Chapter Text
Jaime glanced over at the Payne boy who fancied himself Brienne’s squire and Hyle Hunt, who’d attached himself to her for reasons Jaime currently found unclear. They were both already deep asleep on their bedrolls, but the wench was still sitting by the fire with an untouched bowl of broth in her hand. As he recalled, she had never been much for chatter, but she’d scarcely spoken since her sword had cleaved Stoneheart’s head from her body. When they had finally broken for camp after a day of hard riding, she had told them tersely that she would take the first watch: they might well have been the only words she’d said all day. Her gaze had constantly seemed elsewhere, her eyes seeing something other than the road stretched out before them and the trees around them.
He knelt in front of her and pushed her bowl toward her. “Eat, wench.”
“My name—“
“Brienne, I know. As though you’d ever let me forget.” He smirked, aiming to goad her, but she seemed far away.
“I swore an oath to her,” she murmured, looking away from him. “I swore an oath.”
She blinked, and tears spilt down her cheeks, falling darkly on her bandage as silent sobs shook her broad shoulders. The extra decade that he’d observed etched onto her face when he first saw her riding into his camp fell away, and suddenly she seemed every bit as young as her years. How old is she anyway? Twenty, perhaps? Yet by her age, I’d already killed a king.
He wanted to shake her and curse her for her damned sense of honor, but instead, he found himself taking the bowl from her large, trembling hands and setting it aside. He smoothed a matted tangle of thin blonde hair away from her forehead before cradling the back of her neck and pulling her toward him until her head rested on his chest.
She wept against him, but not for long before pulling away and shutting her eyes tightly against her tears. Her pale lashes glowed damply in the moonlight as they fanned across her skin. He wiped at one unmarred freckled cheek then gripped her wide jaw firmly in his rough fingers.
“Now listen to me. Listen.” He did shake her a little then, ignoring the grimace of pain that washed across her face. Her eyes flashed open and met his. “That thing you killed today wasn’t your dear Lady Catelyn. That was … a horror. You did the right thing. The honorable thing. The only thing.”
Her eyes were blue and watery, as beautiful as her descriptions of her Sapphire Isle, and they seemed suddenly, impossibly close. He went on. “Why weep like some foolish maid? Because there are those who still remember Renly and name you Kingslayer? Because you worry that they’ll name you Oathbreaker now as well? Let them. I promise you, there are worse things than such names, and death is one of them. Whatever they say, you’ll know the truth.”
He paused. He knew how unspoken truth hung like armor, protecting you even as it left you bruised and stiff under its weight. “I’ll know the truth,” he added. Just as you know mine. “Let them call you what they will, but live. Live and keep your precious oath and go on looking for the Stark girls, you stupid, stubborn, brave—“ And then his mouth was on hers.
For a heartbeat she went so still she could have been carved from Tarth’s marble, then she shoved him forcefully off of her. He sprawled on the ground as she stood over him, her great height on full display. Her eyes were steel and fire. Blue flames. “Do not mock me, Ser. Do not.” Her sword hand twitched below the splint on her arm.
He laughed as he scrambled to his feet after her. “I’m not mocking you, wench. I’m kissing you. Has no one ever taught you the difference?” And why am I kissing you anyway, with your ruined face and rough lips and meager teats? But he remembered the way the clash of her sword against his had made his blood sing once and the way her bare, wet arms had held him gently when his whole world had been whittled down to his pain and her warmth.
“Come here,” he said softly. He slipped his right arm around her thick, firm waist and slid his hand to her face before claiming her mouth again. She was stiff at first, slowly relaxing into his embrace, hesitantly returning his kiss. When he touched her lips with his tongue, they parted easily even as her breath quickened. He could sense her hands floundering uncertainly in the air for a moment, and then she was clutching the front of his jerkin. He drove her slowly backward until they collided against the trunk of an oak. She let out a low grunt of pain. Her ribs. He eased off her, and she pressed the advantage, leading with a shoulder and rolling them so he was the one with his back against the rough bark. It was his turn to grunt then, although not with pain. Involuntarily, his hips tilted forward, searching out hers.
But she was gone. The night air against him was made suddenly colder in her absence. She stood only a step from him, their heavy breaths mingling between them in a single cloud. He pushed himself off the tree and moved toward her carefully, the way he might have approached a skittish foal. Reaching up, he pulled her head down so that he might kiss her forehead. “Eat, Brienne,” he whispered against her skin. She let out an unsteady breath that ran like warm fingers down his neck and nodded wordlessly.
