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Cersei volunteers for the willowy, silver-haired beauty reaped for the 42nd Hunger Games. It’s laughable how easily the eldest Lannister overshadows the child. Her hair reflects gold, her eyes shine like emerald gemstones, and her teeth flash pearlescent and deadly for the cameras. She is 17 now, enough of a woman to use it to her advantage.
Tailored for Capitol life.
Jaime grins wickedly, burying fledgling fear beneath a lifetime of pride: in the Lannister name, in the Victor who trained them, in the sweet sister who will lead their district to glory.
He watches his twin savor the applause, paying no mind to the buffoon digging puffy fingers into the boys’ glass ball. Whoever the man chooses, he’ll be dead in a week.
“How thrilling,” muses their round, balding escort, smoothing his elaborate silk jacket over the paunch he’s developed since his last procedure. “This year’s games are a family affair!”
The words lodge, jagged, in Cersei’s frozen grin.
Jaime’s head whips around, searching, searching, as the name “Lannister” rattles around his skull. He can’t say goodbye to them, knowing it is really goodbye. His little brother won’t make it past the bloodbath.
“Shy all of a sudden?” Varys titters as the spotlight sweeps the crowd. “Odd for District 1. Come join your sister, Jaime.”
Jaime’s eyes land on Tyrion in the same moment his name reverberates through the speakers. The stifled horror in those familiar, mismatched eyes shatters his breastbone like a mace.
Not Tyrion. Me.
The wildfire in Cersei’s gaze suddenly makes sense.
No one volunteers to take his place.
Her father’s gaze is weary, gray-tinged, clouding with faraway mist blown in from the sea. It takes no small effort to keep her eyes dry when they catch his. Each step up the brine-worn staircase frays the mooring line tied between her heart and his.
Brienne trudges up to the handsome, smiling man who has charged her to die. She looks stolidly ahead as the cameras swing eagerly to her district partner, a plain-faced boy who used to laugh at her at school.
He isn’t laughing now.
She holds her father’s gaze as she’d once clung to her brother’s stuffed bear, desperate and confused at the bloated, nearly unrecognizable boy onscreen. Her heart breaks on the shoals as it did before, dragged into the depths of Selwyn Tarth’s eyes.
As the anthem begins to play, a glassy thought skims to the surface. The odds are not in our favor.
Brienne can barely move in her hastily patched skirt. A smart viewer might recognize her as a mermaid, but her tail has none of the fluid, frothy grace the flimsy fabric affords her district partner. Carefully anchored pearls swirl with blue gemstones across her chest, a bare suggestion of sea when pieced together with the few plastic shells stuck hastily in her hair.
Her face burns with shame. She can’t decide if she’s more mortified by her miss with near nudity or the poorly concealed sentiment that the Capitol citizens can’t tolerate the sight of her.
She glimpses the twins from District 1 stepping gracefully into their chariot. Between her pity for their plight and her transfixion at the sight of them—dripping in gold and gems and not a stitch of real fabric—Brienne almost forgets her fear. They stand as unwavering as rock, a single formation held apart by earth and sea.
Her heart pounds the echo of their horses’ hooves, rendered inaudible beneath the roar of the crowd.
Cersei spends the training sessions flirting with the male tribute from District 2, a broad, dark haired teen who eats as ferociously as he fights. When the twins retire to their apartments, the sweetness melts from her features.
“Imbeciles and weaklings.” She makes an impatient noise in the back of her throat. “Thank the gods I have you.”
“Ally with someone from 3,” Tyrion had instructed him as Tywin Lannister strode from the decadent room in the Justice Building. Jaime wondered if their father would bother with Cersei. “Wits are as dangerous as weapons, big brother.”
“We don’t need any of them,” Cersei declares.
Jaime fights her on it, but they both know she’s already won.
“You seem confident, Jaime,” notes Caesar Flickerman conspiratorially. He raises his voice, purple eyebrows manipulating the crowd. “Doesn’t he, folks?”
Jaime flashes an indolent grin at the audience, knowing they’ll call him arrogant and not caring. Arrogance won’t hurt his chances.
“What’s there to worry about?” He keeps his gaze from the wings, where Cersei snaps at the girl removing her wire.
Caesar’s smile widens for the crowd. Jaime’s does the same.
His sister catches his eye, as fierce and radiant as the Western sun.
