Brienne suspects they have conjured this love around his memory rather than around his actual person.

The last any of them, sworn to Lannisters or Tarlys, had seen of Jaime, he was charging a dragon on a white horse. If they’ve spun warm stories around their young lord it’s nothing to what they’ve spoken into existence around Jaime Lannister. He’d talked with them, briefly, before the long night and listened to them. Brienne can see them unfolding under her attention. When Sansa dismisses them, solemn and earnest in her praise and thanks, the men bow deeply to her, grateful.

Next come reports on how the people are taking the news of the rationing while Brienne corrals Lord Royce of the Vale from the stables. He reports that the Tarly and Lannister men have mostly integrated into his camp in the aftermath of the battle, largely without protest from the Dothraki, news that pleases Sansa inordinately, considering how small a number they make up.

Sansa shows Royce fresh news from the Riverlands, none of the messages offering a word on her missing Tully uncle. Arya arrives and sits stone-faced next to Sansa throughout.

“What if I killed him?” she says after Royce is gone. She glances back at Brienne who is standing still, at one of her preferred posts, by the door. “What if he really was still with the Freys and I killed him without knowing?”

Brienne’s heart aches for them. She’d sent her letter searching for family connection buoyed up on the unexpected gift of life all around her. No one's life and no one's happiness but her own is impacted by the silence.

Sansa says, “We’ll ask Jaime Lannister about our uncle’s child by the Frey girl, although if no one in the Riverlands knows where the girl has gone, I doubt he does. If she’s not dead then perhaps she was sensible enough to run, in which case, all our mother’s family is gone and the Riverlands are Bran’s if they’re anyone's.”

Arya snorts, “Bran doesn’t even want Winterfell. You can’t be expected to manage the Vale, the Riverlands, and the North.”

“The Vale doesn’t need managing. I trust Lord Royce completely,” says Sansa, with a smile, “and I don’t want the Riverlands, I want someone palatable sitting between us and whoever is in the Red Keep. Bran will choose someone for Riverrun wisely, I’m quite sure, once we win the war or we work out how we would defend a claim to the North.”

“Oh, I’m sure Bran will be so invested in that decision,” says Arya, “perhaps you’ll be able to help him? Do you think?” She peers over the desk to look at the scroll Sansa is scratching at.

Sansa snatches the paper away from Arya and says, “Arya, I want to talk to you about Gendry the blacksmith, newly of House Baratheon.”

Arya sits back in her chair and crosses her arms.

“Brienne, would you mind waiting outside?” she says.

Brienne goes to stand on the other side of the door. She thinks about Jaime saying, You’re not a household knight. Back at Evenfall she would sit by her father’s side while the people of the island filed in to make their complaints and reports, learning by watching. They hadn’t had a sworn knight to stand beside them but they had never needed one, both of them could fight, although her father never relished it, and Tarth had always been quiet, even during her childhood memories of the last war. There had been boundary creep in the salt pits, nets stollen from fishermen, the occasional broken betrothal - other than her own - and compensation for men injured mining marble.

She supposes that she could think of Gendry Baratheon as a herd of goats multiple people wished to claim, but goats didn’t need to have their opinions and emotions managed and they didn’t possess the ability to wield hammers. Perhaps, Brienne considers, Arya will marry Gendry and be Lady of the Stormlands. Arya would be responsible for the safety of Tarth’s people. This is comforting. She particularly likes the thought of Arya as an honoured guest in the wood and marble halls at Evenfall. The trouble is that she can’t see how Gendry makes up a particularly valuable herd of goats. The Stormlands are cut off from them by the Westerlands, which Tyrion had taken and abandoned, and the Reach, which Jaime had nominally taken for Cersei and also abandoned. She had thought she was ill-equipped for governance because she could not marry, but perhaps she is unsuited because she would never have been able to protect her people in negotiations like these. Even if she could claim Tarth as her own, it is too small and distant to give her any right to interfere in all this haggling.

It is rather dull to stand guard by a door in a friendly castle, although it feels ungrateful to think it. What would all those dead men have given for some boredom? It gives her too much time to think and watch the soft morning light shift into cold midday starkness. Aching tiredness is creeping back into her bones, her shoulders painful when she leans against the wall. She pulls her cloak more tightly around herself. They had said it would be today. This is no weather for standing around.

She puts her hand on the jewelled pommel of her sword and thinks about Jaime, not as the man she saw finger combing his hair back into order this morning, but as a political piece. His survival then becomes about use: service. He has a better, and realistically, a more popular claim to the Westerlands than Tyrion. If Daenerys’s claim to the throne is by birthright, it makes sense to be seen to adhere to that principle elsewhere. He claims that he’s useless as a hostage but he hasn’t said it to anyone significant yet. Perhaps he will not repeat it. He can not be trusted in military action against the south while his sister lives, but he is a recognisable figure to the southern forces - the Kingslayer carries a certain mythos with him - and they need to be prepared for victory. He is one of the few people available to them with intimate knowledge of the court and military commands of the last five failed rulers of Westeros.

She could argue away any of these reasons and she’s sure Jaime would have dismissed them all last night: the queen has Tyrion and Varys. But surely it would be such a waste to burn him. Cold blooded. A waste of any person. It’s about risk; it's a matter of working out what to safely do with him instead.

Jon Snow and Samwell Tarly arrive and leave her standing outside the door again. Brienne feels a brief flare of hope when they clatter into the corridor, but Tarly rushes quickly past her without mention of any letters from Tarth. There are raised voices. Brienne wonders if the Tarly who is not a maester knows about his family, or if Sansa will have to be the one to break it to him. Someone else should do it and let Sansa rest. She tries to imagine herself having to tell a man that his brother and father are dead.

She sits with Sansa and they eat food brought for them from the kitchens. Sansa eats quickly, glaring into the fire. Brienne tries to match her pace despite her tight stomach.

She stops only to say, “Lord Tyrion mentioned to us that the spymaster Varys has become disaffected with the Queen. He said he was whispering treason. Or something very like that,” she can’t remember his exact words. The moment is too flush with hurt. It feels essential, but grubby nonetheless to pass the information onwards. Sansa looks up with sudden blazing interest.

“He was drunk and scared for his brother,” Brienne says, “I don’t think he meant to say it, but I’m not sure.”

Sansa purses her lips.

“If he meant for me to know it’s a risk not to have told me more directly,” she says. She pauses a moment longer and then goes back to her food. “Thank you, Brienne.”

She’s poised and regal again as they ride out through the gates of the castle with Jon Snow. Winter’s Town is ramshackle, over-crowded and enveloped by the bustling camps set up by the men who can’t or won’t fit comfortably within Winterfell’s walls. The rows of tents are packed tight into garrisons which were dismantled and then rebuilt over the debris of the fighting. The northern children are just as grubby as before the battle. Few people out here seem to have ever had access to Winterfell’s hot springs. Pockets of neatly but lightly dressed dark skinned men are pressed silently around the fires, swallowed up by shouting war preparations and roving groups of dead eyed men.

Brienne has a clean room with a fireplace and a large bed she has only shared with two others by her choice. Brienne has bathed three times in the hot springs since the battle. She had a raven to send to her father for no other reason than she wanted to send it. At the edge of the town the Dothraki tents begin. Before the battle they continued out beyond where the hills bent away from her sight. Now they are a sea turned into a mildly impressive lake.

“They must be so cold,” says Sansa.

Everyone stands quietly aside as she and Jon and all their retinue pass by. The further they get from the sheltering walls of Winterfell and the town, the more the icy wind cuts into Brienne’s skin. Jon’s wolf prowls slowly around their party and Brienne shifts her horse a little closer to Sansa's.

“These tents weren’t made for northern winters,” Sansa says, running a fiercely practical eye over the landscape. Jon’s face falls into further washed out exhaustion and the wolf circles to stand beside him, as though it also feels the need to survey their troops.

“I know,” he says. “The queen is dealing with it.”

Sansa reaches for his arm. His horse shifts under him.

“I know she comes out here to walk among them but that can’t be enough to satisfy them. We should extend our hospitality and invite their leaders into the great hall.”

Jon Snow’s face is lined with tension. “Is it your hospitality to extend?” he says, then, “We can try.”

She doesn’t get to collect Jaime. Two Night’s Watch in their black furs are waiting awkwardly next to him where he has reclined himself in a chair in Sansa’s study in an almost convincing affect of disinterest. He looks for a moment to be conflicted about standing as their cold little party files into the room. Brienne widens her eyes and jerks her head at him. He gives her a small, tight look and drags himself mulishly to his feet as the Night’s Watch shuffle out of the room.

Jon slaps the men’s shoulders as they leave, ignoring Jaime entirely, and sighs deeply.

“It still doesn’t feel right to do this without at least some of the northern lords present,” he says.

“Jon, we agreed. Later,” says Sansa confidently, and she turns to Brienne.

Brienne knows what’s coming by the flash of sympathy she sees on Sansa’s face.

“Brienne, would you mind waiting outside?”

She makes sure to meet Jaime’s eyes before she retreats into the corridor, dutifully taking up her place by the door.

The queen and her retinue arrive shortly afterwards. They’re walking quickly and purposefully. Brienne experiences a moment where she exists slightly outside of herself and her body almost decides to step in front of the door.

From behind the Queen she hears Tyrion saying, “And if there was anyone left in the world who Cersei would bargain for, it would be him.” Daenerys stops sharply by Brienne and looks back at him. He’s completely calm. He’s a good liar.

“I have neither the time nor the inclination to drag him out for a proper trial. Your advice has been invaluable to me. I don’t forget that,” the queen says.

Tyrion’s calm facade cracks. The queen looks Brienne up and down and speaks quickly to the unsullied man following them in his language. Then she nods to Varys, who looks as apprehensive as he always does.

She smooths her hands over the sides of her well-tailored furs. Brienne feels twice as large as she typically does. “Let’s get this over with,” Daenerys says, and she pushes the door open. The unsullied man takes up a post on the other side of the door to Brienne as Varys, Tyrion and Ser Davos step after their queen and firmly shut the heavy door behind them.

They stand silently, together. Brienne feels ridiculous in her enormous, swallowing cloak, next to his simple military leathers, although the corridor is cold. At least it disguises her unnecessary sword. The man has no weapon that she can see.

The murmuring of dampened voices in the room is punctuated by the queen’s recognisable tone. Brienne struggles to hear without putting an ear to the door like a nosy servant.

“You fought against the dead?” asks the man besides her, either accent or intent making it barely a question.

Brienne refocuses her attention, surprised. Few of the northern men speak to her, even after all this time, and she has never seen one of the unsullied initiate conversation beyond their ranks.

“Yes,” she says, and he nods to her, satisfied.

“You fought with us?” she asks.

“Yes,” he says, with a small smile.

“Thank you,” Brienne tells him, and he inclines his head towards her. She says, thinking of Sansa and her audience with the southern men, “You must have come such a long way from home.”

“No,” he says, with no rancour. He has a friendly face, she notices, settled into seriousness.

Inside the room, she can suddenly hear Jaime’s voice. She strains and strains to understand. She thinks she recognises Tyrion’s voice interrupting him, but Jaime is talking. She prays, silently, as she hasn’t since the battle began.

“Will you fight with us in the coming war?” the man asks her.

“I’m sworn to serve Lady Sansa,” says Brienne and she receives no response to that. She supposes that it really wasn’t any answer at all. She’s embarrassed to admit to him that her fighting is done. Sansa isn’t going to war. Tarth isn’t going to war. She is going to stay safe in this castle while this man marches away into the south, towards her home.

Behind the door there are women’s voices, Daenerys and Sansa passing the conversation back and forth, deceptively pleasant and rendered almost undetectably quiet by the thick stone walls. Then, abruptly Tyrion’s voice again. She can’t stand here like a lead-footed guard. She starts walking, pacing the corridor. The unsullied man tracks her with minimal interest. It doesn’t seem possible, what the men say; that he’s half a man, good only for killing, but he followed his queen to a new continent without leaving any responsibility or feeling of home behind him.

She says to him, “Do you love your queen?”

He seems slightly affronted by her question, his serious face growing more serious still.

“Yes,” he says.

“More than any other person,” she prompts.

He seems to consider this.

“More than any other duty.”

“Will you stay with your queen after the war?” she asks.

“You have many questions,” he says.

Brienne is embarrassed. He was the one who spoke to her.

Still, she says, “I apologise. I did not mean to be rude.”

She has grown so used to talking to Podrick. She wants to talk to Podrick.

He says, “We fought together, all of us, but you westerosi are still strangers.”

“Perhaps that’s because we do not talk to each other,” says Brienne, and then she has to apologise again. The silence in the corridor is stony.

“Perhaps I will ask you questions now,” the man says, “so that we can know each other better.”

His face is no longer friendly.

“I already apologised,” says Brienne. This is why she doesn't speak to people. She remembers now. She can hear raised voices now.

“Do you love your lady wolf? Or do you love yourself and that man in there. People spit on the ground when he walks by.”

Brienne paces. People don’t spit at Jaime when she is with him.

“He fought in the battle too.” The man deigns to tip his head in acknowledgement. “I killed a king,” she says and she finds herself standing in front of the door. Looking pointlessly at the handle. She’s not going to do anything more. There is nothing more she could do. She knows herself.

The man is looking at her with renewed interest and he slides sinuously sideways to bar the door from her.

“They don’t spit at you.”

“He wasn’t my king,” says Brienne, “I didn’t break my vows to do it.”

She’d made sure of that when she swore her oath to Lady Catelyn; vengeance for Renly came above all other duties. She’d asked for no such exemptions when she committed herself to Sansa.

“You killed him in battle? You are a great warrior to have become a household guard,” he says, head tipped back to meet her eyes. “Take up your position before they come back out,” he says. He’s easily a head shorter than her and she has her sword at her hip.

“I’m not a household knight. I don’t have a post.”

She hopes he does not move out of her way. She’s not going in there and she will be embarrassed to retreat now.

“When I killed my master, he still had a whip in his hand. I shoved my spear through his back. It was the day Daenerys Stormborn set me free.”

He’s incandescent with echoed pride. He’s chosen to save all of them with his freedom. Brienne cannot let him think this of her.

“I took that king’s head when he was already dying by someone else’s hand,” she confesses and then cannot stop. “It was the day I entered my lady’s service. I abandoned her when she needed me most to search for him.”

“You hated him?” he asks, “It wasn’t an order?”

“It was justice,” she says into the quiet and his dark, considering eyes.

She’d decided it was justice. They’re all deciding in that room. There is still a remembered horror in that grey ghost, even after everything she has seen. It’s as much the moments after it had gone that haunts her. Renly’s still body, that old sword in her hand and the men she had killed with it. She’d screamed, she thinks, Lady Catelyn's face was wild enough that she thinks she must have screamed.

When she’d found him, Stannis had called his death her duty. It was a duty she thinks she might have gathered a feeling of fierce triumph over, but then Podrick had been calling to her and they’d been running for their horses as the Bolton dogs howled. It had so nearly been a mistake. She thanks the gods she doesn’t have to regret that. She could write home without any shame at all.

Brienne retreats backwards to lean against the opposite wall. He carefully unfocuses his eyes just past her shoulder. It's impressively, passively rude. She wonders who it is, that he loves differently from his duty. She wishes that was the kind of thing you could ask people when it wasn't so obvious that strangers could read it from you, apparently at first sight. She hopes that he can find a way to keep that person safe. She should ask his name. Sansa would have begun there. Her father would never have remembered.

The door opens to reveal Daenerys Stormborn, white-faced and with her mouth set. The unsullied man steps smartly out of her way, and Brienne is left staring straight into her strange, sad eyes. She has dark bruising under them, just like Sansa. Everyone in this whole castle is exhausted. The stones are leaching from them.

“Your grace,” says Tyrion plaintively from inside the room.

“I have no more time for this. These are the conditions of my mercy. They will be met,” she wrenches the door the rest of the way open and sails from the room, her small hands are balled into fists.

The unsullied man falls smartly in next to the bearded old Ser Davos and Varys glides along behind, looking just as pleased as he did when he entered.

Jon Snow emerges next and nods to Brienne, turning to head after the queen. Through the doorway she meets Jaime’s eyes as he is sinking back down into one of the chairs. The sudden absence of constriction around her chest leaves her queasy. She breathes out. She breathes in, breaking the surface of the water. She’d known that they would see that he should live. She’d only allowed herself to be scared by Tyrion and Jaime and their Lannister theatrics.

“I do apologise if any plans of yours depended on me being useful to you in the Westerlands,” says Jaime to Sansa.

Sansa flicks her eyes over him and says to Brienne, who finds that she has barged into the room, “You can take him away.”

Jaime stands and bows his head to her and then, to her surprise, to Tyrion.

“My lord brother,” he says.

Tyrion grimaces. “You’re alive. You’re welcome,” he says.

He’s pulling at the leather on the chest of his jacket. The iron symbol marking his office as Hand to the queen is gone. The material is distorted where he had pushed the pin through. Jaime reaches out to shake his shoulder, very gently. Brienne looks to Sansa who is standing statue still except for her hands which she is holding balled in front of her, fidgeting impatiently.

