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Jaime doesn’t want to be here. But here he is.
His rickety, leaking rowboat crunches to shore in the middle of a pissing rainstorm. He staggers out, exhausted, onto the shale. He’s too cold and too soaked to keep rowing – he’d nearly lost an oar to numb fingers this morning.
It’s an island; he knows that much, and it looks empty enough. Just a tumbledown Septry and some overgrown outbuildings visible from out at sea. Some sheep, bleating mournfully to each other in the drizzle and the mist.
Jaime just needs shelter. Maybe overnight, maybe until the storm passes, maybe until his head stops pounding and his skin stops burning. He just needs somewhere to hide until he can figure something out. He just needs to figure something out. A way to get a new life.
He’s not prepared for there to be anyone here – anyone at all, somewhere so deserted. There were no signs of life from the water, but there’s someone striding down the beach toward him now – a woman? Thick woollen cardigan over her thick linen habit, damp with the rain.
A Septa? A Septa, he thinks, half-dazed - a Septa with steel-blue eyes and uncovered hair lank in the rain. Incongruous hobnail boots, he notices, barely able to keep his balance now. Wanting nothing more than to sink to his knees in the cold sand as she storms up to him – a shotgun in her hands, pointed at his head.
“Leave,” she barks. Hostile. Wary. Blinking rainwater from her eyes. He’s not sure he can blame her at all, but he’s got nowhere else to go. Nowhere else to run from what he’s done, not now.
“I’m a Septon,” he lies. His voice raspy, his throat parched. “Seeking safety on holy ground.”
The Septa lifts her chin – he thinks for a moment she is going to deny him, call his lie out, shoot him in the head, but she doesn’t. There’s something gentle in her eyes. Concern. He knows he must look a sight at this point, running for weeks with barely a thing to eat. Probably he looks as though he’s no threat.
She lowers the gun. Jerks her head in the direction of the septry. Jaime manages all of two steps before he really is on his knees in the sand. Gasping. The beach spinning.
“Please,” he gasps. “Please …”
She helps him to stand. Throws his arm around her strong shoulders, helps him stagger through the mud towards the septry–
There’s another figure at the doorway.
“It’s all right, Septa. He needs our help,” the tall woman calls out. Even half-conscious, Jaime can feel the tension in her.
The other Septa looks like a ghost, he thinks. A corpse. Long white hair, long grey habit. Ugly ragged scars on both cheeks that look as though her face has been raked by talons. Her eyes bore into him with terrible intensity.
And then she snarls at him. Actually snarls, her papery lips pulling back from grey teeth to let out an inhuman sound. Suddenly, getting back in his boat and rowing back across the strait doesn’t seem like a bad idea.
“She isn’t well,” the woman holding him up explains between gritted teeth. “Wait here.”
She drops Jaime on the sand to go to the older woman. Sets down the shotgun, too, by the doorway, and soothes her. Strokes her hair. Speaks in a soft voice like a mother calming a child, moves her back inside, all gentleness in those hobnail boots.
On his knees in the mud, Jaime shivers as he watches her. His head spins – he hasn’t eaten in days. He’s never seen anything like her, he thinks. And when she comes back for him then, to take all his weight as they stagger into the half-ruined septry where it’s oddly warm and dry – perhaps he falls a little bit in love just then, like the half-dazed fool he is.
. . .
He doesn’t remember much of the next few days, except her.
Septa Evenstar, her name is, although he barely keeps that much in his head as he shivers and sweats through whatever sickness befell him on his way here. Her presence is all he understands those first few days.
Pressing cool cloths to his face, wiping the salt and the sweat from his skin, moistening his cracked, bleeding lips. He’s been without fresh water so long, the well water she makes him sip tastes like fine wine.
She feeds him spoonfuls of broth sometimes, rich with mutton fat; chunks of hard bread soaking in it. Sweet stewed apples, too. He can’t understand, somehow, how they survive here. He can’t understand why, most of all, and the thought of it rattles around his brain when the fever takes him.