Brienne can tell that Caesar is trying. His smiles are heartier than with the dazzling twins from 1 or the deadly tributes from 2. He’s almost as new at this as she is, but he leads her through pleasant conversation and turns her terse, stuttering answers into something sweet and shy. But there’s nothing he can do to mask her hunched, muscular body in the short, sea-foam dress.
Polite murmurs and cruel snickers roar together behind the shield of the spotlight. Even his warm, “My dear, your legs go on for miles,” can’t brace her against the crushing swell.
“Brienne.” His smile drops with his voice, a grave murmur as he pats her leg sympathetically. Her heart catches. “These games bring up difficult memories for you, don’t they?”
Don’t clam up, girl! Ms. Roelle snaps in her head. There’s little else to recommend you.
Caesar pauses, pursing purple lips.
The silence tumbles over the edge of a knife, and Brienne hangs on with both hands, cut to the bone.
“You’re 14 this year?” She nods numbly. Caesar sighs, clutching one hand to his heart. “And how old were you when your brother was reaped?”
Saltwater brims, spilling over short lashes to add ugly tears to a plain face and overgrown limbs.
The buzzer cuts through her memories. An attendant bustles her offstage, but Brienne feels herself floating away with her brother, cut off from surf and sun in an unmarked wooden box.
The arena is made up of extremes: scalding lakes and icy waterfalls, orange deserts and deep bogs, with rows of trees as mismatched as the weapons in the training center.
A patchwork of districts for 24 homesick children.
But everything is twisted, wrong somehow. Brienne stumbles on a cove carved straight from District 4, but it reeks of stagnant water. When she puts pressure on the sand it sucks off her shoe and swallows her leg to the knee. She steers clear of water after that, choked with the memory of colorless skin as the hovercraft fished Galladon from the flooded banks of the arena.
They will use your weaknesses against you, Goodwin told her.
Brienne watches a wide, cone-shaped tree crush the male tribute from District 7 and shudders. They will use our strengths against us, too.
“Did you see his lover?” Cersei laughs, eyes glinting as she wipes her bloody scythe on the monstrous boy from District 11. “I bet she squeals like a pig when I stick her.”
Jaime saw the huge girl from District 4 wrestle her way free of the bloodbath. She might be their biggest adversary after Robert, except her brain seems as mottled as her face.
Two easy kills, and the beast snatched a weapon and ran.
Well, he and Cersei took care of the tributes she left behind.
“Looks like a grunter to me.” Jaime shrugs, scraping a nail down his sword to remove a fleck of dried blood. “Even Flickerman found her interview painful.”
His twin smiles. If he didn’t know her, he’d call her expression serene. “I’ll make her squeal,” she lilts for the cameras.
The girl from District 2 twitches on the ground between them. Cersei nudges the dying tribute’s neck with her shoe and crushes her throat for good measure. The body jerks once and goes still, and the canon echoes across the mismatched clearing.
Nine down, thirteen to go. And then . . .
Jaime doesn’t think about then.
Brienne survives on her own. Some nights she wonders what it would be like to have an ally to share the watch. She knows better than to think any of the tributes want her.
It’s just as well. She could never bring herself to trust them; could never harm them if she did.
She has learned the necessity of freshwater through years of sieving for hidden treasures, searching the horizons for her father’s fishing boat. She forces herself to find a stream, shallow and scattered with strange clay rocks. Unfamiliarity will keep her alert.
Her fingers work steadily, tying reeds into knots, making nets and hooks and hoping the current won’t unravel the insubstantial fibers. She has nothing more than the knife she wrestled from a tribute she couldn’t bear to kill in the initial bloodbath. She knows she killed him anyway.
And more heartlessly.
Goodwin said that her softness would get her killed.
Brienne narrowly misses an axe in the ribs, alerted by the squelch of rubber on the grass lining the streambed.
My softness has competition, she thinks. She closes her eyes and stabs the girl through the heart.
The male tribute from District 2 is immense and overconfident, with a huge, deadly hammer and a backpack full of supplies. The Lannister twins take him as he gorges himself on canned stew and a rich, sweet juice he must have received from his sponsors. Cersei has his weapons before he hears their approach, and Jaime hamstrings him neatly before moving in for the killing blow.
“Give me the sword, Jaime.”
He grunts, swinging his blade in a powerful arc, but she darts into his path and he stumbles in his attempt to arrest the movement.
“Was that necessary?” he complains. His heart thuds loudly in his chest, sloshing hot blood through his veins.
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.
