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It’s bad enough that Jaime must suffer the indignity of capture. Bad enough that he’s dragged before unworthy, wine-soaked Robert Baratheon and his loyal wolves on their way to overthrow the Lannister throne. Bad enough that they chain him by his neck to a post in the middle of camp like an animal. All of that is bad enough, and then they send the Kingslayer to watch him.
Jaime of course knows who she is, though no one bothers to introduce her. Everyone knows the first lady knight. Lady Brienne of Tarth. Ser now, though he would never give her the honor of speaking the title she besmirched so soon after receiving it.
She was elevated by one of the knights in Renly Baratheon's guard, and she was chosen to protect the would-be king when he went to Kings Landing to try and take his brother’s throne. She stood with him in his battles. Guarded his back from every harm. She was with him when he agreed to a peaceful surrender.
And then she shattered that peace by slaying King Stannis after the peace accords had already been signed, leaving a vacuum of power in the capital and allowing Tywin Lannister to take his place on the throne.
An undeserved throne. An undeserving king. Tywin is Jaime’s father, and he’s aided in all things by Jaime’s beloved twin sister and his dear little brother. They are his family, but it wasn’t honorably done, and Jaime can’t support them. Not that the Starks understand that: they found him in the wood, and they captured him, and they questioned him thoroughly, convinced that he was leading some force, or doing some dishonor for the sake of his family.
It’s telling, Jaime thinks, that they find his honor so impossible to believe. The idea of a knight who keeps to his vows, of a man who follows not blood or brotherhood but honor and duty and the right thing to do is so foreign to them that it takes them days before they finally accept that he isn’t any part of some Lannister plot. Jaime is alone, and he will be no help to them.
Of course they can’t just release him. So they chain him up. Keep him on display. The Golden Lion of House Lannister, conquered and captured. Quite a morale boost for the northern soldiers, so far from home.
They grow sick of him quickly, learning to their annoyance that Jaime can talk forever if he isn’t stopped. Ned Stark finally orders him gagged; being called a dishonorable oathbreaker is a blow to the Warden of the North and his self-deluding insistence that he would only follow an honorable king. Jaime has seen the doubt on Ned’s face every time he readies to follow Robert into battle. The eldest Baratheon brother passed on the opportunity to take the throne when the Targaryens were killed with half of Kings Landing in the wildfire explosion. Too much rebuilding. Too much politics. Stannis was the man for the job, Robert said, but Stannis was ruled by a red priestess and rumors about the violent god he chose to follow. When Renly, the youngest brother, went against the crown, Robert was still busy fathering bastards in the Vale, and he would not be called to support either brother’s side. There was war, followed by a truce and a tenuous peace. Now, only now that his brothers are dead and the realm is once again stable, Robert Baratheon has decided to want what “should” be his.
To Jaime, languishing away in the center of the Stark camp, it seems increasingly that there are no honorable men left. Arthur Dayne was killed with the Targaryens. Barristan Selmy, too. If Jaime had followed his dreams to become a Kingsguard like them, he would have been with them. Maybe that was how it should have been. Now, it’s just him, a knight who remembers the vows he swore years ago. A knight who tries to uphold them despite everyone else constantly tearing them down. Sometimes he thinks Cersei was right when she called him a golden fool for believing that honor is something that should not be touched or tainted. Something that matters.
No one else seems to care. His father accepted Renly’s people into his ranks, and he even pardoned the Kingslayer, since she was the one he had to thank for his crown. Stannis’s men, though, he executed.
He ordered the king’s daughter killed. He ordered his wife killed.
Jaime broke with his father for a hundred reasons, and he broke with his siblings for the same, but it was those two deaths that he could not stomach. He stayed for months afterwards, watching his father’s coronation. Listening to his sister and brother scheme for the good of the family. The two of them never stopped negotiating with Tywin, bringing up the people who had to die or be married off or be made hostage so that their families cooperated. He sat at dinner tables and at war tables and he listened and he tried. He opened his mouth to argue and was cut down every time. Their scorn. Their disbelief. Even Tyrion, who had always loved Jaime, would dismiss him.
“You just don’t have the stomach for the kinds of things we need to do,” he would say, patient and kind. “You’re too good a man, Jaime. That’s hardly your fault. I don’t know where you could have gotten it from.”
Jaime would try to say that it wasn’t something inherited. Wasn’t something he got. It was a choice he made every day to care about the things he swore and the people he promised to protect. The innocent. Not men like Tywin Lannister in their castles, with their warped sense of loyalty and their dedication only to seeing the success of their families.
