Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Winterfell House was strangely calm as Brienne descended the stairs in her riding kit, her top hat, gloves, and crop tucked in the crook of her arm. 

She expected to be accosted by at least half the Starks who were currently at home, eager to join her regular afternoon ride, but she was greeted only by the distant hum of voices carrying down the empty hall.

Brienne followed the sound to the drawing room, where she found the eldest three Stark children and their cousin Jon scattered across the furniture. Sansa glanced up from the book open in her lap to offer Brienne a smile, and Robb and Jon broke from their animated discussion about an upcoming horse race to wish her a good afternoon.

Before Brienne could return their greeting, Arya sighed loudly from the seat nearest the door. 

“I wish you hadn’t told Bran and Rickon they could tag along today,” she said, tapping her riding crop against the wooden leg of her chair. “They haven’t finished with their lessons yet, so I suppose we shall have to wait.”

Instead of reminding Arya that she, too, was tagging along on what was often Brienne’s sole time to herself, she crossed the room and sat down on the sofa next to Sansa. Only crumbs remained on the sandwich tray resting on the low table directly in front of her, but she hoped the tea was still warm. 

“I suppose we shall.” Brienne set her riding things down on the end table and leaned forward to pour herself a cup. “I did promise them they could join us.”  

Arya grumbled something Brienne couldn’t make out, swatting the chair with her crop once more. Robb looked as though he might scold her for it, but Jon headed him off with a good-natured smile.

“I recall a certain skinny, persistent girl tagging along with us a time or two,” Jon said to Robb, but he winked at Arya when he added, “whether we liked it or not.” 

“That was different,” Arya snapped back, but the curve of her mouth gave her away.

“Was it now?” Jon grinned even wider. “Perhaps it’s all a matter of perspective.”  

Miraculously, Arya made no immediate retort, and Brienne took advantage of the brief silence to redirect the conversation. “Did I hear you discussing the Dragonstone Stakes?”

“We were indeed.” Robb lifted a sheet of paper Brienne hadn’t noticed he was holding and waved it in her direction. “Lord Pennytree is predicting the upset of the century.” 

Jon huffed. “I’d hardly go that far. The man is simply the only one brave enough to back an underdog over Lady Tyrell’s prized three-year-old. It’s not as if underestimated horses haven’t won the race before.” 

“You know as well as I do that Golden Rose has been favored to win Aegon’s Cup since his winning streak last autumn,” Robb said. “If Sweetfoot beats him at the Stakes, that changes everything.”

Aegon’s Cup was the most prestigious contest of the Royal Races, a four-day horseracing event held at the Dragonpit each year in the early summer. The Dragonstone Stakes was considered a bellwether for that particular race, but a loss didn’t necessarily scuttle a horse’s chances for the season. 

Brienne said as much to Robb and was met with a dismissive snort.

“Pennytree is saying Sweetfoot should be able to take both races easily,” Robb said, brandishing his paper again. 

This time, Brienne noticed it was covered in small, neat black print. She didn’t need a closer look to identify it as the latest issue of Lord Pennytree’s Sporting Weekly, a short newsletter circulated widely among the gentlemen of the ton. 

When the newsboys first started selling it two seasons before, the paper had been especially popular among young sportsmen like Robb and Jon, who enjoyed its anonymous author’s insights on horse, hunt, and ring. Now, every fashionable house in King’s Landing seemed to have purchased a subscription. Lady Stark and Sansa were the only ones in Winterfell House who didn’t read it.

“I just have to decide how much I’m going to wager against Loras Tyrell,” Robb went on. “He’s too proud not to match whatever bet I propose.” 

“You know Father doesn’t like it when you gamble,” Sansa said. “Luck will only—”

“—get me so far, yes, I know,” Robb finished for her. “But this isn’t luck. It’s Penntyree. The man is never wrong.” 

Brienne took a drink of her tea. “Everyone is wrong sometimes.” 

“Not Pennytree,” Robb said firmly. “You know that, Brienne. He even predicted Oberyn Martell’s victory last week, and no one thought he had a chance in the seven hells of beating Clegane until Pennytree suggested it.” 

She couldn’t argue with him there. Brienne had accompanied the Stark men—and what felt like half the population of King’s Landing—to Rosby and witnessed every blow of the thrilling match herself. 

Lady Stark didn’t approve of her attendance at such events, of course, but Lord Stark never objected. And although the couple had generously offered Brienne a home after her father’s death, it wasn’t as though she was a delicate young ward in need of their care and protection. She was an old maid of six and twenty, and she rather thought she’d earned the right to watch a boxing match if she so desired. 

And what a match it had been. 

Martell’s triumph over the enormous Gregor Clegane—which the lithe Dornishman nearly bungled in the final round with a foolish display of overconfidence—had resulted in an outburst of wild cheering from the crowd. As it turned out, a surprising number of attendees had made wagers based on Lord Pennytree’s prediction.

“If I were him,” Robb added, “I would spend less time pontificating on the evils of cockfighting and bear-baiting and more time gloating about his infallible foresight.” 

“Perhaps he might, if he ever foresaw anything interesting,” Sansa said lightly, flipping a page in her book. 

“Like what? Who wore the wrong color dress to Queen Rhaella’s ball?” Robb affected an exaggeratedly dreamy tone. “Who danced together and how many times and what does it all mean?”

“I care more about that than which man is going to knock the other one down first.” 

Brienne hid a smile behind her cup. She found pugilism far more entertaining than whatever was happening in the marriage mart, but she could see Sansa’s point. 

“At least what Pennytree prints is actually right,” Robb said. “I pick up more real news at the club than you do from those scandal sheets of yours.” 

“They’re called society papers,” Sansa corrected. “And you’ll excuse me if I doubt the gentlemen of your club have acquired any news that would interest me.”  

“Oh?” Robb smiled. “Not even the Duke of Casterly returning to Westeros?” 

Brienne nearly choked on her ill-timed swallow of tea.

“The Duke of Casterly?” Sansa closed her book with a snap. “How do you know that?” 

After forcing the tea—which had somehow solidified into a lump—down her throat, Brienne took a slow breath in through her nose to steady herself. Unfortunately, it only made the lingering tickle more acute. Gods, her eyes were watering.

Fortunately, the others seemed too preoccupied with the topic at hand to notice.

“I had it from Theon this morning. He saw the man at the club with his brother last night,” Robb said smugly. “So, you see, you can keep your useless society papers. I’ll stick with Lord Pennytree.”

Sansa raised an auburn brow at her eldest brother, but it was Arya who spoke first. “Do you think we’ll get to see him?” 

“The Duke? I imagine so,” Robb said, at last setting down his paper. “He would hardly visit King’s Landing during the season and not make an appearance or two. Why?” 

Arya shrugged. “I wonder if you can tell by looking at him.” 

“Tell what?” Jon asked. 

“If he’s as terrible as they all say he is.” Arya waved her crop in the air like a fencing foil. “You know, Kingbreaker and all that.” 

Any of her relatives might have censured her for making such a remark, even in the privacy of their home, but Brienne didn’t give them the chance. 

“He’s not,” she said, stern and so, so stupid.

Only one person in the world could prompt her to speak so heedlessly, and she hadn’t even seen him in nearly three years. 

Arya’s eyes narrowed with interest, sending a prickle of panic up the back of Brienne’s neck. What in the name of the Father had she been thinking? She could hardly explain her answer. Not without divulging a great deal more than she wished to—more than was hers to tell.  

“How do y—”

“Brienne is friends with the Duke’s goodsister, Lady Tysha.” Sansa slanted Arya a warning glare entirely at odds with the sweetness in her voice. “You know she goes to Casterly Place every week for tea.” 

“Oh right.” Willfully ignoring her sister’s forbidding countenance, Arya asked, “Have you met him, then? The Duke?”

“We’re acquainted,” Brienne said, pleased by how matter-of-fact she sounded. “I met him in Lannisport when my father was ill.” 

He hadn’t been the Duke of Casterly in those days, just Lord Jaime Lannister—restless and insufferable and the most beautiful man she had ever seen.  

Brienne had just turned two and twenty when they first crossed paths, not long after her father’s health began to fail. Instead of returning to King’s Landing for what would have been her fourth season of drudgery and embarrassment, Brienne had heeded his physician’s recommendation to take him west. The doctor lauded Lannisport’s temperate weather and famed sea bathing, promising it would do Ser Selwyn a world of good.

The Sunset Sea had been warmer than the frigid waters of Shipbreaker Bay, but Brienne didn’t think it had done much to improve her father’s health. Still, they’d spent the better part of two consecutive springs and summers there—though her desire to see Jaime again had certainly prompted her to encourage the second visit more fervently than she otherwise would have.

It had been during that second summer that she met Lord Tyrion and Lady Tysha, freshly returned from their honeymoon touring the Free Cities. They had both been uncommonly kind to her from the beginning, and after Brienne’s father passed away later that year, Lady Tysha had taken great pains to keep up their friendship. The Starks didn’t entirely approve—the bad blood between them and the Lannisters was far too old and thick for that—but Lady Stark seemed to understand that Brienne needed some friends of her own.

“And you liked him?” Arya asked, incredulous. 

All at once, Brienne felt worryingly warm, and she prayed it wouldn’t show on her face. In truth, she had more than liked him, but she’d never admitted it aloud. It had been hard enough admitting it to herself. 

“Arya,” Sansa hissed.

“I didn’t mean it like that.” Annoyed, Arya flicked her gray eyes to the ceiling. “I meant…you found him to be a decent sort of man?”

“I did.”

Robb gave her a queer look. Brienne doubted he had ever met Jaime himself—the incident with King Aerys had occurred when Robb was just a boy, younger than Rickon was now—but she supposed he’d heard the same stories as everyone else, probably even from his own father. It was one of the things she had struggled to reconcile about the viscount; he was an honest and principled man—and just as guilty of spreading a convenient, pernicious lie as the rest of the ton. 

“I find it very odd that no one had news of his return until he was already here,” Jon said thoughtfully. “I played cards with Lannister just a few days ago, and he never mentioned it.” He shifted his dark gaze to Brienne. “I take it Lady Tysha gave no hint of it either?” 

“Not a word.” 

Brienne didn’t think Lady Tysha would have kept it from her, if she’d known. Lord Tyrion, on the other hand, absolutely would have. 

What really bothered her was that Jaime hadn’t told her himself. Granted, she hadn’t received a letter from him in several weeks, but he had given absolutely no indication he planned to leave Meereen until the autumn—his plan ever since he’d received news of his father’s death a few months before.

Of course, the Starks had no idea that she and Jaime maintained a correspondence. None of them had ever asked who she was always writing to, if they even noticed, and she had certainly never volunteered it.

Arya frowned. “What’s so odd about it?” 

“If nothing else, every mama in the city should be talking about it,” Jon said. “He became the most eligible bachelor in the Seven Kingdoms the moment his ship docked in Blackwater Bay.”

“Better him than me,” Robb grumbled, and Jon laughed. 

The lump returned to Brienne’s throat, and this time she couldn’t blame a sip of tea. 

Sansa edged forward in her seat, and Brienne braced herself for a question she was certain she did not want to hear, but she was saved by an abrupt thundering on the stairs. 

By the time Rickon yelled her name from the hall, Brienne had already deposited her empty cup on the table. She was half tempted to shout back, purely from relief. Instead, she scooped up her things and rose swiftly from her seat. 

