Archive of Our Own

You think that Renly is immortal, for he shines nearly as bright as you. You think he will live forever, for how can he not? He is your love, and you are his, and when he smiles, everything is clear as a cloudless day and your heart, it blossoms like a peony.

You think he is immortal. He loves you more than anyone ever has, than ever they could, for he understands the depths of your soul, the parts of you that never see the light of day. He shares them, innately, and loves them. When he says your name, it sounds like poetry.

You play together, and your lovemaking is perfection. His body against yours is the stuff of songs, and he is glorious, a king among men.

And when he dies, it is your fault. They say it isn’t so, but you know in your heart it is true. It was only a game, and he was showing off, showing that he could leap as high and far as he wanted, that he could catch a star if he desired it. But would he have reached for it were it not to impress you? He would have let the discus fall, let one of his brothers catch it, except to leap high and grab it would make you smile so he did it and in so doing, fell. Your tears could make rivers, lakes, seas, for he was only mortal in the end.

He dies, but your love does not. His body is interred in dirt, and yours continues on, still youthful though you feel old, still whole though you are broken.

A knight of flowers you may be, but what flowers are there now that Renly is gone? No more does your heart bloom like a flower in spring. It is too starved of the sun to bloom.

And when you can’t remember his face, only the color of his eyes, you put that color in a flower, so that when it blooms each year as the days grow longer, you can remember that once you were young, and once, you loved.

It hurts.

Alannys says it is his heart that hurts, but he does not know if that is true. Perhaps Balon never had a heart. If he’d had one, perhaps he would have known that this could come, that his sons could be gone, given to the depths of the sea, given to the wolves. Perhaps if he’d had a heart, he would have seen his own hubris, would have feared loss as much as losing.

But it is his head that hurts. His head that throbs in the night when he tosses and turns in his sleep, wondering if perhaps—if his ships had come from the east and not the west, if his brothers had not been weak, if he’d not been blind by his own ambition, if his sons might still live and he might yet have the crown he’d so longed for.

Each day, it burns, aches, as though his very skull crushes in upon his brain, as though Robert’s hammer had struck him and not his isles.

He rages. He does not storm, for he is no storm lord. He is the sea, he is iron, he is salt, and rock, and his rages are made of more than wind. He remembers long after the storm passes.

His teeth grit and grind, his face grows haggard.

“You must care for yourself,” his youngest brother warns him one day. “If you fade, what shall become of us all? For the Crow’s Eye will have your seat.”

Let him have it, he wants to say. Let him take it, and this damned headache as well. Are we not already faded? If Robert defeats us so easily? We are the blood of iron, the reavers of the west, and we’ve been chastised like children.

Instead, he says, “He is my heir, with my sons gone.”

“He is not,” pipes up a voice and he and his brother turn to face the girl.

He’d hardly paid attention to her, for she was not one of his boys. But there she sits, his flesh and blood, and he notices for the first time, a throwing axe at her belt.

My daughter, he thinks, looking at her and truly seeing her, as if for the first time. Have you always been thus, born for war? Or were you born from my brokenness and this thrice-damned headache?

“Who goes there?”

“No one.”

She smiles to herself. She can only ever smile when she says those words, for it was No One who brought the Titan to his knees. It was No One who was clever as a cat and who ran beneath the stars like a wolf. But she was not No One, with nowhere to go.

She was Arya Stark and she was home at last. How many years of wandering? How many adventures? Gods in all their fickleness throwing obstacles in her path and she, cunning as a fox, had overcome them all, one right after the other.

“Well, no one had best got about her business then.”

“Does the lord of this castle not let poor beggars into his hall?” she asked, feigning ignorance. Gendry would never do such a thing.

“He would, save that there are too many to feed while they wait to see who he’ll marry.”

How well she’d learned to keep her face still. “Is he not already married? I’d heard…”

“Aye, but she’s not returned from war, is she? Ten years gone, and all the other kings and queens returned to their keeps. Either she’s dead, or the gods have punished her.”