“Do you need anything else today, my lady?”

“No,” says Sansa, “Lord Tyrion, will you please stay with me.”

Tyrion glances anxiously between Sansa and Jaime, “It’s ‘Tyrion’, please,” he says, “nothing is quite that settled yet.”

“Clearly, it was all decided,” says Sansa, “Everyone else: out.”

Brienne wants to ask her what went wrong, what went right, why she’s upset. Brienne gives in and grabs Jaime to tow him from the room. She hasn’t actually touched him like this since the Riverlands and then she had despised him. It’s all tumbled up, shoving him along with her hands on his shoulders and the desperate joy at what sounds like mercy. In the corridor he twists in her grip and she barely remembers to let him go. They have to keep moving.

“I need to tell you-” he says.

He fumbles to grasp her hands and she clutches him back. Her palms are broader than his, his fingers longer. She's still walking him backwards down the corridor, staring down at the messy tangle of their gloves.

He gathers up her hands and presses them to his lips, his eyebrows drawn. She can’t feel anything but light pressure through leather, except the strange solidity of his right hand in hers. He tugs at her again, turning her hands and pressing his lips to the exposed skin at her wrist. His beard is rough. The point of his nose is cold, but his breath against her skin is quick and warm. What would that feel like against her mouth? She watches, fascinated, as he turns his face up to her. She has stopped walking. She wonders if he’ll do it. They should speak first. And not in veiled language and half promises.

“You look… unhappy,” he says straightening, his eyes searching her face.

“I do not,” says Brienne, automatically contrarian. She can’t look away from his mouth.

She reads the potential movement in the same way she anticipates a swordsman’s lunge. He smiles at her fiercely. He pushes up onto his toes to kiss her. She needs to speak to him.

She grabs his arm and sidesteps him, starting to walk again. He’s heavy against her hands. Now it’s really is like trying to drag him across the Riverlands. Here she is trying to follow instructions and do him good and here he is resisting her. When she glances at him, face burning, he’s staring at her, eyes wide and jaw set.

“I’m taking you back to my room. We can talk about this,” she says.

He plants his feet entirely and says her name, his voice strained. She’s trying to drag him now. Tyrion is almost certainly about to be thrown out by Sansa and then he’ll look at them and know and say something awful. She just wants to put Jaime away somewhere safe where he can’t un-do whatever reprieve he was just given.

“While normally, of course, I’d be thrilled to be dragged off and ravished by-.”

She drops his arm abruptly and whirls to face him.

“Why would you say that? Can you allow me a few moments to be glad that you’re alive before you ruin it by speaking.”

He rubs at his arm.

He says, very softly, “You really need to hear what they decided to do with me. Brienne, I had no right.”

She doesn’t want him to apologise for the almost kiss. She doesn’t want him to regret it.

“Let’s discuss it,” she says - he nods - “somewhere else.”

“You should know I’ve been stripped of my titles and lands,” he says, “denounced and attainted. My name too, but that’s mostly a farce. I’ll be Jaime Lannister, Kingslayer until I die and there’s little anyone can do about that.”

He looks so sorry. She becomes aware that she has clenched her hands into fists and drawn herself up to her full height.

“Jaime,” she says, horrified, the reality of it colliding painfully with the strange turning knot of feeling she's been worrying at over Tarth and all it means to her. Her father would never have tried to marry her to someone who wasn't even a knight. She has been oscillating uncomfortably between certainty that Tarth is gone from her and hope that she has stumbled upon a way to return.

“Yes,” he says, “precisely.”

He mostly looks concerned for her. It’s ridiculous for her to be upset by this, she thinks. She hadn’t written about him in her letter to her father, she hadn’t made any decisions nor had any assurances from him, but still, she can’t master her reaction.

“There was no accompanying death sentence,” she reassures herself and as he shakes his head she begins to consider.

It’s possible she lost Tarth a long time ago. She has a Valyrian sword and an extremely dubious knighthood that no one seems to have worked up the energy to object to. She fought an army of corpses and is subject to a queen who rides dragons. Highborn ladies have married commoners before, although they have been ridiculed and ostracised for it. Like he says, it’s not like anyone won’t know who he is. She is used to scorn and she can ignore those who think her disgraced, so long as she knows it isn't true. This part is easy.

“You’re being very dramatic,” she says.

This time when she grabs for him he comes easily.

“Jaime,” she begins, pulling herself to attention.

“Ser Brienne,” he cuts in. She blinks at him. She doesn’t think he’s actually used the title to address her directly, having given it to her. “Are you certain that you should give me this, that they will let you give me this?”

“I will do what I like.”

“Lord of Tarth.” he says, “That is what you’re going to suggest. Brienne. It seems very unlikely they would let me be lord of anything.”

Brienne flushes at the directness and is annoyed by her reaction. This was her idea.

“The land and the title might be gone,” she reminds him and herself. Tarth’s silence might really mean that her father has dredged up some very distant relative and disinherited her. He could be trying to muster the fortitude to reply, firmly telling her to leave them all alone. “But it was my father’s and it would be mine,” she says, deciding. People do that with titles. Everyone would surely agree to it, because who among them will care what goes on in Tarth. It would be so tidy; he would be swept away off the mainland, far away from his brother and anyone from the Westerlands who might think to look to him. Her father had begrudgingly dragged himself to court as little as he could manage and it had never mattered. Jaime can simply not go, if the queen does not want to see him. Brienne would also prefer not to go.

“So disreputable I’ve become Dornish,” he says. “I would expect no less.”

“For all we know, the Dornish are doing rather better than any of us.” she says, “Look at me.”

She does not know why she thought she would be more prepared for his eyes on her now. Having demanded it, she has to meet his stare. He might not want to, of course. He might not want her, or at least, he might not want her quite like that, not to live with in the dirty day to day where she will inevitably be revealed not to be the incorruptibly deceased Arthur Dayne. Moreover, Lannisters are snobs, that was a fact, she was not so much an infatuated fool that she did not know that. Obstinately peaceful Tarth has so few inhabitants that they had not raised men to fight for Renly. Perhaps Ser Jaime Lannister would even prefer to become simply Jaime - surely Tyrion would give him whatever he wanted to live despite their disagreement - rather than become Of Tarth and spend his life deferring to a giant woman. She feels, for the first time, a familiar creeping flush of humiliation. It’s too much to look at him, anymore. She’s revealed herself so utterly and plainly.

“So I would be,” - she looks up at him, hoping - “here in Winterfell, married to a household knight. Or, Jaime of Tarth,” he tries it, carefully. “Gods.”

“Yes, that is what I am asking you.”

“It’s not a question.” he says, soft and frustrated, “Brienne, it’s a gift.”

She fists her hands at her sides so as not to twist them together.

“I’ll ask them then,” she announces, her voice very loud in the quiet room with the fire all burned away.

“Don’t promise the dragon queen anything,” he says, “Not a thing. Not in exchange for me.”

“I’ll ask Sansa. It seems like the queen doesn’t want anything, except to be rid of you,” she says, aiming for brusqueness. The queen doesn’t need to bargain.

He reaches for her hand again, this time leaving his right stiffly by his side.

“I would be thrilled to be so insulted,” he says.

She thinks perhaps that isn’t entirely true.

He walks backwards, not letting go of her hand until his knees hit the bed. Then he collapses, taking her awkwardly with him. It jars pain back into her bruised shoulders and she ends up perched next to his sprawled body, trying to manoeuvre her sword and caught up in her own cloak. Last time they’d been so close and still they’d both stunk of piss and sweat and the stranger had been gnawing on Jaime’s arm.

“You would consent to kiss me, then?” he asks with levity that isn’t reflected in his eyes, as though she is some coy lady of the court, holding him back. She tries to give him a black look, but can’t quite pull it off. He passes a hand over his eyes. “When will you ask?”

Brienne feels that it might be diplomatic to leave them all in peace concerning Jaime, at least for a little while. Just because her war is effectively over doesn’t mean anyone else has time for her wants and wishes.

“I don’t know,” she says truthfully and then she lies back next to him and closes her eyes.

She sinks into blessed, selfish relief. He’s alive. He’ll stay alive. She can be the one to make sure of it. It will be her responsibility. She reaches out to take hold of his wrist again, but he curls his hand to meet hers instead. He’ll stay hers even if she intends to spend her whole life standing outside of doors so that Sansa Stark can better care for the North and all its people. Besides her Jaime shifts.

“You do know that you don’t have to marry me to fuck me?” Jaime says, “The gods won’t strike you down.”

She is keenly aware of the heat that had barely left her face. This isn’t some seven inspired piosity. Everyone says the Lord of Light set fire to the trenches, Brandon Stark claims to be an avatar for some ancient knowledge and Jon Snow is a dead man who did not dissipate into nothing with the rest. Brienne doesn’t think the gods care about her bedroom arrangements. She thinks other men and women care. Sin sticks. Virtue is more slippery. It would never have taken much more than a misstep. Maid is a fragile honour not bound to the truth, but she has a good arm, a Valyrian steel sword and Sansa Stark. There is very little in the world that she has to do.

“I know that.”

She rolls herself and props herself up on the bed above him. He looks up at her, his eyebrows pinched, somewhere adjacent to amused curiosity.

“I know I don’t have to marry you,” she says reassuringly.

This time when he shoves himself up towards her she doesn’t move away. He pauses, breath soft against her, just like it had been on her wrist. She inhales shakily and closes her eyes against the heat smeared blur of him, so close to her face. Then he puts his mouth almost delicately to hers. Closes against her top lip and nudges into her. His beard isn’t as soft against her as his hair is in her hand. She’s drowning in hot air. She pushes back into him and he meets her. Tries to guide her jaw with his cold fingers pressing back into the bone. She catches a ragged nail in his hair and only grips at him tighter: a pinprick pain against the blossoming pleasure of having the warm expanse of his chest pressing back against hers. Her heart is beating in her mouth. She can’t get close enough without hurting them both.

She pulls away to push her face into his neck instead. He runs his fingers over the shell of her ear and she shudders. It’s something she had never considered. She’s prickling with sweat. Reluctantly she pulls her hand from his hair. She pushes herself away from his heat to stand and pull off her cloak.

When she turns back, Jaime is propped up on one elbow, watching her wide-eyed. He’s clutching at the fastening of his shirt and the band of his cloak like a maid holding the neck of her dress. The clench of his jaw looks half frustration, half terror.

“We’re not going to,” says Brienne, hurt, “I’m just hot.”

Jaime pouts like a performer in a lousy street theatre troupe, but it takes him a few moments to let go of the white knuckle grip at his neck.

“Well,” he says, “there’s no particular hurry that I’m aware of. We have informally been promised to each other for the space of two whole breaths.”

Brienne dumps her cloak and pulls off her boots. She hesitates. Technically it’s her bed. He reaches for her, so she lies back down next to him, staring up at the ceiling. He’d tried to kiss her first, she reassures herself. It’s actively counter to the facts of the situation to believe she isn’t wanted, but she thinks about her rough hands and her broad shoulders and her ugly scars. She drags their conversation back through her mind, turning it over, uncertain. What will he do, if she stays here in Winterfell? Take up one handed sewing? Work the land when spring finally comes? What do wives of knights do, if their husband has no lands? He'd said it was a gift. After a moment Jaime stands to drop his own cloak. He collapses back down next to her, puts his hand over her wrist and rolls over to push a kiss to her clenched jaw. With his nose pressed into her shoulder and his chest rising and falling against her arm, Brienne lets her tension seep out into the mattress.

“Tyrion isn’t going to turn up and start talking at you, is he?” she says. Jaime shrugs against her. “Are you angry with him?”

She tries to imagine confronting whatever jumped up merchant or minor gentry her father might have been forced to pass Tarth onto. Maybe whoever it is now sits in Evenfall laughing at all the love she’d poured onto that little scrap of parchment. Maybe she knew whoever it was as a child. She hates the idea of it. She hopes whoever it is will at least find a way to work hard for their people. Jaime shakes his head against her: not angry.

“It’s Tyrion who is angry with me.”

She supposes that he loves and trusts Tyrion. At least Tyrion seems to want all that responsibility.

“Lord Tyrion of Casterly Rock. Father will be back from the dead to murder us all,” he laughs quietly. “But doesn’t it sound perfect. Tyrion, son of Tywin, son of Tytos.” She lets herself push her hand back into his hair. “My mother named me. Father complained once it was a servants name - diminutive - but he loved her so much-.” The amusement bleeds out of his voice. Brienne pats at him.

“You’d make a terrible servant,” she says.

“Oh, really?” says Jaime, feigning insult, “I was a good squire and then I was competent at standing outside of tents and rooms, carrying messages, fetching armour occasionally.” He runs out of steam, or perhaps he is at a loss for what else it is servants might do. She has no idea where he has been staying or who has been looking after his things. The castle is so overrun that the household servants have no time for fires or cleaning private quarters. If Brienne is honest with herself, it’s mostly Podrick who has been remembering to fetch her fresh wood and water. Jaime continues in a drone, “Opening doors, closing doors. I was a poor jester but Robert did try his best for me.” He nudges his nose against her shoulder and tries more lightly, perhaps noticing his descent into bitterness, “I don’t know what’s expected of the average cook these days but it was all very diverting.” Something about this disturbs her.

“You were Kingsguard, not a servant. It was a great honour to serve, you told Tyrion so yourself.”

“So it’s an honoured kingsguard but not an honoured king’s cook. Poor cook,” he says.

That wasn’t how she had meant that. An honoured servant taking out the King’s bedpan and sweeping out the fireplace? It was still service. Someone had to do all of it. She scowls at the ceiling.

“What cook have you ever spoken to, to ask how they felt about it?” she says.

He waves that away with his finely gloved gold hand.

“If I were a cook, I’d never have found a place after the first dead master. That would sensibly have been the end of it. I’m an ill luck omen now I think of it. Three of my last masters? Or, no!” he says triumphantly, pulling away and sitting up, “four!”

Two sons, she thinks. You wouldn’t know it to hear him, but you’d know it to look at him, smiling at the fire with too many teeth. Four dead and that may soon be five, if the preparations for Daenerys’s army leaving continue apace. Sansa worries and worries that the men are tired and depleted in number, but his sister will die. Brienne thinks there is no question of that.

“Four. So far,” he says, slumping back down next to her. She turns to him, shocked, but he says, “The dragon queen wants me to swear to her before they enact my public humiliation. I wouldn’t want any allegiance from me if I were her.”

Brienne examines his glaring profile, “Why do you hate her? You can’t care this much about Randyll Tarly.”

She finds the idea that he cares about any Tarly at all frankly incredible. He doesn’t seem to be able to answer that, lying silent and heavy by her side.

“I don’t hate her,” he says, frustrated.

“What did she do when you told her about the wildfire?” she asks. Jaime sighs and turns to her.

“She already knew her father was dangerous and cruel,” he says, “when I arrived it seemed as though she was entirely ignorant, as though no one had dared to tell her, but she knew.”

“So she wasn’t shocked? She knew it all?” asks Brienne, surprised. The queen hadn’t looked indifferent when she’d been stood with her back to him. Brienne had seen her eyes. There’s madness, and then there is releasing wildfire in a city of your own people. Sansa had relayed to her the increasingly loud whispers, that seem more and more like fact coming down from the south about his sister causing the terrible explosion in the Sept of Baelor. She cannot imagine the impact of what Aerys had planned.

“Not about his final order. How could she have known?” he says, sounding as though it is wrenched from him, “I kept it from everyone.” Brienne waits. “It devastated her. I don’t think she wanted us to see it, but I know it did.”

Brienne is comforted by that. Daenerys Targaryen cuts such an otherworldly figure with her dragon children. It is reassuringly human to be upset by the news that your father wanted to kill so many of his own people in such a terribly purposeless way.

She turns into him to address the top of his hair, “It’s good you told her. She deserved to know.”

He’s quiet for a long time. She lets herself float, halfway asleep.

“I should be angry with her,” Jaime confesses softly into the cooling air.

Brienne doesn’t respond. She doesn’t have to ask whether he means Daenerys or his sister.

“I should have acted after the Sept, although I don’t know what, precisely I should have done. I just thought… maybe she wouldn’t have needed to do it if I’d been there?”

Brienne finds that notion very stupid, but can’t bring herself to try and disabuse him of the harmless wish. He’s lying next to her, alive, safe and very nearly hers.

They nearly sleep through dinner. Pod wakes them, shaking her carefully and averting his eyes from where Jaime is pressed into her shoulder.

Huddled around the fire after more standing in the corridor, eating her morning meal with Sansa, Brienne gathers up the courage for a request. She’d slept next to Pod and Jaime again, and she hadn’t offered any particular excuse. She feels clearer headed for it.

Prior to the battle, she had been responsible for her assigned men and she had been helping Sansa. The days had blinked away so quickly, overshadowed by the wave of death sweeping towards them. This morning has elongated strangely, without the sickening dread of yesterday’s hanging axe. She wants to feel that she has done something.

