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Jaime didn’t really expect Stark to take him up on the flirting; he was only doing it because people did often want to fuck him, and at least half of those people hated him, so it seemed worth trying when there was nothing else to try. Robb was a seventeen year old boy; he ought to have been ready to fuck anything that held still long enough. Jaime would gladly have sucked his cock in exchange for having him in arm’s reach for five minutes, which would be more than enough time to strangle him. Well, he wouldn’t bother actually sucking Stark’s cock beforehand, but he’d gladly offer.
So he did offer and tease every single time Robb gave him the chance; the King in the North was busy, but generously made time to personally check on Jaime’s pen and speak to the guards at least once a week. Jaime entertained himself in between the visits by thinking up new approaches. After the total disaster of Oxcross, watching nearly ten thousand fresh Lannister prisoners being marched into their own pens, he’d been perhaps more inspired than most times. “All these victories… and yet you’re still no closer to actually winning anything, are you,” he said, the next time Robb came by, that afternoon. “No vengeance for your father, no peace terms, no acknowledgement of your shiny new crown. At this point, you’re just throwing around toys and breaking furniture, aren’t you? You must be feeling enormously frustrated. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to work some of it out? On me, for instance?”
He wasn’t hoping for anything more than perhaps a tightening of Stark’s jaw, but instead the boy stood looking down at him a moment, and then he said, “It must be hard for you, Ser Jaime. Penned up in here, useless, while we tear apart your armies. Perhaps I should take pity on you.” He turned to the guards and said, “Have him bathed and brought to my tent,” and walked away while Jaime stared after him, almost disbelieving.
The bath alone would possibly have been worth sucking a cock for. The water turned solid black with his filth; the servants even gave him a bucket to sluice off with afterwards. Then they retied his hands securely and led him to Stark’s sleeping tent—not a very royal affair; nothing but a camp table covered in maps and a triple cot covered in furs, but Jaime wasn’t feeling especially critical—and put him on the cot and tied him down by wrists and ankles.
As soon as they left him alone, he started working to see how much give there was in the bindings and what his range of motion was. Not much, was the unfortunate answer. The ropes were thick and tight and secure, and he had to be careful how he twisted in them; he didn’t want to risk cutting off the circulation to his fingers. His arms weren’t going to be much use, but as soon as Stark untied even one of his ankles, Jaime would get a leg around his neck and break it that way, and then he thought he’d be able to stretch enough to get his fingers on the knot above him.
It didn’t really matter if it was going to work or not; he was almost desperate to try anyway. He’d been a prisoner for three months, and the endless tedium had been the worst of it. He’d gladly have risked dying for the chance. When Robb came in, his heart leapt. “Is this really the best the North can do?” Jaime asked, striving to keep his voice light. “A little drab and cold, your tent. Not that I’m complaining. It’s a distinct improvement over the pen.”
“I’m glad you’re comfortable,” Robb said.
Then he went to his table and started fussing with some papers. Jaime waited for a bit, trying to guess with almost unbearable anticipation when he would come over, and then the time started to stretch into minutes, and then Robb sat down. Jaime turned his head and stared at him. “Busy this evening?” he said, feeling a bit outraged. “Matters of state demanding your attention?”
“Not more than usual,” Robb said, starting a new letter. “Are you bored, Ser Jaime?”
“Curious, really,” Jaime said. “When are you planning on fucking me?”
Robb snorted. “You Lannisters like to think everyone else in the world is an idiot, even after you’ve been taught otherwise. If I really meant to turn raper, I’d have four men in here holding you down for me. But I don’t want to fuck you, Kingslayer. I’ve already done that, and it was good,” a low insinuating growl in his voice that made Jaime desperately long to get off the bed and rip his throat out, “but now I want to fuck your father. And he’s hiding from me.”
“I’m so very sorry to hear it,” Jaime said through his teeth. “So what is this, then? Did you just want a naked captive audience for your paperwork?”