Slowly, his strength returns. His head stops banging, his fever breaks. He can feed himself, wash himself. He can walk across the room without everything spinning.
Septa Evenstar comes and goes. Food and drink. Warm clothes, thick blankets. Slowly, Jaime gets well enough to leave the room, come to the kitchens for food, and take a walk around the gardens and the orchard. He sleeps a lot, still. Eats a lot to recover his strength.
Occasionally, he is woken by the other Septa, Septa Stoneheart, screaming and raging in another part of the septry. Banging. Crashing. Howling. The sounds of Septa Evenstar’s soft voice.
. . .
The first morning that Jaime truly feels himself again is warmer. Sunnier. Perhaps it’s spring, now? He has little idea of how long he’s been here.
He wakes and washes in the water bowl, smelling the soft stone of the well it was drawn from. Dresses himself – his own trousers, his own shirt, carefully washed and mended. A knitted sweater, made from lambswool Septa Evenstar has shorn herself.
Septa Evenstar is in the kitchen, throwing bread dough about the table, her broad arms dusted with flour to the elbow. Septa Stoneheart sits in her high-backed wooden chair by the fire. Chewing on something, slowly masticating it around her mouth without swallowing.
“Good morrow, Septas,” Jaime bids them both as he limps across the flagstones.
“Good morrow, Septon Jaime,” Evenstar replies, looking up from her dough. “I would have brought your tea.”
“No … no need.” He collects a mug and pours some, adding a spoonful of honey to counteract the bitter taste of nettle.
“It is good to see you up.”
Jaime sits, watching the dough get pummelled by the Septa’s thick hands; workman’s hands. Motes of flour dance around her in a cloud, carried by the air she displaces with her kneading, carried on the huffs of her breath. Snow in sunlight, almost.
“I know what you did,” Septa Stoneheart says, suddenly. Her voice a horrible hiss.
Jaime looks to her – she is looking at him.
“Whatever do you mean, Septa?” He forces himself to keep his voice light.
“You!” Stoneheart spits. She rises from her chair, thin as bones and bracken in her habit. “You killed my son!”
“Your … son?”
“My son!” Stoneheart totters to her feet, spitting the well-chewed ball of food to the flagstones. “You shot him! So many times. Stabbed him in the heart! My beautiful boy ... so much blood ….”
Her face contorts into a hideous mask – grief, despair, rage. Her fingers, skin gnawed red around the knuckles, claw at her own hair.
“What … what is she talking about?” he asks Septa Evenstar.
She is at Stoneheart’s side, thick arm about her waist. “It’s alright,” she whispers. “It’s over, you’re safe.” Her big floured hands stroke that tangle of white hair.
“She’s a Septa!” Jaime scoffs. “She doesn’t have a son.”
Stoneheart shrieks. She flies at Jaime, streaking through the floured air like a frenzied beast. Upending his chair, hands tearing at his throat, screaming … wild-eyed.
Septa Evenstar pulls her off bodily, holds her at bay.
“What the fuck?!” Jaime curses from the floor, his head ringing like a bell from the flagstones.
Septa Evenstar’s big blue eyes go wide at his profanity. “She was not always a Septa,” she chides. “We had lives before we joined the order, just as you Septons do. Perhaps her son was murdered?”
“Well not by me,” he complains. Dabbing his fingers at the scratch on his neck, wincing when they come away bloody.
Septa Stoneheart wears out. Slowing, slowing, quieting, stopping. Sagging in Septa Evenstar’s arms like a puppet with her strings cut.
“It’s alright, Septa. Have some tea,” Evenstar whispers. Helping Stoneheart back to her chair.
Jaime gets to his feet. Sticks his mug in the sink. “I’m going back to bed.”
Septa Evenstar barely looks up.
. . .
It’s almost another week before Jaime is strong enough to go outside the Septry. The gardens and orchard bore him, so he heads for the shoreline, to the place where he had beached in the rain. He wonders how long ago that was.