“My lady, could I talk to you about Podrick Payne?”

Sansa places her empty plate on the floor and turns to her, folding her hands neatly in her lap. Sansa and Podrick had grown to know each other a little by necessity on the painful journey from Winterfell to Castle Black.

“Certainly,” Sansa says, and waits, attentive.

Sansa has a new fur. It’s a grey pelt, the unaltered shape of a giant wolf, slung over the top of her cloak. There are marbles in it’s eyes and it’s clawed feet embrace her, curled across her chest. It clearly means a lot to Sansa, because she keeps touching it with careful affection. Brienne has spent the morning trying not to make eye contact with it. She looks steadily at Sansa now.

“Does the queen plan to dispense any honours to those who fought in the battle? Podrick has long been my squire in all but name, and he fought bravely that night. He would make an excellent knight, I’m sure anyone would agree.”

Sansa tilts her head. “I don’t know, Brienne. I can find out. Put his name forward.”

“Thank you, my lady,” says Brienne, and Sansa gifts her with a warm smile.

Brienne finishes the last of her food, and Sansa hands her the empty plate to stack. Brienne will take them away. She hasn’t been useful for much else so far today. There was an exciting interlude when she took a note out to the gate house for collection by someone from the town.

“We’ll have more people available to help with tasks like this when the queen’s forces move out,” says Sansa, apologetically. Brienne doesn’t mind fetching and carrying. She’s happy for another chance to stretch her legs and she’s intimately aware of how much work is going into managing the day to day running of the castle. She’s been there, quite superfluous, next to the poor, overrun steward, through many of Sansa’s meetings with head washerwomen, bakers, candlemakers and clothiers. She and her father had overseen this work together, but their steward had been able to continue largely unsupervised. Tens of thousands had never descended on Evenfall and they had never had to recover from breached defences. It has been enlighteningly complicated.

“I’m happy to help in anyway I can, my lady.” She gathers the plates in her lap, waiting to be dismissed.

“You’ve never asked me for anything for yourself,” says Sansa. “I want Winterfell to be your home. I want you to know you can come to me with anything you need.”

Brienne clutches at the the plates and looks cautiously at Sansa’s unusually open face. She’d meant to delay asking, but she won’t find a better moment. This is as selfish a request as she will ever need to make.

“My lady, I’d like to ask you about Jaime.”

“What now?” says Sansa, “That’s all decided.” She sounds as though she’s pretending to feel neutral about it.

“I want to marry him,” Brienne says. Sansa is, very briefly, a little slack-jawed. Then she settles her face and looks down at her hands, considering. Brienne stays very still. She’d thought it had been obvious.

“Has Tyrion promised you a handsome dowry?” Brienne is well practiced at waiting out remarks that deserve no response. Sansa doesn’t fold into self-flagellating contrition, but Sansa also says aloud, “Sorry,” quickly and quietly.“I have always thought of you as a very sensible woman.”

It’s strange to spend all your time observing one person, monitoring their wants and to not be known in return. Brienne dressed herself in her armour, told her father that she could never give Tarth an heir, and set off as the lone representative from her island to die making a third son King. All because he would have been a great ruler, and because he was kind to her when they were children. She is quite sure that she is not a excessively sensible person.

“I have considered this. Carefully, my lady.”

“You will need to write to your father.”

“I wrote to Tarth,” says Brienne - Sansa jerks her head up - “not about this. I’ve had nothing in response.”

“I’m sorry,” Sansa says, “We’ve heard nothing, even unofficially, from anyone in the Stormlands since the queen arrived.“

Brienne sits, stewing on this. How could no one have thought to tell her? She supposes that lack of word could just be an coordinated political position, but that seems uncharacteristically harmonious. For the first time, she worries truly that there is something more than one man’s death or censure at the other end of Tarth’s silence. They technically have the Stormlands here in Gendry Baratheon, but in the cold light of winter, that is entirely useless. He has no army and no one who owes him allegiance except Brienne.

Sansa says, quietly, voice kicking up a little at the end, “You feel you might go back?” She frowns and thins her lips.

Brienne shifts uncomfortably.

“Have their new lord write to them,” suggests Brienne, “and the name might shake them into some response.”

“Arya says he’s illiterate,” says Sansa sharply, “and I only have so many waking hours and so many ravens to lose. I won’t be responsible for misplaying his hand for him. The queen made him; she should deal with him.”

Brienne struggles not to raise her eyebrows.

“He’s completely illiterate?” Brienne asks, focusing on the practical issue. She does not think Arya would ever be so cruel as to invent that. The storm lords won’t like it. Her father would have been kind about it, but it would have disturbed him. Sansa sighs. “He’s my responsibility too,” decides Brienne, “would you mind if I tried speaking to him about it, my lady? I know those houses. I could tell him what to write.”

“Could you?” says Sansa, alight with relief, “although - could you tell him that you come with my permission specifically.”

Brienne sits back to look at her. She would prefer not to be a piece in some power struggle between Sansa and the queen.

“My lady,” she says, very gently, “She will be gone soon. She’ll take all her armies and dragons and-.”

“Jon looks at me like that,” Sansa interrupts, “This isn’t some petty competition between women. I’ve worked with her. I’m not Cersei Lannister, no matter what your Jaime says.”

Brienne recoils, stung. She doesn’t want ownership of Jaime’s calculated unpleasantness.

“You shouldn’t be hurt by that. He said it to be cruel.”

Sansa rolls straight over her.

“His words didn’t hurt me because they are not true. Our men are tired and hurt. We need the northern men she’s taking for repairs, hunting, protection, to make long overdue preparations for a winter that’s already here. I know Cersei better than anyone in this castle and she’s not worth their lives. We have no clear grasp of the chaos out there. Likely as not by the time winter begins to turn we’ll find she’s been murdered by her own people.”

Brienne also thinks that extremely likely. Perhaps Jaime did confirm who destroyed the sept.

“Your brother and the queen must have their logic,” says Brienne peaceably.

“They have one very compelling reason; we can’t feed her men. We’ve been talking to the wildlings, but we’re too far from the ocean and we don’t have enough food stored away.”

“She could sail back to Essos and regroup,” says Brienne.

Sansa says emphatically, “Yes. Thank you. She could.”

“But she did come here to help us,” says Brienne. She can’t help but feel for the queen. She’d had no real reason to leave Jaime alive and Brienne is grateful. Now her fear is abating she can’t help but find something wondrous in the woman who flies on the back of mythical beasts.

“As I have said repeatedly to Jon, my gratitude does not give me the ability to reshape reality. I explain everything to her and she only hears that she must go forward, faster. She’ll drag our people south and everything I say only hastens their going.”

Brienne’s request feels stupid and small. She’s been thinking of this as a strange moment of peace. All her people are finally safe and within reach. She’s been looking at a selfishly tight little group, just Sansa, Arya, Podrick and Jaime. Sansa owes her service to a far greater number of people. So does Brienne, when she’s honest with herself.

“I do understand her,” says Sansa, more kindly. “They are already her people, in her heart. She wants to be with them. What’s terrible is that we’re her people too and that’s why she won’t stay depleting our food stores for a moment longer than she has to.”

“But she won’t retreat,” says Brienne.

“Someone who would retreat now would never have come to save us. She can’t be cautious now she’s come so far and lost so much.”

Brienne can respect that.

“The wildlings really say we can’t survive?”

“We can’t support so many people and we need trade access to the south, but people lived through long winters here in the past. We can do it again if we can access the right knowledge.” Brienne is warmed by her confidence. She nods her head supportively. “Also, we need to call them, free folk. I keep forgetting. If they stay for the whole winter, we’re all going to end up absorbing some quite extraordinary ideas.”

“I’ll keep Jaime away from them, he’s already halfway there,” says Brienne.

Sansa looks at her with deadly interest, “She doesn’t already have him as another devoted acolyte then? Even though she was so unexpectedly bountiful in her mercy? Tyrion couldn’t stop talking about it.”

Brienne attempts to stop the awkward sideways slide of her eyes. Sansa reads her easily.

“Alright,” she says, sitting back, “That was a little much, for someone avoiding comparisons to Cersei.”

“You sound a little in love with her too,” says Brienne, “They’re already in her heart. She came to save us,” Brienne repeats, feeling daring. Sansa raises her eyebrows at her, but she looks pleased. “My lady,” adds Brienne, and Sansa sighs and stands.

“I need to get on,” she says. Brienne surges to her feet, holding the plates between them. “You needn’t come back today, I’d prefer you spend the time with Gendry Baratheon. Let me know how it goes sometime tomorrow morning.”

‘I will, my lady,” says Brienne, “If you’re sure you won’t need anything until then?”

“You have things to do,” says Sansa, which is generous. Brienne has two things to do, a dramatic increase from her previous single responsibility of training Podrick.

“Let me send you Podrick Payne,” says Brienne, “He’s nearly a knight.”

Tracking down Podrick is a challenge. He’s not in her bedchamber and neither is Jaime. In the corner of her room there is a little collection of fancy leather packs. On top, carelessly untied, is a leather roll open to show a lavishly engraved razor handle and a little stone tied next to it. She looks closer. There is a hair on the blade. She had assumed his beard just looked like that by itself. Presumably there is a process.

Podrick is also not in the kitchens or the guards’ hall. She finds him in the stable talking with a stable hand and lovingly brushing down one of the reliable but inelegant beasts they’d found after Pod had failed to hobble Jaime’s gifted horses on the way to the Eyrie. Podrick dotes on the creatures, possibly because neither of them has the intelligence or spirit to wander away if left untethered.

“Ser Jaime’s here and I’m keeping an eye on everyone, please don’t worry, my lady,” says Pod.

Brienne hadn’t been worried because she hadn’t known she needed to be. Sansa’s orders had clearly stated that Jaime should stay in the inner castle and remain accompanied. The stables are not the inner castle and Jaime is not in sight.

“I’m here to find you, Pod,” she says, “You’re to help Lady Sansa for the rest of the day.”

Podrick looks up at her doubtfully.

“Am I going back to pouring wine?” he says, then hurries to clarify, “Not that pouring wine wasn’t a great honour.”

“I have never poured wine for Lady Sansa,” says Brienne, “although I would have thought you’d be relieved to go back to it after that battle.”

Podrick goes to hang his brush on the wall and rinse his hands in a pail of melting snow. He looks no more enthusiastic. Jaime should have knighted him after the battle. She hadn’t been thinking clearly about the future, caught up in currents of her cautious dance with Jaime and the thankful, weary, unexpected work of living.

“We’ll still practice, although it will likely have to be after dark,” says Brienne. Podrick brightens, and Brienne leaves him to walk through the stables, looking for Jaime. She can’t keep him safe if he won’t obey her.

She’s never seen him use the hand like this before. He’s using it to guide the top of the handle of the shovel as he scrapes it along the floor. She’d just assumed using it with any force would hurt him. She still remembers it as a fresh and terrible wound through which all his life and spirit was leaching.

This is also the first she’s seen of the horse he’d brought with him. Podrick has been checking on their horses. Brienne has been spending too much time with Sansa to do the work herself. The horse is a magnificent palfrey, beautiful, with a shiny black coat and to look at the way it’s shifting its weight at her presence, it’s likely gifted with an enviably smooth amble. It’s not the fussy destrier she had expected at all; it’s an entirely appropriate horse to make an efficient journey on the scale of the one from King’s Landing to Winterfell, except for the fact that anyone looking at it would be able to see how much gold its rider was worth.

“How were you not robbed and left for dead on the road?” she asks.

Jaime startles at her voice and then tries to cover it up, tossing dried horse shit out past her into the common area, filled with other people’s saddles and a few placid cart horses. Jaime had given her a sturdy chestnut courser when she rode out of King’s Landing. It had been Lannister money, clearly, but nothing like this. She can’t help but put a hand out to the horses elegant head.

“See, there are too many animals in here.” It is packed. He was right.

“And you shouldn’t be here at all,” she says, brushing a hand down the horse’s neck.

Jaime twitches a delighted smile at her.

“Are you calling me an animal?” he asks, sounding a little proud of her.

It hadn’t been deliberate. Brienne scowls at him to let him know how serious it is that she’s found him flouting Sansa’s rules. The horse curls its upper lip and she gets a flash of large teeth as it jerks it’s jaw. Brienne takes a healthy step backwards.

“Brienne, I’ve been dealt with,” he says, un-contrite and casual, “Surely the quarantine was temporary.”

“They haven’t made any announcement about you yet,” points out Brienne.

He comes to stand close, digging dried out peas from his belt and holding them up for the horse.

“If you think witnessing a little public humiliation is going to deter men from glaring at me, you’re sorely mistaken,” he says lowly, “They’re holding off on performing the whole spectacle precisely because they think it will be such a morale boost that someone will be inspired to start throwing rocks. Wouldn’t want to have that kind of bloodlust in the ranks before a long march.”

Brienne will concede that seems very sensible.

“I’ve sent Podrick away. You can’t stay here alone. You need to do what you’re told and stay in the inner castle,” says Brienne.

He screws his eyes closed as though his head hurts and pushes his forehead into the neck of the horse with a long slow exhale.

“I don’t want to just sit around,” he says.

None of them wants to do that. There is nothing Brienne can do about it.

“What’s his name?” Brienne asks.

“I don’t name horses,” he says, nonplussed, “do you?”

Brienne can’t say that she ever has. She’s also never had a horse like this one.

On their way out of the stables, Jaime hands off his shovel to a group of young, mousy haired northerners. All of them seem surprisingly pleased to see him. He’s just been painting a picture of the hostile, spitting masses.

“‘Bye, ser,” chirps the boy who takes the shovel.

“Call me Jaime, there’s a good lad,” he says, suddenly charming in a way Brienne knows he’s entirely capable of but has rarely seen, at least not without him draping the gauzy performance over a thick undercurrent of mockery. The boy just looks confused.

“The informality will be less beguiling when they know it’s not your choice,” Brienne tells him, picking up her pace. He lengthens his stride to keep alongside her, glaring.

“Getting them to trust me enough to let me alone with the horse turned out to be a lot of work,” says Jaime, “don’t undermine my achievements, such that they are. Wait, where are we going?”

Brienne has taken a sharp turn towards the smithy. Having Jaime along for this won’t help her gain Gendry’s trust, but she could use the moral support and the practical knowledge of someone raised to this vast kind of duty.

Gendry is shorter up close than Brienne had anticipated. Nevertheless, he has a kind face, and his hands are thick and dirty with hard work. There is something of Renly about his eyes.

Jaime whispers to her, triumphant, “He looks nothing like Robert.”

It is excessive to be that pleased about it. That king has been dead for years.

They take Gendry back to Brienne’s quarters. Every communal space they try has been overrun by parties of men inexplicably in full mail who turn towards them with icy suspicion when they enter. With only the one chair available to them - it is galling to discover Tyrion might have been correct to advise her to find others - they sit by the fire on the rug. At least Gendry is not likely to be insulted by this arrangement.

It takes Brienne a long time to recount the many houses of the Stormlands in satisfactory detail, even tactfully eliding, for now, their many eccentricities. She had begun with the extinct houses; it was essential for proper context. Now she has progressed to those houses still operational, as far as she knows, who rightly owe him allegiance.

She clears her throat before beginning on the more minor families. Besides her, Jaime puts his arm up on their one chair, puts his head on the arm and closes his eyes. Gendry, who is sat cross-legged and closest to the fire, turns slowly away from Brienne to blink at him, wearing the same dismayed and overwhelmed expression he’s been wearing since Brienne began her lecture with the pronouncement that the Stormlords were great military men with the ability to raise tens of thousands. She had made sure to clarify that Tarth was one of the exceptions to this rule.

“My lady, could I have a moment,” Gendry says.

Brienne stutters to a halt, realising that the man she is currently describing is surely dead with Stannis’s force and that it would be more useful to relate to Gendry the various foibles of his wife and daughters, about whom she knows very little. Her jaw aches again. Her father might know, he might not. Brienne turns to glare at Jaime who appears to be nodding off. He cracks an eye open blearily.

“Don’t stop on my account,” he says, “I know most of this from many tedious hours of childhood and that awful old man must surely be dead by now.”

“You finish telling him then,” says Brienne, “if you know so much.”

It’s her home. They’re her peers, even if they rarely acknowledged her as such.

“We need something to draw the house sigils,” says Jaime, straightening, “it’s no good trying to remember them without seeing them.” This is, unfortunately, a perfectly passable idea. “Do you think you could explain as you write his letters to them? Context might help to fix them all in the mind.”

She climbs roughly to her feet, annoyed with herself for not thinking of it. She can’t remember learning to read and write. She’d just… learned and then her handwriting had improved. She assumes it will be even easier for an adult to learn. They both stare up at her.

“I’m going to get supplies. You can learn to read and write at the same time,” she tells Gendry, trying to sound encouraging. They both suddenly look even more worried, as though they think she expects him to immediately be able to write out something acceptable.

