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The first yellow primrose of spring was blooming in Kings Landing despite the last clutching fingers of the hard winter. Brienne walked the castle walls in that final, whirling snow only a fortnight past before departing for the Wall. Even then, the air had smelled of spring and she could see the peeking color of life from beneath the diminishing blanket of white, quite like the pale, billowing cloak that tumbled from her broad shoulders.
The other knights had balked at the notion of missing the burst of the southern spring, of returning to the bone-deep cold in the North to bring news from the Wall, and the Queen had been tolerant of their hesitation, though Brienne had not missed the flash of impatience in her eyes, bright as the crocus buds in the Kingswood. She had her reasons for accepting, not least her unyielding devotion to the Queen, but nor was that reason foremost in importance when she mounted her chestnut mare and started north on the Kingsroad.
It had still been snowing when she left Kings Landing, but the skies were clearing when she rested in the Trident and stayed bright and blue as a robin’s egg even as she passed into the North to Winterfell. She did not tarry there, though Lord Stark rode out to meet her as she approached to ask himself what news she brought from the south. Brienne could only tell him briefly what she knew of his lady sister, that she was well when last she saw her in court, though that had been months before and Lord Edric and Lady Sansa had since returned to Starfall for the impending arrival of her first child.
The remainder of her journey from Winterfell was unremarkable. Much of the northlands had been left ravaged by the war, then the aftermath of the fighting, but signs of life were emerging as shyly as the budding signs of spring. It was two weeks hence that she was met near Last Hearth by a figure in black moving south on the Kingsroad. Brienne did not even need to see the shock of gold on his head to know which of the Night’s Watch was coming to meet her. Indeed, it was Jaime she had hoped to see so much that she had sacrificed her witness to spring.
“I might have thought you would avoid Last Hearth,” Brienne remarked as she dismounted and embraced him. The Umbers were fewer in number these days, but she could hardly imagine any of them would be all too pleased to find Jaime near their homestead. He did not seem particularly concerned.
“Tyrion sent word by raven when you departed Kings Landing,” Jaime told her when they broke apart, and Brienne thought he even sounded impatient by the length of her journey, as if he could not have possibly understood how long it would take to travel to the Wall. She thought it was particularly telling of the healing rift between the brothers that Jaime had not deferred to some unspecific reference when speaking of who had sent word. She also suspected strongly that word of her impending arrival had been sent directly to Jaime at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea rather than to the Maester at Castle Black.
She cleared her throat and took the reins of her horse from him, “Then you would have known it would be some time before you saw me.”
“Brandon Stark sent word from Winterfell as well, some two weeks before now.”
“Then you ought to have known to prepare for my arrival within a fortnight, as you have plainly done with some impatient haste. When last you wrote me, you were far from Castle Black.”
“I asked to escort the knight of the Queensguard to the Lord Commander,” Jaime said with a breezy air that suggested he was lying.
Brienne scoffed and allowed Jaime to lead her to the nearby inn. Few people gave him a second glance as they walked through the streets—a man of the Night’s Watch was no uncommon sight this far north and few of them would have recognized the Kingslayer as he was—but stared after Brienne herself with hushed whispers and unsubtle gawking. She shifted her weight, still uncomfortable with the attention after this time, furrowed her brow and dropped her head to the muddy road.
“Straighten up,” Jaime said sharply. “It’s hardly becoming of a knight to hang her head like a meek maiden, let alone one of the Queensguard. They know who you are.”
“I have nothing to be ashamed of,” she retorted, but instead of complaining further, she turned her head upward and looked once more at the at the clear skies before turning her horse over to the boy in the stables.
When she knocked the slush from her boots and entered the inn, most heads turned to her and ignored Jaime. She caught the tail end of one whisper, but Jaime led her on past all the tables, up the stairs to what must have been the finest room the inn had to offer. Brienne wondered what Jaime had paid for it, what he had told the keeper, and pressed her lips together tightly.
“We will be able to speak freely here,” he explained and removed his dark cloak. Brienne thought that it was still strange to see him without Lannister red and gold, but he had forsaken those things when he took the black. He put his boots up on the table, leaving Brienne to remove her sword, cloak, and the mail tunic she wore under her plain white sigil.
Brienne looked him over when she sat opposite him, evaluating his well-kept beard and his bright golden hair. “Freely enough,” she murmured, even as Jaime laughed at her demure tone.
“Give me news,” he asked greedily, and stood up to retrieve wine for both of them. Expensive, imported wine, she knew, for there were no fruits to turn to wine, not until spring was truly upon them.
She took a slow sip and thought of the summers of her youth on Tarth, but only tasted the warm winds of another land entirely. After a moment, Jaime kicked her boot with his and she set aside the cup.
“I have been to see your lady sister,” she began slowly, watching his face change abruptly. Jaime’s eyes dropped to his wine, and then he sighed, leaning back and glancing out the window.
