Chapter Text
The summons greeted Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth’s return to the Lannister host from their encounter with the Brotherhood Without Banners and its ghastly leader. The raven sent to Harrenhal might have bided its time in winging those dark words their way, and the rider Ser Bonifer Hasty had sent to find the Lannister host and deliver the message might have known Jaime and Brienne would be tired from their journey. More than tired: sore-muscled and dark-countenanced from the battle waged in a nameless cave, worn out with the cold anger and leaden guilt which stood between them like a silent sentry, watching their every move, preventing them from speaking more to each other than the few necessary words about food, firewood, and watering the horses.
Jaime read the scroll Peck handed him, felt the blood draining from his face, leaving him the color of whey. He passed the message to Brienne without looking at her. She read, and reread, and reread it again, as though the burning force of her gaze could transform the words into something less final.
“This cannot be,” she said at last, her voice creaking like a rusty chain from lack of use and the damage the noose had done to her throat.
Jaime had sung occasionally during their long ride back from Lady Stoneheart’s hideaway, mostly to relieve the urgent desire to shake the wench till her teeth rattled in her head. Brienne had spent hours on end saying nothing, grieving for her squire and some hedge knight who’d been captured alongside her, mute as a stone, and as yielding and companionable. Not that Jaime had wanted her company. When he’d woken up and seen her huddled, sleeping form across the remains of their fire that morning, it was all he could do not to wake the wench with a sharp kick to her treacherous ribs.
“It cannot be,” she repeated, quiet and pig-headed.
Some things, at least, never change, Jaime thought with bitterness and something he refused to recognize as relief.
“The champion of the Faith has to be one of the Warrior’s Sons,” Brienne insisted, staring between Jaime, who wouldn’t return her look, and Peck, who just looked bewildered at having his opinion solicited. “Doesn’t he? And the queen’s champion has to be a member of the Kingsguard. One member of the Kingsguard cannot be made to fight another. The High Septon cannot change the rules.”
“This new High Septon is a bird of a different feather from the fat hogs who preceded him. And it was my sweet sister who changed the rules when she allowed him to revive the Faith Militant,” Jaime replied to the frozen mud beneath his feet, to his boots, to the tops of the bare trees swaying in a wind coming out of the north like the breath of an army long dead. Not to Brienne’s face. “Kingslaying was not enough to have me dismissed from the Kingsguard, but it seems the High Sparrow’s lashes and thumb screws have produced enough evidence of my other sins to ensure Cersei and I will end this life as we started it: together.”
So much for his burning Cersei’s letter, refusing to act as her white knight ever again. So much for everything Jaime had done since coming back to King’s Landing, a hand short, a sense of honor rekindled in his breast, and a glum giantess at his side. Jaime did not doubt that even if Cersei’s champion won – which he undoubtedly would, Jaime’s left hand being about as useful as a wet fish in comparison to what his right hand had been – the Faith would use the evidence against her and the persuasive power of the mob’s newfound religious zeal to part Cersei from her pretty head. Apparently there was such a thing as destiny after all, and it would no more let Jaime out of its clutches than a bored cat would consent to release a captive mouse.
“Jaime.”
He saw Peck start at the wench’s easy use of his name. It was the first time she had called him anything or addressed him directly since he had dragged the truth about Stoneheart out of her, word by stumbling word, before the sun had passed the midday zenith on the day they had set out from Pennytree. Jaime had wanted to drag the wench off her horse and beat her down into the roadside dust then and there, yet still he had gone with her to confront the dead woman and her ravening pack of self-righteous curs. Thoros of Myr had been the best of them, the rest little more than a ragged, half-trained assembly of failed sellswords and smallfolk puffed up beyond their true size by the stolen swords and scavenged pikes they had wielded. That had not stopped Jaime killing quite a few of them after he had plunged his sword through the wineskin the fat red priest had had in place of a gut, and Brienne had parted Lady Stark from what little life had still squatted in the woman’s cold, white flesh.
Would that Jaime could do the same to the High Sparrow and all the rest of that zeal-stoked mob baying for his and Cersei’s blood. He could almost hear their howls on the wind, the North’s revenge laughing at him through Winter’s sharp teeth.
He turned his back on his squire and the Maid of Tarth, and started to trudge toward his tent, his stride shortened to that of a hobbled horse by the ridges of frozen mud and slick snow fallen in the night.
The wench spoke again behind him, her voice rising, if only just. Enough for him to know she was upset. “Jaime.”
“Leave be, wench,” he said without looking back.
The missive from King’s Landing specified incest and dereliction of duty to his king as the grounds on which Jaime had been stripped of the white cloak in his absence. The letter dangled one last chance to save his neck, a carrot before a mule. Jaime’s sole consolation was that whoever championed Cersei would be a better fighter than Stoneheart’s mangy dogs, and would undoubtedly kill Jaime before the High Septon and his flock of sparrows could peck out his guts. So in the end Jaime’s love for his sister and his faith in Brienne’s honesty would join hands to be the death of him. The thought was almost worth a snort. Almost.
Jaime slipped on the icy ground, nearly lost his footing. Trudged on, and lifted his tent flap at last, greeted by a gust of close air which smelled of braziers and clean bedding. Still he would not look at Brienne, frozen far behind him, when he spoke.
“My sweet sister has chosen trial by combat to test her innocence, and the High Sparrow wants me for the Faith’s champion, so I can prove my guilt by dying at the hands of one of my erstwhile brothers. Of course, I could hardly have fucked Cersei without her being present, so what the High Sparrow really wants from me is to act the mummer for hungry smallfolk. In the end I will be dead, and my sister will still be guilty. If I believed in them, I would say the gods must be pissing themselves with laughter up there in the sparkly quintessence.”