It didn’t matter what he said. They didn’t listen. They didn’t understand. How could they? The world had showed them, as it had begun to show Jaime, that it wasn’t interested in fairness. He was just the fool who was the last to see it.
The Kingslayer takes the gag out of his mouth one evening.
Most of his guards just ignore him, but from the moment the Kingslayer showed up in camp and was assigned to be his minder, she has watched him. This amused, curious look as he attempted to talk around the gag, his eyes locked on hers, unmistakably trying to speak to her. She must be bored, set guarding a man who can’t possibly hope to escape. Jaime has heard rumors about her strength and her ability with a blade, and this seems below her. Likely, she thinks so too.
“Kingslayer,” he spits when she takes out the gag, and the woman sighs. She crouches beside him in the dirt, examining him with fascination. She’s meant to be hideously ugly, according to all the stories, but Jaime thinks that her features together amount to merely plainness. Her eyes are beautiful, a clear ocean blue, and there are parts of her that could be endearing on a more honorable woman. Brienne the Beauty, he has heard her called. Sarcastic and scathing. Even men with shit for honor feel comfortable showing her scorn.
Loras Tyrell had a sword made for her, the rumors say, after her Kingslaying was done. Flowers on the hilt, with thorns that prick anyone else who tries to wield it. A pretty gift for a murderer, but everyone has heard the rumors about Loras Tyrell and Renly Baratheon. Kingslayer or not, she protected Renly to the end.
“Is that all you wanted to say?” she asks. Her voice is low and amused. She’s a decade or more younger than him, but there’s a weariness to her that makes her old. A darkness under her eyes. And an indulgence, too, in the way she speaks to him, as if he’s a child beside her. “You’ve been talking an awful lot just to get my attention for that.”
She starts to raise the gag back up into his mouth, but Jaime pulls on his chains and says, “wait”. The word is weak, unmanly. His father’s shame can be felt from here. Jaime has never been the prince his father wanted, and he knows it more acutely than ever, now. Several days without conversation, and he resorts to begging. “Please. My siblings. Have you heard anything?”
The Kingslayer offers a half smile.
“Nothing new. They aren’t anywhere near the front lines, if that’s what you’re worried about. You’re still the only lion in our possession. Are the rumors true, then? About you and your sister?”
“No,” Jaime answers firmly. “Vile lies spread to weaken my father. I would never dishonor my sister. I love her.”
Brienne rolls her eyes, but she releases the gag and doesn’t put it back in his mouth. She sits back on her heels. Even shrinking herself to be closer to his level, she’s enormous. Maybe that’s why she’s his guardian. He’s the Lion of Lannister, the fiercest, fastest fighter in the seven kingdoms, but she could squash him utterly if he tried anything.
“Dishonor her,” she muses. “From the stories, there’s no honor in your sister that your cock would remove.”
Jaime grits his teeth and feels the tension building in his sword arm, wanting to fight. Brienne notices, and she laughs.
“I don’t know what you’re so angry for. You told Robert that you broke with your family. If that’s true, surely you can’t mind me calling them what they are. They have broken every oath. They have dishonored every…”
“You speak about oathbreaking?” Jaime asks. “Kingslayer? Oathbreaker? Woman without honor?”
Brienne sighs again. He tries to avoid it, but she pulls the gag back into his mouth. She pats his head after, adding to the humiliation.
“You’re all the same,” she says, tossed over her shoulder before she goes back to standing just outside the torchlight, where he can’t see her. Leaving him alone. “Bloody knights. You’ve never met a choice like the one I made, Lannister. I pray you don’t, for the sake of all of us.”
The Starks make a deal with King Tywin: their daughters and a host of other political prisoners for the price of one prince who ran away and was fool enough to fall into enemy hands. The Kingslayer is the one who is meant to take him. Jaime goads her as they walk, mocking her and reminding her just how little he respects her and reciting the knightly oaths that she has apparently forgotten. Nothing bothers her. She plods on and on, pulling him bodily after her, like a pet on a leash. He tries to fight it until she threatens to carry him over her shoulder, and then he resorts to barbs about her stained honor and what her father must think of having a daughter who chose to be a knight and then choose to be such a poor one.
Sometimes she looks at him with amusement, and it gives him pause. She must be more of a monster than he had realized, to be so at peace with what she has done.
They are captured on the second week of walking.