Robb didn’t look up from his work, but he grinned, the smile curving across his cheek, so Jaime could see his amusement even from the cot. “Does that sound hard to believe?”
“It does, actually,” Jaime said.
“Good,” Robb said, and looked up at him, his eyes glittering. “Because what I want everyone to believe is that Ser Jaime Lannister comes to my tent at night for my pleasure, like a common whore.” Jaime stared at him breathless with rage, his heart pounding so furiously he thought his entire chest might erupt. “And that’s what my whole camp will know by morning. How long do you think before your spies tell your father? And then maybe he’ll bring his armies out to play with me again.”
“He’s going to have you murdered slowly,” Jaime said.
Robb only smiled at him, vicious and satisfied. “Well, even if he does, at least I’ll die knowing that for the rest of your days, everyone in the Seven Kingdoms will know that you lay down for me and took my cock. And no one will ever believe otherwise. Not even your own father.”
#
Jaime could almost admire the pure savagery of the plan. He certainly had the time to appreciate it; Robb left him in the bed and kept on with his work. After half an hour of absolutely nothing happening, Jaime even fell asleep: he’d spent the last three months sleeping while tied sitting up to a post. When he woke up, it was morning and Robb was in the bed with him, asleep under his cloak. Jaime tried desperately to strain close enough to at least bite him, but he couldn’t get that far. And when he got as close as he could, the direwolf lifted its head from Robb’s other side and growled a warning at him. Robb woke up and stretched, and then got out of bed and called in his squire—who was brick-red the entire time and kept darting his eyes over to Jaime, who was conscious of being completely naked in Robb’s bed—and told him to bring in breakfast.
Ten minutes later, Jaime stared at Robb almost disbelieving across the table. Four men had come in to untie him and dress him again, but they hadn’t taken him out to his pen; instead he’d been tied into a camp chair, with one hand unsecured—except by a chain to his other wrist—so he could eat the hot porridge being put in front of him. The smell made his stomach clench with longing. “Now we’re breakfasting together as well?”
Robb grinned nastily at him over his mug of hot mead. “After you let me fuck you so nicely last night? Of course I’ll have you treated more gently.”
It had never occurred to Jaime once, in the three solid months he’d spent in the pen, that Robb Stark could make his imprisonment worse by giving him a bath, a warm bed, and some decent food to eat. “I can’t even imagine how my father’s going to kill you,” Jaime said, wonderingly. “Those Boltons of yours like flaying, don’t they? That’s an interesting option. And there’s always crucifixion.”
“So you’re hoping for your father to rescue you, then?” Robb said. “I’m sure he’ll come soon. Once he stops being afraid to meet me in the field.”
“My father’s not afraid of you,” Jaime said.
“I wonder if the other lords of Westeros will still believe that when he’s letting me fuck his son rather than come out to fight,” Robb said, and oh, that was squarely on target. Father would have to answer this, and fast.
That thought came, and right behind it, the dawning, glorious realization—Father would have to answer this. He wouldn’t be able to play the safe long game of running out the clock against Stark, with his leaner purse and his thinner supply lines, relying on Jaime’s value as a hostage to keep him safe until Stark could be tidily destroyed in one overwhelming blow. Father was going to have to get him out of here, even if it meant taking chances he wouldn’t want to take otherwise. And the worse the rumors were that got to him, the more urgent the situation would become.
Jaime looked down at his bowl of porridge, and then he said, “Well, I suppose I’d better make the best of your kind hospitality while it lasts, then. Do you have any cream?”
“This is an army of Northmen, not a nursery of children,” Robb said.
“Mm. Pity,” Jaime said, and picked up his spoon and dived in. The porridge tasted ambrosial. When the servants came in to clear, he licked the spoon clean, slowly and sensually, smiling at Robb across the table as he did it, before he tipped it into the bowl to be taken away. Robb was frowning at him a bit puzzled, but then he sat back, his eyes narrowing, and when the servants were gone out again, he said, “You want your father to come out, too.”
