She couldn't say what it is that makes her look up.
They had chosen to make camp, ceasing early enough that the light would allow time for repairs to a wagon axle that had snapped. A lucky thing, in Brienne's estimation, as just three days' travel was already taking its toll on the exhausted and stubborn Stormlanders who insisted they didn't need a night's rest.
It doesn't register right away that what she heard wasn't the pick up of wind or the sound of distant thunder. But something pulls at her as she leads Tommen into the Wildling's camps to finally introduce him to Dormund, whose deep voice and animated stories she's sure will offer some respite from the thick tension that she created by refusing to lie to them all.
The noise ripples through the little camps, and Brienne puts a hand out to grip Tommen firmly by the elbow though she doesn't clock any immediate threat. Something isn't right.
Then she spots it, too high up to be any bird she knows, and growing in size at a speed she can't estimate.
"Dragon!" Someone shouts, and the chaos erupts around them. Brienne hollers for Podrick and curses herself for not putting her armor on, practically dragging Tommen as she barks orders around her. Orders that are going to amount to nothing, not against a dragon. She hears Dormund's deep voice bellowing, and she can't even spare of moment of satisfaction as she sees Jon's men and Jaime's men fall in with each other.
It lands on one of the hills with an earth-shaking force that quiets everyone for a single moment, as they all recover from the shock. Some break and flee, though the free folk have seen horrors most of her people can't fathom. Brienne shoves Tommen behind her, cursing the kind of filth a sailor's daughter might say. The cream colored thing just watches them, and Brienne feels suddenly like one of the mice Tommen's cat liked to stalk.
Then, fire. And terror. She doesn't remember unsheathing her sword, or screaming at Tommen, or moving toward the blighted thing as its jaws opened to reveal a furnace. She doesn't remember how she gets its attention away from the rest of them, though her arm is coated in a thick black ichor, too slick to keep her grasp on Oathkeeper.
She doesn't remember dropping it, or being carried into the air.
JAIME LANNISTER
He's good at conjuring up terrible what ifs, of thinking of worst case scenarios and everything that could possibly go wrong. Tactician's habit, taking all options into account and trying to plan to prevent them and/or be ready for them. A great many things could have gone wrong between the Dreadfort and Winterfell, and he tortured himself at night by dreaming about them all and waking up in a cold sweat, shaking with fear. Not once, however, did his cruel mind do him the courtesy of preparing himself to hear that Brienne had been killed by dragon fire.
Taking Oathkeeper from Podrick's hands is the hardest thing he's ever had to do. The young man apologizes for being unable to clean the dragon blood from the hilt, but Jaime barely hears him, and from the way Podrick stares at him it's clear that his response about wanting the evidence of her having wounded that beast before it took her life to remain for all to see wasn't spoke aloud. He doesn't have the wherewithal at the moment to force himself to, instead handing the blade to Addam and asking him to put it back where it belongs.
Above the hearth, where he decides it shall remain. (Just Hand joins it later, mounted below the blade she wielded. When questioned by Arya, who tells him he should carry the damned thing, his only response is: They should be together.)
The reunion with Tommen is bittersweet, and he allows Rosa to dart forward and cling to him as she weeps into the taller teenager's shoulder. She cries in relief that Tommen isn't dead, but also in earnest sorrow for the loss of her cousin’s lover. Of a woman she had grown to admire and was genuinely looking forward to seeing again. A woman she wouldn't be able to show off having learned how to properly grip and hold the hilt of a blade to now that she was gone.
Rosa embracing Tommen isn't surprising, but Tommen rushing forward to embrace him once he's released is. Jaime is sent toppling backwards through memory, taken back to the time Myrcella hugged him in the bowels of that Dornish ship after telling him that she was glad he was her father. He'd been hesitant then, scared, and unsure — he is here, too, but he finds himself hugging the boy tighter to him upon realizing, painfully, that Tommen is the last remaining vestige of his immediate family.
Tommen is all he has left.
"It's okay," he whispers into the bright blonde crown of Tommen's hair, and the boy shatters. Whatever he'd been using to hold himself together snaps then, and he clings to Jaime as he soaks his tunic with the tears he's been holding in, likely since Daenerys Targaryen stormed the Red Keep. Rosa ends up hugging Jaime's side and he wraps his right arm around her, holding the distraught teenagers to himself as he peers over their heads to meet the forlorn gaze of Podrick Payne.
I'm sorry, his eyes seem to say.
He's sorry, too.
Brienne is gone and he can't abandon his people and post to ride south and extract his vengeance against the Mad King's daughter for allowing one of her so-called children to take his beloved from him. Can't ask Tormund if any of the great beasts beyond the wall were capable of taking on a dragon. All he can do is be sorry.
And he hates being sorry. He hates it so much.
(He misses her. He will always miss her. His heart aches and he suspects it will never stop aching — for his mother, for his daughter, for the woman he loved.)
The Evenstar and Stannis keep their distance from him. Jaime doesn’t seek them out.
Sansa grants Tommen asylum in the North, voicing for the first time her experience living in the Red Keep as Cersei's guest for all to hear. She details what it was like to be an obedient puppet, and how Tommen, a boy of barely fifteen, cannot be held responsible for the actions of a mother who ruled through him. That the lies told about his birth were not his fault — nor (surprisingly, and Jaime's eyes go wide with shock when she says this) is it the fault of his true father, who only sought to protect him from the wrath Robert Baratheon surely would have brought down on a child who was ultimately innocent of all charges placed against him. It wasn't Tommen's fault. None of it was. He was just a face and a name, and he no longer bears that name.