“What for?”

“Whatever gods punish mortals for,” the man shrugs. “In any case, you’d best get about your business, or the fine ladies within will be offended by your presence. He’s to announce who he’s to wed today, though—” the man lets out a dry laugh, “He’s been saying that for the past five years and still hasn’t. When he finishes his bloody bull’s helm, he says, and he’s been nearly done for five years. How a man can make so little progress and yet hammer so fiercely…”

Arya tips her hat at the man, who’d been more useful than even he knew, and made to leave, skirting the castle walls out of sight. She climbs up the wall of the castle, finding footholes as easily as Bran had done when he’d been a boy, then down into the courtyard on the other side. She hears the ringing of hammer on steel, and sees some women in brightly colored dresses hovering near the forge. She pushes past them, ignoring the way they whisper, the way one of them even calls to a guard, for who had let this peasant past?

She goes into the forge and sees him by his anvil, tapping away on the steel edge of a horn.

“You’ve lost your touch,” she says dryly, “If it takes you ten years to weld a horn onto a helm.”

He looks up, his eyes bright, and blue. “You lost your touch, taking ten years to come home,” he retorts, laying the hammer down. His lips crush against hers and she feels herself melt into the familiar taste of him.

“I at least had adventures,” she says when they pull apart, running her fingers along his cheek, his beard soft beneath her fingers.

“And I unwelded at night,” Gendry shrugs. “You wouldn’t think I’d marry someone else while you were still out there, would you?”

She had been beautiful, Lyanna. She had been so beautiful. There were songs of great beauty, of Aphrodite’s loveliness, but no one had been half so beautiful to him as Lyanna.

Each day, Robert goes into his workshop and he carves. He carves from his memory, her smile, the length of her face, the brightness in her eyes—he’ll put them all in stone that she will live forever, that everyone will know how much he loved her.

He carves, and sometimes, he imagines he hears her voice. She does not whisper as Cersei does. She laughs deep belly laughs the way he does. She does not grimace when he pours another glass of wine. She extends her glass and he pours one for her as well.

She’s a statue, but in this statue, Lyanna lives on. She lives forever, her beauty exactly as he remembers it, shining like the moon in polished marble. Sometimes, he holds her close to him and weeps that she is cold and stiff in his arms, that she is not soft and supple and warm. But at least he has not forgotten her. At least he remembers her. And the world will remember her as he does.

“I don’t see why people think that Stannis would make a better king when I’m here.”

“I’m here.”

“It’s not as though he’s charming or thoughtful. He only thinks of duty, and duty isn’t ruling. To rule you must truly care for your people. I don’t think Stannis has ever cared about anything. He’s certainly never cared as much as I have. No one has ever cared as much as I have.”

“No one has ever cared as much as I have.”

“That’s sweet of you to say, Brienne. Loyal to the last, my Brienne the Blue. You’ll rise high in my service, I promise. My breastplate. Let’s see how it looks in the mirror. Handsome. Yes. Handsome.”

“Yes, handsome.”

“See? Don’t I look kingly? One must look the part, something Stannis would do well to remember. And I certainly look the part. Ah yes. I love you.”

“I love you.”

Rhaegar wants her. He wants her, and for as long as he can remember, whatever Rhaegar wants, he gets. Even if he did not ask it.

He does ask it this time, but she does not wish to come with him. She is young—only a girl, it is true. She does not know what she refuses. So she runs from him. Why is she running from him? Does she not see that she is his, that there are worse things than his love, that he will sing songs of her beauty for all of time? Why does she run from him?

“Brother!” Lyanna calls, as she leaps over the river. “Brother he has come for me, the prince has come for me,” and her brother the water spirit rises from the river, long of face and grey of eye. But he is a god, and he washes aside the water spirit with ease.

