Archive of Our Own ^beta

Jaime wasn’t especially enthusiastic about fetching Ned Stark to begin with. He understood it was all part of the plan, but surely there could have been a plan that wouldn’t have meant months or even years of enduring his glowering presence at the Red Keep. But even apart from that, visiting the North in autumn had seemed like a bad idea even when they’d first set out from King’s Landing.

After one week in Winterfell, it seemed like possibly the worst idea anyone had ever had. There was already half a foot of snow on the ground, and by halfway through each night, the cold had leached its way through all his layers and got to his skin, and he woke up and had to get out of bed and do exercises for half an hour just to get his blood moving.

“You’re not meant to be sleeping alone,” Tyrion said, when he complained, but Jaime wasn’t going to share a bed like a traveler in a common room who couldn’t afford privacy. Tyrion shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’m sleeping quite comfortably.” Jaime glared at him.

There was nothing to do during the day but go hunting, except if you went hunting, what actually happened was, you fell through a deceptively solid-looking snowbank that was actually a loose drift five feet deep, got soaked to the skin, and came back shivering without having killed anything at all, while your Northern guide had a deer slung over his shoulders and a wooden face hiding his smug amusement. Jaime was ready to kill him by the end of his one abortive attempt.

Robert was being even more of a rutting beast than usual: mounting every willing woman in the fresh territory, and moaning over Lyanna Stark at the same time. Normally that would mean Cersei coming to fuck him in a rage, which would certainly have enlivened the boredom, only they hadn’t managed to find anywhere to do it. There were always servants and children popping up unexpectedly out of odd corners, even in the crypts. There was a half-ruined tower near the godswood, but as it was in fact half-ruined, it was full of snow and ice, and when he’d tried to lure Cersei there with the suggestion of taking blankets, she had just glared at him from where she was sitting by the fire drinking hot wine.  

The only entertainment left was lounging about the castle and batting people around just to see how you could make them twitch. Five days into their stay, Jaime was in the courtyard enjoying a little light needling of his host—he thought he might as well start with Lord Eddard as he meant to go on, at least until he got to take his sword out—when they heard the galloping coming. Both of them were already at the gates when the Hound came charging in on a half-foundered horse, foam lathering its mouth, with Joffrey clinging on the withers pale and terrified and spattered with blood; Clegane dumped him to the ground and snarled, “They got Tommen.”

By the time Jaime got back down with his sword, Robert was bellowing for his horse and his hammer, throwing the entire castle into an uproar. Stark was an island in the chaos, standing near the gates organizing a handful of men in worn leathers and decent steel, with bows and dogs: his huntsmen. Jaime shoved through the crowd and up to him. “They’re leading me,” he said, a demand, his heart pounding.

Stark looked at him and said quietly, “I understand your feelings, but these men know these woods like you know the Red Keep. They’ll go quicker if we let them go alone, ahead of us, and come meet us when they’ve found the trail.”

“They’ll go as fast as they can, and if I can’t keep up, they’ll leave me behind,” Jaime said, flatly.

Cersei was flying out of the house by then with Catelyn Stark on her heels, stricken; she went first to Joffrey, cupping his face, and then whirled to Jaime. “I’m going,” he told her, before she could say a word, and turned back to Stark ready to keep arguing, but Stark’s younger boy had just darted through the crowd and grabbed his father’s arm.

“Not now, Bran,” Eddard said.

“Father,” the boy said, gulping for air, “Robb’s on the trail. After the prince.”

“What’s that?” Robert said sharply, wheeling round.

“We were down by the river, with the wolves,” Bran said, still panting. “We heard the fighting. We found the—the dead men—” He swallowed, a flinch going over his face. “Robb took Grey Wind, and told me to come back, so Summer could lead you after them—”

“Good lad,” Eddard said, and raised his voice to his master of horse. “Callamy! A fresh horse for Bran, now!”

The direwolf was sitting waiting for them at the edge of the trees when Jaime rode out with the huntsmen and the boy in the lead; Bran leaned over and told the beast, “Find Grey Wind! Go!” and the wolf went bounding into the forest, leading them onward.

They passed the clearing with the corpses after what felt like almost a quarter of an hour: two guards dead with arrows in their backs, another one with a slit throat, and five strangers at one end of the clearing, butchered; most likely by the Hound on his way out with Joffrey. The direwolf barely paused to sniff the ground, and then was loping onward, into the trees; a moment later, one of the huntsmen said, “M’lord Bran, let him go quicker; your brother’s leaving us a trail,” and pointed to a dark twig broken to inner white, at eye level, and they were pressing on at higher speed.

Jaime was trying not to do the brutal calculations in his head: half an hour for them to have got back here, even if he didn’t count the time wasted in the courtyard, and the raiders had taken the guards’ good horses. Half an hour’s lead in a pursuit might as well have been an eternity. If the bandits came to a river, or rocky ground, and made even a modest effort, they’d lose Stark’s older boy, and then—

Summer suddenly gave a howling bark; a moment later, another one came answering, and a second wolf, bigger, came out of the brush with its jaws bloody. Robb Stark rode out after it, Tommen clinging to him. Robb’s face was streaked with blood, and Jaime lunged his horse forward, but Robb said, “He’s all right. They hadn’t hurt him. Tommen, look; your uncle’s here.”

Tommen only clung to Robb the harder, and wouldn’t be detached. He was still clinging when they met the rest of the hunting party, a short way behind, and wouldn’t let go for Robert either; he held on until they were in the courtyard and Cersei was there, stretching her arms up to him, and even then, Robb had to slide down with him before Tommen would transfer his grip to her neck instead. She sank to the ground with her arms tight around him, pressing her lips to his forehead, clutching him close.

Robert was off his horse and gripping Robb by the other shoulder. “Should’ve known I could trust Ned’s son to do the job. Did you get all the whoresons who took him?”

Robb swallowed and said, quietly, “I think so, Your Grace.” Eddard was there beside him, a hand cupping the boy’s cheek, his face serious. Robb looked at him. “There were three of them,” he said, low. “Grey Wind took one, and…I killed the other two.” He looked a little green: his first kills, most likely. Well, he’d get used to it. He took a deep breath. “We should send some men to go gather the bodies and bring them in. Father, I think they were Wildlings.”

Eddard frowned. “Wildlings? This far south?” He turned and beckoned to his brother, the one from the Night’s Watch, who came through the still-milling crowd to join them.

“I had to follow them a while before I thought I had a good opening,” Robb said. “They were arguing over what to do with Tommen. One of them said if he was the prince, maybe they should take him back over the Wall, to someone called Mance Rayder.”

“A deserter from the Night’s Watch,” Benjen Stark said immediately. “He’s become a leader among the Wildlings. Calls himself the King Beyond The Wall. Did they say anything else?”