Brienne kills five men on her own before she is taken down with a brutal slice on the back of her leg, and Jaime is chained hand and foot and can do nothing but squirm annoyingly until someone cuffs him on the head with a gauntlet and knocks him out.
The next thing he’s aware of is someone saying, “he’s the prince.”
Voice low, calm. Gentle. Brienne. She’s right beside him. He can feel her hand on him as he lies on his side. Her fingers curled around his hip. Taking possession of her prisoner.
“A prince, eh?” asks a second voice. A man, crude and doubtful. “Awful dirty for a prince.”
“Look,” Brienne says, and she grasps Jaime’s bound hands, holding them up so the man can see. “The ring. See? He’s King Tywin’s son and heir. If you kill him, the might of the crown will fall on you. And he’s meant for a trade for the Stark girls, so if you fail to make good on that trade, the Starks will fall on you, too. No matter who wins the war, you’re fucked.”
“That’s true anyway,” points out the second voice, and Brienne makes a low noise of agreement.
“True,” she says. “But the Lannisters are wealthy. They can make it worth your while. Trade us for a ransom. They’ll pay for both of us, because I’m an envoy for the Starks, and they need me. But killing him would be a mistake.”
She’s defending him, Jaime realizes. They were going to kill him, and she's stopping them. He blinks himself awake, and he sees that she’s knelt beside him, almost over him, preventing them from taking him. She looks back down at him, and he can see that her face is pale and her eyes are big with warning. He feels dread.
“All right,” says a man who moves into view, crouching down to look at Jaime. He smiles. “So we won’t kill him.”
Brienne is beaten unconscious when she tries to help him. He’ll remember that, later. Kingslayer. Oathbreaker. Woman without honor. When they grab him by the hands and drag him, she screams for him. When the man pulls out the knife, she breaks her bonds and she fights. It takes ten men to hold her back as she roars threats and promises and entreaties so raw that they’re more animal than human.
But even she can’t stop them from taking his hand.
After, they throw him into the dirt beside her, and he stares at her bruise-swollen face. Bloody and slack in sleep. The pain takes him out and in and out again, and each time he wakes he finds to his relief that she’s still beside him. She wakes and pulls him closer, sheltering him from the wind with her bulk as he shivers and suffers, and she whispers apologies and tucks his head against her shoulder so he can cry quietly into the fabric of her jerkin without being seen by the men who have them.
“Live,” she tells him, days later, when she realizes that he’s refusing to eat. “Live, and take revenge.”
Their captors send Jaime’s hand to Kings Landing as a message. Tywin’s response is a letter that neither Jaime nor Brienne ever see, but the men leave them with two horses and enough rations to make it back to Kings Landing, and then they ride off already panicking about where they can go that the King’s wrath won’t find them.
Jaime is too weak to ride on his own, so Brienne frees their other horse, and Jaime rides behind her, with his maimed arm tucked against his chest and his left arm around her waist.
She talks to him as his fever rages. She tells him stories about her youth. She tells him about how she fell in love with Renly. She seems to expect him to laugh at her, falling in love with the too-beautiful man who danced with her and was the first person who didn’t treat her like she was ugly.
He doesn’t laugh. It keeps him awake that night, imagining it.
She’s the Kingslayer, he reminds himself. Even Kingslayers can have sad stories. Even Kingslayers can be kind sometimes. It doesn’t make her any more honorable. It doesn’t undo what she did.
He grows weaker and more feverish, and one day he falls from the saddle and wakes as he’s being carried into the river, naked. He panics, flailing, but Brienne shushes him gently and tells him that he soiled himself and needs to be washed. He thinks he weeps, then, exhausted and sick and so humiliated that he would rather be dead. He tells her so, but she ignores him. She washes him. She undresses to her own smallclothes and washes herself while he lounges in the shallows, more awake now that the cold water has reached his head.
“Why did you do it?” he asks. Brienne turns to look at him, and he’s startled to realize that he can see the shape of her beneath the fabric of her shirt and smallclothes. Wet and clinging and formed with more muscle than he’s ever seen on a woman. Hideous, people call her. They’re all mad. How is he the only one who knows? They’ve never seen her like this, he’s sure.
“Why did I help you?” she asks.
“Why did you kill Stannis?” Jaime answers.
Brienne freezes, and she looks at him with something odd and almost scared in her expression.
“What?” she asks. Then, “you want to know why?”
“You must have had a good reason.”