“Father!” she calls as she leaps over a lake. “Father, a god wants me.” And her father, the spirit of the lake rises, but the brightness of the sun burns him away.

She lets out another cry. “Please,” she begs. “I do not want—” but surely she must know that he loves her? Surely he must know that he must have her, that he will sing songs of her beauty that will be themselves so beautiful that men will sing them for thousands and thousands of years?

He catches her, and wraps his arms around her, his lips searching out the white skin of her neck as she cries out, one last time, “You promised!” He presses them to it, expecting soft, supple flesh. But he does not find warmth. Her skin is rough, and hard, and cool, and when he opens his eyes, it is not skin at all.

She is a tree, with white bark and red leaves and her face—her eyes bleed and her lips laugh at him and his failures.

She hates him.

She hates him, and his infidelity, but mostly she hates that he must be called king, while she—queen—somehow does not merit the same reverence. He is a poor king, an angry loud buffoon who is ruled by his member and not by his thoughts. If it were not for his brother at sea and his brother guarding the underworld, he would have been overthrown long ago as he had overthrown Aerys before him.

She likes that image—of her husband chained and suppressed. Let him know what it is when others hold the power over him.

He loves his bastards, how they burble and gurgle and slobber on his fingers when he gives them to suck. How he loves his bull-headed boy whom she had thrown from the mount, and his mule girl, and the storm boy who would live for all eternity for his mother was a goddess and not one of Robert’s mortal sluts.

She’d killed two of them, once—twins who lived beneath her Rock. It had been subtle, and she’d congratulated herself too soon, for the moment they’d passed into the underworld, Stannis had told his brother—out of duty, not love, he’d said—and Robert’s fury had been vicious. Jaime would have killed him if Robert had not sent him to oversee a war far away. Jaime would have cut out his heart, and given it to her to eat.

She’d had to become more subtle after that. Not death, but challenges. Make their existence hellish because she could, because their father made her existence hellish.

Gentle mother, font of mercy,

Gentle mother…

The words ring over and over in your head. A refrain, a song more pure and beautiful than the song of birds, than the bells that toll overhead. You’re not a singer. Your heart is not full of songs. It had been once, and for a moment it had been again, when you’d dreamed of taking her away. But this song…It rings in your head over and over again, though it is a dead song. A song to a dead man, from a girl who is gone.

You drive your spade into the earth.

It will be home, soon, to another body. Another bit of rotting flesh, of ended life. Is it mercy to kill someone? Do you remember where the heart is?

Another thought to push from his mind as he thinks. He is repenting. That is what the Elder Brother told him. Repenting for his crimes, for wanting the death of his own flesh, for not being able to save his sister. Your soul must know hell.

Only a man who’s been burned knows what hell is truly like.

He’d told her that. He’d told her that, and she’d been frightened. He had wanted to frighten her, wanted her to see him as a monster. You don’t deserve the gift of mercy.

That’s hell. Knowing that that’s true. Knowing that you could die and the world would be the better for it. Knowing that your life doesn’t matter. That you’ve only ever hurt the world, never helped it. Not even her. She’d been forced to marry the Imp, after all. And he—he’d left her to that.

You could rescue her, he thought sadly. But where’d she gone? No one knew. The whole kingdom was looking for her. What chance did he stand of finding her, when able-bodied knights—and ladies, for elder brother had hosted a lady looking for her as well—couldn’t? He was a damned fool with a limp and blood on his head and hell in his heart.

If she’d died…If they caught her and brought her to trial for Joff’s death…What did it matter if she died, they wanted him to think, because it was his own soul that mattered. But what if she was his soul, and his soul had died. Could he bring her back from hell, that song guiding him, Gentle mother, font of mercy, save our sons from war we pray…

He finds himself humming it sometimes as he digs. Humming, and refusing to look over his shoulder because if he does, she won’t be there and he’ll remember that he’s lost her forever—if he ever truly had her.