Robb nodded. “One of them said he wouldn’t go back for any price. That…” He hesitated, and then said, “that the White Walkers didn’t care about southern princes. They should keep going south, and sell Tommen to someone who’d buy him for the chance to get a reward, for bringing him back safely. And the third—” a flicker of anger went over his face. “He liked frightening the lad. Kept saying he wanted to find out what princes tasted like.”

“Bald head, scarred with long lines?” Benjen said. “Arms scarred too?” Robb nodded. “A Thenn. He wasn’t just trying to frighten him.”

The Stark boy looked horrified, and Robert went purple with rage. “By all the Seven, I swear I’ll bring an army and we’ll go through the Wall and gut every last one of those goatfucking savages,” he said, all but snorting smoke, so obviously absurd that Ned didn’t even argue with him, just shook his head a little.

“This is the third group of Wildlings we’ve heard of coming south of the Gift in the last six months,” he said. “If they’re fleeing this far south, there’s something sending them. I don’t know whether to believe it’s truly White Walkers or not, but they’re not a weak or cowardly people. Brutal, aye, but they don’t scare easily. And there was that deserter…” He looked at Robert. “I don’t like leaving the North now, with all this happening—”

Robert gave a loud snort. “You wouldn’t like leaving the North if the countryside were carpeted in fucking flowers and the gods themselves came down and promised you not a thing would go wrong while you were away. No, I’m not letting you off that easily. Besides, you don’t need to worry, not with this one here watching over things.” He shook Robb by the shoulder a little. “Almost as old as we were, back in the day, eh, Ned? He’s ready for it. You’ll take care of your father’s realm, and he’ll come take care of mine,” he told the boy.

Robb Stark looked at his father and said quietly, “I’ll keep our people safe, Father,” and Ned let out a deep sigh and said, “I know.”

#

Jaime did have a lingering murderous impulse afterwards—always annoying when someone else did your killing before you got to do it yourself—but it didn’t occur to him to keep worrying about the incident until that night, almost immediately after Tommen was finally tucked into bed, when the boy woke up screaming. Jaime was up the stairs and in his bedroom with sword drawn before he even thought about it, only to find Cersei kneeling by the bed and Tommen clinging to her sobbing. She tried to get him to go back to sleep for what felt like hours, with stories and songs and cuddling, only every time his eyes closed and she tried to get up, he woke up with another cry, and grabbed for her again.

Cersei looked ready to commit murder herself soon. She snarled Robert away after his one attempt to order Tommen to buck up and come out of it ended in even worse tears, and the old septa who came by offering to help got roared back downstairs for her pains. Jaime hadn’t the faintest idea of anything that would help, so he just stood by the wall to be with them both, since he wasn’t leaving them alone in this; he had assumed that Tommen would finally collapse from exhaustion eventually, but after the sixth round, that hope was wearing thin.

When the third quiet knock came at the door, and Cersei glared red-eyed at him, he went to go chase off whichever well-meaning idiot had come by this time before she had to. Tommen was currently in her lap gasping weakly in small sobs, after his seventh waking. Only it was Robb Stark out in the corridor, and when he said, “I thought I’d see how Tommen was doing,” Tommen’s head came up tearstained and desperate, and Jaime hesitated, and let him come in.

Robb came to the other side of the bed and sat down and said to Tommen quietly, “You were brave out there today. Swallowed all those tears, now they’ve got to come out. It’s all right. But you’d feel better if you took some rest, too. Do you think you could be brave again and get some sleep, if Grey Wind and I were here with you?”

He gestured towards the rug before the hearth, and the direwolf came padding in through the door, glancing up at Jaime with a brilliant yellow eye as it passed, not much shorter at the shoulder than he was; the beast was a monster. But it came up to the bed to look at them, and wagged its massive tail, and Tommen rubbed one fist over his eyes and said softly, “Can I touch him?”

“I don’t know,” Robb said. “Put out your hands flat with the backs up, and let him take your scent.” Jaime tensed, but Stark put his own hand on the scruff of the wolf’s neck, and when Tommen let go of Cersei the rest of the way and did it, Jaime couldn’t bear to stop it. The massive head stretched out and sniffed at Tommen’s hands, and then it opened its mouth and Jaime almost lunged, but the wolf only licked a massive tongue out to swipe over Tommen’s chin, and Tommen squealed a little.

“That means he likes you,” Robb said. “All right, put your hand up here and you can give him a scratch,” and Tommen climbed the rest of the way out of Cersei’s lap and reached over to rub the wolf’s head; the beast took it patiently a moment, and then it turned away and went over to the rug and settled itself by the fire, yawning its massive jaws wide before it put down its head on its paws.

“What do you think?” Robb said gently, and Tommen looked up at him and gave a small nod. “All right. Lie down, and when you wake up with terrors again, just look over and see us here, and go back to sleep. They’ll die down after a few nights. My brother Bran had them badly, a few years ago, after he got hurt on a hunt,” he added.

He got up and smiled at Cersei; her face was stiff, but she was looking at Tommen, who was laying himself down, and with an effort Jaime could see, she smiled back, although she couldn’t make it more than a thin controlled line, barely curving. “You’re very kind. I hate to take you from your bed.”

“I’ve slept harder and colder for longer,” Robb said, with an easy shrug. “It’s all right, Your Grace. He’ll need you in the day; let me do what I can for the night.”

For the next three nights, he slept in Tommen’s room. The cries still burst out, jerking Jaime out of his bed each time, but they stopped again before he even made it into Tommen’s room, and by the third night, they indeed had almost died down. He couldn’t help but be grateful to the Stark boy, although a bit resentfully, and he certainly felt it was just as well when Cersei finally managed to prompt Tommen to tell Robb that he was all right, and Robb could go back to his bed. Stark rubbed his head and told him he was a brave cub, and went as easily back to his own chambers as he’d come to Tommen’s in the first place, without any sign of being offended, even though Cersei had been a touch churlish. Possibly Jaime had been so as well. He didn’t like Tommen wanting Robb Stark for anything.

He didn’t like the Starks at all. He didn’t like their earnestness and honesty and prudishness, he didn’t like their cold heavy-walled castle, he didn’t like their frozen block of a realm, and he especially didn’t like Robb Stark, who had saved his son’s life and been kind to him and got him to sleep, and what business of his was it to have done any of those things? Did he think he was racking up debts that House Lannister was going to pay?

If he did, he kept at it. Tommen started to fill every meal with excited chatter about what brilliant and novel remarks Robb had made that day and what treats Grey Wind had let Tommen feed him, until Jaime even more wanted to duck the Stark boy in a trough. When Joffrey sneered, “Ugh, will you shut up about Robb Stark? Who cares about him, anyway. He’s just a stupid Northern lord,” Jaime privately shared the sentiment, and he didn’t like that Tommen showed more fight defending his new hero than he had for anything else in his life.