It’s not something he’s spoken aloud yet, and he has struggled because there is a part of him that is sure that there can’t have been a good enough reason to break the peace accords the way she did. Plunge the realm back into chaos. But he has gotten to know Brienne through this, the worst part of his life, and she has been everything that an honorable knight should be. She protected him. She fought for him. They beat her, and she still refused to let him suffer without trying to help. She brought him here to clean him when she could have very well left him to die. A true oathbreaker would have.
“I did have good reason,” she says. She’s still standing there, dripping, and he finds himself alarmingly aroused by the sight of her body beneath her sheer clothing. He has leaned on her. Relied on her. She’s strong. That’s all it is. She turns away from him and continues to scrub at her skin with her fingernails, washing off the grime that has coated them both. “Not that anyone was ever interested in asking.”
“I’m asking,” he reminds her.
She sighs. She wades closer. She looks down at him. Jaime’s using his maimed arm to keep him by the shore, to keep the gentle current from washing him away, and she lowers herself to sit beside him. More than an arm’s length away. She doesn’t look at him.
“I loved Renly,” she says. A reminder that he doesn’t need. “And I trusted him, too. But I warned him. Stannis is treacherous, I said, but Renly laughed at me and called me a mother hen. Loras did, too. But Loras’s grandmother found some reason to call him back to Highgarden when it was known that the peace would be signed. She knew, too.”
“King Stannis was a man of honor,” Jaime says. “Everyone said.”
“No man of honor uses black magic to kill his brother,” Brienne spits. She’s looking at him, finally, and he can see from the despair on her face that she’s telling the truth.
“Brienne…”
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that no one ever asked, because no one would have believed me anyway. Your father would have named me mad and driven me out, if he hadn’t outright killed me. It was a shadow that killed Renly, and I could only stand and do nothing to protect him.”
Jaime remembers, unbidden, the way she’d fought against their captors. Desperate. Screaming for him. Too desperate for a man she only barely knew and certainly didn’t like. A man who had sneered at her and mocked her for her lack of honor at every turn. A man who shared his open disgust with her. Had she been seeing Renly again? Had she felt that same lack of power?
“Surely someone would have believed you,” he says. Brienne rolls her eyes, so it stops him from saying I would have believed you. Would he have?
“I killed the witch, first,” she says, very far away from him now. “I had smelled the burning flesh all through the city as Renly and I rode. The closer to the palace, the more pyres there were. Thieves. Murderers. Scum. No one wanted to see them burn, but if it kept the city in good health and kept the flames from themselves, they had no problems letting it continue. Flea Bottom was the worst. The Red Woman and her acolytes would burn anyone there, where the nobles didn’t have to see it or hear the horrible screams, but I can’t imagine anyone could escape the smell. It was on everything in the capital. Perhaps they just grew used to it. I think people can adapt to any horror, as long as it keeps them alive. Renly was wearing flowers in his doublet, a reminder of Loras. I told him we should flee. He said he could hardly smell the filth at all. He gave me one of the roses, and he told me to smell it. It did nothing. The Red Woman…” Brienne sighs and looks at him again, to see if he’s still listening. Jaime doesn’t think anything could pull his attention away. “She smiled as the shadow appeared. Stannis was on his throne. He looked away when Renly died, as if ashamed of himself, but the Red Woman smiled. I killed her first because I knew that the magic came from her, and because she wasn’t afraid, and because she deserved it. For Renly and for all those people in Flea Bottom whose crimes were not nearly worth the sentence. Stannis pulled his sword, but he was no match for me. A better politician than a fighter, people have always said. I made short work of him. His Kingsguard were slow, and Stannis was dead by the time they approached. I killed them easily. You’ve seen me fight.”
“Yes,” Jaime agrees quietly. He can imagine it. Brienne fighting desperately, holding them off. I loved Renly, she said, before. Jaime tries to imagine fighting off trained soldiers, Kingsguard, as the person he loved lay dying. He can’t imagine it. He’s never been in love before, but he has longed for it, and he can’t imagine losing it that way. Even if Renly never would have loved Brienne in return, she loved him. That kind of loss…
“When they all were dead, I didn’t know what to do. I held Renly. He was already dead. I knew I needed to get away. But then your father came in. He saw what I had done. He asked me if I intended to have his head as well, and I told him I didn’t. And then he took the throne.”
She looks at him curiously, and she can see that she’s wondering. How much of Stannis’s madness did Jaime know? How much did he support? And Tywin? The truth is that Jaime didn’t know any of it, learning how to run Casterly Rock, stuck there alone in that miserable castle until his father had already taken the city. He had known that Stannis’s god as an unfriendly one, but he had assumed that his father had a handle on it. Only giving the worst offenders to the flames. It didn’t feel like justice, but it was as close to it as they could come without opposing the king.
