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When Brienne was 7, a woman stopped her father on the street and spent a long time looking at her face.
“What a unique nose,” she commented, and Selwyn Tarth smiled tightly.
Unique was the nicest of the descriptors applied to his only child, but it meant more of the same. ‘Squashed’ ‘crooked’ ‘ugly.’
Brienne arched into her father’s side, tucked up under his arm. She was tall for her age, already most of the way to his shoulder, and it made him want to pull her closer, protect her better.
The woman handed them her business card, and Selwyn looked at it incredulously before firmly shaking his head.
“We’re not interested,” he told her.
“She’s perfect for my spring campaign.”
The woman was airy, tall and thin in a gossamer suit that seemed to float on her. Her hair was chunky, her brown eyes rimmed in silver.
Selwyn decided that she was touched in the head.
“Thank you,” he said, stuffing her phone number into the wrinkled tweed jacket he loved to wear. “But no.”
The woman watched them go, pensive, dissatisfied.
Brienne didn’t know what was going on, but she felt that stare in her dreams that night, and for many nights after.
*******
Raquelle Seta was an opinionated, destitute grad student who had taken Professor Tarth’s Medieval Lit course in undergrad. She babysat Brienne while the girl’s father taught classes at the university.
“What’s this?” she asked Brienne, who was playing with her knight figurines at the breakfast table.
Brienne looked over, saw the crumpled business card sitting in a pool of coffee that had sloshed from the pot during her father’s morning ritual.
“Some lady gave it to Daddy,” she told her, going back to her toys. “Said my nose was nuh-nique.”
Raquelle grasped her by the chin, forced Brienne to meet her eyes. Her narrow hand barely spanned Brienne’s jaw.
Brienne blinked up at her, earnest and confused and trying to think of what she’d done wrong.
Her babysitter dropped Brienne’s face, snorted disbelievingly, and nudged Brienne’s shoulder, urging her toward the bedroom.
“Get dressed,” she ordered, fighting a grin. Brienne wanted to be in on the joke, but Raquelle wouldn’t let her. “We’re going out.”
The building they entered was shiny and empty, with a huge front room and a tiny woman sitting behind a desk. She hit a button on her phone, and the floaty woman from a few days ago came out to talk to them.
She introduced herself as Dellie, nodded curtly at Raquelle’s introduction, and smiled at Brienne when the girl spoke up, soft and stuttering.
She didn’t like meeting new people, and this woman was much stranger than her teachers and her daddy’s students.
“We’ll do a few test shots,” Dellie said while Raquelle signed some papers. “Find her best look.”
Raquelle muttered something low under her breath, and Brienne didn’t hear what it was on purpose. The tall woman frowned and slipped her hand into Brienne’s.
Brienne almost pulled away, but Raquelle was nodding, so she guessed this woman didn’t count as a stranger.
“We’re going to find you something to wear,” Dellie explained as they walked past the woman at the desk. “Do you like to play dress up?”
“Not really.”
Brienne looked back at Raquelle, a rigid figure with crossed arms, receding in the distance.
“What do you like?” the woman asked, and Brienne looked up at her.
Dellie made her feel small, which was weird. Brienne was almost as tall as half of her teachers. Dellie wasn’t as wide as her, though. Brienne wondered if she was like those starving people in foreign countries.
“Knights,” she said, biting her lip. “And superheroes.”
“A challenge, huh?”
Brienne had heard her teachers say ‘challenged’ to her daddy, when they were talking about her and didn’t think she was listening. This woman didn’t say it in a mean way, though, like Mrs. Aker did when she’d hit Oliver for stealing Adrienne’s crayons.
Dellie said, “Challenges are fun,” and let Brienne pick her own costume.
Her father looked over the contract that night, pride and bewilderment and concern flickering off his reading glasses with the light of the study and the flame of a candle that smelled like the sea.
“You want to do this?” he asked her, as serious as she’d ever seen him. He was looking at her like only he did, like she was a grownup and had good things to say.
The cameras made her feel funny, but Miss Dellie was nice.
“They let me be Thor,” she told her father.
And it was settled.
*******
Audrey Hepburn and Coco Chanel became her best friends. They made classmates’ snickers hurt less; eased the stuttering politeness of grownups who realized her dad wasn’t joking when he said, “She can’t play soccer this week. She’s got a shoot.”
“Not conventionally pretty” Brienne learned early on, was just a nice way of saying, “That ugly girl’s a model?”