“I’m tired of being chained up in a pen, to be honest,” Jaime said. “And my father takes more of the long view of these things than I’d like. I’d rather just go at you and have it done one way or another.” Where by one way or another he meant, having Robb and his entire army slaughtered and torn into pieces.
Robb huffed a laugh. “Well, then,” he said, “it seems for now we might be allies.”
#
The alliance didn’t stretch to untying him or anything. The rest of the day Jaime lay in bed with his arms and legs securely tied and stared at the blank tent canvas overhead, numb with boredom, until Robb came back in and started scratching away with his pen again. Jaime had to fight down the strong impulse to start lecturing him that he needed at least one secretary and some staff officers instead of just a squire and field commanders; the only reason Stark had been getting away with it this far was clearly because his army was too small and his capacity for work was too large.
“Do you really think this is going to keep convincing anyone for long if you spend the entire time scribbling away over there?” Jaime threw out instead. “Surely the guards are close enough to overhear. We should at least talk about something. Wouldn’t you like to tell me all about your plan of conquest?”
“I don’t think I will,” Robb said, without even lifting his pen. “But it wouldn’t hurt if you moaned a bit, I suppose. Just imagine I’ve got your legs bent back and I’m sliding my cock into you.” Jaime glared at him. “What kind of noise would you make?”
“ ‘Ow,’ loudly and repeatedly, I presume,” Jaime said. “It doesn’t sound very pleasant, does it?”
Robb did pause long enough to look up and contemplate that. “I’ve never really thought about it. There are men who do it because they want to, though. It can’t be that bad.”
“There are men who have themselves flogged with whips because they want to,” Jaime said. “I do take the point, though. If Renly and Loras can stand it, I could. Although I imagine they probably use perfumed oils or something.”
“I’ll tell one of my squires to go hunt some down for me tomorrow,” Robb said, with a snort, and went back to his work.
Jaime sighed deeply, stared at the ceiling again, and then waited until Robb had reached for his cup and put it to his mouth and then groaned loudly, “Come on, Stark, put it in me. Oh, yes, seven gods, you’re so big.”
Robb choked on his wine so badly that he even sprayed some of it out through his nose all over his carefully-written letters and had to clap his hand over his face, his eyes streaming. He threw an outraged, accusatory look at Jaime, who smirked back at him and moaned even louder, “Yes, yes, that’s it, give it to me.”
Robb gawked at him a moment, and then his eyes went narrow and he said, just as loudly, “Oh, Maiden, you’re so tight,” and they both glared at each other, and then Robb’s face suddenly worked helplessly and he buried his head in his arms on the desk and started convulsing silently with stifled laughter, and Jaime had to drop his head back against the pillows and bite his own tongue to keep from laughing with him and giving away the game.
#
The report was much more graphic than Varys’s tact would ordinarily have made it, but clearly he’d decided that the information had to be passed on, and had also decided that having to be in the same room with Father while he learned the contents would have been the substantially greater of the many evils at hand.
The nearly purple rage that suffused Father's face as his eyes went over the page did actually support that decision; Tyrion would have quite liked to be elsewhere himself. The only problem was, he was fairly certain he needed to be here, to stop Father from taking the contents the wrong way—which admittedly was clearly what Jaime wanted him to do, but Jaime was an idiot and had also possibly lost bits of his mind from being locked up for months.
“He dares,” Father said, almost panting. “He dares.”
Tyrion swallowed hard and said, “No, he doesn’t.” Father’s head came up from the report twisted in rage; if he could have burned holes with his eyes, Tyrion was well aware he’d have been a smoking husk. He forced himself to continue. “That’s why Varys included the details. Can you imagine Jaime saying any of those ridiculous things while Robb Stark raped him?”
Father paused, still breathing hard, and said through his teeth, “What are you saying?”
“This isn’t a report about Jaime being raped,” Tyrion said. “This is a message. It says, Dear Father, I’m tired of being locked up in a pen. Have found a new way to entertain myself. If you don’t like it, come get me. Love, Jaime.”