Arya still beat her to the door. 

~~*~~

Rickon chattered at her about dragons, of all things, as their riding party made its way from Winterfell House to the Iron Gate. He had apparently been reading about Aegon’s Conquest in his history lesson, and he was fixated on the notion that the great creatures’ skulls were still hidden somewhere beneath the Red Keep.  

Rickon longed to know if Balerion’s teeth really had been as long as swords, or if one really could have ridden a horse down Vhagar’s gullet. And if he could only see the skulls for himself… 

Brienne had never been inside the castle except to attend Queen Rhaella’s annual ball, which obviously did not extend to the cellars, but she didn’t think it was likely. If the royal family of Westeros had still possessed such things, King Aerys would have long ago mounted them on the gates for the world to see. 

Undeterred by her pragmatic response, Rickon abandoned talk of the skulls to inquire about which dragon Brienne liked best. He seemed disappointed to learn she’d always fancied Silverwing, who carried Queen Alysanne to the Wall. Rickon, unsurprising for a boy of ten, favored the size and terror of Balerion. 

Only when they reached the open stretch of the Rosby road did the boy cease his exaltation of the Black Dread to canter ahead with his brother and sister. Podrick, one of the Starks’ grooms, rode after them at Brienne’s nod, at last leaving her alone with her thoughts. 

Unbidden, they turned to Jaime.

She pulled up her horse to collect them—collect herself—but it was useless. The green fields to her left and Blackwater Bay sparkling to her right bore too much resemblance to the spot they had first met.  

It had been early morning rather than afternoon when Brienne crept out of the rented lodgings she shared with her father, hired a horse from the coaching inn down the street, and rode out of Lannisport to the ocean road. Below the steep plummet of the cliffs, the Sunset Sea stretched toward the horizon in a vibrant dance of blues and greens, and the tall grass swaying along the road ahead beckoned her like a siren’s call. She hadn’t ridden since they left Tarth, and her horse’s flanks felt so steady and sure beneath her… she just couldn’t help herself. 

Thinking she was alone, Brienne tossed one leg over her saddle and urged the sweet mare on until they were positively flying along the clifftop. It was the first time in weeks she had felt so free, and she might have thrown out her arms into the wind if a strikingly handsome man hadn’t galloped up alongside her with a cocksure smile. 

He had been, well, Jaime, right from the start, snarking at her about riding as though the Stranger himself was chasing her. He said he might have mistaken her for a man if not for her skirts, and Brienne said she might have mistaken him for a gentleman if not for his tongue. It was the quickest rejoinder she had ever managed in her life, and rarely repeated, especially with him.

She encountered him again two days later on the same stretch of clifftop, and again the day after that at a horse race on the outskirts of the city. Jaime bet her a golden dragon when she told him his favored horse, Glory, would surely lose; he was more amused than cross to part with it when a stallion named Honor won the day instead. 

When they once again crossed paths on the ocean road later that week, Brienne began to doubt it was coincidence. Though why any man—let alone a future duke—would seek her company, she couldn’t say. 

He finally introduced himself that day, bowing exaggeratedly from his saddle, but she had known who he was since their very first meeting. It shamed her, now, to recollect how that knowledge had made her wary of him, how she had been just as guilty of believing the worst of him as everyone else.

Even then, though, it hadn’t been enough to make her ride away. Jaime challenged her to a race to reclaim his golden dragon, then insisted it was a tie when she had obviously beaten him by half a length, at least.

The next time she hired a horse, Brienne headed inland along the river road instead, and still, he found her. They raced once more, hard and fast through the trees until Jaime’s gelding finally outpaced her mare. It was a clear victory, but he didn’t boast or demand the return of his coin; he just grinned and drew back level with her, suggesting they let the horses walk for a spell to recover.  

They were ambling along that way, arguing about something Brienne could no longer recall, when half a dozen highwaymen melted out of the woods and surrounded them. Styling themselves the Brave Companions, the men demanded Jaime give up his money and abandon Brienne to their ostensibly nefarious purposes. After all, one of them insisted, even an ugly woman was good for some things. Jaime’s face twisted in anger as he refused, positioning himself between her and their leader. 

The lisping man rewarded him for his valor by aiming a blunderbuss at his face. 

Jaime tried to use his father’s title to talk the man around, but it only provoked him further. His men ripped Brienne from her horse, slashing her across the cheek as she struggled, and the leader shot Jaime through the hand when he moved to intervene. They would have done worse yet, she knew, if the gunfire hadn’t drawn a group of nearby travelers to their aid. 

The highwaymen made off with her horse in the ensuing scuffle, and Jaime all but forced her to ride back to Lannisport at the reins of his own. He couldn’t grip them, he said, with a white-faced stare at his mangled hand, so he would sit behind her. And he had, clinging to her waist so tightly that the blood from his wounds soaked through to her skin. 

She never did get the stains out of that dress, but she hadn’t been able to part with it, either.

Two days later, Brienne had ridden the few miles to Casterly Rock, her wounded cheek scabbed and painful and likely to scar. She found Jaime in a much worse state, sick with fever and missing the last two fingers of his right hand, and insisted on sitting with him while one of the footmen fetched the doctor.  

While they waited, she attempted to thank him for what he’d done—and apologize for what it had cost him. 

“What kind of a gentleman would I be if I had abandoned a lady to such ruffians?” he asked in reply, his green eyes fixed on her face with such glittering intensity that Brienne worried his fever was worse than she’d feared. “But I don’t suppose you were expecting an act of chivalry from a man of my reputation.” 

“I don’t know what you mean,” Brienne said, but she could tell by the curl of his lip that he knew she was lying. 

“Yes, you do. Surely you’ve heard the stories. Kingbreaker, traitor, man without honor. Everyone has,” he said bitterly. “It’s been more than a decade, and they all still hate me for the wrong reasons. Just like you.” 

Brienne frowned. “I don’t hate you.” 

“You don’t like me.” 

She found him quite obnoxious, in point of fact, though it had little to do with his being the man famed for giving the Mad King his name. Brienne disliked his sharp-tongued arrogance, his excessive self-assurance, his constant flippancy. 

And yet, she couldn’t say that she disliked him. Not entirely.

Though he poked at her incessantly, none of their encounters had made her feel as though he wished her to be anything other than…exactly what she was. Despite his jests, he hadn’t seemed put off by her size or her face or her interest in masculine pursuits. He had sought her out, for the Seven’s sake. He had saved her life. 

Jaime, oblivious to her thoughts, mistook her silence for something else. 

“You’re an honorable sort,” he sneered. “You would have tried, as I did, to do the right thing. And they’d have blamed you for it, just the same.”  

It all poured out of him, after that, furious and raw—what had really happened that day in the Red Keep—while Brienne sat at his side, too stunned to do anything but listen.

Jaime had gone along with his father to a meeting at the castle, milling about the halls in hopes of catching Prince Rhaegar and confirming their plans for an upcoming hunt in the kingswood. He heard a commotion in the Great Hall, which should have been empty at that time of day, and rushed in to find King Aerys waving a silver knife in one hand and a candelabra in the other. He had the queen backed into a corner, trying his best to light her skirts on fire while two of his personal guards stood there and watched. 

“I tried to calm him, but he just started shouting at me, saying he was going to burn her first and then have the Watch set fire to the whole city. All so he could rise again as the dragon reborn,” Jaime said. “He hit his head on the floor when I knocked him down, but they all knew he was mad well before that. Even the upstanding Viscount Stark had questioned his fitness to rule. But it was much easier to blame a boy of eighteen for ruining their king than themselves for nearly allowing their king to ruin his kingdom.” 

“But you—you saved her,” Brienne stammered, so horrified it was hard to speak at all. “Even if you had injured him, how could they fault you for that?”

Jaime smiled, blade-sharp and biting. “The only people who knew the truth were those two cowards standing guard and Queen Rhaella herself. The ton manufactured the rest, how I’d attacked the old man, how I had caused the break in his mind. Of course, they could never quite agree on why I’d done it. Perhaps it was petty revenge for the queen refusing to name my sister her diamond, or perhaps my father and I were plotting to replace the House of the Dragon with a Lannister dynasty. Perhaps the king said something vile, and I simply forgot myself.” He shrugged in his chair. “The truth is, they had always hated my family, and they were more than happy to hate me as well. And instead of wondering why they hadn’t thrown me in the black cells if any of it were true, they hated me for getting away with it, too.” 

“But the queen, she could have—” Brienne shook her head. “Why didn’t she say anything?”  

“It wasn’t her fault. Look what she endured, and gods only know for how long,” Jaime said, his voice dipping low. “The queen had no more power over what story they decided to tell than I did.” He winced as he shifted his wounded hand, then scowled down at it. “She told Rhaegar, I think, though we never spoke of it. At least he has never treated me like I stabbed his father through the bloody back.”

“He never cleared your name, either.” 

“No, he didn’t.” Jaime raised his eyes to hers, brimming with a hurt that made her heart clench. “I don’t suppose something so paltry as my honor was worth the risk to his throne.” 

“It should have been.” 

“See?” He huffed, but there was a softness around his mouth there hadn’t been before. “I said you were an honorable sort. Far too naive for your own good, but honorable nonetheless.”  

Brienne hadn’t realized it then, but that was when things began to change between them. Friendship was too small for what they came to share, but she had no other word for it—unexpected and, though she sometimes wished otherwise, utterly irreversible.

By the time his hand had healed, they were going for near-daily rides, albeit never along the river road again. Jaime took her to boxing matches, too, and asked her opinion whenever they attended the weekly horse races, though he still didn’t heed it half the time. Toward the end of the summer, he even asked her to go sea bathing with him—for the good of his health, of course—on a secluded little beach at the base of the cliffs below Casterly Rock.

Initially, Brienne balked at the idea. Riding and boxing were one thing, but this was something else entirely. “Jaime, you know it wouldn’t be proper to—”

“Oh, hang propriety,” he’d said. “Who else can I trust to haul me back to shore if I happen to feel faint?” 

She argued that he was in perfect health, but he kept at her until she gave in. He had an annoying ability to make her do that far more often than she would have liked. 

Jaime had looked half a god as he waded about in the sun-dappled water, teasing her as she remained crouched low, the waves lapping at her chin. Eventually, he coaxed her out for a swim and accused her of being part merling when she beat him back to the beach despite the weight of her bathing costume dragging her down.

It was strange, gazing out at a different sea all these years later, to think on how brief their time together had actually been—just five months that first year, and four the next. They had been separated by the Narrow Sea and over half the continent for far longer than they had been in each other’s company. 

And now he had come home, and he hadn’t told her why. He hadn’t bothered to tell her at all. 

Jon had been right. The entire city would be talking about him as soon as word spread of his arrival. Kingbreaker or not, he was still the Duke of Casterly, and she doubted he’d have trouble finding a young, beautiful wife if he wanted one. 

The thought made her feel achingly hollow, as though everything vital had been carved out from inside her and discarded in a heap on the ground. 

“Has your horse gone lame?” 

Brienne jerked her head to the left at the sound of Arya’s voice. 

“No,” she said slowly, jarred by both the intrusion and the question.

“Then what are you doing all the way back here? You haven’t moved an inch in ages, and Podrick was getting worried.”  

“Just thinking.” Brienne squinted against the light as she looked up the road. “Where are your brothers?”

