Chapter Text
She stood in the snow for a long time, she later realised. Long enough that ice had crystallised in the sleeves of her robe and on her eyelashes; long enough that she was too numbed to shiver; long enough that her chest felt utterly emptied of all feeling and her stomach was a block of hollowed ice. Long enough that, in the morning, she could report his departure to Lady Sansa and the Targaryen queen in a clear enough voice, without tears.
She had not been able to meet Lady Sansa’s eyes or anyone else’s. She had looked at the air just before their faces and let their features become a blur. But her voice and face had been all right; her grip on Oathkeeper at her side had held her, somehow, steadied her, let her listen to them quarrel and reason about Jaime and his loyalties and his future and his death as if it was all politics and war, all part of the game. The queen was angry, very angry, because all betrayals—no matter by whom—angered her now and she seemed to blame Tyrion for this one for some reason, interrogating him fiercely about what information Jaime had and what he might do with it. She asked Brienne the same questions and Brienne told her and then they let her go and she went out into the courtyard and trained with Pod in the snow until she felt that the ice in her stomach had spread to the tips of her fingers and down to her feet, until she felt as if she was made entirely of ice and stone.
As ice and stone, she found, it was possible to do most things. Sleep was difficult. Meeting the eyes of certain people—Lady Sansa, Pod, Tyrion Lannister—was difficult. But training was easy and listening to Lady Sansa think aloud and answer her was easy and riding to King’s Landing and hearing the endless talk that came after the end of the war was easy. Being Lord Commander of the Kingsguard was easy.
Two moments, only, felt like a crack in the ice. One was when Tyrion had told her that he had not found the bodies—he had searched and searched—but that he was fairly sure that Cersei and Jaime were drowned.
“I left him a boat,” he said. “But he didn’t find it—he didn’t take it. It was still there.”
“Perhaps he took another,” Brienne said. She kept her eyes on his hands, his boots. She could hear the thickness of tears in his voice, knew they would be standing in his eyes; she could not, could not let herself start weeping again or it would never end.
“There was no other,” Tyrion said. “I think he must have tried to—swim. Carrying. Carrying her. She couldn’t swim.”
Brienne said nothing. Tyrion began to weep and she managed, somehow, to put her hand on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” she said formally. “I know he was.” Was. Her own composure cracked, then, and something black and hollow opened in her chest. Her vision swam. She swallowed, forced the blackness down. “You know how he loved you.”
“And you,” Tyrion said and her hand flew away from his shoulder as if he had scalded her. She took a step away.
“He loved you,” Tyrion said, insistently, and she had a fleeting appalling desire to turn her strength against him, to fling him bodily out of the room. She swallowed that too. He was trying, in his way, to be a comfort. An argument would do no good.
“Perhaps,” she said, in lieu of anything else she could say. “Do you wish. If you wish. I can ask my men to continue the search for the.” Her voice cracked and she caught it. “For the bodies.”
“No,” Tyrion said wearily. “There’s enough else for the Kingsguard to do. Thank you, Ser Brienne.”
She nodded and left him. The common room of the White Sword Tower was empty, awaiting her. The book lay in its place. She took it, held it, let the ice thicken a little more before she opened it. She held steady all the way through, then, until the time came for the final sentence, the last sentence of Jaime Lannister’s story. The black thing opened up again at that, awful, clawing at her, trying to take the pen out of her hands. He left me. He wouldn’t stay. He chose to die with her, not live with me. All truths, but all maudlin and foolish and irrelevant. She forced the pen steady and finished the story, gave it its proper ending. Jaime had died, in the end, for loyalty as well as love; it was proper that later knights should know of and honour the loyalty, even if they could not understand the love.
That was the second moment of danger. After that, she went on easily, encased. The work was endless, complex, demanding, important; the men were eager but green and in need of training; she slept only a handful of hours a night anyway, and that could usually be managed by the recital to herself of the next day’s work. Once or twice, her dreams were bad and there were danger points just as she was falling asleep—her sleepy mind would unexpectedly, horribly, evoke a sense memory of his arm about her waist, behind her, the scratch of his beard, the warm breath of his sigh in her ear—and then she would get out of bed and find some piece of work to do and leave sleep till the next night or the one after.
It wasn’t too bad, ultimately, as the weeks and then the months wore on and Tyrion stopped looking at her with even a hint of pity. There was so much to do, rebuilding King’s Landing, shoring up the ruins of the six kingdoms. It would see her through the rest of her life, she thought; the work, at least, would outlive her.