He should have known. He should have asked. He should have done something. That’s what a knight is meant to do, and Jaime has never wanted anything more than to be the kind of honorable knight that people will one day tell stories of.
No one will tell stories of the one-handed heir of a corrupt king. No one will tell of him abandoning his Lannister cloak and leaving in the middle of the night, riding out of Kings Landing and abandoning his family because he could no longer support them but also couldn’t bring himself to go against them. History will remember him as a coward or a deserter. His early chivalry and heroism forgotten. He will be remembered for this.
“Someone should have asked,” he says. “I should have.”
“You weren’t there.”
“I should have been. I should have joined the Kingsguard when I wanted to. I should have put a stop to it.”
“Would you have?” Brienne wonders. Jaime tries to imagine breaking that kind of oath. Even for the right reasons, could he have?
Yes, he knows. He doesn’t have to imagine for very long. Oaths are nothing if you keep them for the wrong reasons.
“Yes,” he says, and for the first time since he has known her, Brienne smiles.
She leaves him in Kings Landing. She sees him standing with his father and his sister on either side of him. He’s still dirty and sick from the road, nearly insensible, the fever and infection eating away at him, and he wants to beg her to stay. Please don’t leave me with them. She looks at his father’s hand on his shoulder. She looks at Cersei’s false smile. She meets his eyes, standing lower than him for once, several steps down from the throne. She bows.
“Goodbye, Ser Jaime,” she says. His fevered mind takes comfort in the fact that she clearly does not wish to leave him. He’ll remember this, later, too. He clears his throat.
“Goodbye, Ser Brienne,” he answers, and he sees the way her eyes glimmer with emotion before she turns and strides away, taking the Stark girls with her.
Jaime lives an entire lifetime before he sees Brienne again. The Baratheon and Stark forces attack the city when he is still recovering from the fever. Tyrion is able to slow them down by using wildfire to send Blackwater Bay up in flames, but Stark is too clever to rely on a naval assault, and he has enough people on his side who know Kings Landing by heart—Brienne might even be one of them. They sneak fighters into the city and attack in a thousand places at once, and they open the gates in the panic, and the armies stream through. Tywin holds them back from the Red Keep for days with his own forces, and with wildfire, and with threats and open murder of hostages. None of it stops the tide of Robert Baratheon and his wolves.
Jaime is abed when Robert Baratheon smashes Tywin’s skull against the steps of the Iron Throne with his warhammer. He’s still feverish and weak from the infection, and useless without his hand. Tyrion and Cersei come to him, and they lead him up, up a thousand steps into the chambers of the Hand of the King. Cersei disappears into a secret passage that Varys has apparently shown them, and then Jaime is made to follow. He is slow, weak, one-handed. He reaches the bottom and cannot find his sister. Tyrion follows and grabs Jaime by the hand, like he’s a child who doesn’t want to be left alone in the dark.
“She’s waiting for us,” he says. “Come on. This way.”
Cersei isn’t waiting for them at the boat, but Tyrion bundles Jaime in regardless.
“She must have gotten turned around. Varys will get her out,” he says.
Tyrion and Cersei hate one another, but Jaime never thought Tyrion would abandon their sister. He tries to argue, he tries to fight, but he won’t hurt Tyrion, and Tyrion uses that against him and bullies him into compliance.
He keeps promising that Varys will help her. Jaime doesn’t believe him.
They reach Pentos, somehow. Tyrion has gold. They keep running.
Rumors follow them of the reign of Robert Baratheon. There are rumors that he has married Cersei. There are rumors that he has killed her. There are rumors that Ned Stark has set aside his wife to marry the last Lannister. That one’s Jaime’s favorite. He can’t imagine anyone setting Catelyn Stark aside for anyone. She’d raise all seven hells if they tried.
Brienne, he hears, has been given a force to command in the Riverlands, quelling the fighting there. Doing away with the bandits that have plagued the region since the war began. He thinks of her sometimes, especially when his stump aches. He remembers the careful way she’d held him and the way she had been so surprised when he asked for the truth. He remembers her low, comforting voice those times they were riding and her stories were the only thing tethering him to this world. He had been so eager to get back to Kings Landing and away from her, but now that she’s gone he finds that he wishes he was back with her again. Kingslayer. Oathbreaker. Woman without honor. None of it true. All of it rumors that he should have known better than to listen to in the first place. How does she fare? Has she told anyone else the truth? Has anyone else even asked, or does Jaime remain the only one?