“In the apple orchard with Podrick.” Arya wheeled her horse around in that direction. “How about you stop thinking and race me there instead?” 

Not waiting for Brienne to agree, Arya rocketed off with a snap of her reins, flashing a wide smile over her shoulder as she rode away. 

It was, she thought wryly, exactly what Jaime would have done. 

Half a second later, Brienne sent her horse shooting forward with a squeeze of her calf, satisfied in knowing Arya's head start wouldn’t be enough. 

Chapter Text

Brienne surveyed the ballroom from her seat along the back wall, fiddling with the gold chain of her necklace and only half hearing the conversation passing between Miss Frey and Miss Manderly on the bench to her left.

Before her, what seemed like half the city had crammed itself into the Hightowers’ mansion, and the space wasn’t nearly large enough to accommodate them all. It was already bloody stifling, and the night had barely begun. 

Despite her fondness for both music and dancing, Brienne had never enjoyed balls. She found them more endurable now that her advanced age placed her on the periphery of the social whirl rather than in its center, but sometimes her perch in the chaperones’ corner brought back unpleasant memories of Miss Roelle scrutinizing her from such a seat, years before.

That night, however, her mind was occupied by other thoughts… and other people. 

She peered through the couples as they hopped and circled and twirled, looking for a tall man with golden hair in the shifting sea of people, but there was no sign of him. 

Brienne had been watching for him everywhere during the past three days, constantly listening for the timbre of his voice while walking in the park, during an errand with Sansa down the Street of Sisters, on a ride with Podrick along the Blackwater Rush—a route she’d chosen precisely because they had to cross the entire city to go out the King’s Gate. But she hadn’t seen him anywhere.

Then, the day before, Lady Tysha had finally written to her with tidings of Jaime’s arrival. Her friend closed her brief message by saying that all three of them were looking forward to seeing her at the ball, but Brienne still hadn’t heard anything from him. 

He hadn’t sent a note, nor had he called upon her at Winterfell House. Not that she would have expected him to. 

She didn’t know what she expected, frankly. They had never known each other in the confines of society like this, where he was now a duke and she the destitute daughter of a baronet. Where she couldn’t as easily forget that she was dull, ugly, and poor and he was dazzling, notorious, and tremendously rich.

Things couldn’t be as they had been in Lannisport, Brienne knew that well enough. But they were still friends, and she also knew their friendship was important to Jaime, even if not quite as important as it was to her. 

Which was why his continuing silence only made her more curious—and, if she were honest, a little apprehensive—about what was actually going on. 

Perhaps he had come to choose a wife now that the dukedom belonged to him. Lord Tyrion and Lady Tysha thus far remained childless, to their great dismay, and while Jaime had always spoken scathingly of his father’s obsession with the Lannister legacy, Brienne wondered if securing it was more important to him than he let on. 

In truth, she could think of no other reason for him not to tell her he was coming home. It wasn’t hard to imagine him withholding his intentions to protect her feelings, though he should have realized they were well beyond need of that. He had made it very clear he wasn’t interested in her, not in that way, and Brienne thought she had made it clear she never expected otherwise. 

Of course, that didn’t make it easier to imagine him romancing one of the great beauties spinning around the floor. A match between Jaime and Tyene Sand or Margaery Tyrell or, gods forbid, Sansa Stark seemed exceedingly unlikely for many reasons, not least because Brienne didn’t think any of them would suit him. They were all so young, too—none older than nineteen to Jaime’s thirty-four. 

She couldn’t deny, however, that more unequal matches were made all the time. At twenty, she had received—and rejected, despite her father’s wishes and Miss Roelle’s advice—a proposal from Lord Humphrey Wagstaff, more than forty years her senior. 

Jaime, despite his reputation, would be harder for any woman to refuse.  

A rustle of fabric drew Brienne out of her thoughts, and she glanced up to find Miss Stokeworth swiftly approaching their corner. 

The young lady drooped as she eyed the row of occupied seats, and Brienne, knowing better than most the urge to seek refuge away from the crowd, stood and offered her own. It was just as well. There was no sense stewing over the past or the future. If Jaime meant to marry, she would have to cross that bridge when it came. Meanwhile, it did her no good to sit there gaping around the room like a giddy girl who had never been to a ball before.

Brienne smoothed her gloved hands over the skirt of her ice blue satin gown and made her way to the refreshment table with more purpose than she felt. Often, the array of food on offer was a bright spot of such affairs, but not even the éclairs could overcome her present lack of appetite. She helped herself to a lemonade instead, drinking it down in three long gulps and replacing her empty glass on the tray. 

She turned, then, having no real idea what she planned to do with herself next, and nearly ran headlong into a man in a black velvet tailcoat.

If it had been anyone else, she would have murmured an apology and hurried away. 

But it was Jaime.

She came perilously close to blurting out his name as she stumbled back a step. “Your Grace,” she said instead, surprisingly level. 

“Miss Tarth,” he replied, thick with his old teasing lilt. “I was hoping you would be in attendance tonight.” 

It had been two years and ten months, almost to the day, since they last stood face to face. As Brienne took in his tanned skin and green eyes, the slight curl of his hair and the sharp line of his jaw, it felt like a lifetime—and no time at all.

His mouth lifted in a familiar crooked smile, and Brienne’s heart thumped fast and hard against her breastbone. It raced even faster when he glanced down at the spot where the sensation was most intense. Mother’s mercy, could he hear it? 

“It suits you,” he said, nodding toward her chest even as his eyes returned to hers. “I thought it would.” 

Reflexively, Brienne’s hand went to the necklace resting just below the hollow of her throat: a string of starbursts, wrought in fine Lannisport gold, sapphires shining in their centers. Jaime had sent it to her only a few months after they last parted, along with the letter informing her he had accepted a diplomatic post in Meereen. Something to remember him by, he’d said, as though they might never meet again. 

As though she needed reminding.

“Thank you,” she managed, but only just. And then, because it was true and she could not help it: “It’s good to see you.”   

He smiled again, so broadly it crinkled the corners of his eyes. “I take it by your lack of surprise that you received Tysha’s note.” 

“I did.”

“I would have sent one myself, but I wasn’t sure how it would be received.”  

“It would have been very welcome, as would any news of your return,” she said. “You mentioned nothing of it in your last letter.”

She hadn’t planned to press him on that score, at least not so soon, but his paltry excuse had needled her. He knew quite well that Lord and Lady Stark’s feelings on the matter would not have changed her own.

“Ah, yes.” Jaime’s gaze darted briefly away and back again. “The truth is, I left Essos in a bit of a rush. Any letter I might have sent would have arrived along with me.”

Brienne’s eyebrows leapt up of their own accord. That was not at all the answer she anticipated. 

“Is everything all right?”

“It’s rather too early to tell,” he said, puzzling her even more. She was used to the odd glib or sarcastic deflection, but she’d never known him to be cryptic. “It will be, I hope.”

Though she wished to, Brienne didn’t dare probe further. If something were truly wrong, he wouldn’t want to discuss it while Mr. and Mrs. Tarly stood just behind them snacking on sugar biscuits. So she asked about his voyage, and he inquired after the Starks, and she reminded him that the Dragonstone Stakes was to be held in a sennight, expressing her hope that he planned to be in town long enough to attend. 

“Of course I do,” he replied, smirking. “It’s been far too long since I lost a dragon to you over a race. Though if I heed the wisdom of this Pennytree fellow everyone is raving about, I might finally win one.” 

“You’re familiar with Lord Pennytree?” Brienne knew the paper was popular, but she hadn’t thought it so prominent that he would have already heard people raving about it. 

“Tyrion mentioned him in his letters once or twice.” Jaime shrugged. “He finds the man’s paper excessively amusing, though I believe a touch too moralizing for his taste.” 

“Perhaps that’s precisely why he should read it.” 

Jaime laughed. “I won’t tell him you said so.” 

A slight, irrepressible smile rose to her lips. “I doubt he would be surprised if you did.” 

“You used to be rather adept at such predictions yourself, as I recall.” Jaime angled his head as he considered her. “Do you find Pennytree as faultless as everyone else seems to?”

“Lord Pennytree is often correct,” Brienne acknowledged, trying to ignore the tightness coiling in her gut. “But faultless?” She shook her head. “I doubt anyone could make that claim.”  

Jaime hummed. “I suppose I shall see for myself next week.” 

His mouth gathered in the way it always did when he had more to say, and Brienne steeled herself for whatever he would ask next. Instead of persisting on the subject of Lord Pennytree, however, Jaime simply nodded toward the ballroom floor, where pairs were assembling in the telltale squares of a quadrille. 

“In the meantime, balls demand dancing, do they not?” He held out his good hand to her.  “Unless your card is full.” 

“My card is never full.” 

He took a step closer, his fingers nearly brushing her arm. “Do me the honor, then.”

Brienne stared down at his proffered hand. 

She wanted to. Desperately.

So she did. 

Her pulse pounded anew as she placed her gloved hand in his and allowed him to escort her into the fray. The two of them had done many things together in their time, but they had never danced. 

The steps took her away from him as often as they led her back, but it was still a strange feeling to be partnered by someone so nearly matched with her in both height and breadth. Brienne was larger than Jaime, but only slightly, and he made her feel much less unwieldy than she did when Robb or Jon dutifully led her to the floor. 

She was a bit breathless by the time the last violin note trilled into the air, and not only from the exercise. Jaime, who was not, immediately insisted they dance the next, a waltz, together as well. Brienne knew it was unwise—tongues would wag even more vigorously than they surely were already—but she couldn’t refuse him. 

How could she deny herself the opportunity of being, just this once, in his arms? 

Jaime took her right hand in his left and moved in close, waiting while she placed her other hand on the firm cap of his shoulder. He stretched his right arm toward her waist, and Brienne felt his hand curve around her side, then lift, then press down again.

“I had more fingers the last time I waltzed,” he said grimly, adjusting his position yet again. “My apologies if the sensation is unpleasant.” 

Brienne frowned, appalled he would think she’d notice such a thing, let alone mind it. If only he knew how many nights she had dreamt of that very hand cupping her cheek—how she cherished the memory of it, even though it had never been real, because it was his hand.  

Because she loved him.

It had been a quiet, distant thing, these past several years—a tender ache that waxed and waned, but never entirely left her. She’d almost forgotten what it felt like when he was standing in front of her, looking at her in that strangely soft way of his that made her feelings swell like trapped steam inside her chest. 

“It’s not unpleasant,” she said gently. “How could it be, when it reminds me of who you are?” 

“An insufferable loudmouth who nearly got us both killed?” 

Brienne squeezed his shoulder in rebuke. “A good man who risked his own safety to preserve mine.”

“I’m not, especially. Not as good as I should be.” 

“Are any of us?” 

His hand shifted again at her waist, drawing her fractionally closer. “You are.” 

Once, she would have glowed with pride to hear him say so, but now it only filled her with sorrow. He thought so well of her and so poorly of himself, and the distinction did neither of them any favors.

Brienne had compromised her morals more than once in the years since they both left Lannisport. She wasn’t ashamed of it, either, not as she once would have been. She had come to understand that justice and goodness and honor were far more complicated than she once believed them to be. Jaime himself had helped her to see that. And while she still tried to do what was right, Brienne understood the costs and consequences of that choice far better than she had in her youth.

“I’m no better than anyone else here tonight,” she said. 