Her father wrote once, formally, asking whether she meant to marry—the King wanted married men for the Kingsguard, now, so the oath was no security—and, if not, whether she would promise to name her infant cousin, Alwyn, heir after her. She agreed and so the course of her life seemed smooth and solid, set in its path. She would not marry. She would rebuild King’s Landing. After her father’s time, she would return to Tarth and formally adopt Alwyn and bring him up as her heir. When she died, they would write her name in the White Book and tell what she had done; perhaps they need not even mention how she had come to be a knight and whose hand had put Oathkeeper into hers.
Jaime. His name came into her mind at random, at odd times of the day, blinding moments of blackness and pain, like twinges from a forgotten wound. She had thought at first that time might do something, would reduce how often she thought of him or the intensity of the flashes. It did not. Six months passed and then a year, and still it went on and on. But they were only flashes, momentary, barely interrupting the flow of her day, her work. No one could see them, or guess at them; she could, she thought, live with them. And then, a year and four months and eleven nights after the night Jaime had ridden away from her to his death, Tyrion knocked on her door in the night. He was breathless, shaking, and the first sight of his face told her what he must have to say.
“You’ve found them,” she said, watching him pace in the candlelight, up and down her narrow room. “The bodies.”
He shook his head.
“No,” he said. “Not—bodies.”
Her heart dropped.
“What do you mean?” she asked. There was a quiver in her voice that she could do nothing about. The fantasy that she never, never let herself indulge—the one image that she refused to allow to linger in her mind for even a moment, even on the worst nights—
“They’re alive,” Tyrion said. “We found them. Jaime and Cersei. Alive.”
Her mouth opened soundlessly. Where she had meant to ask but no air came. Tyrion went on, not needing the question, stumbling in his excitement.
“They were in a village. A fishing boat picked them up. They’ve been hiding. Playing smallfolk. An ordinary couple, fisherfolk.” He huffed a laugh, shaky. “Who’d have thought Cersei could have pulled that off. A fishwife. Cersei.”
“How do you know?” Brienne found voice, at last, to ask. “How can you be sure it’s them?”
“I’ve seen him,” Tyrion said. “Jaime.” His voice broke. He tried another laugh, weaker than the first. “Jaime the fisherman, bringing his catch to market. In King’s Landing. I’ve got him, Brienne. He’s here.”
He’s here. A wave of dizziness swept over her and she blinked it away. She made herself think.
“Why?” she said at last.
Tyrion gave her a confused look.
“Why what?”
“Why—” her throat closed and she had to force the words out. “Why did you take him? You could have—why not let them be?”
“Let them be?” Tyrion repeated, staring up at her as if she was mad. “You can’t seriously believe my sister means to live out her years as a fishwife. She wants the throne back.”
Brienne stared, baffled.
“She has no army,” she pointed out and Tyrion smiled, a grim little smile with no humour in it.
“She has—had Jaime,” he said. “She sent him here as her spy, Brienne. To find Lannister loyalists. To drop a word here and there. To begin the next war.”
It was a nightmare. It never ended. Another war. Another battlefield. Another war against Cersei, a war against Jaime. She felt sick.
“So you arrested him,” she said in a leaden voice and Tyrion shook his head.
“He came to me,” he said. “He told me. He wants. He wants it to stop.”
He handed her a paper. A map, hastily sketched but clear, with a bold X that marked a particular spot by the river, only a few hours north of King’s Landing.
“I promised him clemency for her,” he said. “And I promised—I promised you would be the one to arrest her.”
Brienne’s hands were shaking. She could hardly hold the paper.
“Someone else,” she said. “I’ll send a squadron. Pod. He won’t hurt her.”
“I promised him,” Tyrion said. “You’re the only person he trusts with this, Brienne. With her. He wouldn’t have given me that—” he gestured to the paper—“if I hadn’t sworn it would be you.”
She wanted, absurdly, to laugh. Of course. He had sworn it would be her and he was the Hand of the King and she was sworn to arrest who he told her to arrest. They make you swear and swear.
“You’ll come with me, then,” she said savagely. “You’ll be the one to tell her.”
He flinched but nodded.
“Wait for me,” she said. “I’ll be half an hour, with the men.”
“All right,” Tyrion said. He hesitated. “Do you. There’s time, if you wish to see him.”
She shook her head, blindly, and he gave her a long look and then nodded and trotted away. She tried to make herself imagine it—seeing him—and then let it go. She would see him, eventually, inevitably. She couldn’t let herself think of that now. She got into her armour, hastily, grateful for its cool enclosing weight, and went to rouse Pod and the handful of other men she trusted on this journey.
The night air was cool and crisp, the beginnings of winter this far south. The wind blew chill in her face as she rode, Tyrion before her and Pod behind, and she kept her eyes on the road, silver and shadowy in the moonlight, and thought only of the remembered taste of snow.