“I think we’ve had about enough of this,” Cersei said, and the next day told Tommen that he couldn’t keep pestering Lord Stark’s heir, who had a great deal of work to do, and he should stay inside and play with his sister instead. Tommen got a bit teary and actually argued with her, and then went to the window of their room and sat there staring down miserably into the courtyard, and Jaime was about to try and get him to play a round of cards when there was a knock on the door and Arya Stark was at the door to ask Tommen to come out and play hide and seek with her and Bran and Rickon.

“Yes!” Tommen said, before Jaime could say anything, and was out the door so quickly Jaime couldn’t have stopped him except by snatching him physically off his feet.

“Do you want to come too, Myrcella?” Arya added, sticking her head back in.

“No, thank you, it’s too cold,” Myrcella said; she was huddled near the fire with her sewing, and Arya shrugged and said, “If you like sewing, Sansa’s got hers down in the solar, it’s loads warmer there,” and the end of it was Jaime alone in the room with both his small children gone to play with wolves.

Robb brought them back at dinnertime just as Cersei was about to send Jaime out to retrieve them; Tommen was wet to the tops of his boots, pink-cheeked and glowing, and Robb said to Cersei, “Your Grace, the lad’s no bother at all, I’m glad to see him better,” and Jaime could see Cersei trying to decide exactly how rude she was going to be when Tyrion said, “Thank you, Lord Stark. It’s not the child, it’s the mother; she’s still having a hard time letting Tommen out of our sight. But you know it’s not good for him to be cooped up,” he added to Cersei, in a gentle kind tone, and when Robb even more earnestly promised to look after him, she kept her teeth clenched and thanked him with cold politeness, then whirled on Tyrion the instant he was gone.

“What exactly do—” she stopped, because Tyrion had held up a hand and was looking pointedly over to where Tommen had fallen like a proper lion onto the waiting food, telling Myrcella of a massive snowball battle won in the godswood that afternoon. She held off until the children were tucked away in bed and then came storming back into their sitting room.

“You’re being a little too obvious,” Tyrion said sharply, when she started in on him. “Tommen isn’t old enough to be discreet, and if you make it clear enough to him that you don’t think Starks are suitable company, other people are going to find out, and they’ll start wondering why.”

“Why I wouldn’t like that Stark boy encouraging Tommen to trot after him—”

“Robb isn’t doing anything of the sort!” Tyrion said. “I wish he were; we could put a stop to that easily enough. He’s doing something much worse: he’s making no special effort whatsoever. He’s treating Tommen exactly the same way he treats all his own little brothers and sisters, which in case you’re wondering means he’s kind to them, keeps them in line, plays with them occasionally, chides them when necessary, and is uniformly their first port of call whenever they’re in any sort of trouble. They all love him and trust him unconditionally, and that includes the bastard, who has no business doing anything but hating him with a burning passion. He’s an ideal big brother for any boy of nine, much less one whose actual big brother is Joffrey, and if you haven’t yet realized that makes Robb Stark much more dangerous than if he were scheming, you should now.”

Cersei’s face had gone hard as he spoke, and after a moment she said, tightly, “Fine. How do we detach him?”

“The best option I can think of right now is the opposite,” Tyrion said. “Encourage Tommen to spend all the time he wants with Robb, since he’s now been invited, and let’s hope that a boy of seventeen, no matter how kind to small children, will lose patience at having one constantly tagging along after him, pestering.”

“And if he doesn’t?” Cersei said.

“We’ll think of something else to try,” Tyrion said. “But in the worst case, we’ll live with it until we go home, which won’t be very long from now.”

Robb didn’t lose patience with Tommen, because he didn’t get pestered; after a few days he took it on himself to give Tommen work to do: arms practice and lessons with Bran, running around the castle carrying messages with Rickon, going to the ladies in the solar and asking them if they wanted anything, and helping with the direwolf training, which was two solid hours for all the Starks every single day, one in the morning after breakfast and one in the evening just before dinner, which Robb didn’t allow any of his siblings to shirk, not even Sansa, who was visibly unenthusiastic about going out in the increasing cold, but obeyed her brother without much complaint.

He himself usually went out for another hour after dinner, too, and Tommen kept going after him; Cersei tried to send Jaime out to at least stop that, on the grounds of it being too cold and dark, but instead Jaime ended up staying himself, because Stark was teaching his wolf to fight alongside him. It was fascinating and also more than a little concerning. He had a stuffed training dummy of a mounted fighter set up in the godswood. He put a treat in a bag underneath, between the saddle strap and the horse’s belly, and the direwolf would dart through and take it from underneath without the least bit of trouble, unhorsing the rider. Robb could stab a lance into the fallen man without his own horse even breaking stride. It looked to Jaime like the maneuver would work beautifully even on a man in full plate and a horse in barding, and Robb wouldn’t have to get in reach of the rider’s own weapons. He could probably personally take out five or six enemy knights in a battle. As Jaime knew very well himself, one man taking out that many actually mattered, in the field: it meant being able to break a line, create a breathing space for your knights, let them double up on either side of you and get at the enemy’s flanks.

“Very nice,” he said, when Robb wheeled back from his final pass and dismounted; Robb inclined his head. “Have you ever tried it in the field?”

“Not with a mounted man, but I’ve got him taking deer that way now,” Robb said, with a gesture; the wolf loped to his side and looked up at Jaime with a considering eye.

Jaime eyed him back. “And with infantry?”

“It depends on their armor,” Robb said. “If their legs aren’t armored past mid-thigh, he can kill them, so I’d let him just go. Otherwise I’d send him at their weapon arm; even if they’ve a mail shirt, he can just drag their arm wide—”

“Long enough for you to kill them,” Jaime said, and Robb nodded. “He does seem handy. And he doesn’t spook your own horses?”

“We keep them in the stables, so ours know their scent,” Robb said. “Sometimes they do take a start, but it’s usually their fault,” he jerked his chin towards the wolf. “They like to play a prank or two sometimes, make the horses run right after they’ve been groomed.”

“Direwolves play pranks?” Jaime said. “They don’t seem to be very humorous creatures.” 

Robb grinned at him suddenly. “Aye, we’re all a grey dour lot, buried up to our stiff necks in the snow?” As much as if to say, he knew perfectly well what Jaime thought of Starks, and wasn’t bothered by it in the least. “We like our work, and we like our play, too. When we’re in the mood for it. Tommen,” he called, raising his voice. “Time to go in.” Tommen came running out of breath, carrying an armload of sticks.

“What are those for?” Jaime said, eyeing them.

“Kindling for the solar,” Tommen said. “The pile was getting low earlier, I noticed.” He looked up at Robb, who smiled down at him and gave his head a rough tousle, approving, and said, “Throw one for him; try and get it past that sapling. With your whole arm, like Jon showed you,” and Tommen carefully flung a stick off his pile, possibly the best throw Jaime had ever seen him make, and the direwolf shot off after it and brought it back for the treat Robb gave Tommen to offer him.