“The hell you’re not,” Jaime growled. “Look at them all.” He thrust his chin toward the perimeter of the room, where more than one pair of eyes was trained in their direction. “Staring. Whispering. Passing judgments they’ve no right to.” His jaw twitched. “Some things never change.”  

“Your homecoming was bound to cause speculation.” Brienne didn’t like the attention any more than he did, but it was hardly unexpected. “And choosing me as your dance partner hasn’t helped matters. We should have stopped after the first.” 

“Should we?” he asked sourly. “Why, might I ask? Worried they’ll think I’m courting you?”

The question stung, and Brienne hid it with a huff. “Of course not. They already know I’m acquainted with Lady Tysha, and it’s only a matter of time before they find out we’re acquainted, too.”

“Is that what we are?” 

“Jaime,” she reproached, and gods it sounded fond. Had it always? 

He responded with a playful, “Brienne.” 

“You know very well what I mean,” she said flatly, hoping to appear less affected than she was. “Once they know we’re friends, they won’t let me rest until they find out who you are courting. Or who you intend to court, anyway.” 

He quirked a brow. “Why would they think I intend to court anyone?” 

“Why else would the new Duke of Casterly be here tonight?”

Jaime’s shoulder rose and fell beneath her palm. “Can’t a man enjoy a ball?”

“Please. We both know you haven’t attended more than a dozen balls in the last fifteen years. And so do they.” 

“Maybe my time away has renewed my appreciation of them.” His fingers tightened around her hand. “Maybe I came to dance with you.”

“Be serious,” she chided, though her mouth had gone dry. 

“I am. And I can assure you, I’m not in King’s Landing to choose a wife. There was only one woman I ever wanted to spend my life with, and—” He swallowed. “Well, you know how that turned out.” 

Brienne nearly winced in surprise. 

That had been a much harder truth to hear than anything he’d had to say about the Mad King. It might have been the hardest one she ever faced. 

They hadn’t spoken of it in years, even in their letters, and Brienne never thought he would mention it again—let alone in such a place as this.

She had worked up the courage, several weeks after their brush with the Brave Companions, to ask him why it was he thought people should hate him. He’d implied, that day she visited the Rock, that the incident with the king was the wrong reason, which suggested the existence of a right one.

Jaime studied her for the longest time, his brows low and eyes unwavering, before taking a swig of honey wine and telling her, in that careless tone of his, that he’d been having an affair with his twin sister for more than half his life. 

Brienne’s stomach twisted as he explained how it had started in their youth, when she first came to his bed, and continued until he put an end to it when she came out at seventeen, devastated by her intent to forsake him in favor of the best husband she could snag. His resolve had crumbled after the business with King Aerys, when their father forced her to accept a proposal from Lord Robert Baratheon, Earl of Storm’s End. She’d hated it, hated Jaime for ruining her prospects, and he had vowed to do whatever he could to make her life more bearable. He couldn’t give her the freedom she longed for, but he could give her himself—and he’d loved her, so he had. 

He’d given her three children, too, though not intentionally, and Jaime had always wondered how her great oaf of a husband never suspected it. 

The revelation of it all left Brienne deeply shaken. It was repugnant and perverted and wrong—and she couldn’t square any of it with the man she’d come to know. Having made Lady Baratheon’s acquaintance during her seasons in town only made it harder to believe. 

Still, she did her best to make peace with it—because already, she had loved him, and even this impossible fact could not change that—and tried to think of it as little as possible. And she had succeeded, for the most part, until one morning the following summer, when she went to meet him for a ride and found him staring out to sea with a letter in his hand. 

“Bad news?” she asked. 

“You could say that,” he said darkly. “Cersei has gotten herself on the wrong side of old Lady Tyrell in some ridiculous matter and is quite beside herself at being spurned by the ton.” Jaime crumpled the missive in his fist. “She begs me to join her in King’s Landing so she does not have to bear the hardship alone.” 

With a swift flick of his thumb, he sent the wad of paper sailing over the edge of the cliff.

Brienne made no effort to conceal her astonishment. “You’ve had a falling out?”

“More like a moment of awakening.” 

“To what?” 

His gaze, heavy with sadness and something else she couldn’t decipher, met her own, but he did not answer. 

“I apologize,” she said. “You owe me no such explanations.” 

“I shall not offer one because it is owed, Brienne, but because I wish to give it.” He pointed vaguely to the east with the remaining fingers of his right hand. “I visited her this winter and found things… changed between us. I found myself changed. And I realized—” He broke off with a sigh. “Cersei will always be my sister, but that is all. The rest of it is done.”

“I’m…” she paused, wary of putting a foot wrong, especially on this subject. “I’m sorry.” 

“Don’t be.” His mouth curved in a small, wry smile. “I’m not.” 

Brienne, perhaps foolishly, had believed him. 

Maybe it had not been quite as simple as he proclaimed that day. She could hardly fault him for that. As she looked over at him, his face so close and so very dear to her, Brienne understood well how such a passionate regard could ruin the idea of anyone else—whether one wanted it to or not.

“Where is Lady Baratheon this season?” she asked, because she could think of nothing else to say. “I don’t believe I’ve seen her in town.” 

Jaime’s brow furrowed, and he blinked slowly at her before making his reply. “At Storm’s End, last I heard, doubtlessly annoyed that her husband’s health is keeping them in the country.” 

“Lord Baratheon is ill?”

“So Tyrion tells me. I always said the man would drink himself into an early grave.” 

“That must be difficult for her.” 

“I’m sure it is,” he drawled. “Now would you care to tell me why in seven hells we are speaking of my sister?” 

Brienne pursed her lips, trying not to frown. He had been the one to bring it up. 

“What would you like to speak of?” 

The look he gave her then was so startling that Brienne’s breath caught at the base of her throat. Searing and ardent, it made her keenly aware of the heat where their hands were clasped, where his other rested at her waist. 

He’d never looked at her that way before. 

“Nothing fit for the whole world to hear,” he rumbled.

She wanted to ask what in blazes he meant by that, but his hand gripped hers even tighter, even though the music had stopped, and Brienne found herself incapable of reply. Suddenly all of her felt warm, even where he wasn’t touching her.

It was as though he—

“Oh, look,” Jaime said, scowling as he tore himself away. “The she-wolf has sent her pup.”

Brienne swung around in time to see the last few paces of Robb’s approach. She had never been especially skilled at making introductions, but she managed a perfunctory one that it was obvious neither man desired. 

After a terse exchange of greetings, Robb turned quickly to Brienne. “Might I have the honor of the next dance, Miss Tarth?” 

He sounded as sincere and amiable as he always did when he asked that question, but there was something unsettling sheepish about the way he peered up at her. 

Jaime must have been right; Lady Stark had sent him. But Brienne was not a debutante who required looking after, nor did she need someone to prevent her from dancing with Jaime a third time. She may never have been lauded as a diamond of the first water, but she knew the blasted rules. 

Of course, she could hardly declare as much to Robb in the middle of the ballroom. 

Unexpectedly, Jaime spared her the need, tipping his head in a brief bow. “Thank you for the dance, Miss Tarth. We’ll meet again soon, I hope.” 

She dipped her own head in reply, hating the formality—hating her reluctance to be parted from him. “I hope so, too, Your Grace.”

He grinned at that, but it wasn’t real—wasn’t Jaime—and she felt the weight of his gaze as Robb took her arm. 

The feeling lingered as the two of them lined up with the other couples for the country dance. When they all bowed to begin, Brienne dared a glance back in Jaime’s direction. 

He was already gone. 

Chapter Text

A light breeze rustled the foliage around the narrow, hard-packed road as Brienne steered her dapple-gray mare through the kingswood.

For a moment, she closed her eyes, breathing it in.

The earthy smell of soil and cedar mixed with the distant tang of the sea always reminded her of Tarth. Its comforting familiarity was why she sought the forest when she was out of sorts. And the Hightowers’ ball had her very out of sorts. 

It had been forty-odd hours, and still she could not get Jaime out of her head—could not forget the intensity of his gaze or the firm grasp of his hands or the peculiarity of what he’d said. The prospect of seeing him again, which she most likely would when she called at Casterly Place for tea the following day, filled her with both dread and longing. 

She had no idea what to expect. 

Would he finally explain why he had come home? Would he tell her whatever had been so unfit he could not utter it in the ballroom? Would he look at her again with eyes burning like wildfire? 

Brienne turned her face toward the trees so Podrick, trotting companionably beside her, wouldn’t notice the blush flooding her cheeks—not that he seemed to be paying much attention.  

As adept as anyone at reading her moods by now, the groom had made no attempt at conversation ever since they crossed the river. He had, in fact, made no sound at all until a quarter mile back, when he began humming the melancholy tune of an old song. Brienne did not especially wish to be reminded of Jenny and her ghosts just then, but she also knew Podrick meant no harm by it. 

After all, he was the closest thing to a friend she had in the city other than Lady Tysha and the Starks, and Brienne found his company just as soothing as the wood. 

Lamentably, she would have to relinquish both far sooner than she wished to. 

Just ahead of them, a sweeping curve turned the road eastward. Not far beyond it, they would reach a fork where Podrick always stopped to tell her they should turn back. He would undoubtedly do so again, and he would be right. It was unwise to venture further from the kingsroad, even in the brightness of the afternoon. Besides, Brienne had promised Lady Stark she would join the family for a promenade, and it would take them at least three-quarters of an hour to travel back to Winterfell House. 

The sound of an approaching rider put an abrupt end to Brienne’s train of thought and to Podrick’s low melody. The groom urged his horse nearer to hers, making room for the traveler still mostly obscured behind the lush greenery to pass them by. 

When the man came into view, dressed in a tall top hat and a deep blue riding coat nearly the same shade as her own, Brienne pulled so hard on the reins that her normally docile mare reared up with a whinny. 

“Easy there,” Jaime said, bringing his big bay horse to a stop in the middle of the road. “It’s only me.”  

His uncanny ability to surprise her—and to find her, damn him—was something she definitely had not missed. 

“As I see,” she said brusquely. “What are you doing here?”

“Enjoying a ride in the kingswood,” he said, his tone as glib as his smile. “Same as you.”  

“Is that so? Just a ride?” 

It had been an age since Brienne summoned annoyance to disguise the disquiet Jaime’s presence so often inspired, but their years apart had clearly not diminished her ability. 

“No, as it happens, I came with a purpose. I need to speak with you.” His eyes flicked pointedly to Podrick and back again. “Privately.” 

“And accosting me on the road in order to do so seemed like a good idea?” 

“It’s worked before.”  

Brienne frowned. That had been a long time ago, and there’d been no witness riding at her side. 

As though he had read her thoughts, Podrick edged closer to her. “Miss, do you know this man?” 

“Indeed she does,” Jaime said mildly, but Brienne heard the impatience beneath it. “I mean her no harm, I assure you.” 

The young man gave a skeptical grunt.

“It’s all right, Podrick,” Brienne said. “Lord Casterly and I are old friends.” 

Podrick’s brow creased. “Friends?”

Brienne didn’t blame him for his disbelief. She and Jaime had never made a likely pair. 

“I wish only to borrow her for a short while,” Jaime said, more earnestly this time. “There’s an oak grove not far from here, just on the other side of this thicket.” He pointed to his right. “She shall be quite safe.” 

As much as the idea of being alone with him made her pulse quicken, there was no predicting when they might next have the opportunity. So when Jaime shifted his attention to her, canting his head entreatingly, Brienne nodded.  