She slams out of the room without her cloak. In retrospect, attempting a soporific recounting of lineages that close to the comforting fire had been a mistake. She had only wanted to make the inevitable tedium somewhat comfortable for him. That Gendry had managed to maintain such a high and exhausting looking state of anxiety for that long, probably speaks very well of his commitment to his new responsibilities.

She takes a detour via Sansa’s study and finds Podrick slumped against the wall outside. He straightens quickly when he spots her coming.

“She’s in there with Lady Arya again and you were right, she pours her own wine,” he says.

“Don’t inform on her to me,” says Brienne, but she pats his shoulder reassuringly and heads out towards the maester’s tower. She pretends not to feel the slap of cold, wet air, and sets her shoulders, guiltily circumventing the little sept Sansa had pointed out for her use. The late Lord of Winterfell had built it for Lady Catelyn’s comfort when she came north. Brienne has not visited. There are men camped all around the little building now, and the stink of worked leather is filling the air again. Only one of the men says anything offensive as she passes and he says it very quietly and quails when she turns her head to glare imperiously at him. The cold is so sharp, without her cloak, that her face must have already been pink.

She trudges up the steps in the maester’s tower to find Samwell Tarly in his rooms under the raven’s loft. There is even bedding in each alcove of the staircase now. That hadn’t been there when she and Jaime made the climb, she’s sure, although she might not have noticed. The men occupying them are blessedly absent. At the very top of the tower, she finds Tarly's pretty young woman curled in a wide windowsill, dandling the child of indiscriminate gender in her lap. They’re both wrapped thoroughly in furs. There is ice on the latch and metalwork even inside of the window. The two of them can keep an eye on the whole secondary courtyard from up here and see anyone coming or going.

“I’ve seen you,” says the girl, eyes piercing.

Brienne has seen her too, but would not have chosen to put it quite like that. She keeps a careful eye on the child and sidles past.

“I’m sure. I’m just here about some books and some supplies,” says Brienne and she raps as quietly as possible on the door, not wanting to disturb the child.

“He won’t have heard that,” says the girl, and she turns into the child and says, “will he little Sam? Will he?” in a warm low voice that turns over in Brienne’s chest.

She beats her fist more solidly on the door, shivering. It’s no weather to be standing idle without a cloak.

“Are you from further south?” the girl asks.

“I’m from Tarth.”

“Yes,” the girl says kindly, as if speaking to someone a little slow, “you’re Ser Brienne, the maid of Tarth. Is Tarth in the south?”

“Yes,” says Brienne, hitting the door again; the child is craning its neck around to look at her and its eyes are very bulbous.

“Did you ever see the Great Sept of Baelor, before it burned?” the girl asks.

Brienne pauses to look at her properly. She looks desperately curious. It’s as if Brienne is the most fascinating thing to happen to the two of them all day.

“I did,” says Brienne. The girl retreats a little at her abrupt tone, but the child babbles happily enough.

Brienne finds herself elaborating with the girl’s hungry eyes fixed on her and the swallowed question she can almost see in the air between them, “there were statues of each of the seven southern gods, every one of them as tall as this tower. With the candles lit at night, it felt as though they might step down and-.”

She stops. What would the seven do? It is a strangely practical question now. The girl falls backwards, enraptured.

“I’m going to see the Red Keep and the Great Sept and the Dragon Pit, even if I have to see them all as ruins,” she says as the door finally swings open behind Brienne.

“What’s your name?” Brienne remembers to ask.

“This is Gilly,” Samwell Tarly says, “don’t mind her, my lady. There’s still no news from your father. I’ll find you immediately if a raven comes in. You mustn’t worry yourself.”

Brienne pulls herself up to her full height, then reminds herself that she must be kind because the man must only recently have learned that his father and brother were incinerated by a dragon. The politics of Winterfell have become very complicated. She thinks sorrowfully of poor Sansa, responsible for keeping track of it all and decides to try her very best not to take a dislike to the man. He’d let her and Jaime send their letters and delivered Jaime’s to her, respectfully unopened.

“My lord, I’m here to borrow some simple histories and to collect some paper for letter writing.” At his look of worry, she clarifies, “They will be letters sent in the queen’s name.”

It’s a relief to let herself back into her own warm room. Brienne finds Jaime and Gendry are still sat on the floor, now propped up against the end of the bed frame having dragged the rug far away from the fire. Jaime is recounting, in low, slightly amused tones, the details of some melee. She hopes it at least took place at Storm’s End or featured anyone still politically relevant. He cuts himself off, tracking her as she goes to stand for a moment in front of the fire, clutching the books and papers in her arms. She has ink held in her chapped hands. It hadn’t immediately frozen when she stepped outside, but it felt as if it should have.

“Gendry was apprenticed to a master blacksmith who knew how to forge Valyrian steel and do all kinds of ornamental work,” says Jaime as she masters her shivering.

Gendry mostly looks suspicious at his enthusiasm.

“You could,” says Jaime, more cautiously, “ask to have the pommel on that sword altered.”

She puts a hand to the ostentatious ruby studded gold. It would be sensible. Its gaudy Lannister colours have caused her no end of trouble, and they almost lost her Sansa and Arya for good. She knows that it’s Tywin Lannister’s taste and not Jaime’s. But it would be a frivolous waste of time. Entirely unnecessary. Gendry glances anxiously between them.

“I don’t know where I’d find the time,” he says, “there’s more preparation for when we leave, and now all this,” he indicates Brienne as if she represents the whole responsibility of the Stormlands to him. She supposes this is currently accurate. There are all these titles sitting around in Winterfell and so few people beholden to them.

Brienne comes to drop the books heavily between him and Jaime and sits down cross-legged with her back to the fire. Jaime crosses his feet so that his calf brushes up against her thigh. She places her papers out on top of the books, uncorks her ink and tries to decide where to start. Then allows herself to pat at Jaime’s leg while Gendry is preoccupied with gazing worriedly at the stack of books. She decides that she doesn’t want to change anything about her sword. To change it would be a lie. Oathkeeper has served her very well.

“Maybe we should begin with Tarth?” Gendry prompts, “You can put in a note from yourself if you like?”

Brienne’s heart seizes.

“Perhaps House Selmy,” Jaime says, and he nudges her with his feet. “Ser Brienne seemed as sure as anyone can be of their loyalty to the Baratheon name.”

Brienne is careful as she writes out the first overture to his lords, I, Gendry Baratheon, Lord Paramount of the Stormlands, written in her most carefully elegant script. Her father would be proud. The three of them string together words of duty, promised service, and a new love for the families and their people. She tries to make each message personal and hopeful. The more awed Gendry looks by his new responsibilities, the more Brienne likes him and the more sick she feels at how sure she’d been when she left Tarth, that it would remain sunny and undisturbed in her absence.

They break for the sake of their stomachs and Brienne’s cramped wrist and back. She should have taken the chair back to the desk. On the long tables of the great hall, Gendry sits with them, sliding easily into place besides Pod. The mousy haired northern boy from last night’s meal comes past to twice to try to offer them wine. Now Tyrion has alerted Brienne to his hovering, she can not ignore it. He’s small but perhaps not so much of a boy as she had thought; there is a deeply scored wrinkle in the skin between his eyes. She wonders who owns his service. Varys no doubt.

Finally, they write two letters to Tarth. In the first, Brienne includes her name and an appeal for her lord father, or whoever has valiantly taken up his burden, to report to their new lord and their new queen. Brienne daringly includes personal endorsements of both. In the second, she erases all mention of herself and lets her hand belong entirely to Gendry Baratheon. Gendry prefers the version where she lends her name in support of his. Jaime compares them carefully and hands her back the same copy.

After Gendry leaves to find out if the queen is still awake to look them over, Brienne carefully places the unused letter on the mantle in case they need it after all. Jaime watches her do it, jaw jumping. She hadn’t been expecting his help to go so far. This has very quietly slid from helping her with her duties to something tantamount to working directly against his sister.

He’d grown quieter as they worked their way through the old names to the new, and now he’s holding his right arm in his left in front of him, as if the gold is pulling at his shoulder. Brienne doesn’t know how to approach speaking about it, if Jaime isn’t going to acknowledge it himself; the sister or the hand. Besides, she has her own worries.

“My voice might harm his cause, if they might feel I gave up my right to speak to them,” says Brienne, confessing the pressing concern.

Pod, who has been sitting in the chair, working his way through their mending by the low light of the fire since dinner looks up at her.

“I’m sure they’ll all be glad to hear from you, my lady,” he says.

Jaime pauses, halfway to dragging himself to his feet, apparently surprised that she hasn’t seen fit to walk herself through the fire twice by telling Pod about her failed missive to Tarth as well. Pod will soon be knighted, and his fortunes will no longer be tied to hers. He doesn’t need to know her humiliation and grief yet. There’s no rush. Jaime’s eyes go back to the mantle and her letter. His mouth turns down.

“Sons of lords go off to fight their king’s wars and return to govern during times of peace. No matter how you left, your word should carry weight,” says Jaime. This is true, and it almost maps onto what Brienne has done, if only she really were a man. She would even be returning with a knighthood. “They should have followed you when you left to fight,” says Jaime. “Every one of them should be ashamed.” He drops back onto the bed and crosses his arms over his chest.

Brienne would not have asked them to follow her. They are too few, and it would have left the island undefended. Pod puts down his mending, looking approvingly at Jaime despite his ill temper, before a great yawn shudders through him. Their promised practice will have to wait, her duty to the stormlands has taken up all their evening. Brienne starts blowing out candles and she’s thankful when neither of them make any move to leave.

Brienne wakes to Jaime pushing his face against the narrow window in her room. The barest hint of morning is lighting his face so it must be late. She sits up and next to her Podrick murmurs unhappily and turns his face into the pillow, muttering himself into wakefulness.

“Do you think they’re fully grown?” Jaime asks them, “So many of the skulls at King’s Landing seemed bigger. But perhaps I never got as close to the real thing.”

Brienne yawns widely and clicks her teeth together. Now she’s awake she can hear the dragons. She cracks her neck and scrubs the sleep from her eyes.

“Imagine if I’d been killed by an adolescent dragon,” Jaime says, “How would that have sounded in a song?”

Pod snorts beside her. Brienne looks down at him curiously.

“If they get any bigger they'll be able to hear the wings beating from King’s Landing,” says Podrick foggily, “I’m grateful for them, but I won’t be sorry when they’re screaming elsewhere.”

Brienne crooks her head. Now she concentrates she thinks she can hear the thud of their wings. She’d been distracted before, by the terrible creaking screeches. Podrick begins to lever himself up off the mattress. He looks so much better rested than he had in the days following the battle. She should have asked them to stay earlier. His eyes are clearer and the yellow bruising on his face is finally dissipating.

“Go back to sleep,” she urges him, and he shakes his head at her. “We didn’t practice last night and it’s too late to practice this morning. I am sorry, Pod.”

When she looks up, Jaime is smiling at her. She attempts to subtly remove the hand she finds she has stuck up her shirt and under her arm to scratch vigorously. His smile widens. She huffs. It’s so very wonderful to be amusing to him, she thinks, throwing back the covers to go and wash the warm comfort of bed from her bones and begin her day.

“Jaime and I can practice, my lady,” Podrick says.

Brienne hesitates. She wants to be there to supervise, at least at first. She’d trust Jaime’s instruction of Podrick, but she doesn’t want Jaime settling back into the rhythms of his right arm.

Jaime is looking at her strangely.

“Brienne, let me be useful,” he says, “there’s so little for me to do here now and I’m confined to this building anyway.” Brienne still hesitates. “I promise you we’ll stay in this room and we’ll show you everything we’ve done.”

When she leaves, they’re already shifting furniture around to make room.

It’s the end of a long morning of standing by Sansa’s shoulder while she talks to members of the castle staff and representatives from the northern houses about when and even if they plan to return to their holdfasts. Sansa has already hastily tidied her table and is straightening her sleeves, when the queen appears unexpectedly at the door. Sansa stands.

“Jon passed along your invitation,” the queen says, walking smartly into the room.

Sansa has planned this conversation then. It explains the sudden need for order in her papers. The queen looks like she just came from flying, windswept and practically dressed. Behind her comes her young advisor.

“Your grace, welcome,” she motions towards one of the chairs in front of the desk she and Brienne stand behind. The queen makes no further move into the room. “Surely we won’t need a translator,” says Sansa, inclining her head towards the woman standing at Daenerys’s shoulder. The woman simply smiles politely at her. “I wanted to thank you, Missandei, for your work with the injured after the battle,” Sansa says, “your courage and kindness when we needed every hand we could gather did not go unnoticed.”

The woman arches an elegant eyebrow, although her face somehow remains entirely pleasant.

“Lady Sansa, Missandei is not only my translator, she is a trusted and valuable advisor,” Daenerys says, smiling fixedly, “You will also come to appreciate her insights. Surely you, however, do not need an armed guard?”

Brienne expects Sansa to match the queen’s false pleasantness, but instead, her face transforms, and her voice becomes grave.

“Your grace, Ser Brienne is a knight of your Seven Kingdoms and daughter of the Evenstar, Lord of Tarth. She is sworn to me, personally.”

The queen’s eyes come to rest unsubtly on the gold at Brienne’s hip, the subtle red leather of the belt, her smile becoming toothier and uncomfortable looking.

“All the same...”

The queen doesn’t demure at all as Sansa lets her stand there, waiting. Sansa’s face is troubled. Brienne wonders if she should intercede. She has already explained the sword. Armed and armoured. It’s why they’d trusted him enough to let him fight.

“Very well,” says Sansa, “Brienne, you are dismissed for the day. Attend to your other duties.”

Brienne turns to her in shock. She can see a member of the queen’s unsullied general standing rigidly just outside the door.

“My lady, I can wait outside,” says Brienne. She can. She’s grown very used to it. “Or I could send you Podrick Payne again.”

That might work very well. He doesn’t have any Lannister gold strapped to his person, just a vaguely Lannister coloured jacket, and she wants the queen to have a chance to see him. Brienne can’t leave the entirety of the responsibility of getting him noticed and knighted with Sansa.

“No, thank you, Brienne,” says Sansa.

Brienne walks slightly dazedly around the desk and past the queen, who has dropped her rictus grin for something more genuinely curious. She pulls the door closed on them.

The queen’s guard is the same man as before. She nods to him, and he returns the gesture before looking away, giving her a moment of privacy. He must have heard her dismissal. It’s too early to take Gendry from his work. Sansa hasn’t given her any other duties.

At the end of the passageway, she sees a flash of movement. It’s the mousy-haired young man, the eavesdropper, stopped in the archway that turns into the great hall.

“You!” she exclaims, stepping towards him, and he turns and runs. She tells the unsullied man, “don’t let him listen to Lady Sansa’s door.”

She catches the barest glimpse of his annoyance. She didn’t need to give him orders. She knows that. Brienne runs. The weighty wooden doors to the great hall squeal as she charges into the strangely deserted space, so dismally dark even in the middle of the day. She’ll never catch him. Winterfell is old and closely built by generations of northern men addled by lack of sunlight. She sprints after him anyway.

Out in the courtyard she circles in the freezing air, calling out for anyone who might have seen him go. The courtyard is as full as it always is. Women move quickly and determinedly between crowds of men, all with clear destinations. Brienne moves as they do, trying to see between the cloaked shapes, looking for a suspiciously darting movement. Some of the men watch her, vague curiosity through their thick frozen beards. Others ignore her entirely. No one interrupts their business to help her. She stops, heart like quick marching feet in her chest, frustration boiling in her gut.

Through the front gates, a ragtag group of northmen and Wildlings ride, most with game hanging from their saddles. Tormund of giant slaying fame, is sat awkward and heavy on his horse, but he looks delighted, shouting out to his friends and guiding the horse successfully to a neat halt.

She reaches out to arrest the progress of a passing northern woman who is huddled low in her furs. The woman shrinks from her.

“Have you seen a young man? He would have been running. Northern. This high, thin...” She indicates, still casting around over the woman’s head. She can see the hunting party dismounting and she wants to move on. When she felt frustrated like this at home, she would train. Since then there has always been more than enough to do.

“No, ser… I mean, I’m sorry, my lady” says the woman, “there’s lots of skinny boys these days.” She’s clutching a basket of freshly folded linens close under her arm. “Please, I’m needed with the injured.”

“It’s for Lady Sansa,” says Brienne, “I need to find him.”

The woman looks up at her properly, more interested now Sansa’s name has been invoked, but she still shakes her head. Out of the corner of her eye, Brienne sees Tormund spot her; he points her out to the rest of the men.

“Thank you, anyway,” she says to the woman, who scuttles immediately away once dismissed, disappearing entirely from the courtyard.

Brienne can see Tormund closing on her. She doesn’t want to admire his catches or hear anything about what anyone else thinks of her. She hunches her shoulders and marches away, embarrassed to be driven off, even though she could stay if she wanted to, even though she has a sword and not only a basket of laundry as protection.