Jaime hadn’t paid much attention to Tommen before all of this. Cersei didn’t like him spending much time with the children; she thought it was too dangerous. Jaime hadn’t protested, either; he’d never found small children appealing, and he didn’t actually have very much time. The hours of duty were dull as ditch water, but they ate up the day, and he needed two hours in the ring morning and night, and another two of riding when he could get them. He wasn’t going to run to fat. Anyway, the children had nurses and maesters and tutors up to their eyeballs, they didn’t need him. When someone tried to kill them, he’d be there to stop it, and when the boys got old enough to fight, he’d give them a good polish on top of whatever their sword masters taught them.

Only neither of those things had ever happened. As far as the sword went, the last time he’d looked into it, Joffrey had more chance of cutting himself than his opponent, and Tommen had been bidding fair to be the same; they were both picky about their food and neither one of them was putting on much muscle. Jaime still hadn’t given it much thought; he would fight for them if necessary, and there were any number of great knights who’d be glad to serve a king.

But he started to realize after another week that apparently Tommen had needed something more, or at least wanted something more, because now that he was getting it, he was opening up like a wilting flower that someone had watered and put in the sun. His form with the sword had gotten at least ten times better in the course of a week, and he was hitting the target one in three by now with a bow.

Jaime had occasionally gone by his training sessions at the Red Keep before, but it hadn’t been a pleasure; Tommen cried whenever he got hurt, and the sessions ended immediately thereafter. When Tommen took a good hit from Bran and cried, all the Starks jumped like something terrible had happened; Robb, who’d been drilling with the bastard at the other side of the yard, apparently paying no attention, came at a run. A moment later Arya said, incredulously, “Are you crying over a fair hit?” and it would have taken a duller child not to understand that he ought to be mortified. And Tommen clearly was, only then Robb, who’d been looking at Tommen's hands with a frown, said to him, “Does your training master not hurt you, when you practice?”

Tommen shook his head, his cheeks red, and Robb said, “That’s been ill done. You need to learn to take a blow and keep going. And your hands are too soft. You need to harden them with more rough work.” He studied them a moment more, then said, “You’d better start with falls, and climbing. Bran, do you remember how I taught you, on the half wall? Good, show Tommen the way. Don’t try to do too much at once,” he added. “This isn’t your fault, and you won’t do two years of work in a single day. No more than six hard falls, and then go to the cold bath after for as long as you can stand it. Try not to cry, but if you can’t help it, just try to get up on the wall again as quick as you can, even if you’re still crying.”

And Tommen nodded and trotted off obediently with Bran to climb and fall off a wall onto hard ground repeatedly, without protest, and even though he was crying for most of it, he kept going. Jaime felt inclined to flog the training master as soon as he got back to the Red Keep, only he had the uncomfortable sinking sensation that it might be Cersei's fault, and very possibly his. He remembered with vivid clarity the one and only time he’d whined about some training bruises as a boy; Father had taken him straight down to the master and said, “My son is complaining of soreness; he needs another hour of practice, I believe,” and the master had nodded, and kept him at it.

He was even angrier at Robb, of course, for making him angry at himself and Cersei; but the one person it never occurred to him to blame was Robert, up until he was having it out with Cersei in their chambers and Tyrion broke in sharply, “Did you tell him you’d fix it?”

“What?” Jaime said.

“Did you tell Robb Stark you’d take care of the training master back in King’s Landing?” Tyrion said.

“Why would I say anything to him? It’s none of his business,” Jaime said.

Tyrion stared at him incredulously. “He’s seen it, so now it is his business, which means the first thing he’s going to do, if you haven’t told him it’s taken care of, is go tell Tommen’s father, like a good responsible young man! Go back and tell him right now!”

Jaime was about to go, but it was too late: there was a heavy tread on the stairs and Robert came charging in, bellowing at Cersei loud enough for the entire castle to hear about how she’d ruined their boys, which went on for a round or two before it got a hundred times worse: he stopped bellowing and said heavily, “I shouldn't shout. It’s my fault, not yours. But I’ll see it mended, from now on. Thank the gods we came up here with them. I’ve half a mind to leave Tommen here to foster,” and when Cersei surged up—Tyrion tried to raise a hand to stop her, but it went ignored—and said nearly in a snarl, “With a seventeen year old boy?” Robert bellowed back, “Who’s done better by our lad in a week than all your fine masters!” not inaccurately, and went charging back out again.

“Are you trying to get him to leave Tommen here?” Tyrion snapped at her as soon as she’d whirled back to demand that Jaime go and talk sense into him. “Why didn’t you just keep your mouth shut? Now he’s going to seriously think about it.”

“We’re not leaving my son behind to be raised by wolves!” Cersei snarled at him. “If he tries to, Jaime will go back and get him.”

“What a wonderful idea!” Tyrion said. “And when Jaime shows up alone demanding the boy, of course Robb Stark will ignore the last command from the king, his father, and hand him over, except that’s not what he’ll do. Then what happens? I recognize that you and Jaime would both like to kill him, but you can’t actually do it!”  He ran a hand over his face. “We’ve got to get out ahead of this,” he said. “Everyone knows I’m going to visit the Wall. Jaime, tell Robert you agree the fostering might be a good idea—shut up!” he added fiercely to both of them, “but the Stark boy is young for it, so you’ll stay here to keep an eye on Tommen until I come back on my way home, and then decide if you should leave him to foster, or bring him back with us.”

“It’ll be two months!” Cersei said.

“Would you rather it was four years?” Tyrion said. “You’d undoubtedly get back a fine, honorable, well-trained young lion. Wolves seem to be very good at raising cubs. But it will be inconvenient in all sorts of ways, won’t it.” There was a hard warning note in his voice, full of things they couldn't talk about with wolf ears listening. “So two months it is, and he’ll have his Uncle Jaime looking after him and making sure he doesn’t forget he’s part of a pride and not a pack. And you are going to start being friendly to the Stark boy,” he added to Jaime sharply. “Start by thanking him for finding out the incompetent master—you can do it grudgingly if you have to—and get involved with Tommen's training yourself. For that matter, it wouldn't hurt if you offered to teach Robb a thing or two somewhere that Tommen and his new friends can see just how much better his uncle is, and give him something to feel proud of in being a lion instead of being sorry he’s not a wolf.”

That sounded like a real pleasure at least, so Jaime took the advice to heart. He was grudging about making his thanks, because he couldn't help but be, but Robb took it in silence, and after a long moment said, low, “I should have spoken to you, instead. I’m sorry if I’ve made trouble for your sister,” and there was something odd and constrained in his voice, and after Jaime stared at him, too taken aback by the unexpected return apology to be cautious, it came out in a sudden burst. “If Joffrey treats my sister as he does yours,” meaning Robert, and it was savage; but then Robb looked away, his jaw moving, clearly aware he had no idea what he’d do about it, and then just walked away.