Father stared at him. “Are you proposing—”
“We haven’t heard even a single whisper before now to suggest that Robb Stark likes raping his prisoners. As far as our reports go, he’s waiting without much enthusiasm for his wedding night to Walder Frey’s daughter. On the other hand, we know for certain that Robb Stark very much likes fighting Lannister armies in the field. He wants you to come out and meet him. And Jaime would like you to do that too. So Robb came up with the clever idea of having Jaime brought to his tent to send some scurrilous gossip to burn your ears uncomfortably, and Jaime decided to throw a lamp’s worth of oil on top of the flames.” Tyrion shrugged. “The only people who could possibly imagine anyone talking like that during sex are two virgins who’ve never had any.” Admittedly, Jaime wasn’t one, but Tyrion was fairly certain that all of Jaime’s actual experiences involved Cersei dragging him into dark corners and ordering him to be very quiet while she rode his cock.
Father sat for several moments with the expression of a man being forced to slowly and meditatively chew through a rotten lemon. “He can’t have done this on purpose,” he said.
“To get a sword back into his hand?” Tyrion said pointedly. “I’m sure it’s never seriously crossed his mind that you might lose. He thinks the reason you’re not fighting Robb is because it’s the sensible thing to do to let him get worn down. Since when does Jaime care about being sensible?”
Father literally crumpled the report in his hands convulsively and threw it across the room, as if he couldn’t help himself. Tyrion drew a deep breath through his nose. “That said, I’m not sure it matters. We do have to go and get him now, don’t we? Even if we know it’s fake, no one else does.”
But Father didn’t say anything for several moments, glaring ferociously at the crumpled report on the floor, and then he bit out, “We can’t.”
Tyrion paused and said, warily, “Is there someone else coming I don’t know about?” Father just jerked his hand in a furious sharp motion, denying. “Then—we’ve got thirty thousand Lannister troops and forty thousand Tyrell, camped right outside the Keep—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Father said. “He’s running rings around us. If we go at him, he might not destroy our army, but he’ll win every battle he lets us have. And we can’t afford for him to win any more battles!”
Tyrion stared at him in alarm. “We also can’t afford to look like we’re afraid of him winning any more battles.”
“No,” Father snarled. “We can’t.” And then he went back to staring rage at the crumpled report in the corner.
“Then it’s got to be an assassination,” Tyrion said. “Something extremely dramatic and unpleasant, and ideally expensive. The Faceless Men?”
After a moment, Father said, “Write to them,” tightly, and then he took another ledger out and opened it and pretended to be working on it. Tyrion took it for the dismissal it was and got off the chair. He snagged the crumpled report on his way out; no need to share that with the scullery maid. Oh, Robb, you’re so big, indeed. He was going to dump a bucket of slop over Jaime’s head when they did get him back.
#
It took three days for it to occur to them that they might as well actually be fucking. Robb was lying in the bed next to him at the time, and they’d just put on a loud performance of a fairly energetic round. Jaime said faintly, still panting with the effort of not laughing like a hyena, “I spent twenty years fucking Cersei and no one knew, now everyone knows we’re fucking, and we’re not. There’s something wrong with all of this.”
“I could really fuck you if you want,” Robb said, talking into his pillow through strangled laughter himself, and then both of them shut up abruptly and didn’t say another word.
Jaime tried desperately to go to sleep, but he’d spent most of the last three days alternating between sleeping luxuriously and being bored out of his mind, and he couldn’t, because his cock was stiff and he was tied up, and he could tell Robb was wide-awake in the bed next to him pretending to be asleep and actually thinking about using his own hand, which wasn’t tied up, and finally Jaime broke and said, “I don’t suppose it does make a difference,” because after all, maybe Robb would untie him, and then Robb groaned faintly and said, “I’m not going to untie you,” and Jaime nearly gnashed his teeth, before Robb added, “but I’ll suck you if you let me have you,” and Jaime loved having his cock sucked—Cersei only ever did it for him as a special treat, and only if there was plenty of time for him to return the favor for a much longer time afterwards—and as for the other thing, Loras could handle it, so.