She barges back into her room to find Jaime lying listlessly on her bed, stripped down to his shirt and trousers, pink and newly clean looking. He’s holding his letter and he gathers it slowly into his fist and slides it into a pocket. Pod has vanished, she notes with annoyance. There are two blunted swords lying next to Jaime, but otherwise, everything has been put back to rights.

“Someone is spying on Sansa,” she announces, hand still on her sword. He doesn’t even sit up.

“Is that surprising?” he says, unhelpfully, flexing his left arm through a series of movements that seem designed to protect against stiffness. Brienne draws herself up.

“This is her home,” Brienne tells him severely, smarting again with the invasion of it.

She supposes that if your home had largely been King’s Landing, this might seem an acceptable state of affairs to you. There had been no spying on Tarth, she’s sure. Her father would have been very dull to spy upon. Jaime sits up on the bed.

“Do you want us to… do something about the spy?” he asks, beginning to look interested.

The us glides revelatory along Brienne’s frustration. She takes a breath and she tries to think about it as Sansa would. There might be some kind of hidden trap in exposing the spy. What if he’s been fed lies to spread if they catch him? What if he belonged to the Queen herself - explaining the unsullied man’s lack of worry - and it wouldn’t be politic to expose him? What if, what if. What she’d like is action.

“He knows I’ve seen him now so he might be wary,” she tells Jaime, trying to talk it through aloud, “but you and Podrick could help to grab him.”

Jaime raises his eyebrows at her, looking more awake by the second.

“Alright,” he says, “what does the spy look like?”

Brienne describes him. Mousy hair, small face, deep groove between his brows, the one with the jugs of water. Jaime’s face falls as she speaks.

“What’s wrong now?” she asks.

The boy can’t be Tyrion’s. Tyrion had been worried by his eavesdropping.

“Brienne, that one isn’t spying on Sansa, he is Sansa’s,” Jaime says, “You don’t want us to grab the poor boy. She won’t thank you.”

He stands and gathers up the tourney swords. Brienne blinks through the rush in her ears and the wide absence in her lungs.

“How could you possibly know that?” she asks, her voice sounding louder and somehow further away than she had intended.

“Tyrion,” Jaime says, leaning the swords by the mantle and not even looking at her, as if this whole affair is of minimal interest. “He came by to pick up Podrick to help with work on his saddles, and he’d noticed - just as you have - the boy hovering at mealtimes, so he found out, and he told us.”

Tyrion, who possibly slipped up and gave Brienne information about Varys’s disloyalty. Or Tyrion who pretended to be drunk enough to dodge responsibility for passing Brienne information Sansa could use. Or Tyrion… Brienne doesn’t want to have to think like this.

“Brienne,” says Jaime and she opens her eyes to see him already close, ducking into her line of sight to try to force eye contact, concern on his face. She steps back. “Brienne, you shouldn’t worry. We just have to let them all get on with this kind of thing.”

Brienne doesn’t want to do that. King’s Landing had been like this, only worse because she’d had to wear a dress. At least there she’d known on arrival that she’d soon be leaving. Winterfell hasn’t been like that. She doesn’t want it to become that. She’s not made for this sort of court and she doesn’t know how to keep them all safe within it.

“I should talk to Sansa about this,” Brienne says, retreating again to avoid the placating reach of Jaime’s hand, “she doesn’t need waste her energies spying on me.”

Jaime smiles soothingly at her.

“It’s nothing to worry about,” he says, “You’re never going to do anything traitorous for her to find, clearly, so why upset her needlessly?”

He reaches out towards her face. She intercepts his wrist and wrenches. There’s a moment where she thinks he’s going to step into her and try to use his weight to break the hold. He tenses to do it. She can see it in the shift of his weight. He’s not going to manage it. This is something she knows. Instead, he stills. She flexes her fingers, trying and failing to feel his pulse through the thin linen of his shirt. She watches his lips part. She waits for him to move forward, anticipation burning in her stomach. When she flicks her eyes up, she finds he’s looking down at the fingers she has on Oathkeeper’s hilt and not at her mouth. Then he does lean forward. A quick, warm touch of his lips against hers. She doesn’t have time to decide whether to move into it.

He says, voice liquid but awkwardly loud, “Are we playing that I’m your prisoner again?”

She shoves him away from her.

“No,” she says, earnestly. “How could you think that?”

His eyes are big and apologetic. She’s burning up. She tears off her cloak and fumbles to get her sword belt undone, trying to shake the sickness of it away. When she goes to lay her gear over the desk, Jaime moves too, circling, a swordsman keeping an equal distance from an opponent. She’s grateful for the space. She marches back to collapse into the chair that he and Pod have placed carefully back by the fire. It’s burning low again; someone should tend to it.

After a moment, Jaime crouches where he is, still distant, making himself low, steady eye contact, like she’s a skittish animal.

“I shouldn’t have kept coming at you like that,” he says.

That’s fine, so long as she doesn’t have to discuss what happened after. She focusses on the spy. She wishes she’d grabbed him. She’s glad she didn’t. There’s nothing else she can do about it today. She’s been dismissed, but only until tomorrow. It just aches.

“I thought she knew she could trust me,” says Brienne.

Jaime sighs.

“It’s almost certainly just that she doesn’t trust me.” But that’s the same issue here. Brienne vouched for him. Brienne had said she’d marry him. He’s her responsibility. Sansa doesn’t need spies. “Her mistrust is sensible. And it’s like with-,” Jaime cuts himself off, “She needs to know, so she can control what she can. I know how this feels, but it’s harmless to you, I promise, because you’re loyal and hers.”

Brienne blinks at him, still balanced low on his toes, looking at her with that burst open affection, thinking he knows so much.

“She’s not someone like your sister,” Brienne says, “She doesn’t need to be. Not with me. And that’s not how this should work.”

Jaime’s lips thin.

“I know she’s not like-,” he grits out, “She trusts you,” Jaime says, “as much as she trusts almost anyone, I’m sure. She wouldn’t let us-.”

He gestures back at the bed and Brienne feels herself flush, involuntary and embarrassing. Sansa is letting them, is the thing, if she’s been keeping close watch, if she knows, so there’s nothing to be ashamed about. If Sansa wanted her to stop, she would ask, and Brienne would find a way to do it.

She’s so tired of embarrassment. Brienne sits up to tug off her boots. Jaime watches her do it, stilling. It’s just her boots, Brienne thinks tiredly, they’re all so difficult, all these people poisoned by King’s Landing.

“We don’t have to-” she says, gesturing towards the bed, even though it makes her feel sicker and grubbier than any spy leaning over her shoulder.

She tries to place her boots aside casually. Jaime leans forward like he doesn’t quite understand. “If you’re-” she swallows the word scared. He’s a man, isn’t he?

“No,” he says violently, starting to his feet, “I’m not-. Brienne.”

He so obviously wants her to understand something. She waits, for him to clarify or for him to turn it into some empty joke. Instead, Jaime steps towards her and Brienne experiences the strange, slightly gut turning sensation of looking up at him. He leans down cautiously, looking to kiss the uneven lip she has pulled between her teeth. He reaches out to tilt her up towards him. It’s so soft. It’s awkward to crane her neck. She doesn’t know what to do with her hands. It’s not as sweet as it was when she had his wrist caught, which itself is a thought that prickles uncomfortably along her awkwardly half raised arms. It makes her twitch to have him crowded above her like this. Maybe it scares her, just a little.

“You do need another chair,” he says and drops down to his knees between her legs. Almost immediately, it’s better. More than that, it’s good. His hand on her jaw is explanatory now, not controlling. She can put her hands to his upper arms and hold him. He’s the one reaching, stretching to snap at her, so it doesn’t feel wrong to push back. She kisses him until she feels like she’s been running in full armour and she can hardly think about any spies at all. She kisses him until he strokes his hand down the line of her jaw and then up the inside of her knee.

What she wants is hazy. She tips her head back. Jaime kisses her where her collarbone lies under layers of wool and linen and leather. There is a pink space between the sick dreaming fantasy of peeling him from Renly’s armour and the pleasingly practical reality of him in a freezing field, asking to serve and then living.

He strokes his hand a little further up her thigh. A little higher still. He turns his face into her, his beard scratching against her neck, the press of his lips at the hinge of her jaw. She still has her hands on his upper arms, the grip tight. If she let go, he could put his hands higher. He could put his arms around her waist. She drags in more air then turns her head to mimic him, pushing at him with her nose until he turns enough for her to push a kiss of her own to the pulse at the softer edge of hair on his neck. She wants to feel the rhythm, cantering quick in his chest. She could. She could do anything she liked to him if she could just let go of his arms.

She’s heard men talk about this casually, incessantly, almost every day. They’ve talked about women crying and screaming and pleading, for them to stop, for them to start. Men have been threatening her with this since before she left the safety of home. She’s tried not to hear, not to think about it. Nothing has prepared her for the gentle pass of his knuckles against the bunched muscle at the root of her thigh. Soldiers laugh about women wanting. It doesn’t feel funny. It’s too fast, slipping out of her control.

She could do it if it was like a fight, if she didn’t have to hold still for it, except that it makes her ill to think it. It’s how she’d always thought of it, under the assurance that she’d kill anyone who tried.

She lets go of him and drags herself away from his warmth. Hunger makes her feel nauseous too, when it’s new. Jaime balances himself with his hand on her thigh. He considers her and twitches a slightly teasing look of concern at her.

“You know, we don’t have to-” he says and mimics the gesture she had made towards the bed earlier, “if you’re-” he trails off, again in imitation of her.

He’s confident that she wants him. He’s right, of course. She just has to work out how to trick her body into having him. It’s supposed to hurt, but it can’t hurt like bears claws, and it can’t hurt like a metal plated fist. She hadn’t held still for those either.

She reaches out to tug at his shirt, to see if she can make him clutch at it virginally again, half afraid that he’ll do it, half wanting to triumph somehow by being less cowardly than him. Instead, he grins a little wryly, clearly reading the memory in her eyes and tugs the whole thing quickly over his head.

There’s time to look. Time to calm her purposelessly panicked heart. There’s light hair on his chest, smooth skin over arced collarbones, hardly a scar to comment on. He had been very good, of course, with his sword and his lance. She thought maybe to uncover some bruise or scrape. Some hidden injury. Even the queen bore marks from that battle.

Although that’s forgetting, one gold hand, held in place by tooled leather. None of it she hasn’t seen before, years ago in the baths of Harrenhal, but more recently too, glimpsed while they dress, the curve of the blades in his back as he tugged into his shirt yesterday morning after a quick wash by the fire. He shifts a little and leans his hip and his elbow on her leg. She has to tense up again to support his weight. She hesitates, her hand extended.

“Wait, Brienne, are you actually worried about this?”

Brienne decides that she is done with embarrassment. She reaches out to touch him before the opportunity passes her by. She smooths her hands down his bare arms, too close now to deny herself the feel the little blond hairs she can see catching the firelight. She can hardly feel them until she tries with her fingertips, running back up against the grain, an added sandy softness. She strokes again to watch his chest and stomach move as he drags in air. She reaches out to touch the delicate skin of his stomach with the backs of her fingers. He shuffles closer between her legs. She rides through the involuntary clench of her muscles and practices a deliberate, careful relaxation, although of course, pressed this close he hasn’t missed it. It’s only an amateurs instinct for retreat, when to take the advantage she needs to push up inside the guard of the enemy. He only needs to let her push through it.

He says, “My septa said-.” Brienne freezes with her thumbs on the lowest point of his ribs. Jaime stops breathing, then inhales noisily. “When I was-.” He comes to another abrupt halt. He sits back on his heels and passes his hand over his face. She prods him with her foot.“When I was being... ah. Oh well.”

“When you were what?” asks Brienne, in a rush which burns scaldingly through her. He looks up at her despairingly. Boys don’t have septas. She must have been his sisters. It seems strange for him to suddenly be inhabiting some level of shame about this. It douses the confused heat that had brought sweat to her upper lip. She tugs at her shirt and rubs at her face. He’s still looking up at her plaintively. Brienne is suddenly very glad she’s still wearing clothes.

“When I was my sister,” he says resignedly.

He twists his mouth again.

Brienne pulls all the foolish, lust scattered parts of herself back together. Perhaps his septa said something useful.

“What did your septa say to you?” she asks. He just flexes his fingers in his lap, looking as though there might be parts of himself that he’s still gathering too. Brienne tells him, “Mine told me nothing about this except that I was ugly, that it would hurt and that a husband would be cruel.”

Jaime scowls.

“What could she know,” he says and pushes himself back to sit and ease out his legs. She really does need another chair. “Ours was clever. It felt like she knew everything there was to know, except perhaps-.” He picks at one of the straps on his arm.

“Jaime,” she prompts, trying to get back to the practicalities.

She feels awkward now, sitting up on the chair looking down at him. She pushes at him again with her foot so he’ll shuffle backwards and give her room to drop down next to him.

Jaime says, “She told me it needn’t hurt and that most highborn girls lose their maidenhead to horseback anyway. She made it sound filthy.”

He frowns for a moment longer before smoothing the expression away. Brienne meanwhile is experiencing a steadily growing feeling of outrage.

“What are the septons and maesters checking for then?” she says. He blinks at her, as though the question isn’t the obvious train to that statement.

He says, “My-,” and stops again and grimaces. Of course, it’s Cersei. But Cersei might actually have had the answer and Brienne wants to know.

“Look we can’t not mention her,” says Brienne, “Clearly. Tell me what she said.”

Jaime gets up to pull his shirt back on.

“This isn’t from anyone from inside the faith, or any maester, it’s just what she used to say, but they’re checking for pregnancy, having a good leer and then saying whatever they think people want to hear.”

Brienne is revolted, arriving so quickly at pure rage that she feels lightheaded again. She’s so angry that she has to stand up and move. Jaime watches her. She hates it.

“It’s all a big lie so that some nasty old man can claim power and piety and pore all over us?” she spits.

Jaime shrugs. “I agree that they could do away with the leering maesters, it used to make us so angry, but checking for pregnancy before marriage makes a certain amount of sense.”

She supposes he has a personal interest in cuckoldry.

“None of it makes sense,” says Brienne, except that of course it does, everyone is weighing out all their little measures of control and acting out their own sick fantasies on anyone who, even for a moment, has a little less power than they do. Even his sister, who is a queen capable of capriciously killing hundreds, is subject to a maester’s petty abuses.

There had been that man at Harrenhal. Brienne bunches her hands into fists. She had liked the maester on Tarth. He’d never grasped at her to her knowledge, but then none of her suitors had ever asked to have her examined. No one ever intimated that she might be touched by anything except violence or dragging obligation.

“Why does everyone go on and on about bleeding and pain?”

It seems to take Jaime a moment to realise that it’s a genuine question. He twitches his hands at her in a gesture of resignation.

“Most common folk don’t have horses to give to their daughters?” Jaime suggests, bringing his shoulders up and letting them fall again. “She was only a girl, now that I look back. And marriages seem mostly cruel; your septa was more than right about that.”

Brienne has seen enough of the world to know that for herself. Brienne held Sansa against her chest and pretended not to notice, trying desperately to give her some sense of privacy, when she shook, silently and tearlessly on the ride to Castle Black. She casts about the room. There’s nothing. Some histories. Various tat on the mantle. An unmade bed she can’t use for anything except chastely sleeping next to a man she’s been dreaming of for years. There are swords.

“Let’s practice. Pick up one of the swords,” she tells him.

Jaime blinks at her. He takes a stutter step to actually do it and then stops.

“You realise I won’t be able to give you a good fight,” he says.

“Put your boots on and pick up a sword,” she says, marching over to shove her feet into her boots before picking up her sword belt. She looks over at him where he’s watching her, unmoving. “Please, Jaime,” she says. She wants to move. She wants to do something useful and practical and there is nothing else.

It takes Jaime longer to get his feet into his. Then he picks up both tourney swords, tucks one under his arm and comes close to offer her the other.

He indicates Brienne’s hard hold on Oathkeeper’s hilt and sheath, “You’ll shatter one of these things in my hand the very first pass.”

Brienne looks down at the proffered ugliness of the tourney sword and then up at his tight green eyes. She feels ill, like King’s Landing is somehow in the room, even though the air is crisp. She thinks about the delicacy of his collarbones, his wrist in her hand. She swallows.

“I’m going to be back before it’s time to fetch Gendry for his lessons,” she tells him. She grabs her cloak and her daggers, and she leaves.

Brienne arrives back at Sansa’s door to find it unguarded. Either the queen has left or the unsullied man has been invited in. She hovers for a moment, listening. Sansa had dismissed her for the day; she had been clear. Brienne knocks anyway and Jon Snow opens the door.

“Brienne. Good. Please come in,” says Sansa. Inside Arya and Bran stare at her with identical brown eyes. Jon Snow shuts the door behind her and goes back to take up his seat next to Bran by the fire. Brienne drifts forwards, waiting to be prompted to speak, but Sansa turns back to Jon.

“Now, Jon,” she says, “Brienne can confirm, I made the queen feel so very respected.”