“Miss, I don’t think you—” 

“I’ll be fine.” She gave Podrick the most consoling smile she could muster. “Lord Casterly and I rode together often in the Westerlands, some years ago.”

His brown eyes widened in protest. “I’m not leaving you.” 

“We’ll be the ones leaving you, lad,” Jaime said, turning his horse off the road. “Stand guard here, if you like. We won’t be far.” 

Podrick glared after him, but he seemed to sense the futility of further argument when Brienne tugged her mare to the left, making to follow Jaime into the trees. 

“Promise me you’ll shout if you need anything,” he called after her.   

“Thank you, Podrick. You have my word.” 

Brienne glanced over her shoulder once or twice as her horse ambled through the dense green brush, trailing Jaime in silence until the undergrowth thinned beneath the cover of a dozen giant oaks. They dismounted near the far edge of the grove, and Brienne couldn’t help but peer back toward the road as Jaime tied both their horses to a thick, low-hanging limb. 

Satisfied that Podrick had not followed them, Brienne turned to find Jaime standing a few paces away, studying her intently. 

“You never used to ride with a groom.” 

“The Starks are more insistent on the matter than my father was, at least when we’re in town,” Brienne said. “It’s my own fault, really.” She lifted her hand to the thin, silvery line on her cheek. “I made the mistake of telling Sansa the truth about this when she asked.”

Her freckles camouflaged the scar well enough, but it was clearly visible to anyone who bothered to look closely. Of course, few people did. Hers was not a face meriting careful inspection. 

“How did you know where to find me?” 

Jaime shrugged. “You wrote often of your penchant for afternoon rides. I simply waited for you to depart and followed you out of the Mud Gate.” He gestured northward. “I had to cut through the woods to get ahead of you.” 

Brienne’s brows drew together. Is that what he’d always done?

“You needn’t have gone to such trouble,” she said. “I was due for tea with Lady Tysha tomorrow.”

“It couldn’t wait.” 

“What couldn’t?” 

Slowly, Jaime reached inside his coat and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. Even before he held it up, Brienne knew exactly what it was. The latest edition of Lord Pennytree’s Sporting Weekly.

“This,” he said, uncharacteristically somber.

Her stomach lurched. “A sporting paper?” 

“Your sporting paper.” 

The shock of it rolled over her like an icy wave from Shipbreaker Bay, and Brienne sucked in a sharp breath. 

It wasn’t that she had never envisaged someone confronting her about it—she could hardly have penned the confounded thing for nearly two years without considering the possibility. She just never imagined it would be Jaime.

“I thought perhaps I was wrong when you answered me so easily at the Hightowers’ ball. Then I read it again.” He took a step forward, a challenge in his gaze. “I know your words too well to doubt it. Your keen observations, your stubborn devotion to honor and fairness, your subtle wit. It’s you, Brienne. You cannot deny it.”  

“I have no wish to deny it,” she said, solemn but without shame. “Yes, I write the paper. Lord Pennytree’s words are mine.” 

It was remarkably liberating to speak the words aloud after concealing herself for so long behind a shroud of fiction. Brienne knew the venture would never have succeeded if she hadn’t assumed Lord Pennytree’s persona, but she hadn’t planned it that way. 

She never planned to write it at all. 

If not for Mr. Goodwin, her father’s solicitor, Brienne would never have dreamt of sharing her reflections so publicly; she shared them with precious few even in private. But the kind old man had encouraged her, suggesting the pseudonym to protect her identity. Eventually, with her consent, he made the arrangements with a publisher on the Muddy Way and set up the payment account, where Brienne had been tucking away every coin she earned. Lord Pennytree would never make her rich, but she hoped to save enough to one day establish her independence—perhaps in a snug cottage by the sea somewhere that felt like home. 

“I—” Jaime gave a faint shake of his head. “I never thought you capable of such a thing.” 

Brienne dropped her eyes to his boots. “I don’t suppose you would.” 

Most people would laugh at the idea that big, dull Brienne could write with the acuity of Lord Pennytree, could produce something that had so engrossed the ton. She wasn’t a witty conversationalist, to be sure, and she had never been quick and sharp-tongued like Jaime. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t clever. And her inability to easily participate in most of the sporting events she enjoyed did not preclude her from having opinions—quite good opinions—about them. 

“You mistake my meaning,” Jaime said, dipping his head until she would look at him once more. “I would never doubt that you possess the skill, Brienne. You have that in spades. It’s the foolishness of it, the deception, that is not like you at all.” He shook his head again. “This is so far outside the bounds of propriety that I—” 

“Propriety?” That he dared to censure her with such a word made the tips of Brienne’s ears flush hot. “Are you not the one always telling me to hang propriety?” 

“This”—he flourished the paper at her, his forehead bunching with anger—“is not the same.” 

It wasn’t, but Brienne had expected his understanding, nonetheless. She had never fit neatly into the box society had crafted for her; Jaime had not only known that about her, he had encouraged it. Appreciated it. He was the only person who ever had. 

“Perhaps not,” she said, “but that doesn’t explain why you are so upset about it.” 

“What else would you have me be? Did you think I would be glad of this”—he waved his hand in the air, and the paper crinkled beneath his grip—“this lunacy? Gods be good, Brienne. I am the one prone to recklessness, not you. You’re the responsible one. The one who does what is right.” 

“What great wrong have I done?” Brienne demanded, her own frustration rising to meet his. “I have written about sport, Jaime. I have not acted out of malice or trafficked in lies. I have protected people from both, more than once. The only deceit is that the paper does not bear my name. Is that so dreadful?”

“I didn’t say it was dreadful. In fact, it was quite ingenious to invent something that would entertain the gentlemen of this horrid city the way the gossip papers keep its women clamoring for more.” More measured now, Jaime stuck the half-crumpled paper back inside his coat. “I’d say I was proud of you if it wasn’t so bloody dangerous. If you were found out—” 

“Surely you realize there’s little chance of that.” Even if anyone were ever shrewd enough to deduce that Lord Pennytree was not a man, they would never accuse her. “I am the last person in Westeros the ton would suspect. No one will ever know.”

“I know.” 

She splayed out her hands. “Do you plan on unmasking me, then?” 

“Of course not,” Jaime snapped. “But I didn’t spend weeks on a boat from Slaver’s Bay to have my concerns so hastily dismissed. Just because you disagree doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

Beneath the wool of her riding habit, goosebumps prickled on her skin. “This is why you came home?”

Jaime gave her a flat, knowing look, as though it had been obvious, but it certainly had not.

“I could hardly stand by and do nothing while you were placing yourself at such risk.”

Brienne felt a queer irritation at his presumption, irked that he thought her so incapable of caring for herself when she’d been doing it for so long. But there was also something else—something warm and wishful that snaked beneath her skin and curled around her heart.

He had been worried for her. He had crossed the seas for her. 

“I don’t understand,” Brienne said quietly, and she didn’t. Any of it. “Lord Pennytree is only published in King’s Landing. It can’t have reached you in Essos.” 

“Tyrion sent it to me.” 

“Tyrion?” That made even less sense. “Whyever would he do that?” 

“Because I asked him to,” Jaime said. “I told you he wrote of Pennytree in his letters. It started early last year, when he told me how the man’s impeccable predictions had half the ton hanging on his every word. And then he positively crowed over that business with Baelish and I…” His chin puckered as he frowned. “I can’t explain it. I had this ridiculous, nagging suspicion I couldn’t cast off, so I had him send me a copy of this season’s first edition. I thought it would put my mind at ease.” Rueful, his lips turned up this time, instead of down. “I sailed out of Meereen a fortnight later.” 

Brienne tried not to notice the warmth expanding in her chest. “I appreciate your concern a great deal, Jaime, but you needn’t have come back on my account. I’m perfectly well, as you see.” 

“Are you?” he asked dryly. “Because it seems to me you’ve gone out of your head.”

She opened her mouth to argue with him—maddening, stubborn man that he was—but Jaime held up his hand to forestall her. 

“Listen to me, Brienne. I never liked Petyr Baelish any more than my brother does, but he’s been relegated to organizing fights in that decrepit pit at Harrenhal thanks to you, and I can’t imagine he’s pleased about it.” Jaime narrowed his eyes at her. “What do you think he would do if he discovered the person responsible for his exile?” 

Brienne sighed. She hadn’t planned on that, either. 

She’d had an inkling for months that Baelish was up to something vile—or at least illicit—on the old tourney grounds just outside the King’s Gate. Too many fighters won that shouldn’t have, and too many of the best men didn’t enter his bouts at all.

Then, near the end of the previous summer, a talented young boxer named Gendry Waters had burst out of the crowd at the conclusion of a match, shouting that Baelish had been fixing the fights and swindling them all. Baelish, the weasel, claimed that Waters was the true cheater, and he wound up blacklisted from every ring from Bitterbridge to Duskendale.

Brienne believed the young man, and, after much deliberation, she decided to say as much. Lord Pennytree’s words had not completely turned the tide of public opinion, but they had gotten half a dozen other fighters to come forward and confirm the truth. 

“I don’t regret exposing Baelish, no matter what he would do,” she replied. “The entire scheme was criminal, and Gendry Waters would have lost his livelihood if I had not.”

“And why, pray tell, did you care so much about a man you do not know?” 

“All people deserve justice, Jaime. Whether I know them or not.”

It hadn’t, however, been only that. Not in truth. Brienne had thought also of something else—someone else—a wrong she could not right. 

More softly, she added, “I’ve seen what happens when the ton believes a lie because it is more convenient than confronting the truth.”  

Jaime’s throat went taut as he swallowed. “Brienne—”

“I would do it again, if I had to. It was the right thing to do.”

“Right for him, maybe, but not for you.” Jaime moved toward her, his face lined with determination and something else she could not read. “Don’t you understand? It isn’t only Baelish. Plenty of other men detest Pennytree for condemning their blood sports and criticizing their favorites, and that’s without knowing a woman is behind it all. There are people who will want to strike back, to ruin both your life and your reputation. They will want to hurt you, Brienne. Obviously you do not fear the danger, but you must own that you see it.” 

Mutely, Brienne shook her head. Perhaps he didn’t understand her after all. Not as she’d thought.

“My reputation has never been of much consequence, and these days…well.” She hitched up a shoulder, then let it drop. “I face nothing but a life of spinsterhood, and Lord Pennytree is the only hope I have of scraping together a future that is in any way my own. Perhaps I think that is worth whatever danger there may be.” 

Thunder flashed across Jaime’s features, but when he spoke, he sounded almost sad. “You need not have chosen that life.” 

“Chosen it?” she asked, abashed. “Are you suggesting I should have wed Lord Wagstaff, then? Or gone begging to any other gentleman who could be persuaded to take me?” An old wound split open inside her, threatening her with tears she could not afford to cry. “What choice is it that you think I had?” 

“Me.” 

The word slammed into her like a fist to the chin, and Brienne nearly tripped over a tree root as she staggered back. Jaime reached out to steady her, but she wrenched her arm clear of his grasp. 

She couldn’t fathom why he had said such a thing, but it was a cruelty she did not deserve.  

“Don’t you dare mock me.” 

“Mock you?” Jaime spat. “It is you who mock me, Brienne. First at the ball, and now this?” He waved a hand at the forest around them. “There is no one here but the two of us. You need not continue to behave this way.”

“As though I am entitled to direct the course of my own life?”