His lords are, oddly, uninterested in the drama or the confirmation of a truth most of them had suspected for the past decade or so. Tommen is a bastard, but that matters not when Jaime has already named a legitimate Lannister as his heir. Tommen will not be the next Lord of Casterly Rock nor will he ever hold the title of Lord Paramount of the Westerlands. He's just Jaime's son. A bastard born out of wedlock who will never be anything ever again and they're fine with that.
So is Tommen, who is moved into Lord Rickon's rooms and watched over by Arya, whose rooms are next to her younger brother's. She tells Jaime she'll keep an eye on him, that no one will get past her, and he believes her. If anyone could keep his boy safe from harm, it's a girl who trained with the infamous Braavosi Faceless Men.
And a woman who stood between his son and a dragon.
Tommen believes she survived, that the fire had not burned her, but Jaime finds that hard to believe. He lets his son believe it, but false hope never looked good on him.
SANSA STARK
The wax on the rolled parchment Sansa holds out to him is a royal blue, the arms of Tarth pressed into it. Her mouth forms a thin line, the only evidence of her grief allowed to the surface, and only because it is Jaime she faces.
"She wrote this before going north. I thought you should have it, in case…" Sansa trails off, uncharacteristically tongue-tied. "I should have burned it on her return, but Brienne is so guarded, I thought better of losing any words she does put down."
Jaime—
You once said that my script is easy for your eyes to follow, and I hope for that reason you may read this yourself. Or burn it. I would understand if you wish not to hear my thoughts. It is hardly fair that I offer them to you now, for if Lady Sansa has delivered this letter, I am dead. And in death I reveal myself a coward, for it is this reason only that I am bold enough to say the following.
I cannot apologize to you for leaving, though I know you deem it a dereliction of our shared duty. I can only say that I trust you will do the right thing by the Starks, and allow me to help undo the political tangle I have caused by spilling your secrets to men who do not deserve to know them. I cannot apologize for that, either. I know I am difficult to care for, and I cannot deny that you hold some affection for me still, or you would not be so angry with me for going.
You told me that vows will always rise against each other within the swearer. I left Oathkeeper at Winterfell, unfit to wield it until I could prove myself able to carry my loyalty to Lady Sansa alongside my regard for you. Now, Oathkeeper shall pass back to you, and with it, my heart.
It is mine, and I am yours, so it is forever in your care—
Lady Brienne of Tarth
JAIME LANNISTER
Jaime cries. He’s held himself together pretty damn well, all things considered, up until this point, and he has to hold the letter away from himself so he doesn’t smudge the ink with his tears. Later, he will put the letter by his bedside for him to read whenever he needs her words to sooth him, but for now he’s left stunned by it.
Devastated by the loss of her, seized by regret and longing and in inability to do anything to avenge the loss of her.
She wouldn’t want him to. He knows she would want him to remain with his son, to stay here, to continue to see their oath to Catelyn Stark for them. Running off to King’s Landing to confront Daenerys Targaryen would only anger her, much as he wants to.
Sansa sits with him. She even places a hand against his back and rubs slow circles into the fabric as he sobs into his hand, letting him remain in the sanctity of her office to weep and then collect himself before departing so his men don’t have to bear witness to his mourning, to his broken heart.
BRIENNE OF TARTH
When she sees Winterfell in the distance, from this height, she can hardly believe how small it looks. But her perspective has shifted, irrevocably, in the time she's spent with this stinking golden beast. Scouring a cold desert isle for shelter and warmth and food, followed by a whining doleful creature whose eye she'd gashed. This after a frantic flight where Brienne thought she should die frozen to its back or fallen into the icy waters until they crashed onto a stony shore.
Skagos, she'd thought initially. But there had been no sign of unicorns or huge shaggy men, and with the shore of the mainland on one side and the vast sea on the other, she had remembered: Skane.
She thinks it'd been a sennight or so of that: freezing and starving and telling this giant thing she can't kill and won't kill her to shut up, shut up, shut up! It never shuts up. It grumbles and groans. It hisses and whines, and gods but she thinks of Jaime yet again, which leaves her laughing hysterically like a madwoman—and at least that scares it away for a time. She dreams of Jaime transforming into some huge deadly, hungry, creature made for killing and only seeking her out, wanting to be near her.
The gods must be mocking her.
But there it is, and she marvels at how small everything looks. Is her father alive? Is Tommen all right? Safe? And Pod, and Dormund—she'd counted half their number burned alive before she'd pushed herself into action against the beast she's now riding and guiding, their tentative truce somewhat intact.
They land hard at the edge of the forest, in the Holdfast, and she scowls at the creature that she knows can be graceful and quiet as a shadowcat. Brienne can hear panicked scouts and the ripple of fear as the thing yawns and pads the ground. She scrambles to get off its back, and it doesn't help her at all so she winds up falling in a limp pile at its feet, twisted ankle burning with fresh pain.
Once she's back up, she begins hobbling toward the Wildling encampment at the north gate. She doesn't hear it fly away, so she turns to be greeted with the cursed thing following her. She yells at it, calls it a stinking fucking shit, tells it to fuck off, leave her alone. Makes rude gestures at it, tells it the people are off-limits or she'll find her magic sword and cut its other eye and she'll make sure the job sticks this time. Go eat a shadowcat, she tells it, gesturing to the forest. They stare at each other before it turns and knocks her over with a gust from its great stupid wings.
But it's too late by then. She can hear bells ringing and the free folk shouting the alarm as she shoves herself unsteadily to her feet. Brienne pulls the tattered wool cloak she'd torn from the remains of a raided ship around her equally tattered and ill-fitting stolen clothing and just puts one barely-booted foot in front of the other. Winterfell seems so far away still, but she drags her beat-up, thawing body forward. Ever forward, on to home.
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22 __ DONE
BRIENNE OF TARTH
JAIME LANNISTER
SANSA STARK
JAIME LANNISTER
BRIENNE OF TARTH