It was just a show then. Letting the queen feel like she could pressure Sansa into giving up ground. Brienne feels a little of her tension bleed from her, only exhaustion in its wake. Everyone is playing so many games with such high stakes. She’s just trying to see Podrick come to their attention.

“It’s not a question of whether I believe you,” Jon says. Sansa stares thinly at him.

He flicks his eyes at Brienne in an unsubtle question. Sansa waits.

“Was it enough?” he asks.

“It won’t ever be enough, you know that. Not even once she has seven kingdoms to feast on.”

Jon turns to Bran who stares back sorrowfully.

“There’s no one else,” he says, which is not an endorsement that Brienne finds particularly inspiring. “Look - if she keeps wanting, she’ll keep trying, to keep their love and their respect. It’s not a one-sided devouring with her, Sansa. She’ll let them consume her in return.”

Sansa stares at him coldly.

“So you think it will be a mutual destruction? How wonderful. How unnecessary. Think of our father; that was a noble, sustaining service, for him and our people.” Jon shakes his head, but he won’t look at her again. “Unless Bran has decided to share anything actually useful with us?”

“The three-eyed raven does not exist to be useful,” says Bran.

Sansa rolls her eyes and Arya snorts inelegantly. Brienne doesn’t think he means it to be a joke.

“Well, we’ll just have to wait, like everyone else, and see what she decides now,” Sansa says.

She stands crisply and comes to look up at Brienne, putting her back to the others.

“I was going to apologise tomorrow, Brienne, for the performance. I hope you understand that it was necessary. How can I help you now?”

Brienne feels unmoored from her earlier urgent need for action, but she came here for a reason. It will anchor her. She thinks she will enjoy it.

“Thank you, my lady. But I came because I hoped to find Arya.”

She rests her hand on her sword. None of them exhibits any sign of tension. Arya is looking up at her though, surprise on her face.

“I wanted to ask if you would like to train together again.”

Arya grins at her and hops to her feet.

“Let’s go now. All this subterfuge and politicking isn’t really my area,”

Sansa and Jon both turn to her with identical looks of incredulity and judgement. Brienne doesn’t see what’s so terrible about wanting to move through the world a little more honestly. That is why Brienne had suddenly wanted her; another fighter with the skill and the tools to more than match her.

“My lady, could I give Jaime his sword back now?”

It’s out of her mouth without conscious thought. The slight pause this gives Sansa makes Brienne’s heart clench. If Sansa is willing to let her family talk treason in front of Brienne then Jaime is probably right, the spy is for her only in that it is for him. Brienne tries to think of it as Sansa would. She could ask for Jaime’s word. It might mean more to them now they understand why he broke his oaths. Bran is sitting there looking at her. She doesn’t believe it.

“Very well,” says Sansa, at a disinterested remove once again, and she goes to pull the sword from where it has been lying unused in a sideboard. The surfaces in this room are all completely clear of decorative objects, Brienne had not noticed before. Everything in Winterfell is so very sparse and practical, so different from Evenfall. It should suit Brienne, but Brienne isn’t sure that it suits Sansa. Brienne takes the ornate sword from her with a rushing sense of relief that drowns out her guilt. Arya smiles again in a way that Brienne doesn’t entirely like.

Out in the courtyard, drenched in sweat, with all the residual frustration and rage bleached from her bones, Brienne finds that their sparring has gained an audience, most notably, Sandor Clegane. Arya nods to him with a smirk as she squares up again, Needle in one hand, her dagger held confidently in the other. Brienne considers. Oathkeeper has a long reach, unwieldy without the occasional support of a second hand. She motions for Arya to pause and goes to swap it for Jaime’s lighter sword, selecting her long dagger as she does.

“Worn out?” Arya calls.

Brienne comes back, smiling at her, although she can feel that it’s awkward on her face. There’s some undercurrent to this that she doesn’t follow, but she used to fight with two weapons more often. It will be a good use of time to stay in practice.

Arya circles her, stalking predator low. She uncoils. Arya wins the first exchange, knocking Jaime’s sword into the ground and coming up under Brienne’s rusty left-handed guard. Brienne flexes her grip, considering.

Arya, mollified, retreats to let her gather herself, alight at the new challenge. This time Brienne hardly gives her time to engage. Her playful confidence lets Brienne in close, and then Arya doesn’t have the strength to stop herself from being driven down onto the icy ground. Arya picks herself up, brushing dirt-logged snow and ice from her clothes, focussed and glaring again.

“Tell us how you’ve acquired even more Lannister gold, good knight,” says Clegane, his voice low but carrying, “I’ve heard whispers.”

Brienne flushes despite herself. She’d decided she was done with blushing and quailing from that. If only these things were as simple as deciding.

“You can tell me what men are saying with your sword in your hand,” calls Brienne.

She’ll eat the other side of his face. There is a ripple of amusement but the crowd also shifts away from him. Jaime practices in secret. The men have a an image of him - not a flattering one, but a useful one - that might be tarnished by the appearance of hard work. Brienne practices in public. She needs to keep reminding them that the painting they make of her isn’t a joke. She means to scare them.

“Shut up, Clegane. I can look after myself,” says Arya.

The amused murmur of the other folk watching falls away. This time they manage a few extended passes. Brienne has time to adjust to the new weight in the familiar forms. The last time she fought like this her sword was well balanced but comparatively cumbersome in her hands. Arya tries her trick of dropping the knife again, and Brienne knocks it out of the air with the back of her glove, baring her teeth triumphantly as she moves in to use her weight once more. This time Arya lets her come. Brienne finds her own height used to topple her into cold mud and Needle’s point at her throat.

A wave of scattered approval comes up from the courtyard. Arya looks up, frowning and puts out her hand, making a show of friendliness. Brienne plays along and pretends that Arya is pulling her to her feet. Arya looks at her with consternation, then she sighs.

“Show me what you did with your sword hand to distract me during the knife drop,” Arya suggests.

From then on, they are so dull and studious that the crowd falls away. Only the Hound is left, carefully observing their every move.

When they stop, Arya’s face is a blotchy red, and the frozen air is ripping razor sharp down Brienne’s throat with each laboured gasp. Brienne feels glorious. She turns to the Hound, who can say whatever he likes now. She could go back to Jaime right this minute, and he would be waiting for her in her room. She might do it. She meets the Hound’s eyes.

“Kill me quicker, if we ever fight again,” he says.

Her blood is cooling. The desperate guilt she’d felt after their last bloody encounter adds to the drop. None of that had been exhilarating. She's suddenly shivering with sweat.

“Why would we fight?”

“Fucked if I know,” he says, and he glares at Arya before he stomps away.

Brienne looks down at her, reassuring herself. Arya looks as fiercely alive as ever, small and safe and deadly.

They go down to the hot springs to warm their tired limbs. There are so many in the castle now, and so few idle servants to carry water, that there are organised shifts of male and female entry for efficiency. Brienne has grown so used to being clean. None of the dead made it down here. It helps that there are few others with the luxury of time to bathe at this time of day, but they stay long enough that other highborn ladies filter in, laughing and in ecstasies over the heat. Brienne nods to the woman who sleeps somewhere off the same staircase and whose dark curly hair apparently tumbles down to brush below her ribs when loose, and Arya brightly greats them all before the two of them slink away.

It’s already so late - dark and snowing heavily - that Brienne goes straight to the forges to collect Gendry. She and Gendry arrive back at the blessedly warm room to find Jaime, lying with his boots kept off the bed, dressed exactly how she left him. The tourney swords are lying next to him again.

“Podrick’s still not back,” he says, dragging himself up to his elbows.

Brienne tries not to flush. She tries. Jaime sees Gendry, stiffens for a moment and then he gets smoothly to his feet, moving to shrug into his jacket with his back to them. He fumbles, tightening the neck of his shirt. He’s kept the fire built up.

Gendry clears his throat awkwardly and Jaime pivots to glare with his his chin high.

“Here, Jaime,” she says, charging through the embarrassment and holding out his sword.

Jaime blinks at her, jaw slackening, then he strides over to gather it and her hand to his chest. Gendry turns away towards the fire.

“Sorry,” he says, under his breath, “Should I speak to him?”

Brienne heaves her shoulders. She hadn’t been thinking. She had promised that she would come back alone. And people are already talking, apparently, not that they’ve yet managed anything together worth whispering about. Gendry won’t add to it, she doesn’t think, although his pretence of intense interest in the carvings on the mantle is mortifying.

“What could you say?”

They discover quickly that it does matter that Brienne does not remember how she learned to read. No matter how patient Gendry is with her, she cannot work out how to explain to him why the letters he already has some understanding of, form the words they do. Surely it can’t be this complicated. Worse, Gendry seems to have some other system memorised, impenetrable presumably to anyone except him and his old master, but polished as a means for communicating things Brienne has no understanding of: fire intensities and metal craft.

She wants to go back to teaching Podrick how to gut fish, wield an axe and pick stones from the hooves of horses. She’d prefer to give dance lessons than continue with this, and she mutters as much to Jaime, but she’s begun and she means to see it through. Sansa has asked so little of her these last seven days in the wake of the battle.

The more visibly frustrated she becomes, the more Jaime slowly takes over responsibility for the lesson. He begins with bizarre suggestions: pace the room while you repeat the letters that make up your name, or, practice drawing those letters with your finger on the rug.

They stop, to the relief of every one of them, for the evening meal. Jaime presses up against her side while they sit in the great hall, Pod returned to them by an apologetic Tyrion. Tyrion had also wanted to walk out to meet the southern soldiers apparently.

“Who did you find worth fighting this afternoon?” Jaime asks her.

Brienne looks up to the high table. Arya is absent. Daenerys is surveying them all, looking more drawn and pale than ever. It doesn’t look like weakness on her, but it still makes Brienne feel sorry for her.

“I tried your sword,” she tells him, “one-handed, and my long dagger.” He turns entirely on the bench, lighting up with interest, and across the table Tyrion groans.

They find, back in her room with Podrick for their long-promised practice session, that Jaime remembers as little of learning to fight right handed with a sword as Brienne does of learning to read. He’s been training his left arm by just throwing himself at Ser Ilyn Payne, the crown’s executioner - Podrick takes this news quietly but very poorly - and the sellsword Tyrion hired. Brienne will concede that the sellsword seems to have been a competent opponent, but secrecy and confidentiality have taken precedence over a proper regimen. There are surely swordmaster’s in King’s Landing who would have done a more thorough job with him.

Podrick first demonstrates that Jaime has done no harm at all to Brienne’s instruction on his form during their morning practice and then, satisfied, Brienne starts in on the puzzle of Jaime’s left-handed style, which is clearly one of resentful practicality with none of the fiery interest that drives his observations of Podrick’s progress. Every time she uncovers some new weakness in his technique he recognises it as she does, quiet acceptance in his eyes. Eventually she knocks his sword clean out of his hand, just to see the jump of true frustration in his eyes. After that he’s sharper, better, she thinks that he’ll improve even further now they have time to work together. She works him over until he’s breathless and rosy with exertion. When she calls them to a halt, he smiles at her around his gasping breaths.

The three of them fall into bed, with no question of anyone returning to sleep alone, all their swords resting over Brienne’s desk, Jaime turns into her in the dark.

He says, “Let me be useful with your blacksmith Paramount. I learned slowly as a child, and my father had to step in. He took agonies over teaching me. I know what actually sticks. There’s nothing else for me to do here.”

Brienne is already drifting. Well earned exhaustion washing worry from her thoughts. It’s so unlike the throbbing unquenchable tiredness of the cold nights after the battle. She is more than happy to accept.

Pod wakes them when the window is still ink black and they practice their sword work. Then it is so cold that they build up the fire and climb back into bed. Pod wakes them for the second time, climbing out of bed again. The air is still frosty when he lifts up the covers. Jaime huddles further down next to her, their hands curled against each other, his feet tangled up with hers. Pod slips out of the room.

“Jaime,” she prompts. He strokes a foot along her ankle and turns into the blanket he has pulled up over his mouth. “Jaime, I’ve had a thought about you using the right hand on the pommel, for extra support, like with the spade.”

Jaime shakes his head.

“Tried it. Hand’s too smooth, even with a glove. Looks fine in theory but in practice it makes me a broader target to no benefit.” There is still almost no light in the room, the greyness of low, thick clouds rather than night at the window, and the fire has burned low behind its guard.

“It if gets any colder I’ll leave you all and go back to King’s Landing,” he says and with his eyes still closed, he gathers her in unselfconsciously with a leg. “Where’s Podrick?”

“Gone for food.”

“You should knight him already. I need things to do. I could fetch food.”

“The queen might knight him still.”

“If you say so,” he says. Brienne stares at the criss cross weave of rough wool over his face.

“Don’t placate me.”

“I’m not,” he says, still muffled, “You’ll do what’s best for him, but it would mean a lot to Podrick if you were to do it.”

She sits up, dragging the blanket with her, getting one foot out onto the cold floor before she stops herself. He levers himself up until he can see her face again. Scrubbing at his eyes and then sitting, round shouldered, squinting at her. She wonders what he sees when he looks at her so intently.

“There are so many places where people will laugh when he tells them who knighted him,” Brienne says, and his eyes slip back into wide sadness.

She doesn’t want him to tell her those people are wrong again. That’s meaningless, now they’re all going to live. She has to consider what’s real and practical.

“I know,” he says solemnly, and she lets herself be reeled back in, pulling her uncomfortably exposed leg back to sit under the covers. “But Brienne, almost no one will ask. Maybe at tourneys, very occasionally. He has a recognisable name. People will just be expecting a Ser Podrick Payne,” Brienne blinks at him. “It’s a legitimate concern,” he says. “I don’t deny it.”

She pushes in to kiss the edge of his mouth so quickly that she doesn’t have time to be embarrassed. He tries to follow when she pulls back.

“Could you change the shape of the hand? So it was more useful?”

Jaime smiles at her.

“Why a hand and not a hook, you mean? Pass it to me.”

Brienne leans back over the bed to retrieve it.

“I already had more straps added because the thing fell off if I moved suddenly,” his smile widens again as if he’s swallowing a laugh, “it flew off once and made a terrible noise.”

She watches him tug the leather guard over his wrist and then strap the metal into place.

“Yes,” she says, “why not a hook?”

It had seemed very rude to bring it up.

“Honestly not as practical for daily life as you might think,” Jaime says, and it’s true that she’s seen him hold thin stemmed goblets in that hand, and use the wide palm as support to help his left hand hold cloaks and sift through ash and dead men. “Also, I’m a very vain man,” - Brienne looks at him doubtfully, he’s a pretty man, which is a separate matter - “and this is very well made,” he says.

Brienne looks it over. Intricate patterns curve over the metal, and the same designs are mirrored on the tooled leather straps.

“It’s true,” he says, leaning towards her, amusement in his eyes, “I’m so very vain and prideful. That’s why you have to let me fetch you cloak and boots from now on, and teach your Lord Blacksmith to read, and help with Podrick. It’s so my enormous sense of self-importance can be soothed by how very useful I am to you, Brienne.”

He climbs over her entirely unnecessarily to get out of bed. He makes a show of moving the fire screen, stoking the guttering flames and adding new wood. Brienne watches him, inordinately pleased.

“Do you really not mind trying to teach Gendry? It was me who told Sansa I should do it. He’s my lord, my responsibility.”

“If we are really to be married.” Jaime says, “wouldn’t he be my lord too?”

This is even more pleasing.

“You can’t call him Lord Blacksmith or any of that then.”

Jaime climbs over her again, back onto the bed, pretending to frown.

“I can. But I promise to point out to you anyone else who does.” He leans in to touch the tip of a finger against the smile she’s suppressing with only a little caution. “Besides, It’s not a bad idea for me to practice writing with my left hand. I’m even worse than I am with a sword unless I take all day over every letter.”

The day stretches out before Brienne. Training with Pod and Jaime. The duties of the day with Sansa. Talking with Gendry about the Stormlands. Training again. This could be their routine, at least for a while, until she decides what to do about Tarth. None of her people are leaving when the army moves out. It all feels dangerously like something she could live with very happily.

“We’ll work on the sword hand,” Brienne says, “It’s already so much better than I expected.”

Jaime’s smile is understated and genuine, with no showy flash of teeth.

“It occurs to me that everyone but you is getting rather a lot out of our little tutoring enterprise.”

“I’m happy to be of service,” she says.

Jaime looks at her in the worshipful way that is becoming familiar. He pushes up onto his knees to kiss her, so far and so sudden, that for a moment she’s tilting awkwardly backwards, precarious on the edge of the bed. Then she pushes back into him and he falls away, dragging her down with him so that she’s hovering over him like before. The castle sounds more awake now, and the hazy snow filtered light is finally giving a violet colour to the window panes. She watches Jaime’s eyes flicker with every echoing crash and shout from the men setting up for the day in the courtyard and then still as someone drags their feet down the steps outside their door. Soon the noise will all blend into one continuous hubbub.

She lets herself be pulled down into him. She’s learning a little about kissing and a lot about frustration.