To Evenfall she would always be an awkward yearbook photo, but Brienne was given a fresh lens every day. She heard words like “interesting” and “dynamic,” and even “exotic” from the man who spent an hour playing with lights so her freckles looked as dark as leopard spots. She phased “pretty” out of her vocabulary, stuck “compelling” in its place. Learned to widen her eyes and pout her broad, swollen lips and make people look twice. Make them stop and think.
She always did print. She didn’t have the slimness for the runway; her movements were too sluggish for film. She had to think about every expression, every pose, and she froze when the photographers snapped, “Just have fun with it.” Some of them got irritated and stopped working with her. Dellie always found more, though, and the ones that didn’t mind long hours never worked with her just once.
Brienne knew she wasn’t pretty or smart or exciting. She wouldn’t like what that man was thinking, sitting next to his golden daughter with her golden curls while Brienne’s assistant escorted her backstage at New York fashion week.
But when the cameras were on and the lights were hot, Brienne got to be somebody else. She saw the world through endless filters and vanquished the villains one shoot at a time.
*******
The best thing about moving to Milan was leaving Raquelle behind. Brienne was 11, too old for a babysitter, but her dad worried about the paparazzi following her home. She was used to the cameras; they didn’t upset her like people did.
It was a relief when the plane tickets arrived and Raquelle imparted her last lesson: “You’re naive and unsightly, Brienne, and they all want something from you. Never forget that.”
It took Brienne a long time to realize that she was right.
They taught her martial arts for balance, horseback riding for fluidity; and those nights she kicked her soccer ball around the dusty red courtyard she wasn’t thinking about the makeup they’d smeared on her or the games she’d missed, but that Dellie had let her meet Abby Wambach, and she’d shown her how to dribble in a dress.
Dellie swept in and out of meetings, leaving a whirlwind of contacts in her wake. Wealthy businessmen invited them to fancy dinners, and Signor Illyrio welcomed her to his villa in the country. Illyrio was large and rich and simpering, and Brienne avoided him whenever she could. He was the only one who would sweep her wide hands high, twirl her in her simple gray pajamas, and proclaim, “tu sei radiosa, la mia bellezza.” She didn’t know what he was saying, but something whispered that his flamboyance was all for show.
Brienne split her time between tutors and wandering the grounds, playing at fencing with rudimentary skills from her last campaign. Patrons took a cue from Illyrio, and suddenly Brienne heard words that were never directed at her before. Words that made her squirm and slip away to slash at the flowers in the courtyard.
When Dellie booked her for an extended stay in Paris, Brienne forced away her familiar fears, put on her snapshot smile, and stuttered thanks to Signor Illyrio for his hospitality. From the look in his eyes as she waved farewell, she thought he understood her somehow.
*******
When Brienne was 15 when she fell in love with a Prada boy who didn’t squint or scrutinize or throw obfuscating language in her face. She trailed him through two galas before he laughed and coaxed her from the shadows. Renly was all charm, offering his arm and escorting her to the balcony where camera flashes dotted the night, a twinkling starscape just for them.
They graced the cover of US weekly. Dellie applauded her the publicity and Brienne bit her lip and smiled shyly and tucked the captured moment under her pillow when Dellie had gone. The next week Renly was back on the cover, entangled after a shoot with a very male swimsuit model, and Brienne spent two nights crying herself to sleep.
“All publicity is good publicity,” Dellie said. Her words were brusque but her hands were soft, running soothing circles through Brienne’s hair.
Brienne consoled herself with the harsh reality of the lesson.
At 19, clothed in sullied sheets and scarlet skin, she remembered Renly and Raquelle and wished she were a quicker study. The empty warmth beside her still lingered with false promises.
*******
Brienne had lost track of the number of parties she’d successfully navigated. For the day’s spectacle she wore an unadorned one-piece and a gauzy blue cover up, hair short and free and teasing her chin. All in all she looked rather dull beside the bikinis and monokinis on the upper deck, and Dellie would press her lips if she saw the ratty Coach flip-flops dangling between her fingers. Brienne had avoided her for that reason alone.
Coco Chanel had described days like these: “you belong to some man, not to yourself, and you die of boredom.” Brienne had found nothing truer. They were at an investor’s meeting disguised as a yacht party, and she had slipped away to stare at the endless Caribbean waters. She had not met the man pulling the strings today, and she was grateful for it.
She pressed her forearms against the unfamiliar rail, taking comfort in the spray of the sea. Clinks and conversation drifted down from above, and she hunched around the cold metal like it might anchor her beside the waves.