Of course, his boat has gone; the efficient Evenstar has long since moved it. The sea is wild and windswept, white horses breaking on the rocks in the bay. He wonders how he ever made it through them – he must have been desperate to attempt it.
Footsteps crunch in the wet shale. Septa Evenstar and her boots. He turns to her, her scruffy self-cut hair dancing in the wind. Her arms wrap her cardigan about her.
“It’s colder than it looks, out here,” he says.
She nods. ”The beach is quite exposed.”
“I’ll leave soon,” he tells her. Looking once again out to sea. “I’ll take my boat, and ….”
“I don’t think you’d make it. Not in that.”
“I made it in,” he argues, but he sees her point in every smash of every wave on the rocks. It looks like madness.
Septa Evenstar does not reply.
“What’s wrong with her?” he asks then. “Septa Stoneheart.”
She shrugs. “She has always been this way, ever since I arrived. Of course, there were more of us then, to look after her.”
“More Septas? Where did the others go?”
“They died. Old age. I was the youngest, so ….”
“Why don’t you go back to the mainland? There are other Septries.”
“We’re a closed order. We made vows not to leave the Septry grounds.”
Jaime looks back, confused, at the walls behind them.
“Sometimes, I’ve had no choice,” she shrugs. “I’ve been alone ten years. Things change.”
Has she changed? He wonders how she was ten years ago.
“She’s not that old,” he says. “You could be doing this for decades.”
“Does that matter?”
“It’s thankless work.”
“You think that’s beneath me?”
“It’s nothing but a life of … servitude. For someone who doesn’t even know you’re there.”
“She knows I’m there.”
“She doesn’t know who you are. Does she even know your name?”
“Is that important? To be known?”
He scoffs. “I suppose so long as the gods know?”
She doesn’t say anything. There’s only the cold wind, and the salt spray of the shoreline. Jaime fancies he can see the mainland, somewhere out in the mists. Fancies there are throngs of people over there, watching for him.
“Brienne,” Septa Evenstar says beside him.
“What?”
“My name is Brienne. No one has known that for a long time.”
He turns to look at her, but she is striding back up the beach, back past the septry walls. The wind blows her hair and her habit and her cardigan.
. . .
“Do you need help?” he asks later, as she scrubs vegetables in her bucket of wellwater before dinner. Septa Stoneheart paces in the halls above them, footsteps thumping like a heartbeat. “Brienne?”
She looks at him warily when he uses her name. “Help?”
“I could … peel things? Chop them? Or … something?”
She points to the cleaned carrots on the table. “Those? Perhaps?”
He fetches a board, but looks about the kitchen fruitlessly for something to cut with. “Where are the knives?”
Brienne points up high, a cupboard too tall for Septa Stoneheart to reach. “In there. For safety.”
“Of course.” He gropes about to find a knife sharpened so often there is very little blade left. Its wooden handle has been recently replaced, though.
He cuts in silence. Just the rhythmic thump of the knife, the splash and scrub of the water bucket, Septa Stoneheart’s footsteps in the upstairs of the Septry. The spit and crackle of the fire.
“You’ve really been alone ten years?” Jaime asks as he watches her wet hands work the brush.
She blinks, seemingly surprised he has spoken. Used to silence, he supposes. “More or less. I haven’t counted for a while.”
Jaime nods. He can imagine that. What difference is counting days in a life of drudgery? One more sunrise, one more sunset? Three more meals, another round of knitting and cleaning and one more sheep to the slaughter?
“Why? What makes a woman choose to become a Septa? In an enclosed order … on a deserted island?”
“A lot of things.”
“Like what?”
“The quiet,” she says pointedly. “For one.”
Jaime laughs, and drops a chopped carrot into the soup-pot. “You strike me as a practical person,” he tells her. “Rather than a pious one.”