Robb started with no more idea of how to suck cocks than he did of managing staff work, but he was a very clever and wonderfully determined boy with an absolutely glorious, wet, soft, lush mouth, and Jaime didn’t object to a single heartbeat of the time he spent experimenting with just sucking the head, or licking him, or moving to different positions, until Jaime unexpectedly came wildly in his mouth when Robb suddenly worked out how to get him almost halfway in.
“Oh, fuck,” Jaime sighed deeply, his whole body shuddering with small aftershocks. He hadn’t come in months. It was deliriously good.
Robb had gone to spit and rinse his mouth with wine, coughing, but when he came back, Jaime unhesitatingly cooperated with being turned over onto his belly, with his hips raised up on a pad of folded blankets; fair was fair, and anyway if he let Robb, he’d probably get his cock sucked again at some point in the near future.
The actual sounds Jaime made as Robb’s cock pushed into him—the perfumed oils were in fact very helpful—were mostly gasping explosive breaths, but after getting all the way in, Robb murmured in his ear a little wistfully, “Moan for me?” and Jaime groaned and said, “Come on, Stark, fuck me so hard I see stars,” and Robb did his very best, which was in fact good enough to accomplish that goal.
Afterwards, lying next to him, both of them gulping for air, Robb said in resigned tones, “My mother told me I should be ashamed of myself for the idea and the gods would punish me if I did it.”
“Why worry about the gods?” Jaime said peacefully, without opening his eyes. He felt aglow with pleasure and release. “My father’s already going to murder you. You might as well have a good time before you die horribly.”
“There is that,” Robb said.
#
Jaime was feeling much better by the end of the month. He was eating decently, bathing regularly, sleeping like a log, and getting fucked on a daily basis and sometimes more if Robb was feeling especially frisky, which he often did. Robb had even arranged for him to be given the length of a line inside the tent during the day, so Jaime could do exercises, and if he strained a bit even get a few glimpses of Robb’s maps.
The camp had been moved three times since Oxcross; Robb was prowling on through the Westerlands, taking one strategically important keep and garrison after another. Jaime would have resisted temptation much more—well, probably—if he hadn’t actually been convinced that Father should come out. The Lord of the Crag had surrendered without any fight at all last week, and that was only going to get worse, because Robb had gone personally to accept the surrender and had treated the man with scrupulous courtesy and danced with his three extremely tiresome daughters, which was more than Jaime had ever bothered to do in his life.
He knew all about it because he’d been lying in Robb’s bed listening with a sense of rising apprehension while in the neighboring tent Catelyn Stark had been telling Robb how to behave. Father wasn’t rude to his lords, but he didn’t cater to their pride in the slightest, and often made clear what he thought of their minor pretensions. Jaime had the bad feeling that more than a few of them would be happy to trade in their slightly-too-distant lion master for the wolf at their door that wagged its tail at them and showed appreciation for any treats they offered it.
But it had been more than a month; Father had surely heard the rumors by now. Of course, they weren’t rumors anymore, but Father wasn’t ever going to know that. Robb was utterly wrong about that part; Father would believe the explanation of Robb’s scheme in a heartbeat as soon as Jaime told him, without the shade of a doubt. Jaime was hoping Cersei could be convinced, too, for that matter, otherwise he’d have an unpleasantly cold welcome home. Tyrion was going to be more of a challenge, but he also wasn’t going to tattle.
Jaime was doing his best to think about it all that way, going home, getting back to the Red Keep, seeing his family again, instead of the other direction: what Father was going to do, and just how badly Robb Stark was going to die. Jaime wasn’t going to mind that, obviously; the only thing he’d wanted from the beginning was to get out of here so he could get back to the business of killing Starks himself, and that was still the only thing he really wanted; fucking Robb was just a way to pass the time.
