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Beric enters the lists again.
There are tourneys again, as many and as merry as under the old king. The prize money is more modest; the feasts are supplied richly from the Reach. King Renly is sensible, not a wastrel like his brother was. Renly won the realm by force of arms, but under him there shall be peace, a long warm summer of plenty.
Thoros is not sure what to make of it. He has seen the realm die twice, and return to life twice, much like Beric, who braves the lists again.
Beric has a dark pit where one eye should be. It’s not a rare condition for a tourney knight. The splintering lances — you understand. Beric has a bruise around his neck that never seems to fade. That does get people talking. Rumors say he gets it refreshed nightly by his whores. In truth, Beric has never been much for whoring, even before, much less now. But his closeness with Thoros makes people assume. Thoros feels it’s not his place to correct them.
There are other scars, too. Ones that can be hidden under clothes and hair. Thoros has seen them, but most have not.
Beric’s horse is barded in red, decorated with flames, to honor the Lord of Light. Beric won’t wear the heart-of-flame, won’t paint the red on his shield. It would remind people of the pretender Stannis and his red witch. Those times are over.
But the Lord of Light remains.
Thoros does not enter into tourneys any more. He is a priest again, he has convictions, and converts. King Renly is not among them; kings have proven quite resistant to Thoros’s attempts at preaching, especially this one, piously married to a Tyrell. But Thoros has brought back many acolytes from the Riverlands, and they have built their own little red temple that draws more and more people as time goes on.
Many of his men are knights, too. Renly’s scholars debated, for a while, if men knighted under the eye of the Lord of Light could be called knights at all. In the end, they relented. Convinced by the fat red priest, now less fat and more of a priest than he has ever been.
Thoros does not enter into tourneys any more. He can’t make himself smear wildfire on his blade and set it aflame. The people of this city have had enough of wildfire. Pretender Stannis with his flaming sword made people loathe the image. And then, when Renly came, half the city went up in flames.
It is said that the Lannisters lit the fire, so that no-one would rule what they could not keep. Thoros was far away in the Riverlands, and cannot say if the rumors are true.
The city has scars. Burns, dark pits, holes in rows of houses like a missing tooth. But they are healing as time goes by. People rebuild, whitewash their houses, bury their dead. King Renly was generous with his gifts. Grain from the Reach, gold from the Rock.
Beric has no use for grain or gold. Beric will not heal.
Some refuse to ride against the knight in the lists, arguing that his survival is unnatural. But most find him an interesting opponent. You see, Beric does not ride like a man who wants to win. He rides like a man who wants to die.
It was the same in the Riverlands. Beric was reckless, thoughtless, rushed into battle, found himself in the hands of enemies more than once. Maybe it is hard to fear death once you have tasted it. Or maybe his injuries made him clumsy. When Beric died, Thoros would revive him. Once, Beric had been hanging on the gallows a whole night, and his skin felt colder than the morning air. But under Thoros’s hands, he grew warm again.
Too warm. Feverish. He is no longer a man of flesh, but a man of fire.
Thoros prefers not to think about that.
Fire consumes.
Beric says that sometimes, and Beric stares at Thoros with the one eye he has left.
Some people come to their temple and ask Thoros to bring someone back to life. A parent, a child, sometimes someone they lost when the city fell. The last part is easy to decline: it’s impossible to raise someone who has been dead and burned for months. The first ones, he declines as well: he doesn’t want to do to others what he has done to Beric.
It’s never people who have known them for a while who ask for that. Only strangers, new converts. People who have been with them for longer know it has only worked once, Thoros tells himself. It was a miracle, not something they can ask him to repeat.
They have seen what it did to Beric.
Thoros has always found some comfort in the idea that the Last Kiss might bring the dead back to life. That was back when he was young, when it seemed like a polite fiction, the same way you might say the moon is an egg, the same way the Dothraki think sea water is poison. But it comforted him nonetheless. Thoros never had much opportunity to give the kiss himself. In Myr, he was too low-ranking to hold funereal rites, and no worshipper ever had the grace to die in front of him. And in Westeros, he never converted very many people before the war, and the few followers he had were young.