Her eyebrows lift. “I suppose I’ve not been much of a Septa, since the others died. I don’t cover my hair; I don’t do a lot of prayer or contemplation. But the gods … aren’t they in everything? In the dirt of the garden and the woodlouse in the woodpile? The water when I’m washing, the soup when I’m cooking? Certainly in the blood and the meat of the sheep, their wool, the warmth the clothes and blankets give us.”
“I suppose so.”
“That’s me,” she says softly.
Jaime shakes his head. “It sounds like a lot of work to me.”
“Well, what made you become a Septon?” she asks.
Jaime sighs. “Brienne …”
“What?”
“I think you know I’m not really a Septon.”
She regards him with that measured blue gaze of hers. “I suspected.”
He takes another carrot from the pile. “Well, thank you for not … you know … shooting me. Thank you for taking me in anyway.”
“The shotgun isn’t loaded,” she says, her cheeks a little pink. “I found it in an abandoned shepherd’s hut a way across the island – there were no shells with it.”
“Well, you certainly looked like you meant business.”
She shrugs. “Who are you then, Jaime?”
“I … I don’t think you want to know.”
She stops scrubbing. “Why not?”
He can’t answer that. He doesn’t want to.
He doesn’t have to. “What did you do?” she asks.
“Well, I … I killed someone.”
Her eyes go wide. “Truly?”
“I’m not a murderer.”
“Then what happened?” Somehow, her gaze is full of concern. The look she had every time she’d mopped his brow, every time she’d fed him broth in the soft warmth of his bed.
He wants to tell her. Perhaps he wants absolution from the virtuous Septa? Perhaps he wants to say it out loud to someone.
“Well, I work … worked for the Targaryen Railway Company. You know it?”
She shakes her head. He’s not surprised. Ten years ago, it had barely existed.
“We plan railway routes … for locomotives?”
“Ah yes – I know of locomotives. Big … steam engines? On rails.”
“That’s right. There’s going to be a network. Huge, revolutionary – railway to every part of Westeros. It’ll change everything. Goods, services, food, crops, coal – everything will be moved so much faster. More efficiently. And I work – worked – at the very top. Planning – construction. Design.”
“That sounds exciting.”
It had been. Even now, Jaime can’t get the smile off his face. “There’s a new route – trans-Westeros, the biggest line anyone has ever imagined, joining the North to the Crownlands, King’s Landing to Winterfell. A huge project – so big it will take a decade to complete. We’re calling it the Kingsroute.”
Brienne looks baffled – Jaime isn’t surprised. The thought of a railway connecting the whole length of the country – being able to travel all that way in under a day … it’s more than most people can imagine. Certainly not a Septa who has lived on a barren island for over a decade.
“But … the boss … Aerys Targaryen, he’s old, and he’s not been the full ticket for some years now. His son Rhaegar took over, but no one had the heart to officially sideline Aerys, so … he’s still technically our boss. And the problem with such a huge project is that we’re all spread so thin. My team is working on the King’s Landing end of construction – Rhaegar is up in Winterfell. And Aerys turns up at my camp in his hansom cab one morning … and he’s … a lunatic. Paranoid, delusional, speaking to people who aren’t there. He makes Septa Stoneheart look quite reasonable.”
Brienne hands him another carrot. “What happened?”
“During that point of construction, my team is a couple of miles out from the city – blasting through a hillside. Near a hundred men, with the engineers and the navvies. Using dynamite, you know? And obviously, we keep that stuff very secure, but Aerys – he’s the boss. So he can walk into anywhere he wants.”
Brienne’s eyes have grown very large now. Her hands stop moving her scrubbing brush.
“Aerys is convinced we’re fucking him over somehow. Me, Rhaegar, everyone down to his own footmen are conspiring against him. It gets worse and worse until …”
“Until what?”
Jaime sighs. “I came out of my hut one night … woken by his screaming … and he’s – he’s sitting there … on a fucking detonator, and there’s dynamite everywhere, all around our camp. He’s going to blow us all to kingdom come.”
“Gods …”
“I … I had to stop him. Obviously.”
Brienne nods.