Brienne felt a presence the moment a boat shoe touched the stairs. It was a skill she’d learned of necessity, and she’d learned it well. Her body elongated into a familiar curve, leonine and taut. The man paused on the deck like he’d expected no one, so Brienne pretended that’s who she was: a piece of the furniture, contemporary, of unexpected design. An image to scrutinize and digest and dismiss in turn.
She was not so lucky.
“Ah, the famous pig-faced supermodel.”
Brienne transformed her face into a portrait of indifference, smothering the wince that twitched beneath her skin. She had not been called ugly in years. It clenched her stomach in a way she didn’t care to admit.
He leaned next to her against the rail, his back to the sea. She kept carefully still, but her eyes drifted sideways. His face was perfect, clean lines and high cheekbones and everything that hers, by all rights, should be.
Those features weren’t hard to recognize.
“Was it my brother’s lechery that sent you scurrying below deck,” he mused idly, “Or envy of my sister?”
Was it your sister’s lechery that drove you below deck, she could have retorted, Or envy of your brother?
She didn’t deign to reply. She knew better than to start a conversation from tabloid gossip.
Jaime Lannister did not.
“Or perhaps it’s your lack of arm candy that’s left you skulking in shadows. How did you manage to scare off that Hilfiger model after so long? He must have grown used to your face by now.”
She itched for a foil, for boxing gloves, for anything that would let her wipe the self-satisfied grin from his expression.
“Leave me be,” she nearly growled, shattering her façade.
The victory in his smile sliced neatly through the sutures binding her pride together.
“Ah. And when did you realize it was all a publicity stunt?”
The lick of salt scraped her cheek, charlatan tears gifted by the sea.
“When did you?”
Her words gained purchase, dragging his smirk into the sea. It tangled together with the shreds of her lost dignity, churning beneath the yacht to drift behind in their wake.
*******
Brienne was wrapping up a shoot in London when she saw Jaime Lannister stride onto set like he owned the property and everyone within a two-mile radius. Her final poses culled mindless chatter from the photographer, who deemed her coiled tension ‘rousing.’
Jaime seemed entertained watching the woman click through her final shots. When the lights went dim and the damp air seeped between the leather strips of her dress, Brienne tugged on her robe and stalked past him.
“My sister tried to be a model,” he called after her.
The woman flashing across the computer monitors was as fierce and unforgiving as the English sky, but Brienne only felt like that girl whose classmates had jeered.
His chuckle chased her to her trailer, was cut unceremoniously silent by the slam of her rickety door.
*******
Brienne didn’t like meeting new people, even at 20. But she’d learned to smile and cock her shoulder so no one expected her to speak. Men assumed she was vapid, and Brienne took no pains to disabuse them of the notion. It had saved her a lot of heartache over the years.
It was the women she couldn’t handle. Starlets all wanted her at their parties, and the few who succeeded had peered up at her in wonder and confusion and jealousy until cocktails loosened their laughter.
Cersei Lannister offered no pretense. She smiled with barest civility, and there was no mistaking that Brienne fell short in her estimation. For all that the golden beauty was well past 30, she walked with a poise Brienne could only mimic for a single frame.
“Your features are – “ Cersei turned her nose, as if Brienne were a rash investment, “— coarse.”
“Your twin said the same,” Brienne murmured, merely for something to say. Jaime’s wording had been fouler and his intent milder, but the sentiment was indistinguishable.
Cersei straightened as if someone had yanked her strings from a hidden terrace. Red lips pursed, her crown of golden curls flashed under the light check, and the heiress whirled and disappeared into the investor’s box, another shadow in a pressed Armani suit.
Brienne received no accolades in the morning rags. Dellie frowned and whipped out her phone, and Brienne felt something ease in the set of her shoulders.
*******
She was sitting in a cleft in an underwater cove when her eye caught on a circle of sunlight shimmering under the sea. She could do nothing to prevent Jaime Lannister from resolving before her eyes. Dripping, he hauled himself up the rocks to collapse beside her. She ground her teeth as he glistened in the blue-green light, wondering if he was some figment of her lonely imagination.
“Damn, you can swim.” When he grinned he looked younger than she felt. “I almost didn’t make it.”
He was barely winded, and Brienne wondered if he was taunting her. His eyes traced the cave walls, some hundred feet thick, and she mulled the passage in her mind. She could swim that expanse in the dark—had done, several times—but when she’d discovered the cove at 13, the distance had been enough to make her lungs burn.