With time and all her knowledge of him, Brienne knew that Jaime regretted Cersei most of all, succumbing to her and failing her; leaving her to become the pitiful, toothless creature she was. She was mad, but in her failing lucidity she had insisted on staying in Kings Landing. The Queen had granted her that request, and so Cersei Lannister raved at the moon and wandered her tower, rending her clothes some days and appearing as perfectly, maliciously untouched as before. Some said that the Queen herself visited some days, though rarely.
Finally, Jaime turned his face so Brienne could see, as if he had realized that he could no more hide his emotion from her then than ever. “Is she well?”
“No worse than ever.” Brienne thought to lie to him, but she could only defer a more detailed answer as long as another sip of wine. “She curses your name and asks after her children.” Jaime didn’t respond then, but Brienne saw his single hand stiffen reflexively. His children.
“Cersei believes I will be the one to kill her,” Jaime remarked and refilled his cup.
“Your sister does not know herself most days,” Brienne said as gently as she thought seemed appropriate, because the former queen had indeed said something quite similar upon Brienne’s brief visit. She hoped that Jaime chose to change the subject.
Mercifully, he took another drink of wine. “My brother writes that spring has come in Kings Landing.”
Brienne finished her wine thoughtfully. “Surely your spirit is not so diminished that you cannot see the spring has come here, as well?”
Jaime smiled grimly, but the shape of it changed and Brienne watched it morph to a brighter thing. She could not help but to think of it as one of the birds taking flight outside the window, the northern birds returning home finally.
“Perhaps the Night’s Watch has had its effect on me,” he mused and Brienne appreciated for the first time all the ways in which Jaime was changed, and the heavy burden he carried for his past sins. It was said all those things were wiped away upon taking the black. Brienne wondered if Jaime had chosen the Night’s Watch for that particular reason. “Tell me, how does the Queensguard suit you?”
“My lord father begs me to retire and take a husband that Tarth may have an heir.” Brienne’s lips tipped upward in a mirror of Jaime’s smile and she held her eyes firmly on his. If there was anyone she could be so frank with, it would be him. “Yet my suitors are hardly great in number, so I fear I will be forced to disappoint him.”
“Our circumstances are unfortunately similar, to take no wife, hold no land, and father no children.” There was a slight flash in Jaime’s eyes that Brienne recognized as mirth, some indication of humored irony. Brienne blushed at the implication.
“I thought you finally above jesting at my expense,” she said with some bitterness. She wasn’t even certain that Jaime was teasing at all, but the mere notion was as preposterous then as it had ever been.
He smiled on. Brienne resented his superior cheer for the joke he was having. “Do you believe that I am not merely lamenting the tragedy of our misfortune?”
“I believe you would lament the tragedy of your misfortune, but not by comparison to my own.” Her bright lips tightened in an expression Brienne knew made her look no more beautiful. Jaime didn’t appear to mind.
“But this is all mere talk.” Jaime turned his cup. He looked older, much older than Brienne had thought possible, and she recalled that he was many years older than she. His leonine features were beginning to look evermore like Tywin Lannister had once looked in life, with a streak of gray tinge beginning to appear in his beard. Once, he might have been one of the great lords. Once, in some sense, he had been.
She stood abruptly, the legs of her chair screeching against the wooden floor. As though Jaime could read her intentions, he rose to his feet. She was a towering woman over many men, but with Jaime she had only an inch of height. He had the grace not to look up to her, and Brienne did not know which of them made their move first. All she knew was the crush of his softer lips to hers, a firm hand on her broad, muscled frame.
Jaime had dragged her toward the bed and Brienne gasped, struggling for control over herself again, to undress or to compose herself.
“This is folly,” she only sighed close to his ear, and Jaime struggled to roll her to her back, fumbling with the black of his garb. Brienne watched wordlessly until he was bare once more, and she then rolled over willingly and removed her white clothing, leaving them in a heap overtop Jaime’s.
“But it will be terribly fun folly, don’t you agree?” Jaime’s teeth nipped the slight lobe of her ear and Brienne sighed at the warmth of his breath.
She chided him, “Far greater folly than before.” It was true, of course. When they had last lay together, it had been before Brienne had taken the white and before Jaime had traded his own white for the black of the north. It had not occurred to her then that he was making mockery of a vow she now took so very seriously, but the gravity of their mutually incompatible oaths settled on her thick shoulders. It had been the only clear way forward when they had made their respective decisions, and one she found herself regretting every day that she spoke with him, sending or receiving letters on dark wings with weeks between.
Brienne had loved Jaime, and perhaps still did, in a way different than how she had loved Renly. She did not want to think of her first king, not in bed with Jaime, and she thrust all thoughts of him and the past years from her head. It was much easier this way, to forget and think only of the present without expectation for the future. It was, after all, the only way she thought Jaime ever managed to put one foot in front of the other and live every day of his life.