“But he had this swordstick and he was .. he only had to press that plunger and …”
“He would have killed you all.”
Jaime nods.
“So you killed him.”
“With his own swordstick. I … I wrestled it off him and … I ...”
The picture is still so vivid in his mind. The cold, the rain, the mud. Sweat and fear stinging his eyes. The bright shock of blood on Aerys Targaryen’s dapper white cummerbund. All over his hands.
Jaime takes a deep breath. He brings himself back to the present, back to the kitchen, the fireside, and chopping carrots.
“I just … ran,” he says. “My brother was in the city at the time – I went to him. Hid a few days, but they were looking for me. Everyone was looking for me. He smuggled me out of there, got me a boat and .…”
And then he had rowed. Out on the ocean, through wind and rain and hunger and exhaustion. Rowed away from that nightmare and somehow here, fevered and weak and sickly. Into Brienne’s care.
She grasps his arm, her fingers wet and strong. “Jaime,” she says. “I can’t pretend to know how things work on the mainland now, but … it seems to me that what you did was no murder. Surely you couldn’t be blamed for it. Surely they would see that you were saving the lives of your crew?”
He shakes his head. “Aerys Targaryen was a rich man. The richest. And the company has so much riding on this Kingsroute project – there’s no way Rhaegar would allow it to be known his father was trying to kill a hundred innocent men. It would destroy his reputation, the company’s reputation. He couldn’t allow that. No – I’d be swinging from the gallows before a moon was out, if I went back.”
Brienne swallows. “That’s not fair.”
Jaime puts his carrot down. Followed by the knife. “I can’t let myself think about that.”
. . .
They fall into this pattern, over the next few days. Preparing dinner together, often in companionable silence. The rich smell of food, the warmth of the fire, the sound of Brienne’s spoon stirring the pot. Jaime spreads the cloth on the table, finds the dull steel spoons and places them before each chair, followed by the wooden bowls, the chipped enamel mugs. He goes to the pantry to find the big earthenware jug full of what Brienne calls apple juice, but is very definitely cider.
“Cut the bread?” she asks tonight as he comes out, and he nods, finding a serrated knife to use on the domed, crusty loaf she has made that morning. Brienne slices some thick wedges of ewe’s cheese, opens a jar of spiced pickle. A little smile on her face.
And then Jaime holds out the bowls as she ladles her thick soup into them, the steam rising lazily in the air between them. Drifting around the table as he places them.
Brienne pours her cider into the mugs, and he catches her smiling, still. “I’ll get Septa Stoneheart,” she says softly, but she lingers just a little too long before she leaves. Enjoying the moment, perhaps.
Septa Stoneheart is distressed by the time Brienne persuades her downstairs – she has a blanket bundled up and cradled in her arms, rocking it, cooing to it in her thin, reedy voice. Stroking it with her long yellow nails.
She clutches it to her chest when she sees Jaime, letting out a low, troubled moan.
“Sit down, Septa,” Brienne urges. “There’s soup.”
“No!” Stoneheart cries, her voice rising and shrill. “No, it’s poisoned! You poisoned it … you want to kill my baby!”
“No, Septa,” Brienne insists. “It’s just soup. Of course we don’t want to kill anyone.”
“I should pull out your eyes!” she hisses at Jaime. “I should cut your throat!”
“Maybe I should eat this in my bedroom,” he suggests.
Brienne sighs. “If you’d like.”
It’s the same every night – Brienne has that defeated slump to her shoulders again, that line between her brows. She gets Stoneheart to sit in her chair, but now she’s dodging a flying spoon, trying to keep the soup from being knocked over.
Jaime can’t watch it again. He can’t. So, tonight, he puts his bowl back on the table. His spoon beside it. Sits back down in his chair.
“Is that your baby, Septa?” he asks, his voice firm enough to cut through Stoneheart’s terrible wailing.
Brienne stares at him. Septa Stoneheart hisses.