She flies on wings of wax and wood and feathers, and there’s something good in it. Something right. Man was not made to fly—they do not have wings like birds or dragons, but her wings, these wings…they will take her far.

“Be careful,” she calls to her brother, who flies at her side.

He smirks at her. “I do not need to be careful. I am the blood of the dragon, and I will have my crown.”

“We are not yet there, though,” Daenerys calls to him, but she knows he will not hear her. He will not listen.

He flies higher than she does, and the higher they fly, the greater the gap between them. Home, Daenerys thinks. My brother is taking me home. She does not think of bruises or of pain. She does not think of her fear of falling. She should be afraid when she looks down at the stretched sea below, for only pain and death await her if her flight fails. Instead she looks to the sun, Drogo’s chariot in the distance, bright and warm and steady in the sky. The sun will guide them to the home that Dany never knew, to the crown that is rightfully her brother’s.

“Wait,” she calls to him. “Viserys!” He is so much higher than she is, and he turns to look at her, flapping his wings. She is surprised that he listens to her. It has been so long since he truly heeded her, or thought of her as anything more than a stupid little girl. “You are too high!” she tells him. The air is thin and she has trouble breathing, and there is no need to be so high. They are free.

The worst of it is the way he smiles.

“I can go as high as I want,” he says. “I will have my crown—you cannot command me.”

“It’s no command, brother,” she yells, but already he is flapping his wings harder, pulling himself up, up, up through the air. For the briefest of moment, the golden wheels of Drogo’s chariot glows around his head like a crown. Then she sees the wood of his wings begin to slip, wax melting down its side, and he screams, and falls.

She is puissant. Stronger than any, and faster. Freakish fast for a woman her size, she’s heard it said. Perhaps they are unused to a woman who can fight, for she’s seen men who are big and fast. Though perhaps they are not so strong as she.

They say she was suckled at birth by a she-bear. They say that the gods gave her the strength of a man for her father had no sons. But Brienne does not think either is true. At least, she’s fairly certain that neither is true. For if the gods had given her the strength of a man, why not make her a man? Why not give her father a son to live to adulthood, instead of making it so that she was his only surviving child? She remembers her mother as well, and her mother is no bear. The stories men will tell when they are defeated by a woman. They say they are brave, and good warriors, but they are little more than boys if they speak of me in this way.

They say that she has sworn to Artemis that she will never wed. They say she doesn’t want the love of a man, that she is too manish herself to truly know what it is to be a woman. This, too, is a lie, though Brienne does not dispel it. Who would want someone like her, as ugly as she is? How else to explain the suitors who come for her hand and then retract their offer?

It is her father’s idea in the end—a competition. Whoever shall best Brienne in a footrace shall have her hand in marriage. Men like competitions, he says, they like proving their mettle. And whichever man bests me will have proven himself a better man, she thinks angrily. He will not love me for me, he will see me as a trophy. Brienne the beauty, bested.

Brienne the beauty, bested—or not bested, for no man can outrun her. No man can out-fight her. No one can withstand her. Perhaps the gods did give her powers.

She wanders the world, finding a king to serve, or a lady. She wanders alone until one day, she finds a lion.

He is a cursed lion, and attacks whoever comes too near him. He and his sister had had congress in a temple, besides the corpse of their son and Zeus had turned them both into lions to punish them, for all know that lions cannot mate with their own.

He is cursed, and he attacks those who come near him, but Brienne is not afraid of him. No one has ever bested her—not even a fearsome golden lion.

She wrestles him to the ground of his cave, and when he is whimpering and defeated, she runs her hands gently through his mane. It’s silky and soft and he looks up at her, confused. “I confuse everyone,” she tells him, wondering if he still understands the speech of man. “There is no shame in defeat.”

He continues to watch her, green eyes sparkling out of a tawny face, and when he drifts off to sleep, he burrows his face in her lap and for the first time Brienne feels known.