Jaime needed a good ten minutes to decide what he thought of it, which eventually was that Robb had even less business feeling sorry for Cersei than he did paying attention to Tommen, and needed a good sharp lesson about getting too familiar with lions. Jaime made sure to be at the training yard that afternoon, and after Robb and Jon Snow had done a bit of dancing, and Bran and Tommen were taking a break to drink a little water and throw snowballs at Arya, he offered to show the older boys a different drill.

They were both curious, obviously; he’d been doing his own drill in the private courtyard of their own quarters instead, so they didn’t have any idea what was about to hit them. He thought he wouldn't be too obvious about it at first, so he started with a simplified version, a pass of only twenty-three moves, which they could just about follow—Snow was better than Robb, and not smart enough to hide it, apparently—and then after they’d got it more or less down, he invited them to try it against him.

Robb was going to let Jon go first, and Jaime said, “No, both at once, that’s fine,” lightly, and Robb glanced at him and said, “Are we that bad?”

He sounded amused again, of all things. “Just new to it,” Jaime said from behind smiling teeth, and restrained himself for a bit, meeting every blow one after another, making it look a little harder than it was—they weren’t bad, actually; with five years of good training the bastard would even be a real swordsman, but not bad wasn’t in his league.

Then he picked up the pace a bit, and started tossing in a few more moves, coaxing them to overextend themselves. The bastard was getting a little angry about it, too; Jaime could tell; there was a temper under there, and he didn’t like being made to look like a fool. Which was too bad for him, only just before Jaime was about to really get into it, Stark stopped and stepped back, breathing hard, and waved Snow out of it as well. “That’s it for us,” he said. “We’ll be falling on our faces in another round. Will you show us the rest?”

Jaime felt more or less as if someone had offered him a haunch of fresh red meat and then pulled it away just as his jaws had been about to snap on it. Only Tommen was watching, and Jaime had to be friendly to Robb Stark, so there wasn’t anything for it but to make the best of it. So instead Jaime did make it obvious, blatantly so: he tore through the most complicated version of the drill he ever did, a brutal pass of sixty-eight moves at top speed with sword and dagger, run through three times with the major variations.

Afterwards Snow looked faintly stunned, but Stark only had a hard intent expression, watching him. “I didn’t get there until I was twenty or so, to be fair,” Jaime said to them, smiling and smiling, not even letting his breath come fast; maybe he wasn’t going to kill Robb Stark, but he could, in fact, and the boy might as well know it.

And then he felt a faint tingle of something just at the edge of his peripheral vision, and turned to look: the children were all perched on the fence around the yard, and sitting all in a ranged row in front of them were six direwolves, with Robb Stark’s beast in the middle, all of them watching him with unblinking eyes. He stared at them, an odd touch of unease; he’d never seen dogs behave that way. After a moment, as if they’d seen as much as they wanted, the big one got up and led the whole pack in a flowing line across the yard and over the far fence into the godswood, vanishing swiftly together out of sight.

#

“When I said to be friendly to Robb Stark, I didn’t actually mean, try to humiliate or intimidate him,” Tyrion said under his breath at dinner. “I have no idea what he took away from that little display of yours, but it certainly wasn’t a warm feeling!”

“You also told me to show off for Tommen. I did my best,” Jaime said insincerely. Robb hadn’t stopped frowning since they’d come inside: Jaime had been watching his face with some satisfaction. After dinner the Stark boy even went back outside and took Snow with him: were they going to try and muddle through the drill together? Jaime couldn’t resist following to see, although Tyrion glared at him and went along, which meant he wasn’t going to get to have any real fun like stepping out to give them a critique.

They did try it, or rather Snow did, the first version he’d shown them, with Robb watching and talking him through it. The bastard really did have some talent; a few years of work with good masters would make him dangerous, Jaime was thinking idly, watching them from the concealing shadow of the stable Tyrion had hauled him into.

“I think I’m starting to follow,” Snow said, panting, as he came out. “Just barely.” He took the cup of water Robb held out to him to gulp down several swallows, and gave him a rueful grimace. “The way that man smirks—I can’t like him.”

“He doesn’t want us to like him,” Robb said, dryly. Jaime felt Tyrion's glare even before he looked down and shrugged back at him a little: oh well.

“But I’ve never seen anyone that good,” Snow admitted, with a delightfully wistful tone. “I didn’t know anyone could be that good. I still don’t know how he did that turn after the sixth stroke, and he was doing it with a dagger in his left! It’s all I can do not to cut my own arm off as it is.”

“You’ll learn,” Robb Stark said.

“Do you think?” Snow said, faintly incredulous, as well he might be.

“Starting tomorrow,” Robb said, and there was a hard finality in his voice that made Snow stare at him. “Never mind the rest of your work. I’ll sort it out. From now on, you’ll be drilling six hours of the day, sword and mounted combat. Don’t keep fussing with this,” he jerked his head at the ring. “Even the easy version he started us with, that’s beyond where you are. You can’t start halfway down the road. You’ll need more speed and care and muscle, first. Ser Rodrick can help you with that. He’ll work with you, and I’ll look after Bran and the others until you’re gone. You’ll find better masters in King’s Landing, who’ll take you on from there.”

“King’s Landing?” Snow said. “I’m going to the Night’s Watch, with Uncle Benjen—”

“No, you’re not,” Robb said. “I need you in the south. You’ve got to become a knight, and good enough, before Robert dies, that he can give you a place in the Kingsguard.”

“What?” Snow said, helplessly, sounding as bewildered as Jaime felt; next to him, Tyrion had stiffened.

Robb jerked his head towards the empty ring. “If I had a man like that, do you know what I could do with him?” he said, and Jaime realized, in dawning outrage, that what Stark had taken away from the display hadn’t been resentment or intimidation; his voice was instead full of—hunger, as if he’d been shown something he wanted, something to sink his own teeth into and never let go. “Put him in the right place at the right time, he’d change the course of an entire battle, maybe a war. Even in peace, there’s real work for someone like that. Instead he’s living in a golden cage, fighting in tourneys, guarding a king that no one’s trying to kill.”

He sounded disgusted, more than anything: yes, what a stupid waste Jaime was making of his life, lazing around uselessly in the Red Keep, and Jaime was on the verge of going out there to kill him, despite everything, and then Stark said, “But he does it, because it’s the only way he can guard the honor of his sister and his house,” and Jaime stopped, not because of Tyrion’s hand on his arm, as rage fell away into a strange blankness.