“He’s a bonny thing, isn’t he?” Jaime smiles. He’s always been told he has a disarming smile. “What’s his name?”
“What do you care?” Stoneheart spits. “Poisoner!” But she lets go of Brienne’s sleeve to cradle her bundled blanket to her body.
“I don’t think I’ve seen such a beautiful babe before,” Jaime enthuses. “He has your eyes, I think?”
Stoneheart looks from Jaime to her blanket, confused at first, but then, “Yes … yes … that’s my Brandon! My Brandon … everyone says he has my eyes!”
She rocks the bundle with alarming ferocity.
“He looks hungry, Septa,” Brienne says softly, stroking Stoneheart’s hair.
“He does!” Jaime agrees. “Do you think he might like some soup?”
“Yes … yes … soup … my poor boy ….”
Brienne brings Septa Stoneheart’s bowl back towards her as Jaime fetches her another spoon. She takes it from him without snatching. Still fussing over ‘Brandon’.
Brienne steps slowly back. Sits in front of her own steaming bowl. Tears the crust off her bread and takes a bite. She turns to Jaime with her eyebrow raised. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Rhaegar used to do it with his dad sometimes,” he tells her. “Distract him. Change the subject. I thought it might make her look at me differently – like less of an interloper?”
He thinks again about Aerys, how frail he had looked, bloody and dead in the rain. He thinks about the ocean, out there smashing against those rocks.
Stoneheart will get used to him, he thinks. Interloper or not.
“It’s a lot for you to do alone, Brienne,” he says. “All of this.”
. . .
Jaime washes the dishes. He scrubs out the pot. Mops the floor where Septa Stoneheart was sitting, wraps the uneaten food to store in the pantry. He brews a pot of Brienne’s nettle tea.
He takes a cup to her room. Knocks on the door with soft knuckles.
Brienne opens her door, moving it slowly so that the old wood does not creak and disturb Septa Stoneheart.
“Tea?” Jaime whispers.
Instead of taking it, Brienne steps aside in her thick woollen socks to let him in. Inside, her room is as sparse as he imagined it would be – a bed with blankets. A single candle. Clothes drying on a chair before the fire.
“Thank you,” she says. She takes the mug, her fingers brushing his. Her fingers are red from washing clothes, calloused from digging.
He looks up over the faded linen of her habit, over the bobbled wool of her cardigan. Up to the fullness of her lips, up at the clear blue sky of her eyes.
For a moment, he imagines kissing her, what that might be like. What it might be like to feel those fingers touch him. The thought doesn’t feel entirely wrong, which concerns him.
“Well, goodnight,” he says. He turns to go.
“Jaime,” she says. Her voice sounds raw somehow. Urgent.
He turns back.
“I …” Her eyes are huge. Her hands tremble.
“What is it?” he asks, trying to sound gentle.
“I … you know I haven’t been a Septa for a long time,” she says. “Not really. Not in that way.”
“You said you didn’t pray.”
“After ten years, things change.”
He doesn’t know what to say. “I understand,” he says eventually.
“And my vows … they’re … they’re part of me. And they always will be. But they’re not part of my life now.”
“Oh,” he says. Then, “What does that mean?”
She chews her lip, worrying it between her teeth until it flushes pink. “It means if you want to, you can stay.”
“Stay? You mean …?”
“Stay with me,” she says, lifting her chin in that almost-defiant way she does. “Here. Tonight.”
“Brienne, I –”
“You don’t want to?”
“That seems like a big thing.”
“You wouldn’t be my first.”
“No?” He is surprised by his own jealousy.
“I wasn’t always a Septa.”
“No, but …”
The silence grows between them, grows so much it is almost a physical presence, a creature crawling on his skin.
“Don’t you want to?” Brienne asks.
“I … I didn’t say that.”
“It doesn’t have to be tonight. If you want to think about it?”
“No, I … tonight is fine. I mean – tonight works. If it works for you?”