“When Illyrio directed me to your ivory tower, I had no idea you were such a masochist.”
“He shouldn’t have told you,” she murmured. Her fingers slipped against the rocks, tiny pools clinging droplets to her wrinkled fingers.
“I came all this way,” Jaime shrugged. He didn’t seem to mean the sea. “And I think he expected me to drown.”
“Why are you here?”
“Maybe I’m a masochist, too.”
He said no more, and she didn’t ask. When the silence began to prick she challenged him to a race; she relished his astonishment when she beat him back to shore.
“My family’s falling apart,” he grunted, supine on the sand, one arm flung across his eyes. “But I’m sure you knew that.”
“A media darling” they called him, but that was a lie Brienne knew all too well.
She wasn’t sure why his confession mattered to her, but she bit her lip held her breath, and soon enough secrets were tumbling from his lips like the saltwater pooling beneath him. Her ears drank it in like the sand.
*******
Brienne earned a billboard in Times Square, and that was the year the Lannisters decided to sponsor New York fashion week.
Everyone wanted to capture her with the ad, and Brienne bore the attention with a carefully detached expression. But Perez Hilton juxtaposed a photo of her leaving the gym with the broad, grotesque features of Brienne the designer Cyclops, and it was the paparazzi shot he superimposed with the word monster.
When she donned her heels and began the long march up Madison Avenue, camera flashes felt like eyes for the first time. Jaime strolled onto the red carpet just as Brienne was escaping it. He took her glare as an invitation, and Dellie nodded emphatically when he wrapped his arm around her waist. She shot him a look of such displeasure that the exchange graced the New York Times front page, pushing Perez to the back of the Fashion section.
She couldn’t get rid of him after that. After a while, she realized she didn’t really want to.
*******
“You’re not pretty, you know.”
To Jaime it was a simple fact, but Brienne squeezed her eyes shut when she whispered, “I know.”
She had always known.
A pair of magazines lay haphazardly on her floor, highlighted by some vain, bitter impulse of her hand. Brienne and Jaime were folded beside them.
Too old for consumption, criticized one. A bold move that’s all played out, asserted the other.
His hand pressed into hers like that was all right, and suddenly his touch was the most substantial thing in her universe.
“You’re astonishing,” he shrugged. Her eyes shot to his, and Jaime quirked his lips. “Just a bit.”
“And you’re very pretty,” she bit back, hot and overwhelmed and feeling suddenly defensive.
“Was that an insult?” he sounded mildly affronted and entirely enamored, and Brienne desperately thought of Renly and Raquelle and Hunter and Jaime, all those years ago on his brother’s yacht.
“I don’t know,” she confessed, staring at the long, freckled legs tucked beneath her. She still didn’t know when his mouth closed on hers, or when he muttered, “Beauty is such an slippery mistress,” against her large front teeth.
She was 24 and rapidly approaching unemployment, but she couldn’t bring herself to care until several hours later.
******
“Suck it up, darling,” Dellie suggested. Dellie had done runway until she was 23. When the critics had sharpened their pens and questioned her permanence, the willowy woman proven that models were adaptable.
Brienne threw herself into training. Her contacts would disappear with her contract, but she was determined to make the most of it. She moved past martial arts and fencing and into wrestling and heavy sword work.
She inspired an issue of Vogue Paris. It was personal in a way no other spread had been, and somehow it made her want to hunker under the covers until people asking about it. The interview had been painful, 3 hours of conversation spliced into a single coherent page about purpose and resilience and the capability of the human form. But behind her dramatized pose and overly ornate broadsword lay 80-odd pages of athletes and scientists and businesswomen, and Brienne felt kind of triumphant about that.
*******
No one was more surprised than Brienne when she got the call.
“How’d you get into this, anyway?” Jaime asked as she held the phone in shaking hands, terrified and thrilled and unable to do more than stare at the receiver.
She’d taken the audition on a whim, barely remembered it between shoots and galas and mastering new combat techniques.
She shook her head, a bark of laughter bubbling from her lips before her throat captured the sound in a firm grip. Her fingers took a moment to settle on the keypad, but when they did she pressed each number with firm practice.
“Hello?” His voice was nearly unfamiliar, but Brienne felt like sinking into it all the same. “Brienne? What’s wrong?”
“Dad.” Her smile was real this time, so deep her freckles bunched in the dip of her cheeks. “They let me be Thor.”
And so they had.