“As though you do not know perfectly well that the only woman I ever wanted to marry is standing right here in this wood, and she would not have me.”

A desperate denial kindled inside her as Brienne struggled to draw breath into her lungs, but her body was coiled so tightly that it seemed impossible. It was impossible—so absurd and incomprehensible that his words had to be a lie. 

Except they weren’t. She could see on his face that he meant them with every shred of his soul.

“Brienne,” he said slowly, appearing more stricken with every passing second. “You didn’t know, did you?” The muscles twitched around his eyes. “How can you not have known? You told me yourself you didn’t want to marry me.” 

“I did not.” Even to conceal her heart, Brienne could never have said such a thing. Whatever Jaime might think of her now, she was no liar. “I told you I never expected you to marry me after you told your brother you never would.”

Jaime stepped close once more, so near now that she could see the gold glowing at the center of his green eyes. 

“That’s what you heard?”

A tear spilled down her cheek. “That’s what you said.” 

It had been one of the most humiliating and heartbreaking moments of her life. Brienne doubted she would forget it until the day she died. 

Jaime had invited Brienne and her father for dinner at Casterly Rock during their second summer in Lannisport, six weeks or so after his brother and Lady Tysha had returned home. Ser Selwyn had been too ill to accompany her, so she had gone alone. 

The new footman let her in, and the poor lad looked so nervous that she offered to make her own way to the drawing room. She knew the house well enough that finding it was no trouble. 

Brienne heard voices, low and male, as she approached the large room, and she halted abruptly in the doorway when one of them said her name.

“I like Miss Tarth a great deal, brother, but please tell me you aren’t thinking of marrying the poor girl just to get Father off your back,” Lord Tyrion was saying from the sofa. “There are other ways to achieve that end.” 

“You ought to know me better than that,” Jaime said. “I would never marry Brienne un—” 

He stopped short when his gaze flitted toward the door, locking instantly with hers. Mortified by his expression of dawning horror, Brienne turned and fled, but he caught up with her in the hall. 

“I’m sorry,” Jaime said, and he looked it. “I never meant for you to hear that.” 

“Yes,” she mumbled, “that’s very clear.”

“You mustn’t think that…” he trailed off, tugging at his cravat. “You see, I—”

“You needn’t worry over it,” Brienne interrupted, unable to endure the agony of his explanation. “I never expected you to marry me, Jaime.” 

His eyebrows arched up, then crashed down.

“I have always known we would only be friends,” she went on, hoping he would attribute the strain in her voice to discomfort instead of grief. “So there is no need for you to—” 

“I see.” His countenance smoothed, though it remained unusually pale. “I suppose we need not speak further on the subject, in that case.” 

“No, we do not.” 

He nodded crisply, and that had been that.

It hadn’t been a surprising revelation—Brienne knew better than to think he would ever care for her as she did for him—but that didn’t make it less painful. Still, she had treasured his friendship, and she hoped things would return to normal between them, in time.

Unfortunately, they hadn’t gotten much of a chance. Two weeks later, her father’s health declined dramatically, and she had been forced to return with him to Tarth. Only a few months after that, Jaime had sent her a letter and a necklace before departing the west himself, bound for Meereen. 

Brienne had always wondered if he meant the gift as an apology, but she had never asked him, and he had never said. Now, she wondered what might have happened if she’d been brave enough to mention it, rather than letting it all fade into the past. 

“Seven hells, Brienne.” His voice drew her back to the present, where the birds were singing among the oak leaves fluttering overhead. Where Jaime was staring at her as though she had just turned the world on end. “All this time, you thought…and I…” 

He huffed. 

And then he kissed her. 

It wasn’t slow or sweet or delicate—nothing like she had imagined a kiss would be when she’d longed, as a girl, for dashing Lord Renly to take her in his arms. 

It was better. Much better. 

Because it was Jaime.

His mouth surged against hers, urgent and fierce, and his hands flattened against her back, drawing her closer. She didn’t fully understand why it was happening, but even the gods would have thought her a fool if she’d wasted it.

Instinctively, Brienne curled her arms around his neck and kissed him back, just a little, but it was enough. Jaime groaned and stepped into her, wrapping her so tightly in his embrace that she could feel him everywhere—a friction and heat that rivaled that of his tongue as it swiped into her mouth, making her shudder. 

His hat hit her in the shoulder as it fell from his head, and her own slipped to one side, the pin tugging on her hair, but still he did not stop. He just kept kissing her, their lips a fight, a dance, a race that had something building inside her she did not have the words to name.

Only when one of the horses whickered did Jaime finally break away, breathing heavily and dropping his hands to her waist as he studied her. The canopy above them turned his eyes a brilliant, vivid green, and he looked so ethereally beautiful that Brienne wondered if she had imagined it all—if she would blink and wake up alone in her bed.

But then he murmured her name, so thick with tenderness she almost couldn’t bear it, angling his head as he eased back toward her. Unwavering. On purpose.

The world shrank to the pressure of his fingers, to the hot puff of his breath on her lips, until a sound—a human sound—made them both turn with a start.

Halfway across the clearing, Podrick gaped at them from the back of his horse.

“Podrick,” Brienne said, her voice little more than a rasp. “What—” 

“My apologies, miss,” he blurted out, “but you were gone so long.” 

“You should go.” 

Brienne jerked toward Jaime, assuming he was addressing Podrick, but he was looking straight at her. 

“Did you hear me?” he asked, gentle but insistent. “You need to leave, before I—” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Before I make this worse than I already have.” 

“You haven’t,” she objected.

“I have.”

He took a step back, then another, and Brienne felt his loss like the slow pull of the receding tide.

“I’ll fetch your horse,” he said, churning up the mossy ground when he spun on his heel.

She wanted to follow him, but she didn’t dare, not with Podrick watching. So she waited, gazing down at his fallen hat as she attempted to straighten her own, while Jaime untied the dapple-gray and led her over. He offered his hand to help her mount, and she accepted, though she did not need it. 

“I…” Jaime sighed, then handed her the reins. “Good day, Brienne.”

A tremor rippled through her chin. “Good day, Jaime.”

Desperate to say more but knowing she should not, Brienne kicked her mare into motion, following Podrick in the direction of the road. She glanced back before entering the thicket, and Jaime was still standing just where she’d left him, his golden hair glinting in the filtered sunlight. 

He smiled, slow and crooked and wondrously fond, and Brienne’s heart rose toward the sky. 

Chapter Text

Brienne felt half mad when she departed Winterfell House the following afternoon, bidding the Starks farewell as though it were an ordinary day and refusing Robb’s suggestion that she take the carriage, even though it looked like rain. 

She always walked the short distance to Casterly Place for tea, so she doubted he thought anything of it. He certainly couldn’t have suspected the truth—that Brienne’s pulse was pounding like a racehorse’s hoofbeats before her feet even touched the pavement, and she needed the open air and the movement of her muscles more than ever. 

The brisk wind bit at her cheeks, but Brienne just pulled her cloak more tightly around herself as she strode up the wide, tree-lined street. Neither the weather nor the exercise, however, were enough to distract her from her thoughts. 

From Jaime.

She couldn’t stop turning what had transpired in the kingswood over and over in her mind, replaying the things he’d said: that he had come home for her, that he had wanted to marry her. That, somehow, he had thought she didn’t want him. 

How in the name of the Seven had they both gotten things so wrong? 

Obviously, though Brienne could not yet fathom how, she had mistaken what transpired that evening at the Rock, regardless of what she’d heard him tell his brother. And, as it seemed, so had Jaime. 

It made no sense at all, but it had to be true. His demeanor the previous day had been at turns angry and forceful—and even wounded, for a moment or two—but never insincere. 

No matter what she thought before, no matter how sure she had been, there was no mistaking his feelings now. Not after he’d pressed his body close and kissed her. And kissed her. And kissed her some more. 

It hadn’t been a whim or an accident, Brienne was sure of that. If Podrick hadn’t discovered them, he would have kissed her again.

And then the way he had smiled at her, with his eyes and his mouth and his entire handsome face. She hadn’t mistaken that, either. 

What it all meant—and what would happen next—she was afraid to let herself imagine, but that hadn’t stopped a small bud of hope from taking root inside her.

The sky rumbled overhead as Brienne rounded the corner into the most fashionable neighborhood of Rhaenys’s Hill. When a light mist began to fall, she tipped her head back, letting the cool water drift under her bonnet and dampen her burning cheeks. Mother above, she was already blushing like a debutante, and she hadn’t even seen him yet. 

Brienne might have dallied, hoping to let it fade, had the drizzle not become a downpour, forcing her to hurry directly up the short stone steps of Casterly Place. She raised her hand to knock, but before her knuckles could make contact with the fine wood of the door, it swung away from her.

Jaime stood on the threshold in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat, his collar open to reveal the tanned skin at the hollow of his throat.

“Jaime,” she said dumbly, breathlessly, and she swore his lip twitched, despite the lines etched across his brow. 

“Come in, quickly,” he urged, gesturing behind himself. 

When she didn’t move fast enough, Jaime huffed and reached out into the rain, hooking his hand around her upper arm and all but dragging her inside. He released her just as swiftly, and Brienne stood in the empty foyer, dripping onto the marble floor while he shut the door behind them. 

When he turned to face her, Jaime frowned. “Could the Starks not have spared you their carriage on a day like this?” 

“I declined their offer,” she said. “I enjoy the walk.”

His eyebrows tilted together. “In the pouring rain?” 

“It wasn’t raining when I left.” 

Jaime sighed, then held out his hand. “Give me your things.”

“I—”

“Come now, you look half drowned,” he said sharply, but his eyes were kind. “Hand them over.” 

Brienne did as he bid her, pulling off her gloves before untying her bonnet and unfastening her cloak. Her sage green dress was mostly dry beneath it, aside from a darkened inch or two creeping up from the hem. 

“Where’s Creylen?” Brienne asked as Jaime took her garments and deposited them rather unceremoniously on the side table nearest the door. The old butler always let her in when she came to call. 

Jaime wiped his hands on the rich blue fabric of his waistcoat. “I gave him the afternoon off. Along with the rest of the staff.”

Brienne blinked. “Can you do that?” 

“It is my house, you know.” 

“Well, yes, but—”

Before she could finish asking how Lord Tyrion and Lady Tysha, who lived there, felt about that, Jaime took hold of her hand. 

Brienne startled at his touch, warm against her chilled fingers. Jaime’s lip quirked again, more noticeably this time, before he started down the hall, tugging her along with him. Bewildered, she followed, offering little resistance until they approached the drawing room door. 

Did he intend to parade her past it this way? Or worse, stroll through it with their hands entwined?

Her footsteps slowed. Jaime’s did not. 

“Jaime, what—” 

“Don’t worry,” he said, pulling her past the empty room. “They’re not here.” 

“But—”

That meant they were entirely alone.

She had been alone with him quite often, in years past, but never indoors. Never after he’d held her close and kissed her among the trees. 

Near the end of the hall, Jaime led her into what appeared to be a study, walking her clear to the center of the room before releasing her hand and returning to close the door. 

In all her visits to Casterly Place, Brienne had never been in this room. Bookshelves lined two of its walls, and the third contained a bay of large windows overlooking the sodden garden. An enormous dark desk and a few chairs sat off to her right, but she didn’t have time to examine anything beyond that. 

Jaime was moving toward her once more, his eyes the soft green of uncut emeralds.