Jaime was just assuring himself of that for the third time that day while waiting for Robb to come back, half hard with anticipation. It had been wonderful to begin with, but one day Robb had come sailing in from a minor skirmish with his blood up and asked to fuck him first, and it turned out that having your cock sucked after you’d been energetically fucked for half an hour—oh, to be seventeen again—was a truly magical experience. Jaime didn’t think he’d ever come that hard in his entire life, including when he had been seventeen. And then Robb had worked out how to get it all the way down his throat, and afterwards his voice sounded different, a little low and gravelly and roughed-up from sucking Jaime’s cock. Ever since then, Jaime had been rather urgently finding ways to get him talking when they were finished, just to listen to his voice.
It turned out once you got past the thick outer layer of knee-jerk responses, Robb wasn’t nearly as humorless and rigid as he seemed. A bit naïve about some things; it was always entertaining to watch him go distressed and grumpy whenever Jaime punctured one of his delightful illusions, such as for instance about the nobility of Arthur Dayne, who’d cheerfully stood outside Queen Rhaella’s bedchamber any number of times while she’d been violently raped by her husband.
He was still firmly refusing to accept that honor didn’t matter, but that was almost charming. “I can’t know every man’s truth,” he’d said determinedly. “That’s the work of the gods, not a man; not even a king. But I know mine. And it’s not wrong to admire an act of honor, whether or not the man who’s done it has also been dishonorable otherwise.”
“And what makes you think you know whether something’s an act of honor or not?” Jaime said, almost gleefully; there’d been a sharp, sparkling sensation in his chest, like cold, or knives. “Take me for instance. The Kingslayer. I can guess what you think of that.”
“Of waiting to kill the Mad King until your father’s army held King’s Landing?” Robb said, rather coldly. “Aye, you can.”
“That’s not why I waited,” Jaime said. “I waited because of my oath.”
“And yet you broke it at the end,” Robb said. “So it couldn’t have mattered to you very much, could it?”
“Oh, it mattered to me,” Jaime said. “It mattered enough to watch him torture your grandfather and your uncle to death. It mattered enough to stand outside Queen Rhaella’s door that night while he raped her. It mattered enough to stay by his side, protecting him, all through the war, and enough to warn him not to let my father and his army through the gates of King’s Landing. It just…didn’t matter quite enough to let him burn the entire city to the ground with everyone in it. At the end.”
Robb had sat up in the bed to stare down at him, his face stricken, and he hadn’t said you’re lying, and he hadn’t asked questions, and Jaime didn’t have enough fucking range of motion in the bonds to turn his body away, but he’d looked away, and Robb had the decency to lie back down without saying anything, but he’d also had the cruelty to put his arm around him, his hand resting over Jaime’s heart, which was pounding horribly; he’d almost been back there, in the throne room, watching the Starks burn to death screaming. He had been seventeen, then. And a bit naïve about things, himself.
But he wasn’t anymore, so he knew perfectly well that Robb was going to die screaming himself, very soon, but that wasn’t any reason not to enjoy fucking him as long as it lasted. He was planning to see if he could talk Robb into trying it the other way around tonight: he rather desperately wanted to watch Robb ride his cock, and he was prepared to suck cock both before and after for the privilege, which he hoped would be a compelling argument; he was ready to marshal it when the tent opened, but one of the guards came inside instead, with a knife, and started cutting him loose.
Jaime stared up at the man, wondering what the hell was going on, and the man glanced down at him and smiled faintly. “A man’s father has paid for his freedom,” he said, and glanced over his shoulder, then offered Jaime the knife to finish cutting himself loose. “A man’s father has paid for a king to die.”
He stood up then, taking out a slim noose of silk cord, a strangler’s tool, and moved silently to the tent flap: Robb was coming, and Jaime cut his ankles loose, and got up, and as Robb came into the tent, and the man shifted, Jaime put the knife convulsively into his back, straight into the heart. The man sank to his knees and fell over, looked up at him with a completely placid expression and said, “A man chooses another way,” and went still and died. Jaime stared down helplessly at the corpse, and then looked up at Robb, who was staring at him, and then Robb was lunging at him and kissing him, and Jaime’s hands were free; he could touch him, and they fell onto the bed and it turned out Robb also rather wanted to try it the other way round, so it was more than an hour before they finally exhausted themselves and only then noticed the assassin’s body had disappeared while they’d been occupied.