“Your queen said this will be the last war, which sounds very glorious,” Jaime says eventually, and Brienne finds that trying to kiss a talking mouth is rather fun. “You’re a great warrior and a knight of her kingdoms. You’re involved in their planning. You don’t want to see it?”

Brienne gives up on kissing. She has no particular desire to ever fight in a battle again, but wanting doesn’t come into it. Her duty lies elsewhere.

“I’m not looking for glory. My place is with Sansa or Tarth.”

He smooths his hand down to the small of her back and she has to roll away from him, shuddering.

“She might ask you to march with her. Sansa could not refuse her.”

Brienne supposes that’s is true. He thins his lips as someone starts shouting about wagons so loudly in the courtyard that it carries all the way to their window. The queen hadn’t wanted Brienne in the room while she talked to Sansa. She’s not going to request that Brienne abandon Sansa, one of her few westerosi allies, just to have one more sword at her side. Jaime grabs for her fingers.

“She doesn’t want Winterfell defenceless. Besides, she will not ask. She doesn’t know me and she doesn’t trust me.”

“Sorry about that,” he says, unrepentant. He stares up at the ceiling, his expression turning sour. “But would you be able to tell me if they had decided to send you with Jon Snow? I know you won’t break Sansa’s council, but you would at least tell me that?”

“Unless they gave me a very good explanation for why I couldn’t.”

Jaime nods. His profile softens.

“I’m flattered anyone believes me capable of some meaningful betrayal, shut up here in the keep with only one hand.”

Feeling daring, wanting to reassure, she reaches out and touches the fading tightness in his cheek. He closes his eyes and leans into her. Encouraged, she reaches over to grasp his right arm and pull him over to face her. He comes easily and lies still. She strokes the silk of his eyelids, delicate at the very edges where the skin is so pink as to look vaguely abraded. She has never seen a face so close and so receptive to her gaze. He blinks her fingers away and pushes them down onto the bed with his gold hand. A movement that would be difficult with a hook. There are gold flecks in his eyes.

“Tell me about Tarth?”

Brienne sits up and frowns down at him, trying to think of where to start. Jaime raises his eyebrows at her, expectant. Pod knocks, which is new, and then lets himself back into the room. Jaime and Brienne make room for him on the bed.

“Thank the gods, it’s colder than ever out there,” says Podrick, distributing warm bowls and then dragging a fur over his lap.

Jaime starts picking out peas as though he expects he’ll see the horse again soon. Brienne watches severely.

“I saw Tarth once from a ship. It was small, had tall hills, and it was very green,” says Jaime, prompting. That is an accurate if unromantic description. Podrick looks to him curiously. “The sea seemed bluer there,” he adds.

Brienne turns her spoon in the vegetable speckled mush of bread, gravy, so different from what they would be eating on Tarth.

“I used to find bronze arrowheads in the ruined castle on the cliffs at the far side of the island,” Brienne tells them and then she pauses, trying to begin again with something more practical, unsure as to why she had started there.

“What’s Evenfall like, my lady? Like the Red Keep, or more like Winterfell?” asks Podrick.

“Neither. Older in parts,” Brienne says. They watch her, waiting. “There are painted panels that have survived for longer than anyone knows how to explain all through the halls. It’s damp, because of the rain, but there are families who learn how to keep them safe, you see.”

The ceilings are high and the marble is cool underfoot in the summer, the wood warmly scuffed in winter. The more she talks, the more her heart aches. She wonders if Tarth is still the same place. Are the people’s days already starting in darkness in Tarth too? She trails off during a description of the women who work the salt pits to shovel down the last of her food. Pod gets up to tidy away his and Brienne’s breakfast things. Jaime watches him do it.

“Brienne, if you believe you need to go now - if that’s what your instincts tell you is needed - we could do that. Or, you could do that,” Jaime says.

Podrick comes back to them, holding out Brienne’s boots to her, concerned.

“I’ll go with you. But where, my lady?” he prompts.

Brienne takes a deep breath. Jaime looks between them cautiously.

“I wrote to my father and Tarth eight nights ago and I have received no reply. It’s possible they never received the letter. It’s possible there is some reasonable explanation for their lack of reply, but Lord Gendry sent his letter two nights ago now. If we hear nothing again-.” Brienne cuts herself off, finding her voice has grown strained. They should have sent the letter on the mantlepiece. The one where her voice is absent. Perhaps it is still Renly, after all this time. Perhaps they have come to believe her capable of that. Sometimes, before she sleeps, she thinks that Loras Tyrell must have died hating her.

Podrick’s eyes grow large and then sad. For her, she realises. It brings a sympathetic flush of heat to the back of her eyes. She has to breathe deeply to dispel the tightness in her chest.

“Sansa would support you, I know it, my lady. The queen too.”

Brienne looks between them. The queen would not support her taking Jaime Lannister off south, leaving her armies behind them. She’s quite sure of that. Jaime knows it too. Jaime shakes his head.

“I could… remain a guest here, for a while,” he says, clearly trying for disinterest.

“The queen will leave soon,” says Brienne, “And I can’t make a decision until we can see what state Winterfell will be in when the armies move out. The Wildlings will be staying, and Jon Snow will be taking almost all the other men. We will not leave the Stark girls unprotected.”

Podrick accepts this easily and turns back to his tidying. Jaime is looking at her again. Green eyes searching and impossible to meet for long. He’s keeping his bowl of stew steady on his lap with the gold hand, clever left handed fingers mindlessly finding and re-finding the balance of the spoon.

Sansa is locked in with the queen and accordingly not to be disturbed. Arya is waiting outside the door with the unsullied man.

“Have you met Grey Worm?” she asks.

Grey Worm says, “We have met.”

Brienne is glad to belatedly learn his name. She introduces herself in turn.

Arya takes her to the godswood to fight because the courtyard is now so crowded with wagons and men that it would be impossible to move there. Brienne would certainly not have invited anyone into the sept to practice swordplay, but then she has not visited the sept at all. Her concern must be apparent.

Arya says, “The tree doesn’t mind; I checked with Bran.”

Brienne cannot tell if Arya is teasing her.

They go at each other hard. She has only Oathkeeper with her, and after yesterday’s experimentation, Brienne longs for variety and a new test. She wants a mace. Perhaps Pod will lend her the axe. She wants to ride at targets on horseback. It’s been a long time since she thought of this skill of hers as being a source of any joy that wasn’t savage. It’s like breaking through the surface of warm water to rich sea air, to lose herself in movement against someone like Arya, particularly now there isn’t anyone watching.

“I’d like to speak to you about what will happen after the queen’s armies leave,” Brienne says, slowing, still lazily trying to tap the flat of her blade to Arya’s side.

The warm burn in her arm soothes the icy catch in the back of her throat. Arya darts easily out of range.

“You feel you should go south to Tarth. Sansa told me.” She sounds suddenly as young as she is. For a moment she’s gripping Needle too rigidly, and if Brienne can catch her, she’ll have her. “You are going to try to be a lady.”

The stabbing embarrassment is instinctive.

“I wouldn’t be anything different from what I already am,” she tells Arya.

She wouldn’t be able to do it if she had to make herself different. It had been impossible even back when she hadn’t known she could beat Loras, or the Hound, or Jaime Lannister, or anyone else the world threw at her. Brienne examines Arya’s suspicious face.

“Don’t let yourself feel you have to,” Arya says, “You’re the best fighter I’ve seen, and you’d be just as good without any Valyrian steel.”

Without the miraculous power of Oathkeeper and Jaime’s sword they might very well both be dead and Podrick with them. Wights had fallen apart as soon as they touched them. Besides, it feels so good in her hands. Arya rushes in rather than away, and Brienne has to concentrate on turning Needle aside so she can break again.

“Like you say, no one could make me do anything,” says Brienne, “and that’s not a boast.”

Although perhaps it was. Brienne had enjoyed Jaime’s curling smile when she told him about that old man her father had one day uncertainly produced and the beating she had given him.

“I could make you,” says Arya, stopping in place, and she flips her grip on the dagger to sheath it. She smiles. The Starks are mostly impossibly strange, and Brienne is profoundly grateful for Sansa who lives in the same world as Brienne.

“Confident words,” Brienne says, flicking the point of her sword towards Arya’s lax hold on Needle, hoping to put an end to this part of the conversation.

Arya draws her guard up once again, circling, still smiling pleasantly.

“I think that if I could convince you it was your duty, that it was honourable and would help innocents, I could make you do something you hated.”

She sounds very confident. She sounds like she thinks she knows something.

“You couldn’t,” Brienne says, “And I’m difficult to convince.”

Arya’s stops moving and stops pretending to smile. Brienne lets the point of her sword dip into the snow. If what Arya says was true Brienne would be on Tarth now, married and torn down into little scraps that couldn’t help anyone. She would, she thinks sickly, know what had happened to her father and her people.

“I won’t go until your sister has no more need of me. And you’ll be here to protect her.”

Arya’s face clears entirely, all her wide-eyed, warm youth stripped away.

“I think you want to go. Don’t dress it up. You made a vow to serve Sansa and now you’ll go back on it because it gets in the way of something you want.”

Brienne shakily sheaths her sword. It’s too cold out here not to be moving. The minimal sweat she’d worked up is cooling in her gloves. She shivers.

“Lords and knights go home to look after their people in times of peace.”

“Yes. I know who you think needs looking after,” says Arya. “Do you think he would push a child from a window for you?”

Then she looks as though she regrets it, looking down to kick through the snow. Brienne waits while the crush of humiliation washes through her and away. Then she deliberately lets the silence grow, feeling strangely untethered without the expected, lingering embarrassment.

“I’m never going to find out. Is this coming from Sansa?”

Arya shakes her head.

“I thought that you’d be staying. I thought you were like me. I hadn’t realised you might-.”

Brienne rubs her arms and shifts her feet in the snow. Arya doesn’t seem to be feeling the icy wind that’s clawing at every seam and fastening in Brienne’s leathers. Arya stands still and severe, although her nose has turned a reassuringly human pink in the wind.

“I love your sister,” says Brienne, trying to comfort, trying to reassure the both of them.

“I love her,” Arya says and quirks her mouth into a brief, thin smile. “Isn’t it lucky for us both, that she doesn’t need anyone.”

Then she holds out a hand to hush Brienne’s movement. She quirks her head about, pausing for a long moment.

“Can you hear wolves?” she asks. “I can’t tell if they’re from the dreams or if they’re here.”

Brienne tries her best to listen past the wind in the heart tree’s red leaves. Arya’s face is empty. All of herself off wherever the wolves are perhaps. She looks so like Bran, but her eyes are brown and slitted in concentration. Brienne shakes her head. She can’t hear anything.

That afternoon, at Sansa’s request, she spends a few hours finding and speaking with every man assigned to the castle guard. It’s a strange job now. There’s a great hole in the walls and everyone out there is dead. She wends her way through the heaving passageways and up onto the castle walls. The cacophony is drowning the festering tension of the days after the battle. If it weren’t for the tents still pitched outside the walls, Brienne would think the armies ready to leave. The wagons in the courtyard are already being loaded.

“You have perhaps three sensible men in twenty,” she tells Sansa, when she returns, trying not to huddle into the fire visibly.

“As many as that,” says Sansa.

“Let them all march south. Most are eager to do it.” Brienne lets her disapproval shine through. The men protecting Winterfell need to understand duty, not glory. They need to love the castle and its people. It would help if anyone of any intelligence could be found. “Pick better men,” says Brienne. Sansa smiles at her.

“I will.”

She’s happy to return to her warm room. Pod and Jaime have kept the fire high. Tyrion is sitting on her bed, which is less pleasing but she supposes not wholly objectionable.

“It’s to be tonight,” says Jaime, as soon as she has handed off her cloak to Pod, who takes it back to where he is settled by the fire. “They’re going to make a public declaration about Casterly Rock and the West at the evening meal.”

Brienne perches on the desk, made awkward by Tyrion’s reappearance. Somebody, it turns out, has made the decision for him to leave Winterfell while Brienne wasn’t standing in the corner of the room.

“We’re all meeting soon,” says Tyrion, “but I wanted to be the one to let you know.”

He’s looking at Jaime somewhat hopefully. Brienne knows, from standing in the corner of a room while it was discussed, that the Lannister armies have all marched back to King’s Landing with no concern for protecting the countryside from the foreign invaders, and that according to Varys, Cersei has lost all control of the surviving houses beyond her immediate reach. She’d killed nearly every potential hostage that lived in the city when she burned the Sept and unsurprisingly houses have been reluctant to send any family to court since then.

The plan Tyrion lays before them still sounds like an incredible risk. That the people of the Westerlands now have little love for Cersei doesn’t mean they’ll be accommodating to Tyrion, who is generally believed to have colluded with Sansa in the murder of King Joffrey and who is now recognisable as a supporter of the invading Targaryen Queen.

“Doesn’t the Dragon Queen need all those men for her idiotic plan?” Jaime asks.

Brienne looks sharply at Tyrion. She’s quite sure that it isn’t proper for Jaime to know anything about the queen’s plans.

“That’s mostly my plan,” says Tyrion, a sardonic tilt to his mouth.

“Was this your idea too?” Jaime asks, listlessly slumping onto the bed beside him.

“And Sansa’s. It was for you, it’s just we’ve expedited it to before they take King’s Landing,” says Tyrion, “so thanks so much for appearing to be the kind of idiot who would take a couple of hundred men off alone through the snow.”

“You’re the man who has agreed to it,” says Jaime, frowning. “Don’t blame me for this absurdity. Why don’t you wait?”

Tyrion turns entirely into Jaime, distinctly panicked.

“You wouldn’t have agreed to this? I’ve been spending time with the men. We’ll have the Iron Islanders. Sansa and Varys say the borderlands are in quiet chaos with all the Frey’s gone and that Cersei has turned away entirely from anything beyond her city walls.” Jaime doesn’t respond, pinching his lips unhappily. “Please, Jaime,” says Tyrion, “forget that she is on the other side of this for a moment. Would you make this march? I need to know.”

Jaime turns to meet Brienne’s eyes frankly. Something in his face makes her stomach drop. He rolls his head on his neck and walks over to the fireplace, past Podrick, who catches her eyes warily. He plucks up a tightly rolled scroll, not entirely hidden behind a stash of candles. Brienne stares at the barely secret little object, chest tight. She lurches to her feet.

“This is a letter from our aunt,” Jaime tells Tyrion.

“Jaime, who let you-.”

Tyrion cuts himself off with a long sigh, turning a look of exasperation filled sympathy towards Brienne. Brienne stands there like the great towering fool Sansa warned her she would be. She doesn’t know why he’s kept it in here of all places. She hadn’t even noticed him leaving it there. She should have read it, she knows that. She meets Jaime’s apologetic look blankly. He doesn’t hold the letter out to her now, and she doesn’t ask him for it. He’s going to show it to Tyrion and that’s what is immediately necessary.

Jaime hadn’t described his aunt or what he wanted to say to her. She’d just assumed when he wanted to write to her after the battle, that he wanted to pour out the same aching sentiments that she’d committed to paper and sent off to be discarded by whoever is now sitting in Evenfall. She thought he’d had the same impulse, to tell someone who had known the childish shape of you all of your triumph and fear and how much love you still had for the living world now you found yourself really in it once again.

Tyrion says, “Sansa couldn’t find out much about our aunt’s plans. Varys reckons she and her husband are uninterested in power or Cersei’s approval and the last report was that they were holding a ship in Lannisport, waiting to see how everything falls out.”

Brienne swallows the hurt that threatens to turn into anger. She hadn’t known Sansa had needed to know about any Lannister aunts.

“Does that letter say otherwise?” she asks.

Jaime pinches his lips.

“She’s Tywin Lannister’s sister; she’s not entirely uninterested in power.”

“Give it to me,” Tyrion snaps and Jaime hands it over easily.

“The Rock knows and loves her. And that husband may be a useless lump, but he’s a surviving, locatable Frey,” says Tyrion, “He has a decent claim to the Twins.”

Brienne’s heart turns over, that’s information Sansa should have had. Unlike Lannisport, the Twins are between them and King’s Landing. The twins are essential to their campaign.

“Only until someone taking Casterly Rock sticks around long enough to pull the much lamented Edmure Tully and his child from imprisonment,” says Jaime.

“Yes, yes,” says Tyrion, pausing to glare at Jaime over the letter, “I’ve been appropriately shamed for that oversight. Thank you for apparently selectively handing them only information perfectly crafted to blindside and humiliate me entirely. Our dearest aunt wasn’t there to greet us when I last visited, and she has not seen fit to write to me.”

He turns back to the letter. “This is excellent,” he says and then his face contorts. He puts his hand out to drag Jaime back down onto the bed next to him and says, viciously, “She’s a rotten, lying bitch.”

Brienne recoils. Jaime had sounded so fond of the woman. Jaime folds a little into himself, defensive, and of course, Brienne realises, in a rising tide of frustration with her own aching heart, it must be about Cersei. Here - with two Lannisters ensconced in their own kingdom shaking family dramas, apparently having forgotten that she, the woman whose bed they’re sitting on is even in the room - she forces herself to hold the truth up to cold winter light. This is why she hadn’t wanted to see the letter.