Cersei is ignorant to the tight cord of fear restraining her brother’s words. She slips the sword from his hand and flicks it expertly. “Father may not believe it, but I can kill a man just as well as you.”
The other tribute is a man, 18, the oldest tribute in the arena and massive enough to prove it. Cersei cuts into the flesh of his gut with graceful ferocity. Her shoulders square in triumph, and Jaime knows who receives the challenging smile she aims at the sky.
She never sees the fingers that close around her throat, crushing her windpipe and going slack, slick with her blood.
Jaime cradles her body for hours, uncaring of the tears and blood mingling on his face. The gamemakers call up a swarm of tracker jackers to chase him away, and he watches the proud, silver lion catch her in its teeth and sprout wings, carrying her home.
It’s not until he wakes, woozy and weak, that he remembers the sword still clutched in her slender hand.
There is a canon just before dawn, and by midday Brienne is folding up a silver parachute and chewing warm, salty bread that turns to ash on her tongue.
She knows her district partner is dead.
A darkness lingers in him where Cersei used to be, a vacuous space, hazy around the edges. Not a hole, exactly, but a mire that consumes a little more each day, slavering to suck him down whole.
Disorientation digs its claws deeper as he scrambles to remember. How long? How many are left?
Why does it matter?
A blurry face half-forms in his memory, so ugly he thinks it must be Tyrion. Drink. His brother never sounded so soft, never touched him so gently. Drink.
When Jaime blinks the face disappears.
I am going home, he orders himself, half afraid he will not listen. I can’t abandon Tyrion. I can’t– Cersei–
He downs most of his water, vomits when it sloshes around his shrunken stomach. He treks back to the cornucopia. Its deadly gleam beckons him forward, a moth to a golden flame.
This is our throne, brother. And if they want what’s ours, they’ll have to fight for it.
Its bowels have been stripped. No weapons. No supplies.
He has nothing more than the canteen on his belt and the crackers in his pocket.
When he finds her, Brienne is wrapping the ornate golden knife in a sheath of knotted parachutes. Guilt gnaws her when she looks at it. This gift was not intended for her, but she lost her weapon in a tussle with the boy from District 12, and the boy from 1 must have a cache waiting for him. The twins controlled the cornucopia, and that handsome face will never want for sponsors.
The boy lingering outside her rocky shelter—a skinny kid from the textile district—has been shadowing her for hours. She recognizes him from a desperate fight at the bloodbath—saw the dark girl’s face in the sky that night—but Brienne has a hard time considering him dangerous. His eyes are lost, alone. Like hers.
“You won’t be able to kill me,” she says, forcing the waver from her voice.
The boy startles, swallowing hard, and slides into view. “I d-didn’t— I wasn’t— ” He swallows again and rushes on, “I’ll t-teach you how to trap if you’ll t-teach me how to fight.”
It’s easy to see that Brienne is better fed. The strange orange fish in the stream taste different than the ones at home, but catching them is no different.
“You don’t want me as an ally.”
He hastens to disagree. “I do! You’re s-strong and honest. You won’t—” He glances down, and Brienne hears the echo of unspoken words. You won’t kill me in my sleep.
“Eat,” she mutters, nudging her supper towards him.
He looks up, hopeful. Brienne nods. Something eases in the hard knot of her shoulders.
The boy scrambles across the rocks, stuffing chunks of raw fish into his cheeks like a stilt-legged pelican scooping up prey. Brienne almost smiles.
Trust is a dangerous weapon, but loneliness cuts deeper than a blade.
When Pod dies, anguish saps Brienne’s tenuous hold on hope. The landslide catches them both off-guard, and although he clings to her ankle as she grasps a jagged outcrop with bloody fingers, he doesn’t have her endurance. Tears drip down her grimy face and leap after him, dancing in open air with the pebbles pelting her from above.
Brienne dangles in a sea of blue, thinking of Galladon and Podrick and the mother she never knew as the waterfall of earth and stone peters to nothing.
She prays death will meet her on solid ground.
He hears the canons, sees new faces in the sky, but Jaime hasn’t crossed another living creature since the day he succumbed to the venom. The image of Cersei is stark in his mind, bone-white beneath her bloody beam. Some days she seems like the last face he will ever see.
“Don’t think of it,” he croaks to the placid arena.
There’s no way of knowing who stands between him and victory. It doesn’t really matter.
What good are strength and skill if hunger and grief undo me?
He has spent his life consumed by a Game that rewards its players with the insistent gnawing of empty bellies and hollow hearts.