Does she ever think of him?
He dreams of her, sometimes. Dreams of her standing in the river, washing herself. He wakes hard and wanting. Not just the softness of her skin but that look in her eye when he’d called her Ser Brienne. Like he had given her something that no one ever had. He wants to give her more. She deserves so much better than what the world has given her, and he wishes he was strong enough to fix it all.
Tyrion makes money buying and selling things and doing incomprehensible amounts of talking over wine with wealthy men who allow him to bullshit them long enough for Tyrion to get whatever he wants. He hires a Braavosi fighting master to teach Jaime how to fight with his left hand. They wait for any sign that it might be safe to return to Westeros. Jaime trains. He fights. He tries. He remembers Brienne telling him not to give up. Live. Live and take revenge. Jaime doesn’t think revenge against Robert suits him, and he imagines that Brienne is taking their revenge on the bandits for him, out in the Riverlands where they were captured. But he can live, at least. Live and continue to be honorable. The carrier of her secret. The one knight in all the world who believes her.
When the Stark men find them, Tyrion chooses to run. Jaime helps him, though he keeps saying that he will not be going with him. Tyrion still has the temerity to look offended when that turns out to be true. Jaime sees him safely aboard the boat that Tyrion has chartered, and then he returns to the house where they had been living, facing the Stark men directly.
If they are at all surprised that he wishes to turn himself in, they don’t show it. He supposes his reputation for fool honor has probably preceded him. They don’t even bother to draw their weapons.
Moons pass, back in Westeros. Jaime is pardoned. Tyrion would have been, too, if he had been found. Robert Baratheon offers Jaime a place in his Kingsguard, but Jaime turns him down. The Kingsguard can only be as honorable as its king, and Jaime doesn’t think Robert Baratheon is a very honorable sort. Surrounded by more honorable people like Jon Arryn and the Starks, true, but Jaime well remembers the way he was chained to a post by his neck because Robert Baratheon thought it would be funny.
“Where is my sister?” he asks, and the silence that follows does away with any notions these men might have that Jaime Lannister’s code of honor will allow him to forgive then.
Stabbed. Her throat cut. Thrown naked into the water, afterwards, her fine dress stripped from her body by some leering soldier. Cersei Lannister was a cruel and ambitious woman in her way, but she deserved better than that. Jaime finds that he has tears for his family, still. He hunches on his bed in his room and lets them out. It’s funny, in a way, that sobbing is his reaction. Cersei and Tywin and even Tyrion would have mocked him endlessly for it.
What is the point? What is the point in insisting on honor when the world around him continues to show him that it’s a farce? He should have stood with his father and sister when he had the chance. Who gives a damn if the throne was seized dishonorably? There is nothing honorable in ruling over men. There is nothing honorable in raising one man above another. If there is to be any king, who cares who it was and how they got it? They were his family, and it would have been so much easier to love them fully than to hold them at a distance because of some code that no one but him apparently ever cared about.
He should have stood with them. Maybe they would have had a chance. Instead, his father’s head was crushed beneath Robert’s warhammer, and Cersei was lost and panicked and afraid, and she was murdered. Her body must have fed the fish all the way out into the Narrow Sea.
More moons pass this way. Jaime is not technically a hostage, but he is a hostage, until he decides to aid the king. Jon Arryn asks him if he will travel to the Vale with a contingent of soldiers to take on some of the mountain clans who have been raising trouble in Arryn’s absence. Jaime agrees, because Jon Arryn is a good enough man, and there is a straightforward honor to that service.
He is a one-handed knight, the only remaining member of a disgraced royal family. His appointment is more symbolic than practical. The men don’t know him, though they have heard tales of him, and they treat him respectfully enough. They all seem to know that he’s here to appease Lannister loyalists. Keep them in line by making them think that he has made faith with the new king. That he has somehow forgiven him for the crimes against his family. Against his sister.
Jaime hardly remembers anything about that trip, later. He swallows the misery of it. He misses Tyrion. He misses the broad back and low, gentle voice of the Kingslayer. He misses even his sister’s scheming, the way her eyes would glitter and her voice would sing out when she had had some clever idea. He misses all of it, and so he goes away inside, finds some place deep inside himself where he can have all of it at once, and he no longer has to suffer the lack.
The mountain clans are not as difficult as he had feared, but Jaime and his men take some losses, and they suffer some wounded. It is no surprise that the bandits are able to sneak up on them, after. It's a short fight.