“Tyrion, don’t,” Jaime says, softly, “It might not have been a lie.”

Tyrion laughs, loud and sharp.

“I’m sorry,” says Tyrion sobering as Jaime’s face tightens, “but don’t lie to yourself in her stead, for fuck’s sake, Jaime.” Jaime stares blankly into nothing. “This is the end of it,” says Tyrion, brandishing the letter at him. “This is good news, doubly. Our aunt will all but give us the Rock, and you’re free. Really free, you hear me.”

“I wasn’t trapped,” says Jaime, still quiet but disdainful now too, “Yes, it’s devious but she-.” He pauses, heaves out a great breath and changes tack, hissing, “It doesn’t matter if I’m free. You’re all so bloody pleased now she’s doomed herself to die. As terrible as she’s become, it’s still indecent and I-.”

Tyrion stands up abruptly, and Jaime cuts himself off.

“She was always this terrible to me. It’s only now she has enough power to torture everyone else,” says Tyrion sharply. Jaime blanches. All the anger drains from Tyrion. “No one is pleased about any of this, Jaime. She is my family too,” he breathes exhaustedly. He rolls the letter up and sticks it up his sleeve. “Your blessed maid has no wine here, and this is a conversation only to be had when dead drunk or nearly dead. I need to show this to the queen, who should have seen it as soon as it came” - Jaime flinches minutely, and Brienne clenches her jaw - “and to Sansa. Jon too, I suppose.” Then Tyrion softens and says to Jaime affectionately, “Try to be less of a fool. I’ll do my best to disguise how long you’ve had this. I need your help writing to dear Aunt Genna. I doubt she planned to make this offer to me.”

He nods to Brienne - how charming of him to have remembered that she, the blessed maid, is still in the room - and turns towards the door.

Jaime calls after him, “Tyrion, when do you leave?”

“Tomorrow. I’ll ask them to send riders with my aunt’s reply.”

“So soon,” says Podrick, surprise on his face.

“They were all preparing to march anyway.”

Jaime huffs at that.

“They were really going to march those men to King’s Landing?”

She’d had the same doubts. She wonders who else was thinking it and not saying what needed to be said. What are they all doing in these closed meetings? She’s glad for those grey-faced southern soldiers in Sansa’s office. At least some of them are going home.

“You really think that plan is any stupider than this new venture?” Tyrion asks, and he still sounds leading, despite his earlier confidence, like he really wants Jaime’s reassurance.

“I’ll help you with anything you want,” says Jaime, he gestures resignedly at Tyrion where he has secreted the letter, “Let that be my commitment to this. I’ll do anything in my very limited means for you to get to the Rock safely.”

Tyrion smiles at him, apparently completely satisfied.

“I love you too,” he says.

Jaime stands when the door closes behind Tyrion and draws himself neatly together like a soldier squaring up to face a commanding officer. Brienne sits heavily back on the desk. She doesn’t want to have this conversation at all. Certainly not like this. Frustration sits heavy in her chest. Her cowardice almost lost Sansa information she needed. She hadn’t known Sansa needed the information. If Jaime had just told her.

“I can tell you what was in the letter,” Jaime says, looking calmly and directly into her eyes, “or you can ask Sansa for it now, I suppose.”

“There was something in it you didn’t want me to see? Besides your aunt and uncle’s apparent political significance?”

“He’s hardly my uncle,” says Jaime with apparent disgust. "My uncle was in that sept."

As if she cares. She wonders if he would ever have told them if Tyrion’s safety hadn’t so clearly been impacted by keeping it a secret. Jaime waits until she meets his eyes again.

“She only offered me support, which I was in no position to accept. There’s a part of the letter that was really about family but I’m happy to-.”

“Then I won’t ask,” Brienne cuts him off.

The gratitude in his face is no longer the sweetness it was in the maester’s tower during those blurry hours after the battle. There’s no reason for her to know any of it now that Tyrion has the letter. It would just be an exercise in wielding a power she doesn’t want.

“The whole army must be less than a week from leaving,” she says, “we don’t have time for you to sit on information that could keep people alive.”

He says tiredly, “Northern people, you mean. It was enough of a betrayal that I wrote to my aunt in the first place.” A betrayal of which queen, Brienne isn’t sure. “They will march straight past the Westerlands and never worry about the rear of their armies. I am sorry for keeping it from you, Brienne, but they have dragons. My sister has lost this war before it has even begun. I wrote that letter, and she lost more of her family and more of her kingdoms. You can’t ask me to joyously flaunt her isolation to all her enemies so that everyone can sing and celebrate her coming death.”

“No one is singing,” says Brienne.

She had known that he couldn’t be relied on to work against Cersei. It had taken him a year and the excuse of an army of dead men for him to break loyalty to Cersei after the Sept. They don’t have time for that kind of endless inaction ended only by crisis. She’s been dreaming of an afterwards, but she thought she’d had her eyes open. If she’d asked for that letter, he’d have handed it over as soon as it came. He’d offered it to her more than once, passing on the responsibility. She doesn’t want to be cast as a benevolent tyrant.

“Fuck loyalty?” he says, quietly and sardonically. Brienne looks at him sharply, abruptly uncomfortable in front of Pod. That was situational, and that context has blown away on the wind. But Jaime continues casually, louder, “and fuck propriety. What next?”

“You need to not hide your treason in my room,” she says. Jaime’s jaw jumps, and he blinks at her as if the magnitude of it all hadn’t occurred to him.

“It was just… family,” he says, a little helplessly.

“No,” says Brienne, “I don’t want to know every grubby little Lannister secret. I need you not to make me into a fool.” He stares at her, stricken. She marches past him, throwing back a command to, “Stay here.”

She looks briefly at Podrick, who has been silent this whole time, sat still and sad mouthed by the fire. She pulls the door firmly closed behind her.

She heads for the smithy. Tyrion and all the other great houses will be gathering. There are a small number who always sit in on these councils, often after Sansa has let Brienne go for the evening. She needs to find Gendry. He’s Lord of Storm’s End - they created him - and the council should reflect that. Her house is sworn to his; she must ensure that they treat him with the appropriate respect.

Gendry comes immediately when she tells him he must. She gives him all the information she has and can safely repeat aloud in the busy courtyards and corridors that lead them to Sansa. The castle is bustling with men and women darting around and preparing to leave, and there is no privacy to be had in the cramped grey walls. Not when they are this pressed for time.

Grey Worm nods at her greeting and allows her to knock without comment. They push into the study to find Tyrion who looks up at her in consternation, with the assembled greatness of the Queen, Sansa, Jon, Royce, Varys, and Ser Davos, now wearing the sigil of hand on his jerkin. Melisandre stands against the far wall.

“Your grace, my lady, I’ve brought Gendry Baratheon,” says Brienne awkwardly, into the sudden silence, trying to address both women at once, “He’s Lord Paramount of the Stormlands,” she adds as justification.

Gendry’s forearms are bare under his cloak and covered in grease and soot. Lord Royce chokes a startled noise into the silence, and Brienne turns to stare at the man, too incredulous to feel the familiar creep of embarrassment. How dare he.

“We should have sent for you, my lord,” says Sansa smoothly, crooking an eyebrow at Brienne, “Sit down. Both of you,” she adds casually as if Tarth has as much right to be here as the representatives of the North, Vale, Stormlands, Westerlands and she supposes the Riverlands in Sansa and Jon too, in their uncle’s stead.

Daenerys twitches her face into a bright smile.

“Yes, I have been gratified to hear that Ser Brienne and,” she hesitates, blinking disdainfully, “Jaime, have been helping my new cousin in his duties. Brienne, Cousin, join us,” she says as though Sansa had not already invited them.

Sansa’s face is very carefully blank, but Brienne thinks she can see a glint of amusement. The firelight glints in the marble eyes of the wolf on her shoulder. Sat around the table, and not stood by the door, Brienne quickly begins to feel much more like a household knight. She’d felt instantly vindicated when Renly had installed her on his Rainbow Guard. She'd felt similarly confident in her abilities when she’d been given command here at Winterfell. She’d been ready. Keeping up with a council like this feels like it might take practice. There are too many moving parts for which she doesn’t have context. Everyone here but Gendry is practiced at quick and decisive decisions made on behalf of vast swathes of human life. They’ll march ten thousand men here, five thousand there. They’ll fly dragons over this minor city, they’ll avoid that river. These are obviously well trod arguments and plans.

Brienne breathes through her panic and then listens carefully. Sansa seems to have given up on disputing the necessity of them going. Jon defers to Daenerys in a way that feels to Brienne to be pointed and performative. Tyrion is quiet, and Brienne is distinctly aware of the holes in his leather jerkin where the hand’s sigil once hung. Lord Royce is as much as a feature as Brienne herself, seemingly there only to sit beside Sansa.

“You think the city will just allow itself to be sacked?” says Gendry, into a pause in Jon and Davos’s deliberation about stationing garrisons in the Crownlands, with their exact plan for getting through any of the walls of King’s Landing worryingly elided. Brienne thinks of Jaime saying, they have dragons. She’s glad Tarth is an island. Everyone turns to stare at Gendry. He swallows creakingly but continues, “Growing up in Flee Bottom people used to tell tales of what they did when the Lannisters rode in, and that army was fresh. It’s a hard city.”

“I’ve found that great masses of people are often less brave than they think themselves to be as individuals,” says Daenerys, untroubled, “and I am their rightful queen overthrowing a tyrant. Once they see they have no reason to fear me, they will not resist us.”

Everyone around the table pauses significantly. Perhaps this is why they were not mentioning it. Brienne turns to frown at Sansa who is entirely relaxed her cheek tilted delicately against the fur of the wolf.

Davos grumbles his way into speech.

“Gendry, er, excuse me, my lord, those tales of what men did when Tywin Lannister rode in are mostly just tall tavern tales. But civilian resistance may come later, I believe, particularly if we mismanage the initial entry or resort to starving the city out.”

It sounds pointed. There is a point Davos wants to make, and he’s not making it. It frustrates her. The pin indicating his position as hand sits dull on his chest, distorting his jerkin and he should say what he thinks. There is tension in Daenerys’s face too.

“How-,” Brienne looks to Sansa who tips her head, encouraging. Brienne gathers herself. “Then how do you plan to gain entry?”

Davos looks shiftily to Jon, saying, “My lady, we plan for a siege and hope for a quick surrender. There are weak points in their defences, too, if you know the city well, which I do.”

“Thank you, ser,” she says, not bothering to disguise the doubt in her voice.

Besides Davos, Varys crosses his legs and places his hands in his lap. Brienne flicks a startled glance at him. There is something particularly loud about the quiet action, although she could not say why.

“Varys,” says Daenerys loudly, “you disapprove of all our strategies.” There is another alarmed pause. Jon sits up. Varys uncrosses his legs. “You do,” Daenerys says, “You talk behind my back about how much you disapprove.”

Sansa is predator still next to Brienne. Missandei moves forwards to put her hands on the back of the queen’s chair. That information came from Sansa via Brienne, she realises with sick certainty. Their passing information led directly to this confrontation.

“But now you only sigh and sulk,” says Daenerys. “What would you do differently, Varys? I know you are a great military commander with far more experience than I.”

Varys stares back at her. Then he turns, very deliberately to Davos. Daenerys stops affecting remove and sits forward, a neat mirror to Jon’s alert posture.

“Davos?” she asks, her mouth tight around the name. Davos looks nothing short of terrified. He stutters and blusters.

“Your grace,” interrupts Tyrion, “We have been talking about smuggling and Targaryen tunnels.”

The queen listens for barely a moment. Then she sends Brienne to fetch Grey Worm into the room.

Jaime starts to his feet, looking drained and desperately worried when she returns. Podrick is still sitting in the chair by the fire. She’d heard the low murmur of their voices from the stairwell.

“They barely spent a moment on the provenance of the letter,” she reassures him immediately. “Sansa is pleased.”

Truthfully, Tyrion had framed the news of a new ally in such a way that the already well-contented assembly had hardly questioned how he had come by the news. He’ll tell Sansa, of course, or Brienne will do it.

“They don’t hold you responsible?” he says, “You were gone so long and I thought-. I wanted to come, but I thought I’d only make it worse it worse for you if they saw I couldn’t obey a simple order to stay put.”

She lets Jaime take her cloak and sword. The warm air in the room feeds the glow of accomplishment rising in her belly.

“I sat with them as they planned with the queen,” Brienne tells them.

“With all the great houses?” asks Podrick, looking suitably impressed.

“I thought the Stormlands had a right to be there. I went with Gendry, as a representative of the vassal houses, to advise and support him,” which is what she’d planned to say if anyone tried to make her leave him there alone.

Her father hadn’t raised her to this kind of politics. She learned to govern a small island that could not raise an army. She was taught to fight alone, not pressed hot and suffocating in a massive formation or with the expectation of anyone being by her side. Although she can’t pretend that she’ll enjoy the politics, perhaps she can change after all, if she needs to. She can learn.

Jaime leans back on the edge of the desk, smiling at her quietly. He was raised to govern one of the seven kingdoms and command a King’s armies. He’s having it all stripped away from him tonight. Technically it’s already gone, technically he refused it all anyway, but none of that means anything in the absence of witnesses and action. She is heir to little Tarth, but it’s possible none of Tarth even knows she is alive. There are only a few hundred men from the west in Winterfell to learn that their warden is officially some different Lannister once again.

She comes to stand in front of Jaime. He holds her eyes steadily. He’s not scrambling to stand to attention anymore, remaining in his exhausted slump against the desk.

She says, “You were in command of armies nearly as large as this one. How would you move them south?” Jaime exhales slowly and looks away. He taps the gold hand against the desk; a hollow thud. She thinks perhaps it will still be too much. She doesn’t think she means it as a test. “If they invited you to push around those wooden blocks on their map of Westeros, where would you draw the battle lines?”

She’s just become accustomed to talking to him or Podrick about almost everything. She wants to know what he thinks.

“I wouldn’t,” he says quietly, “Set up a new court at Highgarden or Harrenhal. Let King’s Landing stew in its own decay and get on with ruling. Why throw lives and precious months of early winter weather away on what is now a hostage city held by sellswords, more than it is a seat of power.” Brienne blinks at him, surprised. That doesn’t sound like Cersei Lannister’s brother angling to have her left alone. That sounds like real advice. She frowns, considering.

“Someone will have suggested it,” Jaime says, “Don’t put yourself in her path. Especially not with advice taken from me.” Brienne waits for him to look up at her again.

“What if I want King’s Landing safe? What if I want it secure before winter comes for all its people?”

“I still wouldn’t do this,” he says, setting his face. “Cersei is the only thing holding the sellswords and the Lannister armies to the city, and the city from you. There’s no successor. No one to take up her madness. Use the men you have. Ask Davos about the currents and Varys about his tunnels. Tywin Lannister would tell you that you need a few well trained men, not too few exhausted soldiers, far from home and fighting through march fractures. She won’t be intimidated into surrender by a couple of apparently undersized dragons.” He clears his face. “She’ll mean to die on that throne. Last time… but they could… capture her, or not, I suppose. Gods knows none of us has much to bargain with.”

Brienne should feel victorious - it may be couched as Tywin Lannister’s advice, but it’s Jaime’s. It’s not as ugly as it was in the council meeting to hear Tyrion map out how they could kill his sister. He’d looked utterly calm as well.

“That’s very nearly what they have decided.”

Jaime puts a hand over his eyes. She watches his mouth pull long and thin and the complete stillness of his chest. She reaches out cautiously towards his face.

After a moment Pod starts shifting by the fire. Jaime drops his hand to take hold of hers and pull it away from his face. His eyes are dry. There’s starburst red blood fracturing under the surface in the inner corner of one of them. She drops his fingers from hers and steps back, looking to Pod. He’s got his eyebrows up, looking down at his boots, half twisted away from them on the chair towards the fire.

“Podrick,” says Jaime, “Let’s visit the baths and then find Lord Tyrion. We should write this letter as soon as possible.”

Brienne has the room to herself. It’s strange, but not unpleasant. She goes to the chest and opens it. Alongside her and Pod’s sparse collection of carefully sorted possessions, there is now a little bundle of material. Something in there is pink, once red, presumably, and washed out over time. Everything else is dark and practical. She shuts the chest, not sure what she had been looking for.

She imagines the boat they could take. She imagines the skies are still summer blue over Tarth. She imagines her father, alive after all, and the long, dark corridor she used to drill in when the rain blew in off the sea.

When they collect him for his lesson, Gendry eyes Jaime’s shortened, neatened beard and the fairly clean job Pod has made of the hair at his nape.

“Are you marching south then?” he asks, indicating his own stubbled chin.

“If you were the queen - or even if you were, my lord, imagine this, the Lord of Storm’s End and her sworn man - would you trust me to march south?”

Gendry looks like he’s stepped out and found the sea floor gone beneath his advancing foot.

“No,” he says at last, with reasonable confidence. Jaime claps him on the back with his gold hand.