The thought traps air in his lungs. They burn beneath his ribs, full to bursting with deceptively rich life.
Jaime laughs so he won’t cry, wheezing out air until his lungs seize, sucking in one greedy breath after another. He laughs himself silly, laughs himself sick, and then Jaime Lannister picks himself off the ground, smiling as he imagines his father trying to convince the world his son hasn’t gone mad.
He scavenges overripe fruit from strange, sandy forests and follows lizards to warm holes he hollows into beds with his bare hands.
Each morning he musters a new will to live.
Should have known she’d make it. Jaime latches onto the thought, muddling through the sight of a living tribute just seconds after the canon startles him from sleep. Who did she kill?
Her hands are empty of weapons, her clothes free of fresh blood, and the tense set of her enormous shoulders tells Jaime that District 4 is just as surprised as he is. He watches her watch the hovercraft pull an emaciated body from the brush. No wounds. No blood.
Poison?
But Jaime can’t imagine a tribute relinquishing even a meager portion of food. Can’t imagine anyone stupid enough to eat from an open container of provisions.
The victim of the elements disappears into the sky, and the blonde giant finally notices him. She tenses, whipping around with an instinct that suggests some distant, sloppy training, and yanks a razor-sharp blade from an expertly woven sheath.
He appraises the gold-and-ruby hilt. It didn’t come from the cornucopia, and anyone who could afford that kind of lavish gift—anyone who could afford a weapon, crude or otherwise—wouldn’t waste their contributions on her.
She sizes him up, stubbornly steady, until her eyes follow his to her hand. Her stance falters, feet torn between standing their ground and making a hasty retreat. Blood pools slowly beneath her skin, swallowing her freckles like spilled wine seeping across white silk.
Only Tywin Lannister would send such an ostentatious gift into the Hunger Games.
Her eyes harden, defensive. “You didn’t need it.”
An image swims back to him, a flash of silver and gold descending from the sky. A distorted face that could only belong to his brother, haunting him back to life.
Had this creature found him, delirious and unconscious, and shielded him from the other tributes?
“Anyone with half a brain would have slit my throat.” Both threat and thanks, his words knock the resolve from her eyes. She blinks, looking almost as shocked as he feels.
“You were defenseless,” she protests, as though that argues her point instead of his.
“And now I’m your biggest threat.” Jaime smiles sharply, nicking the doubt slithering past that vacuous emptiness in his chest.
For such a slow, naive thing, her eyes are surprisingly astute. They assess his bedraggled clothing, his distinct lack of weaponry, and the empty canteen tossed carelessly beside his burrow of roots. She frowns, disappearing behind her eyes for the barest of seconds before she shakes herself free.
“I can take you.”
Her certainty galls him. He lunges without a second thought, realizing a breath too late that the knife still gleams in her fist.
I’m not dying without taking her with me.
Jaime angles his impact, knocking her shoulder into a tree she would have just missed. The dagger flies free and then it’s only them, strength on strength, skin on skin, wrestling through muck and leaves on the jungle floor.
“You’re handy with that knife.” The blond boy eyes her up, breathing heavily as he leans against a gnarled branch. Even half starved and smeared with drying mud, he looks more appealing than she ever could. “For a girl who doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
Brienne glances at the dead boy at her feet, feeling sick. He’d nearly killed them both before Brienne collected herself, shoving free of the struggle to face the new threat. Blood streaks the dead tribute’s clothes, wet and red, more vivid where she’d cleaned her blade than in the place where she’d stabbed him.
Baby Bri, Galladon whispers in her head, want to learn a trick?
“Let’s move,” she grunts, shoving the dagger back into Pod’s sheath.
A golden brow broadens its frame above rich green eyes, but Brienne doesn’t wait to see if he scoffs at her offer.
Allies or not, the gamemakers will want to collect the body.
His father hates his new friend, he is sure. Tyrion must be laughing himself sick.
I bet she squeals like a pig when I stick her, Cersei had said. But District 4 has the blade, not him, and Jaime doubts he can get it without sustaining worse injuries than the dagger is worth. She’s stronger than he realized, and less stupid than she looks.
The gods must be mad for Jaime to find himself navigating this nonsensical terrain with the huge, blonde beast from District 4, but he knows she’s his only chance of getting home.
He roasts a juicy fish over an almost cozy campfire while she flops another wriggling meal onto the bank.
She’s worth the risk, he decides.
For now.