Jaime’s men are captured alongside him. Those too wounded to walk on their own are killed. Jaime fights as best as he can, and he manages to kill several mostly just through the surprise of the fact that he can fight better with his one hand than they assumed, but they still overpower him, and he is still forced to surrender to protect the men he has left.
“We’re under orders to take you to meet The Lady,” one of them says, and Jaime feels a squirming fear. A sense of wrongness. Because even the bandit looks afraid.
When Brienne sees Jaime Lannister again for the first time since she left him Kings Landing, her heart leaps. She cannot help it. Foolishly, she cannot stop it. He's every bit a knight from a tale, and even years after having that idealism bled out of her, she can’t help but admire him. He reminds her of the things she wanted for herself when she was young. Chivalry and romance and the kind of respect that his name carries even now.
She wouldn’t go back and make another choice. She’s glad to be the Kingslayer in the eyes of the world if it means that Stannis and his red woman were stopped. But still, she feels a longing for the name Brienne of Tarth to mean honor the way that Jaime Lannister's always has.
He looks nothing like the golden man she guarded for a time in the Baratheon and Stark camp. He looks nothing like the golden man he likely was when he won all those tourneys and fought in all those battles, making a name for himself by protecting the innocent, the way a knight is supposed to do. He looks older than when she saw him last. He looks weary, with dark circles under his eyes and beautiful streaks of silver threaded through his curls. He wears a metal hand, dulled iron, and it looks dinged-up and battered like the rest of him.
She wants to tell him that she had nothing to do with the death of his sister and father. She wants to tell him that she looked for him, during the sack of the Red Keep. She would have protected him and his family from Robert, if only she had been quicker. But she only scrambles to her feet and says, “Ser Jaime.”
“Ser Brienne,” he answers. His voice is hoarse. He is limping. Leaning heavily on one side.
“You’re wounded,” she says. “Please, sit down.”
He tries to argue, but she grabs him by the shoulder and leads him, and he allows himself to be led. He’s looking at her longingly, like he wishes to tell her something. It makes her worry, though she can’t say why.
“I was leading men out to the Vale,” he says. “On an assignment for Jon Arryn. The mountain clans were too much for us. We were captured by bandits. They sent me. They wish to meet with you.”
“Bandits,” Brienne says. Jaime isn’t looking at her. “Bandits wish to meet with me.”
“With the Kingslayer,” he says. “They have a proposition. I’ve been sent to fetch you. My men…”
Brienne nods. She understands what he won’t say. His men are being held hostage to make sure he completes this task. What the task entails, she isn’t sure. She can’t imagine why any bandits would want to chat after all the work she’s done in erasing them from the realm. But Ser Jaime would never willingly lead her into a trap. He has too much honor for that.
“We’ll leave at first light,” she says. “Rest for now.”
He nods. He leans closer to the fire. He still won’t meet her eyes.
He dreams, but they’re memories. Fragments of the horror that met him when he was brought to meet her. The Lady.
Tyrion, somehow here even though he’s supposed to be across the sea, dangling from the noose. The blue-white face of his sister beneath the hood.
Choose, she had said.
Choose. How could he choose anything else?
The bandits in her group were all terrified of her, and Jaime knew that little was left of his sister in the shade that she had become. The red priest had breathed life back into her, but she was changed. Different. Days rotting in the water, her throat cut. All that remained of her was a thirst for vengeance.
Baratheon men. Stark men. Arryn. Cersei and her bandits will kill them all.
Choose, she said, and even if it wasn’t for Tyrion, it may have been a difficult choice. Jaime had already failed her once, and he would have found it difficult to refuse even this monster. A chance at protecting her, even if it meant the death of his honor. But it was no choice at all as long as Tyrion hung from the noose.
Choose, and only after he had made his choice, Cersei told him what she wanted from him.
They make it two days, with only one more left to them before they reach the meeting place, before Jaime turns to her. He knows that she can tell that he’s been lying to her. Omitting the truth. She has watched him warily since they left her men behind. Always looking at him like she expected different from him. More from him. He can hardly stand it. He tries to remember how he spoke to her, back at the start, when he was taunting and cruel and she was mulish and refused to engage. He doesn’t have the heart to try and fool her with his distracting chatter now. She’s already looking at him now the way he imagines people have looked at her since she killed the king. Like she doesn’t believe his honor anymore. Like she doesn’t trust him anymore.
Still, she follows.