The broth was long since cold, and she ate it with a kind of methodical emptiness that reminded him of his own hazy days after she had finally bullied him into living, but she ate. When she was done he took the bowl from her and wiped it clean. “Now sleep,” he told her. “I’ll take the first watch.”
“I already said—“ she began.
“Lie down.” He interrupted, more forcefully this time.
She curled on her bedroll under a fur, and he settled down near her with his long legs stretched out and his back against a rock. She was turned away from him, but from his angle above her, he could see her open eyes glittering in the dark. When the fire began to fade, he leaned up to toss another log onto it. It was too cold now to let it die completely. And it will be colder soon. How long before we can no longer camp along the road without fear of frostbite or worse? She stirred at his movement, and he could tell she was still awake.
He shifted over and lay beside her, propping himself up on his right elbow with his head close to hers. “Tell me,” he said quietly near her ear, “why did those men call you ‘Kingslayer’s Whore’? I would argue that you should be flattered, of course, but I like to think I would remember claiming your maidenhead.”
She stiffened beside him. Did she truly think I wouldn’t hear their crude words? Or did she only hope I wouldn’t dare to ask her about them? Even in the dim glow of the fire, he could see the blush that descended her face and disappeared down her collar. And how much further down does it extend, exactly? He imagined the tops of her scant breasts flushed pink.
“I dreamed of you,” she said finally.
For a moment, he thought she might be using his own words to mock him, but her voice was soft and her face serious and drawn. She was being honest, just as he’d been when he’d told her the same. Although I never told her all of it: not of my terror or Cersei abandoning me to the darkness, not of the subtle curves of her naked body illuminated in the flaming blue light of our swords or the way I trembled at her touch, not of the ghosts that surrounded us or the salvation she alone seemed to offer. If I told her I had thought her almost a beauty and almost a knight, even then, would she think I japed?
“I was fevered,” she explained, her fingers hovering at the bandage on her face. “I dreamed of the sword you gave me … and … of you. I called out for it ... and ... for you.”
“Do you dream of me often?” he asked. He had meant to tease her, but there was an unexpected hitch somewhere in his chest, and it came out a sincere question. In the firelight he caught her touching a finger tenderly to her mouth as if recalling the recent memory of his lips.
“Yes,” she whispered, curling up tighter.
Yes. The word settled low and hot in his belly and uncoiled there. Yes. As often as I dream of you, I wonder? Waking or sleeping, he found that she was often close in his thoughts. Closer than Cersei? No. But it wasn’t Cersei I thought of in the tub when Pia’s curves stirred my cock. All my life there's only been Cersei. Why does this absurd, mannish maid vex me now? Tyrion’s words came back to him: Lancel and Kettleblack and Moon Boy, for all he knew. But it had begun before then, hadn’t it? At least as far back as that cursed bath, where he’d taunted her for thinking he might be interested in her flat chest and bruised thighs even as his own body made a liar of him. The water running off her thick, pale curls and down the heavy muscles of her legs when she rose with indignation. The gash high on her thigh where I made a red flower blossom.
“You were the last person I fought with my right hand,” he said, realizing even as he spoke that his thoughts had drifted, carrying him into a different conversation. “You were the last person I touched with my right hand.”
She rolled over onto her back then, her broad face inscrutable, a familiar furrow between her brows.
Silently he shoved the edge of her fur back to uncover her legs. She inhaled sharply and tensed but didn’t move. Guessing at where his mark might be hidden beneath the roughspun cloth of her breeches, he reached out and stroked her thigh with a single finger. “Did I leave you a scar for you to remember my hand by?” he asked, a smile playing in one corner of his mouth.
She frowned a little. Then suddenly bold, she reached up to trace a line across his brow where she’d opened his face with her steel. “Did I give you this one?”
“Aye, it’s yours. Who else could have gotten past my parry?” He let the rest of his hand follow his finger, cupping her warm, strong thigh. She shivered under his touch.
“What do you like in a woman?” Hildy asked. “Innocence.” He’d meant it derisively, but gods help him, it had been the truth.
“If you call out for me tonight, I’ll be the one to hear you,” he whispered, but his voice had gone rough and even to his ears it sounded like something between a reassurance and a warning. Her eyes went wide then narrowed uncertainly. He carefully withdrew his hand from her leg lest she think him no better than the men she so often guarded herself against with cold armor and a sharp blade even while she slept.
He hauled himself ungracefully up into a seated position and drew her fur back down around her. “Sleep,” he muttered. She closed her eyes obediently, but she shifted slightly, and he felt the press of her leg against his own, strong and solid and decidedly not a dream.