“Ever going to tell me where you learned to fight?” Jaime asks, sifting through their hodgepodge collection of supplies while Brienne wraps smoked fish in waxy leaves.
“I won’t have you learning, too.” Her father was adamant, but Galladon tugged her behind a screen of nets and showed her where to strike with her chubby toddler’s arms.
Brienne wonders if the pain will ever wash away.
It might soon, she reminds herself, or it might carry me after him.
“I’m sorry about your sister,” she mumbles. Memories seep into her tone, raw and earnest. Her eyes drift, bobbing along the burgundy tide staining his shirt.
Is that hers? Brienne can’t fathom the horror.
His sea green eyes crash against a cliff of hard, gray stones.
The last tributes die with little fanfare. Three canons echo through the valley, and Jaime and Brienne crest the ridge just in time to watch the hovercraft dip into the trees for the final body.
It should have been quite a show. He wonders why the gamemakers let him and Brienne escape the brawl.
Wonders if she’s ready for the last fight of her life.
He can shove her over the lip of the ridge before she gets her knife in his ribs, but there’s no guarantee she won’t take him down with her. The hill is smooth, but jagged, deadly rocks litter the valley, jutting up from the dip where the incline starts to level.
His muscles refuse to move.
When Brienne turns to face him, her eyes are as clear as a pool. Large, freckled fingers tighten on Tywin Lannister’s last gift, and Jaime almost laughs at the irony.
How’s your grand plan going, father?
Brienne doesn’t move. Her eyes implore him, as blue as gemstones, even through the faint sheen of tears. I won’t if I don’t have to, she swears.
Jaime is stupid for believing her.
They’re not doing us any favors, he wants to tell her. We’ll have to kill each other sooner or later.
For now, they take their chances against the arena.
It’s barely a day before they send the mentors after them. Not just Sumner and Goodwin, but Arthur and Olenna; the snarling, spitting man from District 6, and the motherly, fire-haired woman who found Brienne the morning she got lost in the training center. Their faces bear the marks of death: slashed skin and sunken eyes, dark and decaying with the demands of damnation.
Brienne knows they are muttations, but she’s never seen the Capitols’ beasts look quite so human. Even before it’s her turn to sleep, the undead haunt her. Stalking mechanically through the trees like a waking nightmare.
Then they start to speak. Whispers at first, hissing to a growl, until the guttural cacophony forms words. Names.
Cersei. Podrick. Robert. Petyr. Lyanna.
Cersei. Podrick. Robert. Lyanna.
Cer-sei. Pod-rick.
She doesn’t know when Jaime’s hand finds hers, but they grip until their fingers go numb.
They escape to the desert. Jaime loathes giving up the high ground, but the dusty orange expanse allows them to see the mutts approaching. He resists comparing the arid plain to home, and quickly discovers any similarities are superficial. The days are frigid, the heat skyrockets at night, and Brienne yanks him away from a familiar, fruit-bearing plant that sprouts needles and spears a lizard through the heart.
The first day they share body heat, the sudden flush of Brienne’s skin chases away the chill. Jaime wonders if she’s ever been this close to a boy before.
She’s never been this close to a person before, he decides wryly, taking some small pleasure in burrowing his icy hands between their bellies and watching her flinch. I hope her friends enjoy the show.
By the time she suggests returning to the woods, Brienne has stopped blushing when they strip down to their underwear at night.
It takes them days to hunt the mutts. Days of blistering heat and searing, acid rain. Days the fish disappear from the streams and the plants turn black with rot.
Jaime breaks Goodwin’s neck so she won’t have to, and Brienne knows with sudden certainty that she’ll never hurt him.
Why don’t they just end it? she wonders more than once.
When she jabs her long knife into the garish, undead redhead, it seems like the edge catches the soft flesh of Brienne’s wildly beating heart.
The sudden silence is maddening.
They must be approaching three weeks now. That’s unheard of for a Hunger Games. Brienne voices her confusion—her concern—and though Jaime stays silent, his suspicions have been building for days.
It’s always a game with them. Another show.
He doesn’t know if it’s to prolong his miserable life a few days longer or simply to enjoy the hours he has left, but he presses his lips flush against hers. He has never kissed anyone, not since the awkward practice kisses he shared with his twin before their first reaping. Brienne is more awkward than even that, clumsy in the cold that whips through the evergreens. But her lips are full and chapped like fraying silk cushions, and he lets down his guard for the first time since he stepped onto the disk that lifted him into the arena.
Whatever the odds, they will face them together.