“He was dead!” Jaime snarled, in a panic, looking for the knife.
“You killed him,” Robb said, in an unbearable, terrifying way, and Jaime flinched and tried not to look at him, but Robb had sat up and caught his face in his hands and said it again, the bastard, “You killed him,” softly, and kissed him, and Jaime groaned in helpless misery and kissed him back.
He didn’t have the beginnings of any idea what to do; after they made love again, he just tried to bury his head in the pillow and go to sleep in hopes that he’d wake up and none of it would have happened, and he’d be back in his pen, hallucinating and delirious. But Robb was lying next to him wide awake, stroking his fingers through Jaime’s hair, looking thoughtfully into the distance, and Jaime said in faint hope, “I don’t suppose you have any idea what we’re going to do?”
“Your father’s not coming out,” Robb said. “He knows if he comes into the field against me, I’ll win.”
Jaime opened his mouth to tell Robb he was being absurd, his father had at least eighty thousand men to work with at this point, and then he realized blankly that if Father had been going to come out, he would have come out; he wouldn’t have sent an assassin first. An assassin looked weak. “How would you win?” he said, almost angrily.
“I can’t tell you how; I’d have to see where they went, which companies went where,” Robb said. “But there would be a way. Your father’s good, his officers are good, but they always make—the same kind of move. I don’t know how else to say it. It’s always a smart thing to do. But I know what they’re going to do before they do it, and we’re quicker than they are, so I can always do something about it.”
He sounded horribly cool and clear and certain, talking about—destroying his house, and if Father didn’t come out—if word got out now, about the assassin, and Father still didn’t come out—their bannermen were going to start deserting, in droves. “What are you going to do?” Jaime grated out.
“The only thing I can do,” Robb said. “Declare victory and go home. Otherwise, I’ve got to take the Iron Throne, and I don’t want it.”
Jaime stared at him. “You’re just going to leave?”
“Well,” Robb said. “I’m not just going to leave.”
#
What he meant was, he was going to go to Lannisport and steal their fleet. Robb did have Jaime tied back up for that; he had to watch, furious, gagged and under a guard of ten, while Robb and his men went rowing out quietly to nearly thirty Lannister ships floating serenely at anchor, swarmed up the sides, and threw all the unsuspecting sailors overboard. They’d left them the rowboats, so the sailors didn’t drown, but it still meant that by morning, Jaime was in the cabin of one of his own ships—lion banner unceremoniously hauled down; Robb apparently meant to send a bundle of them to be dumped in front of the Iron Throne—and sailing north.
“Just one last fuck you to House Lannister, was that it?” he said through his teeth, glaring at Robb.
“No,” Robb said. “Not that you didn’t deserve it, but I needed the ships. I’m going to go and sack Pyke. Do you want to fight with us?”
He waved to the desk; Jaime looked over and saw his own sword, lying out waiting for him. “Oh, you bastard,” he said, with passionate feeling. “And then what?”
“Then we take back Winterfell and Moat Cailin,” Robb said. “And settle in for the winter.”
“What do you mean, we? When are you planning to ransom me?” Jaime demanded.
Robb laughed, incredulous, as if that were some absurd question. “I’m not ransoming you. Your father won’t fight me, won’t accept peace terms, and sends assassins after me? I’m not giving you back to him.”
“What are you going to do with me, throw me in a cell in the crypts?” Jaime said, indignantly.
“I’m going to throw you in my bed, not a cell,” Robb said. “We’ll fuck, we’ll hunt, we’ll kill Wildling raiders; maybe even White Walkers, if they’re really out there. We’ll get the winter town open; fifty thousand people come to Winterfell for the winter. It’s not boring.” Jaime stared at him. “What were you going to do in King’s Landing all winter? Sneak around behind your father’s back to fuck your sister in dark corners, and stand around all day in a white cloak?”