“I’m not surprised he’s glad to claw anyone who comes to stare at him,” Robb went on, horribly, as if those sharp grey wolf’s eyes had met his, through the gilded bars, and understood his own rage more than he had. “I’m surprised he hasn’t slain a second king and gone to take the black instead. He must think of it five times a day.”

Actually it was more like ten; or rather it had been, earlier on. After a few years, the very monotony of Robert’s grossness and disrespect had worn away the impulse. Now it only came on special occasions. And Jaime had managed to resist the impulse mostly because Cersei had given him another way to stab the king: they’d killed him together in her bed, over and over and over, filling his house up with lions, all the while knowing that they were making ready for the final butchering of the stag.

Then Robb said, to Snow, “And it grieves me to my heart, but I must ask you to endure the same fate. For our sister. The king’s not bothered to teach his sons the art of war, but he’s taught them how to treat a woman of courage, who won’t be cowed when he bellows. Tommen hasn’t taken the lesson yet, but his brother has. So you must go south, and not north, to protect Sansa when she’s married to him.” He put out a hand on Snow’s shoulder. “I know it’s a harder thing I ask, than to take the black. Years of work, and nothing to use it for that anyone else will see. Will you do it?”

There was a deep intent note to the question, asking not for an answer but for a vow. And Jon Snow straightened, his own face going serious and somehow older: they stood together in the cool blue of the moonlight, a knight being given a charge under the hand of his lord. “I swear it,” he said, and Jaime was almost surprised he didn’t kneel. “For our sister, and the honor of House Stark,” and Robb Stark cupped his brother’s face with a hand, and bent their heads together. 

#

Jaime had no idea what he was thinking or feeling, afterwards. He wanted to be angry, but he was something else, something he couldn’t put words to until the next morning, when he went out and saw Jon Snow in the yard, doing a tedious grinding drill to build the muscles of the back, over and over, with passionate dedication, obviously on fire to fulfill his oath to his wonderful honorable beloved future lord, and realized that he was savagely, violently jealous.

He was angry then, at himself: what sort of fucking idiot was he being? Robb was a boy, a nice young man perhaps, nothing more; and he and his house were in the way, lying squarely in the path of the Lannister dynasty his father was building, so either he’d bend the knee and accept the diminishment of his house, or as admittedly seemed more likely, he’d go into the lion’s maw, because Father could snap up nice young men in a single bite.

Jaime set out to prove it to himself, as a kind of penance for stupidity; he shadowed Stark the rest of the day, watching him be unnecessarily nice to servants as he parceled out his brother’s tasks to them. There had been something of an uproar on the Stark side of the castle last night. Robert had told Robb about the project of fostering Tommen with him, and there’d been a bit of his usual “I’ll not forget the service you’ve done my boy, if ever you need something from me,” blustering. It was all nonsense: he forgot pledges the instant they were made, and someone could serve him well a dozen times and still be gored savagely for one mistake.

But Robb hadn’t let him have time to forget; he’d asked for Jon’s place right then and there, and Robert had got all teary about how loyal the Starks were, wanting nothing but to offer more service, and he’d vowed to see that Snow got the best masters in the south, and promised that he’d make him Kingsguard the first tourney he won.

Apparently that hadn’t gone over very well with Lady Catelyn; for some reason she wasn’t fond of the constant reminder of her honorable husband’s faithlessness, and didn’t like the idea of Snow going south with them. She’d almost immediately hauled her son and husband off upstairs for a private row in the lord’s rooms. The noise level hadn’t got anywhere near Robert’s tirade, so Tyrion hadn’t got many details, but the program to send Jon Snow south hadn’t been overturned, and both Ned and Catelyn had looked fairly grim this morning, looking at Joffrey across the room, so apparently Robb had carried his point.

“At least that’s not a problem we need to solve,” Tyrion had said to Jaime, last night, after thinking it over. “In fact, I can’t imagine anything better for Joffrey than having a knight he’ll be constantly afraid of, right by his side. Whenever he wants to do something exceptionally awful, he’ll look at those cold Stark eyes and think about just where his line for kingslaying might be, and then he’ll back down from the worst of it.”

After Robb finished making his arrangements, it was back to the training yard for him, where he personally took over the drill for the younger boys—and Arya, who instantly saw an opportunity and wheedled him to be allowed to join in: apparently Robb was more willing to tolerate Lady Catelyn’s displeasure than their sword master. Somewhat amusingly, she was better than all three of the boys. Robb set them a simple drill, made them stick to it, corrected their form rigorously, and then let them go have another snowball fight for a reward before he herded them through the kitchens, stuffing sausage rolls into their mouths and his own, and delivered them to the old maester for their lessons.

Jaime was expecting him to run his own drill, then, but instead Robb went further into the keep, to a large hall Jaime hadn’t been in before. As soon as he followed Stark in, he realized it was kept for old servants and retainers: four large hearths warmed the place, and old women in blanketed rocking chairs and bonnets sat together like gaggles of hens, knitting or mending or in many cases with their heads tipped back, snoozing.

But at the back of the hall there was a large map table laid out, and a dozen scarred old men around it. Three of them were engaged in a wheezy squabble over the minor Battle of The Forks from two hundred years ago that tacticians loved to chew on, because there had been seven different companies and fourteen different reasonable positions; the crossings there were murder. It was a completely pointless quarrel, of course, because a week later, Ser Dontagh of the Vale had arrived with a larger company and destroyed everyone.

But a couple of the less querulous men were at the table with Robb, laying out a Northern campaign that Jaime didn’t know: two companies of mounted fighters maneuvering inside the Wolfswood, in winter, a tidy little exercise. They were talking through the positions when Robb glanced up and saw him, and straightened.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” Jaime said. “It’s quite fascinating. I’ve never seen this one,” and he sat by watching while Robb worked through a handful of small variations—he did quite well for a boy, nothing Jaime wouldn’t have done, and then he came up with one rather nice idea of getting the enemy’s location essentially by elimination: he stretched a line of scouts on foot the length of the woods, and sent them ahead, and whichever of them didn’t return was where the enemy was. The old men liked that one, too, nodding enthusiastically, and Robb looked pleased with himself.

“Have you ever done the autumn campaign near Red Lake?” Jaime said, from behind a smile he didn’t want to wear. “Westerlands against the Reach.”

Robb looked at him steadily, and then brought out a map of the south and invited him to lay it out: on paper, the campaign looked like an absurd mismatch, fifty thousand Lannisters to seventy thousand Reach, pikes and heavy cavalry, with advantage of supply. It was one of Father’s favorite teaching campaigns for that very reason: anyone looking at it would immediately think that the Reach were going to win far and away. What had actually happened was that Lord Lancel had waited until they’d been marching with the lake on one side, then he’d attacked. He’d handily outmaneuvered the Reach with the faster-moving Lannister cavalry, keeping the flower knights between them and their own pikes, which never had a chance to come into action, and carved them up from all sides with Lannister longbow archers, many of them literally on boats on the lake firing directly into the back of the Reach army.