She thought he might kiss her again when he stopped a mere step away, his gaze dropping to her mouth. Gods help her, she wanted him to. 

Instead, he swayed back a little, holding up a handkerchief she hadn’t noticed him remove from his pocket. 

“You’ll catch a chill if you don’t get dry,” he said, pointing at her face. 

Brienne was far heartier than that, as well he knew, and barely damp, but she took it from him anyway. She patted her face and the underside of her jaw, soaking up the last remnants of the rain, while Jaime watched, looking suddenly serious. 

“Is everything well with Lady Tysha and your brother?” Brienne asked, not knowing how else to begin. “She always sends a note if she needs to change our appointment.” 

Their fingers brushed when she handed back the handkerchief, and Jaime’s countenance flickered with something alarmingly akin to regret before he stepped away. 

“It is you who sent the note, as far as she knows,” Jaime said, dropping the cloth on the desk. “Thinking your visit postponed, she agreed quite easily to my brother’s offer of a picnic overlooking the bay.” 

“You told her I wasn’t coming?” 

That he had been dishonest bothered her less than it once might have. It was the reason for it that interested her now.

Jaime nodded. “It was ungentlemanly of me to lie to her, and to lure you here under false pretenses. But I wasn’t sure you would come otherwise.” He drummed the two fingers of his right hand against his thigh. “Yesterday, I… I behaved badly. You have my most sincere apologies.” 

Brienne tightened her jaw, hoping to stave off a tremble in her chin. “If you mean the things you said about Lord Pennytree, then you owe me no apology.” 

She knew very well he did not mean that, but she couldn’t bring herself to speak about the rest of it, not now that he was standing in front of her. Kissing him had been one thing, but discussing it required a measure of boldness she apparently did not possess—especially not if he was sorry for it.

“I understand your concern,” she went on, her gaze fixed vaguely on the bookshelf beyond his shoulder, “and as I told you, I appreciate it, but—”

“I’m not talking about the damned paper, Brienne.” 

Her eyes snapped back to his.

“I should never have compromised you like that, not when I knew your groom was so close by. I didn’t even bother to ascertain your feelings before I… well.” The apple of his throat bobbed, hard and brief. “None of that matters now that the lad has seen us.”

“Podrick is a good young man,” Brienne said quietly, feeling the hope beneath her ribs begin to wither. “He won’t speak of what he saw, if that’s what has you worried.” 

“You’re far too trusting if you believe that’s true.” 

“And you too little.”

“Perhaps.” Jaime smiled sadly. “Regardless, honor demands that I set things right.”

“Honor?” Brienne asked, detesting the hurt so plain in her voice. Detesting the part of herself that hadn’t hardened against it, even after all this time. “You needn’t act out of honor where I’m concerned.”

He scrubbed his hand across his forehead. “That isn’t what I meant.”

“Is it not?” She could think of few other ways to mean it. “If you’ve done something you regret, there is no need to take it further.” 

“Regret?” Jaime took a large, fierce stride forward, and then another. “What I regret is wasting the last three years in Meereen if there’s even the smallest chance you feel as I do.” His chest expanded as he drew in a breath, shifting nearer still. “We’ve spent far too long misunderstanding each other, you and I, so allow me to make things clear. I’ve wanted to kiss you for years, Brienne. To do far more than kiss you. To spend my life at your side.”

“Years?” she said, a shade above a whisper. 

She couldn’t manage more than that, not with her wilted hope springing back to life, unfurling into something so large and full it left little room for anything else.

The same hope shimmered in Jaime’s eyes as he stared at her, raw and exposed in a way she had rarely seen him. 

“Gods, yes,” he exhaled. “I knew it as soon as you returned to Lannisport. I would have known it much sooner, if I hadn’t been such a fool. But once I did…” He gave a weak shrug. “Did you never wonder why I invited you and your father for dinner that day? I wasn’t sure if I would manage to earn your affections, but if I did, I wanted—” Jaime’s hand flexed at his side. “I wanted him to at least consider granting his consent if the Kingbreaker asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage.” 

“Jaime,” she began, but he shook his head at her, seemingly determined to plow on. 

“Tyrion sensed I was up to something,” he continued, “and he asked me about it before you arrived. I told him the truth, and he said something crass about doing it to appease our father. I should have told him to piss off, but I said he ought to know better. That I would never marry you unless I wanted to. Well, that’s what I would have said, if I hadn’t seen you standing there.” Jaime’s mouth crumpled into a frown. “I thought you heard the whole of it. And when I followed you, the things you said… I thought you wanted nothing more from me than friendship, and how could I blame you for that?” 

“I did.” Brienne blinked against her tears, but they fell anyway, warm and slow down her cheeks. “I did want more.” 

A ragged breath burst out of him. “You did?” 

Brienne nodded, but found that it was not enough. 

She had been guarded and restrained and cautious for far too long, and where had that gotten her? Where had that gotten them both? 

Jaime had cracked himself open to make his feelings clear. She could do nothing less. 

For once, it was she who stepped forward, closing the scant space left between them. 

“You never needed to earn my affections,” she told him. “You already had them.” Jaime’s eyes glistened wide and wet in the rain-dimmed light as Brienne laid her hand on his chest. “I’ve loved you since that first summer. Since the Brave Companions, or not long after. I thought you knew.” 

“I didn’t,” he said hoarsely. “If I had, I would have sailed to Tarth instead of bloody Meereen.” Jaime placed his hand atop her own. “I would have never agreed to go at all if I hadn’t been so desperate to do something with myself that wasn’t pining after you.” His thumb traced the peaks and valleys of her knuckles. “I hoped I would forget you. But then you answered my letter, and I loved you too much to give you up entirely.” 

A fresh flood of tears rimmed her eyes. “I’m glad you didn’t.” 

“So am I.” 

Jaime lifted his hand from where it covered hers, curving it around the back of her neck as he leaned in to kiss her. 

It began slowly, gently, his other arm slipping around her and holding her steady against him, her hand still trapped against his chest. Soon, though, Jaime canted his head, pulling her down into a deeper kiss, his lips and tongue moving fiercely against her own.

She gasped in surprise when his mouth left hers to chart a path along her jaw, sending a frisson down her spine and out into her limbs. Jaime’s fingertips followed in its wake, sliding over her neck, her shoulder, her arm, before finally grazing her ribs as he kissed his way down her throat. Brienne clutched at his shoulders, and when his lips met her collarbone, hot and feather-light, she was seized with a queer urge to thread her fingers through his hair.  

He trailed further down her freckled skin, edging toward the neckline of her dress, and Brienne made a low, breathy noise that didn’t sound like her at all.

Jaime raised his head with a satisfied smirk. “As much as I’d like to, and believe me, I would, we can’t do this here.” 

If Brienne hadn’t already been flushed from his kisses, she certainly was now. She’d never expected to participate in such a moment of passion, let alone with Jaime, and she’d been too overcome to truly think about where it might lead.

Where it would lead. 

She nodded faintly as a new, more intense heat engulfed her cheeks. 

Jaime kissed her once more, quick and hard and brimming with want, before pulling back. “You deserve better than to be ravished in my father’s study. You deserve candlelight and a marriage bed without the risk of my idiot brother coming home and barging through the door.” He settled his hands at her waist. “I intend to give you both, if you’ll have me.” 

Brienne knew that—he’d been telling her all week, each time they met—but hearing it again now that she believed him was a quietly marvelous thing.

“I’ll even ask Ned Stark for your hand, if I must.” He nuzzled his nose into her neck again, placing a brief kiss just beneath her ear. “Though I’m sure you know how much the thought pains me.”  

A small smile pulled at the corners of her mouth. “There’s no need for that.” 

“No?” Jaime straightened. “Whom do I need to ask, then?”

Brienne thought of Ser Endrew, her closest living relative—which wasn’t very close at all. The man didn’t know her well enough to have an opinion, let alone one that mattered. He hadn’t even met her until the day he’d taken up residence at Evenfall Hall, and they had hardly spoken during the week they shared its roof before Brienne departed for the North. 

There was, in truth, no one for Jaime to ask, except for…

“Me,” she said, tilting up her chin. 

Jaime grinned. “Marry me, then, Brienne Tarth,” he said with an affection so earnest it made her chest ache. “Please.” 

“Yes, Jaime,” she murmured. “I will.” 

Eyes bright, he bent close to kiss her again, light and sweet and—

Happy. 

It might have been the happiest she had ever felt.

Unfettered by worry or doubt, Brienne didn’t try to hide it when Jaime pulled away, and his face lit with a joy of his own as he regarded her. 

“Please tell me you’ll consent to a short engagement,” he said lightly. “I’m afraid our years apart have weakened what little resolve I might have had.” 

“I have nothing to wait for, Jaime.” 

“Thank the gods.” He slid his hands to the small of her back. “What do you say to a honeymoon in Dorne when the season is over? I’ve heard the Water Gardens are especially pleasant in autumn.”

“That sounds wonderful,” Brienne said, and it did—especially since she would be seeing it with him. 

“And after?” he asked. “How do you feel about returning to Casterly Rock? Would you mind living there, do you think?” 

“Mind?” How could she mind, when it was where he’d first shown her who he truly was? Where she had fallen in love with him? “Of course not.” 

“Are you certain? I could probably buy Evenfall out from under that cousin of yours, if you’d like it back.” 

This time, Brienne kissed him, and she felt his smile stretch against her lips. 

“The west suited me perfectly well during my time there,” she said when they parted. “I’ve no doubt it will again.”

“You won’t miss Tarth?”

“I’ll always miss Tarth, but not as I once did. It hasn’t been my home in years now.” Brienne bit her lip. “I suppose I will miss spending the season in the city, though I’d never have imagined it.” 

It wasn’t that she didn’t want what he was offering with every beat of her heart. But she would be giving things up, too. Things that had mattered to her. 

“You’ll have no call to miss that,” Jaime said, and she could tell by his tone that he wasn’t only speaking of King’s Landing. “You know I’ve no great love for this place, but your company will make it far more bearable than it’s ever been. Hells, I might even enjoy myself.” He winked. “We’ll have to devise a new name for your paper, though. Casterly Sporting Weekly has a rather nice ring to it. Or perhaps The Duchess’s Sporting Post?” 

Brienne twitched her head back in surprise. “I thought you wanted me to stop?” 

“I did, when it put you in danger.” He arched a dusky gold brow. “What good is being the Duke of Casterly if I can’t protect my own wife?”

“You aren’t worried about what people will say if they know it’s me?” It would not, Brienne suspected, be anything favorable. “What they will think of me? Of you?” 

“Ah, yes, my sterling reputation,” he drawled. “However shall I endure the blow?” 

“I mean it, Jaime. I never planned to reveal myself.” 

Jaime tipped his head forward, his gaze dark and intent as he peered up at her. “What did you plan?”

Brienne shrugged. “To retire, eventually. Mr. Goodwin, my father’s old solicitor, has been managing the accounts so that I might live off them, one day, in a modest home of my own.” 

“Is that why you did it?” he asked. “For the money?”

There was no judgment in his expression or his voice—just a gentle curiosity. 

“Partly,” she admitted. “But not only that, no.” 

“Why, then?”

“Because I enjoyed it, I suppose,” she said. “When my father died and the Starks offered me a home, I got to do things here beyond attending every ghastly ball on the social calendar. Things I liked doing. Things I’d done with you, or on Tarth, but never in town. Lady Stark didn’t like it very much, but she didn’t forbid me the way Miss Roelle had done.” 