Soldiers or travelers or adventurers, as full of life as anyone.
But he has always found it comforting, this idea that you could call breath and warmth back into a dead body. That the dead might return if you only believed hard enough.
Now he has done it. Now he should be happy.
Beric and his opponent crash into each other, tourney lances splintering into a thousand pieces against their shields. Both stay seated, both ride on to the end of the lists. The other knight is someone from the Reach. Thoros has never quite caught on to all the nuances of their hierarchies. A pious follower of the Seven, he assumes, since that’s how Reachers tend to be.
Beric gets a new lance from his squire. The boy is a Dornish lord, the ruler of one of their mountain fortresses, the same sort of lordship that Beric holds. It’s a thought that used to make Thoros smile. Beric wheels his horse around and rides again, unbalanced, reckless. Thoros sees it happen before it does — Lord Dondarrion falls. Tilts sideways off his reeling horse, and crashes into the ground with a sickening sound.
Thoros is by his side before he knows what he’s doing. He pushes the helmet’s visor away, and finds Beric’s one good eye blinking up at him.
“You can’t help me,” the knight says. “I don’t want you to.”
Beric rests in his tent, later. He has not been examined by a maester. He will never let a maester examine him. He fears what they might find. Instead, it’s Thoros who presses on each rib and shoulder bone. It’s not that he is good at healing, despite what the rumors say. But he’s the one who can touch Beric, because he’s the one who already knows.
“Everything in place?” asks Beric, when it is done.
Thoros nods. Beric sometimes forgets to breathe for a while, when it’s just the two of them. If he cracked a rib, it might not ever mend. Thoros doesn’t want to ask if he can still feel pain.
He looks pained now, at least. Without the helmet, Thoros can see the dent behind his temple where the skull was crushed. He pulls a lock of fine red-gold hair over it, and tries not to worry.
“If I die,” Beric says, “just let me be. Don’t kiss me again. Don’t bring me back.”
Thoros doesn’t know if he can do that. He wishes he had paid more attention, back when he was getting his education in the red temple in Myr. They would certainly have some explanation for him. Life without end, he thinks. All men must serve.
Out loud, he says: “The Lord of Light has chosen you. Who are we to deny him?”
Beric rises to his feet, pulls on his clothes piece by piece until he ends by wrapping a black scarf around his throat and placing a velvet eye-patch on his face. There are stars embroidered on it, and the purple lightning bolt that is the sigil of House Dondarrion.
Beric has not been back to Blackhaven since the war. He stays in King’s Landing, and jousts, and trains his squires and all the new knights he has made. Sometimes he helps with the rebuilding effort. Sometimes he talks to Tobho Mott. At night, he sits by the fire in Thoros’s chambers, and watches the flames with one bright eye, his limbs still as a statue.
There is a life waiting for Beric in the mountains. A castle, a bride.
“I can’t go back home. Not like this. Not to marry.” Beric waves pale fingers at his face. “My lady won’t want to take this ruin to bed. You wouldn’t either.”
Thoros waves a hand, vaguely. “You’d keep us warm at least.”
Beric smiles at that, but then he grows serious again.
“Will you ever let me die?”
There are words in Thoros’s head, sentence fragments repeated by teachers to a boy who wasn’t listening. All men must serve, the voice whispers. It is death we choose, or life. Darkness, or light. It might be a sin to let Beric die. It might be impossible.
“I can’t,” he says. “I won’t. Rh’llor is not done with you yet.”
Beric tilts his head back as far as it will go, making the dark bruise rise above his scarf. After a while, he breathes out.
“Do you see it in your fires? His plans for me?”
Thoros does see things in the flames, these days. Dragons dancing in the sky, snow falling on King’s Landing. Death. A winter without end. He does not see Beric in the flames, even if he wants to. Even if he sees him every day, even if he sees him when he closes his eyes.
“King Renly holds a feast tonight,” he says in place of an answer. “We won nothing today, but we’re still invited. Wouldn’t you like to try some Arbor wine?”
Beric breathes in and out, and shrugs his shoulders.