Jaime finished laying it out and sat back with a wide wave of his arm. “Well, Stark? What would you have done, if you’d been in command of the Reach?”

Robb looked down at it, his eyes going to each company in turn, a frown starting, and deepening by degrees until he finally just gave a snort. “I wouldn’t have been there,” he said. “Not with those companies. Might as well be a roast ready for the carving. What did they do? Did they make you work for it a bit, or were they stupid enough to actually come up alongside the lake?”

Jaime said tightly, “Yes,” half incredulous. When Father had set him at the puzzle for the first time, he’d tried to win the campaign for two weeks before he’d realized it was lost from the beginning.

Robb actually laughed. “Did it take more than a day?” It was very clearly a rhetorical question. And then he tilted his head, looking it over, and looked up at Jaime with a different smile, a sharper one, and said, softly, “If I’d had Northmen, though, you wouldn’t have had such a nice time of it. Not in autumn.”

Jaime smiled back at him, savagely. “Be my guest. Do you want to keep the same advantage in odds?”

“Where am I getting seventy thousand Northmen?” Robb said. “I’d take twenty; that’s a number I could raise.”

“Twenty thousand Northmen against fifty thousand Lannister troops?” Jaime said, almost breathless with rage. “Doesn’t seem like a very long fight. Where are you putting them?” He cleared the lake of the Reach markers, gestured an inviting hand over the grounds.

“Oh, I’m not fighting you there,” Robb said. “The fighting would start here.” He moved the Lannister markers back to the mustering point, and stretched them out along the road to Red Lake. “Woods-wise men with shortbows in the trees, taking supply, picking you off as you marched—”

“You wouldn’t get more than a thousand men that way,” Jaime said. “We’d just compress the line of march and use shields.”

Robb grinned at him, a little viciously. “But I don’t need to get more than a thousand men,” he said. “I need you to compress the line of march.” Jaime stared at him. “So that when you come to the wider valleys, here—and here—and here—” he touched the points along the road, “and we bring down the slopes to block your way, your army gets bottled up, and we can hit you in the rear without the rest of your force being able to engage us. And if you did spread out your line again, we’d take the men the other way, after all. Either way, we’d have you whittled down by ten thousand by the time you came to the lake, for a thousand of ours.”

“That’s still nineteen to forty,” Jaime said, still trying to sound light; it was becoming an effort. “Do you think you’re taking the castle that way?”

“I’m not going to the castle yet,” Robb said. “As soon as you get to open ground, I’ll let you march out of the woods, and then hit your supply train again, with my entire army. And then take this keep, over here.” He pointed to a small marker on the map, a minor keep that was barely a fortified tower, up in the foothills. “I’ll load it with all the stolen supply, and leave behind a thousand men who’ll start using it as a base for raiding. If you don’t besiege them, they’ll destroy your supply lines completely.”

“So we’ll besiege them,” Jaime said through his teeth. 

“Aye,” Robb said. “That’s fifteen thousand men, pinned down. Now we’re at eighteen to twenty-five. And those are odds I’ll work with.”

“Fine,” Jaime said. “I’ll grant you your odds. Do explain to me what you’re going to do with them, now that you’re done with all this nibbling here and there? You do realize the strategic target is the castle? You would actually have to fight us at some point to win.”

“Aye,” Robb said. “But I’ve got enough stolen supply to wait as long as two months before I do.”

“Wait for what?” Jaime said.

“For rain,” Robb said, softly, his eyes intent on him across the table. “For two days, three if it looked like I’d get them, of cold, miserable, pissing-down rain. The kind that only hits the south in autumn. And before it slackened, I’d march my entire company of infantry right here, straight for the lower gate of the castle. And you’d come out after me, wouldn’t you?”

Jaime stared at him, and couldn’t deny it, even though here in this room, he saw it coming; he couldn’t pretend to himself that after nearly two months of trying to crush a stinging, biting insect, he would pass up the chance. He would have come out after him.

Robb gave him another one of those slow wolf’s grins. “Aye. You’d come out. And I’d give ground, across the planks my men would have laid out overnight, in the dark, and we’d take them up behind us as we retreated, so your horses and your armored men would follow us straight into three days of churned mud. And my archers would ride around the castle wall here, get into close range, and start killing your horses. Your longbowmen would hit them badly, but mine would do worse to you: half your armored men would drown in the mud, and the rest would be useless. And when the light started to fail, early in the day, my infantry, who’d only be in wool and leather, would cross the river here and back again at the castle ford, come at your rear, and start killing your longbowmen, who wouldn’t be able to see anymore.” He straightened up from the table, and in the shadows of the hall, pooling in his cheeks and brows, his eyes gleaming out of the dark hollows, he didn’t look much like a boy, after all. “I don’t think it would last long after that, do you?” he said.

#

“No, this isn’t open to interpretation,” Jaime said to Tyrion. “Father likes this scenario for training because that’s still our army. There’s some differences in drill and arms, but those are the companies, that’s how we maneuver. And Stark fucked us with an army less than half the size. It wasn’t even a matter of being surprised. If I’d known exactly what he’d do, I wouldn’t have been able to stop him doing it. Even if I didn’t come out, with that many men concentrated at one point, he’d take the gate, and then we’d have a close-quarters fight in the freezing rain against Northmen through the castle. He’d still win!”

“I’m missing something here,” Tyrion said. “This is all on paper. You were talking about a battle that we already won, against someone else.”

Jaime planted his hands on the table and snarled at him over it, “Yes. We won, because the commander of the Reach was an idiot. But if we’d been fighting Stark, he would have won.”

Tyrion inhaled deeply and said, in a faintly beleaguered tone, “Jaime, are you trying to suggest that Robb Stark could outfight Father?”

“Yes,” Jaime hissed at him. “That’s what I’m trying to suggest.” Tyrion stared at him. “I’ve gone over that scenario with him dozens of times. We’ve fought it with different companies from different houses. Most of the time we give them the advantage in numbers and supply, and we still win. We’ve even fought it with Northmen a few times. I know every possible way that Father’s imagined that campaign going, and he’s never, not once, seen the way that Robb Stark tore us apart, after one look at a campaign he’d never seen before. He’s brilliant.”

Tyrion was staring at him with an expression that was traveling from shock to widening outrage. “Jaime,” he said through his teeth, “do I have to stop worrying about Tommen and start worrying about you?”

“Don’t be absurd,” Jaime said, a little too quickly, his heart doing a sharp guilty rabbit-hop.

Tyrion looked as though he was about to have an apoplectic fit. “I just finished arranging things to leave you here with him for two months!”  

“What exactly do you think I’m going to do?” Jaime said. It wasn’t a rhetorical question; he had a sinking feeling it might be just as well to know.