Jaime scowled. He’d expressed his intense dislike of her former chaperone on numerous occasions, but none of that mattered now. 

“You know I wrote to you in those days,” Brienne continued, “but I also corresponded with Mr. Goodwin. He was checking in on me, I think, and I told him about the races and matches I attended with the Starks. I’m sure he could tell how much I relished it all—he’d known me since I was a girl, riding astride in the hills and sneaking into the armory to steal a sword.” 

Brienne went on to tell him how Mr. Goodwin paid her a visit, halfway through her first season at Winterfell House, and asked her if she had ever considered sharing her musings more widely. Papers of all kinds, he’d said, were gaining popularity with the ton, and she offered something he hadn’t read in any of the others. Something special.

She had refused, at first, knowing better than to think she could author such a thing as a woman. No matter how seriously Mr. Goodwin took her opinions, others would not be so kind. 

But he had persisted, calling again the following week to suggest the notion of Lord Pennytree and explaining the income—the future—the venture could offer her. 

That had been what swayed her, in the end. The Starks had made her part of their family, and Brienne was grateful to them, but she had no wish to be dependent on their charity forever. She would not linger in their household once their children moved out of it, only to be passed along to Robb like a burdensome fixture of the estate when he inherited his father’s title.  

“I would never have done it, had my father still lived,” she said, winding down her tale. “But it was easier, somehow, with him gone. I knew there was risk, despite Mr. Goodwin’s assurances, but there was no one left to disappoint.”

“Brienne,” Jaime said softly. “You are no disappointment. You are bloody magnificent.” He touched his forehead to hers. “And you no longer need to conceal your talents. Not if you don’t wish to.” 

Permitting herself to be known, to print her words beneath her own name, had never been a remote possibility. Now that it was, Brienne found the prospect both terrifying and oddly tempting. 

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

Jaime lifted his right hand to her face, brushing his thumb across her scar. “Good.”  

Brienne allowed herself to lean into his touch. She had dreamed of such a moment, countless times, but this one was better. Much better. 

Because it was real. 

Because he loved her.

Chapter Text

The sky above the Dragonpit shone a brilliant, clear blue as the citizens of King’s Landing assembled for the first day of the Royal Races. 

People from all corners of the city streamed through the arena’s great bronze gates, eager to see the finest horses in the Seven Kingdoms compete in the season’s most anticipated races—and to make or lose their fortunes over the victors.

For Brienne, the day held an entirely different kind of anticipation.

She had attended and enjoyed the famed sporting event several times before, of course, but never on Jaime’s arm. Never surrounded by so many whispers and overt, astounded looks.

But it was not Jaime’s presence—or even their engagement—attracting so much attention as the two of them walked up the wide stone path. 

It was her.

Or, rather, Lord Pennytree. 

Jaime himself had revealed Brienne’s identity only a few days before, lauding her achievements in front of the crowd at their engagement ball and calling for a toast in her honor.

He had convinced her it was the best course of action when Brienne told him she would keep writing, at least through the end of the season. He had dragged enough secrets through his life, Jaime had said, and he didn’t wish the same for her. It was safer, braver, nobler to proclaim the truth themselves. 

It was, he’d insisted, exactly what she would have told him to do. 

He was right, of course. Vexingly so. 

But that hadn’t made it any easier. 

At first, as she stood before the ton in the wake of his announcement, Brienne had thought the shocked silence would be the worst of it. She had, after all, survived far worse than a sea of wide eyes fixed on her in anything but celebration. But when a low buzz erupted near the back wall and quickly spread—a vast susurration heralding the birth of a hundred rumors and scathing remarks—Brienne had to clench her teeth to keep her chin from betraying her.

All the while, Jaime kept his arm around her waist, remarkably composed in the face of their response. His steady, proud smile never wavered… until a familiar voice broke through the clamor.  

“His Grace called for a toast, did he not?” 

Jaime tensed beside her, and Brienne lost the battle with her chin.

Lord Stark stepped forward, his tone calm and resolute as he spoke again. “To Miss Tarth.”   

Once, not long after Brienne had taken up residence with his family, the Viscount had told her that she reminded him of both his daughters, that she had Arya’s determination and Sansa’s heart. In that moment, she knew he understood her better than her own father ever had. 

Brienne felt the truth of it again that night in Casterly’s ballroom, watching him be the first to raise his glass, so keenly that she nearly wept in front of all two hundred of their guests. 

Before she could fully take it in, the whole room had joined him, and Brienne’s throat grew so thick she couldn’t even take a sip of punch herself. Someone off to the right began to clap—Robb, she suspected, though she had not seen it—and the applause bloomed outward like a ripple in a still pond. Tyrion, looking positively delighted, stomped his foot, encouraging others whose hands were similarly occupied with drinks to do the same, and a smirking Lady Tyrell banged her cane. 

After that, the entire evening had been a whirlwind.

When Jaime wasn’t monopolizing her on the dance floor, a constant stream of people had accosted her, asking her all manner of questions about how she had done it. Mostly, Brienne demurred, so overwhelmed by the response that she struggled even more than she usually did in such situations. Not everyone, naturally, was amiable and gracious and content to let her be. But whenever anyone spoke even mildly out of turn, Jaime had been there, defending her with sly rejoinders and barbed smiles. Singing her praises. Being… 

Being Jaime. 

He wasn’t quite himself that day at the races, however—albeit not in the way Brienne would have expected, given all the attention they were getting.

He was downright cheerful. 

He was bloody whistling. 

“What’s gotten into you?” she asked as they made their way through the throng.

“Can a man not enjoy an outing with his betrothed on a beautiful day?” He pulled her gloved hand up to his mouth and brushed his lips across her knuckles. “I’m excited to see my future wife proved right about the most prestigious race of the year, now that they all know who you are.”

“That’s not for two more days, Jaime.” The day after next, the royal family would descend on the Dragonpit in full pomp to witness Aegon’s Cup; the Prince Regent himself would crown the winner with a wreath of purple roses. “And I may not be right. Golden Rose had an excellent showing last week in Hayford.” 

“But Sweetfoot won the Dragonstone Stakes, just as you predicted.” 

Brienne was well aware of that, as Jaime knew. They had witnessed the stallion’s stunning three-length victory together just a few days after he’d asked her to be his wife. 

“Yes, he did, but—”

“You won’t be wrong,” Jaime insisted, tucking her hand back into the crook of his arm. 

“I suppose we’ll see.” 

“That we shall.”  

They approached the entrance to their section of the stands, but instead of passing through it take their seats, Jaime walked right past it. 

“Do you mean to watch the race from the rail?” she asked. 

Brienne didn’t mind the closer view, nor the spray of dirt that often came with it, though it wouldn’t exactly be fair to anyone unfortunate enough to stand behind them. 

“We aren’t watching the first race,” Jaime said, so matter-of-fact it made her eyebrows lift. 

“And why might that be?”

It was a short race of mostly older horses, so it didn’t much matter—but it confused her all the same. 

Jaime smiled, broad and boyish. “Because I have something to show you.” 

He refused to answer any further questions as he led her past the end of the stands and around the back of the first row of stables to a small paddock. There were perhaps a dozen horses milling about on the half-trampled grass within it, but two in particular caught her eye. A pair of yearlings—one a dark, striking bay, and the other a rich chestnut with bright white socks and a matching white blaze streaking down its face—were tied to a post directly ahead of them.

A tall, skinny young man stood beside them on the outside of the fence, and when he spun at the sound of their shoes crunching on the gravel, Brienne realized that she knew him. It was Josmyn, one of the grooms at Casterly Place. 

“Is everything in order, Peck?” Jaime asked him.

“It is, Your Grace.” 

“Good man,” Jaime said. “Now run along and watch a race or two before you take them back.”

“Thank you, Your Grace,” Peck said with a grin.

Brienne looked over at Jaime as the young man hurried off up the path. “Take them back where?” 

“To the stables at Casterly, for now.” Jaime steered her closer to the fence. “They’re yours.” 

She turned toward him so sharply that her hand slipped from his arm. “Mine?” 

He nodded, looking far too pleased with himself. “An engagement present.” 

“An…” Brienne glanced at the horses. Once upon a time, she’d thought the necklace too much, but this… this was extravagant even by Jaime’s standards. Speechless, she returned her gaze to his. “Why?” 

“Because I wanted to, you maddening woman,” he said, his teasing laced with a fondness that was becoming wonderfully familiar. “I bought them from Mr. Duncan out of Ashford Meadow.”

A prickle of excitement overcame her surprise. “Ser Henly bought Sweetfoot from Mr. Duncan’s stables.” 

“He did indeed. Mr. Duncan bred and raised your champion himself, as a matter of fact.” Jaime dipped his head at the yearlings. “He tells me these two share his sire.”

Dazed, Brienne held her hand out to the bay, and it snuffled at her palm. She could see the resemblance in his build, and in the chestnut’s color. 

“I don’t know what to say.” She could have spent a decade writing as Lord Pennytree without a prayer of owning one horse such as this, let alone two. Shifting back to Jaime, Brienne reached for his forearm and clasped it tight. “Thank you.” 

Jaime’s eyes glowed the verdant green of sunlit leaves as he smiled. “You’re pleased with them?” 

“How could I not be?” She squeezed his arm again before releasing it. “They’re splendid.” 

“They are, aren’t they?” he asked, preening just a little. “I thought we might pilfer that trustworthy groom of the Starks you like so much, if he wants the job, and take them back to the Rock. The track at Lannisport isn’t as glamorous as this, but it’s not a bad proving ground.”  

“You mean for us to race them?” 

“Not us,” he said firmly. “You.” Jaime curled his fingers around her wrist, snaking between the sleeve of her spencer and the cuff of her glove. “I know you haven’t decided about the paper yet, not beyond this year. If you want to write, write. If not, race these handsome fellows instead. Or do both at once. You’ve the diligence for it, I have no doubt.” 

“I—” Brienne faltered. Her heart swelled with a love she longed to express, but it was too immense, too profound, and such things did not yet come as easily to her as they did to him. “Only if you race them with me,” she finally said, hoping he would understand. “They shall have both our names behind them, or none at all.” 

“You are sounding more like a duchess by the day,” he said huskily, slipping his hand from her skin. “You leave me little choice but to agree to your terms”—he held up a finger—“with one minor condition.” 

“What’s that?” 

Jaime pointed at the yearlings. “They’re yours to name.” 

Brienne twisted toward the horses, but she didn’t need to see them again to know what her answer would be. 

“Honor,” she said, brushing her fingertips down the chestnut’s blaze. She stretched out her other hand to the bay, gently patting its neck. “And Glory.” When she turned back to Jaime, she found his expression extraordinarily soft. “For old times’ sake.”

“And new times, too, I hope,” he murmured, inching his face closer to hers. “They’re good names, Brienne.”  

“I think so,” she said quietly, tipping forward to meet him. 

She would have, too, had the brim of his hat not lightly bumped her bonnet, making Jaime stop short. A disgruntled crease formed between his brows as he glanced around the paddock. 

“It is deeply unjust that propriety prohibits a man from kissing his future wife in public,” he grumbled. 

Brienne’s lips bowed in a slight, unruly smile. “Hang propriety.” 

Jaime grinned. And then he did.