That evening, she loved him again. She also know that he loved her then, for he was the most loyal of men until he met her, leagues from his sister. Brienne could never bring herself to speak the woman’s name, the eldest and most cursed Lannister.
After, they lay together, sweaty and untouched by the chill of the evening that crept in from the corners of the room. Outside, a light snow had begun to fall in the dimming light. It was nearly peaceful. Jaime’s hand lingered on her waist, his cock spent and limp but resting on her thigh. Brienne stared at the snow falling for a long time before she spoke again.
“It sometimes bothers me that there are singers singing of us as the knights of old.”
Jaime laughed, “If you haven’t noticed, Brienne, we are the knights of old now.”
She remained steadfast. “The things they sing about are not… they were never that way before, when they happened. They were monstrous, not heroic.”
His face stayed smiling as he brushed back her short, coarse hair. “They never seem heroic at the time.” Then he said nothing more, and they lapsed into comfortable silence.
“We are terribly foolish.” Brienne’s voice was nearly inaudible, quiet enough to be drowned out by the wet sound of the snow falling.
“Don’t say such things. We were always fools, only for different reasons, I suppose.”
“I cannot be a knight if I am with child,” she murmured, her eyes focused on the ceiling even as her mind refused to settle on any particular thought, as if they were all too hot to touch. “I cannot guard the Queen.”
“Even if you will ever need to worry about that, you are months from concerning yourself with it,” Jaime chided with an affectionate tap of her chin. Brienne could not bring herself to look at him. “And I do not believe you would let even the pains of childbirth keep you from your duties. Are you concerned what name my bastards would take? Hill for the Rock, or Snow for the north his father is consigned to?”
“Or Storm, for Tarth,” she quipped and felt a stab of anxiety. Brienne turned her face away with her eyebrows knitted together. “I could not do that to my father.”
“Ask your lady queen, she is in the practice of legitimizing bastards to carry on the noble lines,” Jaime urged, his false hand resting on her flat, muscled abdomen. “If it keeps you up at night, speak with her. Or flee.”
Brienne scowled at him openly so fiercely that Jaime laughed at her. “I could never,” she declared furiously. “Nor will I ask if she could please pardon you from your vows the same as mine; that we could resign to some cheerfully dishonorable existence.”
“There she is,” he laughed, ignoring her distress. “I worried Kings Landing had sucked the fight from you, Brienne of Tarth.” Jaime rolled atop her and thrust his knees on either side of her hips. “What other things keep you awake at night, Brienne? Do you worry for your isle of sapphires and emerald, your Lord of Storm’s End, and the lingering sense that you must protect Sansa Stark from the dangers of court life?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said and made a face. He was close. She worried for all those things, and whenever she saw one of the surviving Starks, she felt a clutching fist of doom and failure in her stomach. Her fears were greater than that now. Though there were greater consequences if she failed again in her duties, they were not the things that she feared. A child was no curse, and she did not fear the consequences for her honor. She continued with a quaver in her voice, “I worry that I will never see you again once I depart the Wall for Kings Landing.”
It was the closest thing to a confession of love that Brienne dared, and Jaime looked appropriately stunned. The expression didn’t fade, even when he sat next to her on the lumpy mattress and Brienne sat up, crossing her arms over her wide chest and dark nipples.
“It’s true,” Jaime admitted with some tone of surprise in his voice. “You could leave and I could die at Eastwatch during some raid, or from frostbite, or an infected wound during practice, and you would not hear for weeks. Or you could die protecting the Queen, or in some tourney proving your guileless courage, and I will live a long, cold, lonely life on the Wall.”
“So we are fools for allowing ourselves this breach of vows.” Brienne regretted saying anything at all in the first place.
“Take it as it comes, Brienne,” Jaime advised instead, and lay next to her. “Tomorrow, we leave for the Wall. You will deliver your messages and inspect as you like on behalf of the Queen. I will offer to be your escort. Some weeks after, you will decide you have all the information you can possibly need and return to Kings Landing. And you will approach each of those things as they come to you and decide when they are of pressing importance.”
Brienne had appreciated Jaime, and then loved him, long before because he had taken her seriously, because he did not think of her like a fraud like other knights had done before him. She had loved him because he rescued her, and allowed her to rescue him, and because above all, he had not failed to be her friend and her companion and a man she could love truly.
“You are wise, ser,” she complimented. Jaime gave a forced laugh and Brienne could see for that moment that he feared the same as she did.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever had a truer friend than you, Brienne. And surely I never shall again, so promise me that you will do all in your power to keep yourself alive for a change, and I will do the same.”
“As it comes, Jaime,” she echoed to him and peered at his green eyes. They were green as the grass sprouting in Kings Landing, all across the continent even, and brighter than she had ever seen ten years, a year, an hour before.