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Jaime wakes before she does. Neither of them sleep heavy – years of nights on the road will do that to you – but since their daughter’s birth Brienne finds her husband has the edge on her.
“She’s up,” he says, as Catelyn’s mumbling turns to whimpers. It’s late – or early, depending how you look at it. The candles have almost burnt to their ends, and moonlight melts through the shutters. “Is this the first time tonight? Can’t even remember.”
“First time,” Brienne says, struggling to rise, but Jaime sets a hand on her shoulder to stay her and kicks back the furs.
“I’ll get her,” he says, stretching. “Should’ve listened to that bloody maester of yours, I suppose...”
Brienne snorts; he says so every night. There’d been something of a debate over the matter at Evenfall: Jaime had insisted the babe would sleep in their chambers, not with some wet nurse – Maester Warrek had said they’d fast tire of it, that a babe knows no schedule but its own. But they’ve both known ruder awakenings, and so Catelyn stays with them, in a carved wooden crib at the end of their bed.
Privately, Brienne thinks it’s as much for her husband’s comfort as their daughter’s. She often thinks of the children Jaime never got to hold, though certainly not near so often as he must. And of course, she remembers well how he’d wept with both joy and some terrible grief when first she’d laid their daughter in his arms – the way he’d trembled with the weight of his ghosts.
So Brienne had wound an arm about him and another beneath his, and held them both.
“Kit,” Jaime says now, “quiet, I’m coming.”
Kit is what Jaime calls her. ‘Like a little cat, no?’ It seems to have stuck.
He’s still somewhat startled by the full form, Brienne supposes. After all, given their last encounter with the Lady herself, perhaps it’ll be a strange one to explain when the time comes… but it was the only name on her mind, had been for months, and when she’d offered it Jaime had only said ‘well, I wonder what she’d have made of that.’
What would she make of any of this, Brienne wonders as she watches Jaime lift their babe from her crib, humming tunelessly all the while. She hardly knows what she would’ve made of it, had she pictured this scene not six, seven years ago. How I hated him then. His smiles, his laugh, all of it.
And yet here I am now. Practically aching as she watches him cradle the babe, this child they’ve made together, nudging her waving fists with his nose.
She’s known many sides of him since they met in that cell at Riverrun: the worst, the best, and everything inbetween. But their daughter has exposed something else, a sort of softness she hadn’t thought him capable of. Jaime can be gentle, and kind when he wants to be, but with Catelyn there’s a sweetness about him that must be just as new as she is.
“Hungry, I think,” he says now, Catelyn balanced in the crook of his arm. He’d fretted a little before she was born, wondering aloud in a joking tone that belied real concern as to how he’d manage a babe with one hand. But in the end he’d fairly mastered it within a sennight, given his eagerness to hold her. “Can you take her?” he asks, bending at her bedside.
Brienne nods, holds out her arms, and Jaime settles Catelyn into them. The babe latches with purpose as Brienne parts her shift, a tiny fist flexing in the fabric.
“Well,” Jaime grins, “Must say, thank the gods it’s only that.”
“Says you.”
“Mm. Well, my missing hand has served me well in that regard, I suppose.”
“Indeed it has.”
Jaime huffs a laugh and drops into bed beside her, brushes a finger through Catelyn’s wispy blonde hair.
“Do you think it will curl?” Brienne wonders aloud, watching the cornsilk strands of it trail through his fingers. She thinks she should like that. When she’d first known Jaime, his hair was largely gone, but when they’d reunited in the Riverlands and she’d seen his new-grown curls… well. There’d been plenty on her mind back then, but the curls had certainly occupied more of it than they ought to have done.
Jaime looks pensive, his brow furrowed, and Brienne wonders if he’s picturing the golden heads of his first children. She almost regrets asking, but then he smiles.
“I don’t know,” he says, “but if it does, I’ll make sure she’s warned about septas wielding combs.” He snorts. “Bloody murder, you know. I once told Tyrion that was how our father lost all his, and he wouldn’t let Asta brush his hair for weeks.”
Brienne thinks of all the times Roelle would tear through her locks. How she’d once hacked them short when they grew too tangled after a day of training in a helm. Thinks of some faceless woman doing the same to Catelyn, and feels a little sick.
She’s talked a little of her septa – enough to make Jaime spit – but she’s never gone so far as to say she’d like to do without one at all. And what would he make of that? Probably nothing much – it’s Maester Warrek she’d have to worry about, and she’s faced more ferocious men than he.
They could do it, she thinks. What should stop them? Brienne tries to picture herself – or gods forbid, Jaime – teaching their daughter a lady’s courtesies… and it does seem a silly fantasy. But doesn’t all of it? Doesn’t this, now?
“She has your eyes,” Jaime says.
“Hm?”
“Her eyes. They’re blue.”