Brienne parts her lips, and for a moment, Jaime thinks she will kiss him, but she doesn’t. Instead, she steps back, drops her cardigan off her shoulders. Lifts her habit up over her head, slowly and deliberately. She folds it, drops it on the chair.
He’s frightened to look – frightened to see her, to see the woman and not the Septa. A woman, a natural woman without artifice. Unshaven legs, unshaven armpits, thick pubic hair escaping from her underpants. Small breasts. The cold has stiffened her nipples a little, and Jaime wants her. Gods forgive him; he wants her so much.
She’s staring at him – he needs to reciprocate. He fumbles with the buttons on his shirt, then the buttons on his trousers. He’s ridiculous – standing here undressing in front of her. Small and desperate.
He feels the way he felt in her care. Weak. Bandaged. The way he had felt as he had lifted his head from his pillows to accept mouthfuls of broth from the spoon in her hand. Wrecked. Needy. At her mercy.
He kicks away his trousers and closes the distance between them. Wraps an arm about Brienne’s waist. She starts a little at his touch and he pulls back, thinking perhaps she wants to stop. But he looks up at her, into her eyes, and she’s right there, her blue eyes huge and her lips slightly parted. So close, he can feel her heart pound.
Then, somehow, they are kissing, and gods, it’s wonderful – sweet and sweaty and clumsy, neither of them knowing the other’s rhythm. Going too fast and then too hard. Hands everywhere. Staggering towards the bed.
“Are you sure?” he asks. “You truly want this?”
“Yes,” she huffs impatiently.
And why not – she is a grown woman after all.
Jaime pulls her close, gets his mouth to a flushed pink nipple. It’s warm, ripe. The texture of raspberries in the last of her summer orchard. He moans as he tongues it, greedy and aching.
Brienne’s bed accepts their combined weight with a hearty creak. The mattress is old and full of squeaky springs, the pillows flat and gutless. Brienne draws the blanket over them both. Jaime buries himself between her breasts.
She’s arching and sighing, eyes wide and mouth open as if she’s quite forgotten how transcendent sex is. As if she’s rediscovered the gods in Jaime’s touch, in his kiss, in his embrace. Has she even masturbated, all these years?
He tugs her underpants off, fingertips brushing through the thick tangle of hair to stroke into the wet silk of her sex. She’s so wet already. So warm and soft and wet.
He strokes her purposefully – circles, rubbing, tickling, applying pressure, testing until he gets the rhythm that makes her breath catch on every stroke, that makes her hands tighten on his skin. She flings her head back on the pillows, murmuring to the gods to save her. Who said she doesn’t pray anymore? She begs him not to stop. He doesn’t stop.
He keeps going until she comes, her mouth falling open in silent joy. She shudders and shudders against him. Looks at him as though she thinks he’s half a god himself.
She pulls him on top of her. Guiding him. Encouraging him. Wraps her legs over his thighs, and Jaime can’t help himself, poor pathetic sinner that he is. He sinks into her heat. He lets out a soft groan into her shoulder.
He won’t last long; he’s shamefully close already, the pleasure fierce and bright in his loins, his thrusts already erratic, his balls already tight. It doesn’t matter, he thinks. It’s better if they are quick.
And he surges forward and presses, tight, into her. Tight, again. Again. And then it’s on him, rising, rising like a wave in the bay, clenching his teeth and curling his toes. Blanking out his mind in a tumbling, turning, rolling swell and then oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, it’s all cascading, all white water in a rush, and he is lost in it, lost in her, beaching on her shoreline, weak and fragile in her arms.
. . .
He wakes the next morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that, with Brienne. They make breakfast, they feed the sheep, they tend the garden. They care for Septa Stoneheart.
In time, Jaime’s hands get red; they get calloused. In time, he learns to knit and how to lamb the sheep, how to milk them, how to make the cheese and the bread and cut the nettles for the tea. How to cut wood, and how to build a fire. How to soothe poor Septa Stoneheart in the middle of the night.
In time, it is as if he has always been here. In time, he forgets who he was before.