“Fuck off, Stark,” Jaime said, but it didn’t have a lot of force behind it; the plan did have a certain appeal, not least of which was not having to hear the possibly-deserved lecture from his father on how he’d nearly driven their house onto the rocks because he’d been bored.
Well, that was one of the certain appeals.
Robb grinned at him wolfishly, perfectly aware of the other appeals, and then said, “Do you want to try fucking in a hammock?”
Jaime sighed. As if he even needed to ask.
#
They got the report about Jaime killing the assassin on the very same day as the news of the sack of Lannisport. Tyrion almost felt sorry for Father, who was so dazed with horror he couldn't even get angry at first. They were both sitting in total silence in the Tower of the Hand when the door opened and Olenna Tyrell came in.
“This isn’t a good time,” Tyrion said urgently, because the last thing they needed was for Father to erupt in rage and do some irreparable damage to the Tyrell alliance.
“I’m sure, but if I don’t intervene, I expect the next idea that comes out of this room is going to destroy both our houses,” she said. She put herself into the chair in front of the desk and contemplated them. “I suppose you were both certain that they were still just pretending the entire time. Two energetic young men alone in a tent on campaign, having convinced everyone in the world they were fucking, and it would never occur to them that they might as well give it a try and see how they liked it.” She sighed deeply. “And once they did like it, I'm sure they were both certain it wouldn’t make a difference. But we’re made to fall in love with people we keep fucking. They’ve run away to the North together, I presume?”
“I—suppose that’s one way to look at it,” Tyrion said, staring at her.
“Well, how else can Stark keep him? There’s only one possible solution. Wait for them to take Pyke, and then declare peace and celebrate.”
“What?” Tyrion said.
“You’re not getting to Robb without going through your brother, and Robb can’t keep fighting you now that it means killing his lover’s family,” Olenna said. “But he does have to kill someone to keep his bannermen happy. That’s why he’s taken your ships: so he can go kill the Greyjoys instead.”
That all did actually sound plausible, and made sense of why Robb had done nothing but take the ships and immediately dash away northwards. Tyrion darted a wary look at Father, who was just glaring fixedly at the two separate message scrolls lying like twin snakes on his desk, his jaw rigid.
Olenna was sailing onward. “Which is just as well for us; we don’t need ironborn raids up and down the coast all winter. But we can’t afford for people to think that any idiot with thirty thousand men can defeat our armies, because we’ll have other idiots trying it for the next ten years. So as soon as he’s done it, you’re going to announce that the sack of Lannisport was staged, to allow them to take the ironborn by surprise, and actually we’ve made peace with the North. Ser Jaime has gone to Winterfell to make certain the King in the North doesn’t raise another invasion force, and Sansa will marry Loras and stay in the south to seal the peace. And then,” she went on dryly, “thanks to the very dramatic performances the two of them have been putting on for the benefit of the entire continent, everyone will understand that it’s actually a double marriage peace treaty.”
“Sansa will marry Tyrion,” Father bit out, from behind the desk, the first words he’d said.
Olenna raised her eyebrows. “And then will her mother be able to see her at Riverrun for the harvest festival in two months and leave again thinking she’s happy?”
Father looked at him, and Tyrion glared back. “Why shouldn't the poor child be happy? She and Loras are a perfect match. Make Jaime get married and produce some offspring while he’s up there in the North. He can’t possibly claim to still be in the Kingsguard at this point. Half the gossip in the Seven Kingdoms is about who he’s fucking.”
Father grunted, if a little sullenly, and Olenna twinkled at Tyrion and added, “An excellent suggestion. I’m sure we can find a suitable girl to send him. And Robb is meant to marry one of the Frey girls, isn’t he? They’ll make quite a happy family,” airily, as she pushed herself back up. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up with a match or two out of the lot.”
# End