It isn’t right. It isn’t just. It’s for Tyrion, so what can he do?
Cersei, the shade that was Cersei, she’ll kill Brienne. He knows that.
She’ll probably kill Tyrion, too. Maybe even Jaime, in the end, when he has outlived his usefulness. He doesn’t think she will ever forgive him for leaving her.
He cried, when she revealed her face to him. He cried and begged her for forgiveness and promised her that he and Tyrion thought she would be safe, but it was a lie. Jaime knew. Tyrion probably knew, too. And they had left her anyway. She doesn’t have the capacity anymore to forgive a thing like that, if she ever did.
And even if she doesn’t. Even if she’s willing to free Tyrion. Even if she’s willing to free Jaime. Even if Brienne is the only price, is it something that Jaime is willing to pay?
No. It isn’t. For honor, yes. For his vows, yes. But mostly it is for Brienne. He still wishes that he had made a better choice. He still wishes that he had been able to do anything to help Cersei when he and Tyrion fled to Pentos. He cannot cure the world of its ills. He knows that now. He cannot fix it by being the only honorable man. But he can’t do anything but try.
“Brienne, wait,” he says. “I can’t do this.”
It’s Jaime, in the end, who takes his sister’s head. She has already killed all of his men. She has killed Tyrion. Left them hanging from branches along the ride. Tyrion was tied so high that Jaime couldn’t reach him, and Brienne promises that they will bury him on the way back.
She fights well, Brienne. She takes on the bandits who try to stop her, but most of them don’t bother. They flee, freed from their unholy service to the one they call The Lady. Cersei screeches at them and wails with that horrible broken voice, but they don’t heed her. They run, or they die.
Brienne offers to be the one to finish Cersei off, but Jaime refuses. It’s his duty.
“I’m sorry,” he tells her, before he does. It isn’t Cersei. He knows that. But still he weeps, after. For his family. For his choices. For the honor that seems less and less to be of concern to anyone but him.
“You told me, once,” he says quietly, half a day later, after they have buried Cersei and Tyrion and have left it all behind. All his tears are gone, and they stop by a river to wash up. Jaime is crouched in the mud, his hand and stump scrubbing at his blood-stained skin, and he remembers the last time he was near the water like this with her. “You told me that you hoped I never had to make the same choice you did, for all our sakes. You were nearly right.”
Brienne crouches down in front of him, just as she had that first day, when he was chained in the Stark camp and she was the only one who would listen.
“I was wrong,” she says. She puts her hand on his shoulder. Her fingers trail into the hair at the back of his neck. It’s the most intimate touch anyone has ever given him, and he finds himself leaning into it. Brienne pulls him closer, into an embrace. Her lips press against his forehead, and he finds he still has tears left as she holds him. “I was wrong, Jaime. You are a man of honor. You made me believe in my knighthood again. You made me want to follow my vows. I thought knights were all the same until I met you. Swearing oaths and following them even though it would mean standing by and letting the unthinkable happen. But you…”
“Brienne,” he says, unable to say anything else.
“It’s true,” she says. She kisses him again, on the cheek this time. Her hand is still warm on his neck. She is so gentle like this. “You made the right choice. You did the right thing.”
“So did you,” Jaime insists, and Brienne gifts him with a smile.
Kingslayer. Oathkeeper. A woman with honor. He shouldn’t be so startled to realize that he wants to stay by her side, but he is. He has never wanted anything so much.
“Can you stand, Jaime?” she asks him. Gentler than anyone has ever been. She deserves for someone to fight against her reputation. She deserves for everyone to know exactly what she is. He’ll tell all of them. He’ll stand in her corner every time it’s required. He will make the world believe that Brienne of Tarth has the honor that he knows she does.
“Not yet,” he says, still kneeling in the mud. “Stay with me another moment.”
It’s beginning to rain, and soon they will need to find shelter. His demons will follow him there, but so will she.
He’ll tell her, then. He has no intention of going back to Kings Landing. He’ll go with her, if she’ll have him. They’ll finish off the bandits in the Riverlands at last. Together. If she says yes, if she says he can go with her, he will write to Kings Landing. Jon Arryn and Ned Stark and all of them. He will let everyone know that the honorable knight Ser Brienne of Tarth saved his life.
But before that. As soon as they find a dry place in which to spend the night. He will kiss her, he thinks. She’s still crouching beside him by the edge of the water. Her thumb strokes idly against the skin at the back of his neck. She looks at him with the same kind of desperate longing for closeness that he feels. He knows she’ll kiss him back.