Brienne blinks, squints down at Catelyn’s tiny face. She’s usually searching for some feature of Jaime’s there, is satisfied there are plenty, but the babe’s eyes still seem the foggy sort that might reveal anything.
“How can you tell?”
“Well, I’ve spent quite enough time staring into yours.”
Brienne sputters a cough that startles the babe at her breast. “Too early for that,” she says, her face hot. “And anyway, in this light, surely you can’t – “
“It’s light enough. I can tell you’re bright red, for one thing, but I hardly need to look at you for that – “
“For gods’ sakes – “
“You blush loudly, do you know – “
“I don’t know why you’re not, you embarrass yourself – “
“Mm, but not nearly so well as I embarrass you.”
Brienne smiles despite herself. “I suppose I’ll give you that much.”
“Generous of you,” says Jaime with a yawn.
They pass the time in silence a little while, as the last candles stutter to nothing and the room takes on a silver glow. Catelyn settles back in her arms to contemplate the ceiling, a wondrous carving of the cosmos Brienne wonders if she can quite make out yet. She does a great deal of staring, this child – as though a little stunned to find herself in the world yet determined to make sense of it.
There’s a lot she doesn’t know. She makes nothing yet of her father’s missing hand, the scar across her mother’s cheek, doesn’t know of the siblings she’ll never meet nor the aunt who was their mother. She doesn’t know her namesake, that she’s a Lannister, or a Tarth. She hasn’t heard the things her father has done, doesn’t know the king or why he can’t walk.
She’ll hear it all eventually. Jaime hates lies, and Brienne was never very good at them anyway. But the truth is so sharp and unwieldy, Brienne can hardly fathom handing it to her.
Catelyn reaches for a strand of her hair, and Brienne gives her a finger to hold.
“She’s so small,” she says helplessly, turning their hands together to wonder at the difference. It seems faintly ludicrous that any child of hers could be so small – a little terrifying, too. “This world we’ve brought her into…”
“Is fucking awful,” says Jaime flatly. “Not so bad as it was before, perhaps, but you’d hope there were better ones, wouldn’t you?”
Brienne’s torn somewhere between a laugh and a grimace. “You’ll let me know if you hear of any. Some place without pirates, perhaps.”
Jaime smiles, but there’s a slight glaze to his look, like painted glass. He gets like that sometimes – it used to frighten her a little, the sudden distance unravelling behind his eyes. But when one day she’d thought to ask him where he goes, he’d told her, and it hadn’t seemed so far then: nowhere she couldn’t reach him.
She looks at him in askance now, and Jaime shrugs.
“She’ll have to know the worst of it,” he says. “There’s too much of it to hide, and I won’t have her hear it from anyone but us.”
Brienne wonders not for the first time if he’s been somewhere inside her head just now, or if perhaps she in his. But Jaime only sighs, touches Catelyn lightly upon the nose.
“But there are good parts, too,” he says, voice barely more than a whisper. “And there are still songs in that, don’t you think?”
Something in her unspools. Brienne winds an arm beneath her daughter so that she might take Jaime’s hand in hers, and his mouth quirks.
“Some bloody bawdy ones as well,” he says.
“Oh, for gods’ sakes – “
“In fact, if she doesn’t sleep soon I’ll sing her a few – “
“Then it’s you we’ll put in the nursery.”
Jaime tuts, scoops their daughter from her arms with more grace than anyone ought to have at this time of the morning.
“She’s a cruel wench, your mother,” he deadpans in the pink whorl of her ear, half dancing her across the room to her crib. “She’d exile me for the sin of music, and nothing more.”
“A sin to music, perhaps.”
Jaime’s laugh is a better sort of song. “She jokes,” he tells the babe as he lays her down, “Or tries to, you must have patience with her.”
“Well, she’ll certainly need infinite amounts of that.”
“Hm, bit better. We’ll work on it.”
Jaime’s feet are cold from the flagstone floor when he enters the bed, but Brienne finds she doesn’t mind so much, winding her legs through his.
“We’re to meet the Estermonts in the morn,” she whispers, and her husband snorts with derision.
“They can meet us here, then. I’ve no plans to be anywhere else before noon.”
“Hm,” says Brienne as Jaime settles against her back. “Wouldn’t do wonders for our relations.”
“Perhaps not,” he sighs, slinging an arm about her waist. “But they’re not wealthy enough for war.”
“That salmon you liked so well at breakfast was from their waters.”
“Oh, was it? Well, I’ll rise for the fish then, if not the folk.”
Jaime presses a kiss to the back of her neck, and his lips linger there, breath warm on her skin. She thinks she’d like to lie awake a little longer, to dwell on that touch, but consciousness slips away from her like a sandal on the sea.
They fall asleep to the sound of a storm rolling over the waves, treading its usual path across the island. Her family have always known them, this kind and every other, but they weather them. And of course, once they’ve drifted, rippled away – the sky is always bluer.