Tyrion glared at him with real violence. “I’m not going to give you ideas! Just know this: if there’s anything you think of doing to, with, or anywhere near Robb Stark while I’m gone, then before you do it, I want you to imagine in enormous detail having to tell me about it when I get back here, and just how badly I’m going to want to stab you for it, and then I want you to not do it. Just stay away from him!”

#

That was easier said than done. Winterfell seemed ghost-empty after the royal party left, Tommen waving them off beside him without a single tear shed. He ran off with Arya and Bran and Rickon the instant Cersei’s carriage was gone over the horizon and Jaime gave in and let him go: Robb had told them all they could have it as a day of play, after the leavetaking. The only remaining socially acceptable options for company besides Robb were the pathetic squirming eel that was Theon Greyjoy, no; the master-at-arms, Ser Rodrick Cassell, who if possible disapproved of Lannisters even more than his lord; and the doddering old maester.

Jaime did try. He spent three entire days drilling on horseback, which he sorely needed anyway; he visited the tavern and market in Oldtown, which was such a depressing experience he gave up after an hour and went back to the castle; he even tried to supervise Tommen’s lessons a bit, only the maester had them working on the orders of precedence of the minor houses, and he remembered his first time through those lessons as in a nightmarish haze, and he couldn’t make himself endure a second pass.

He’d never imagined missing the stupid mind-numbing guard duty, but without any kind of work, the days had too many hours; he couldn’t fill them all with drill. And worse than any of it, when he finally broke and went looking for Robb one afternoon—he told himself he meant to look for ways to annoy him—Robb wasn’t to be had, because he was too busy.

He apparently took being Lord of Winterfell to heart, and now in addition to drilling, supervising children, and training wolves, he walked a full circuit of the castle walls over the course of a week, held court every Mornday to listen to stupid whining complaints from Stark bannermen and the local smallfolk, reviewed the garrison of the keep at frequent but random intervals, personally went hunting to supply the castle kitchens with meat if they ran low, went over some part of the castle’s records with the maester every other day, and in the evenings read some tedious tome that the old man had recommended. When he finally let himself put it aside, generally because Theon or the children pestered him, he’d play a game of chess or cards or do a round or two of childish games before he ordered his pack off to bed, and went there himself. It was so dutiful and wholesome that Jaime desperately wanted to shove him into a midden.

After a week, he couldn’t stand the boredom any longer, and in even greater desperation went to the next court. When a hapless whimpering bannerman who had clearly failed to properly secure his keep started in on a tale of woe and minor banditry, he said, “That sounds mildly intriguing. I’ll go have a look,” before Stark could send a party of men-at-arms, and was rewarded by Robb looking at him startled.

“How many men do you want?” Robb said, after a moment.

“How many of these villains were there, did you say? Five?” Jaime said. The lordling nodded, uncertainly. “Let’s just go. I’ll be back by dinner tomorrow.”

He felt considerably better after that little excursion. There were seven bandits, not five, but that didn’t make much of a difference. He rode back into the castle yard the next afternoon whistling, and went on into the hall the same way, where Robb was sitting with the maester looking over accounts. Jaime perched on the table and tsked down at him. “You’re letting your bannermen cut corners. That one should have had three more men-at-arms, and then he wouldn’t have to go begging to his liege.”

Robb sat back and looked up at him. “This isn’t the south, and Master Worrin’s not a fool. We can’t afford for our bannermen to keep men-at-arms they might not need all winter. That would leave women and children going hungry to feed idle muscle. They send us the tax, and we keep the spare men, and send the help wherever it’s needed. How many were there?”

“The bandits? Seven,” Jaime said. “It wasn’t much of a fight. The worst of it was having to make them out through the layers of fur.”

Robb frowned. “What was their steel like? Rusted?”

“No, just rubbish,” Jaime said. “I broke three of their swords.”

“More Wildlings, then,” Robb said, grimly. “And they’ll not be the last.”

“Just as well, really,” Jaime said, lightly. “I can use the exercise,” and Robb looked at him again with his eyes gone sharp, hungry: surely thinking once again of what he could do, with a true knight at his service. And Jaime did need the exercise, and anyway why not let Stark have a taste of it, to taunt him with yet another golden shining luxury that House Lannister possessed that the North couldn’t afford. So Jaime smirked down at him and said, “Do let me know if you have any other little errands going begging, Stark,” before swinging off the table and heading back to his chambers, still whistling the whole way.

He was especially looking forward to Robb having to come and bend his neck enough to ask him to do something, only Robb didn’t actually seem to feel the slightest hesitation. The very next morning he came by the ring while Jaime was practicing, watched until he was done—Jaime might have made it a bit showier than usual—and then asked him to come with him and a party of men to a fishing village that had been threatened for tribute by a roving band of ironborn who were slated to return in three days’ time. That was even better, of course; Jaime made a point of condescending to all the Stark men-at-arms as thoroughly as he could on the way out, and when the ironborn arrived, he made even more of a point of just killing them all before anyone else had much of a chance to put a sword on any of them. Robb hadn’t even drawn his sword by the end of it; he was sitting his mount a ways back, watching, with the direwolf yawning at his feet.

“Do you suppose there’s a decent bathtub anywhere in this place?” Jaime asked him, afterwards, blithely riding up to him still cleaning his sword; he was just a touch gory.

“Oh, they’ll get you a bath,” Robb said, low and warmly, his eyes heavy-lidded, seeing something he liked very much indeed, and Jaime enjoyed his deep victorious soak with enormous satisfaction.

By the time they got back the next day, Maester Luwin told them that three different nearby crofters had complained of a giant moose roaming the Wolfswood, smashing through pens and farm buildings. Robb took his wolf to go hunt it down, and Jaime attached himself to the expedition. They picked up the trail in the late afternoon at the last crofter’s collapsed shed and followed a line of smashed undergrowth until dark. Robb finally said, “We’d better stop for the night, we’ll go astray.”

Somehow in less than five minutes he’d found them a small campsite: a heavy patch of brush that had kept the snow mostly off the ground beneath. He cut the lower branches and made a small fire, and without even talking about it, he laid out his bedroll directly next to Jaime’s beneath. After they’d eaten and lain down, Robb covered them both with his gargantuan cloak, and Grey Wind curled up over their feet, near the embers of the fire. Jaime hadn’t actually slept with anyone in ages; when he and Cersei fucked, it was always something rushed and furtive, a burst of heat and lust and pleasure, over quickly. He’d expected not to like it, and maybe he wouldn't have in a keep, the strong scent of another man’s body and breath, but with the savage cold biting at him all around, the warmth of Robb’s body was so sensually wonderful that he only wanted more of it; he hitched himself in a little closer almost involuntarily, and Robb, already half asleep, put his arm around him and drew him in even more. His mouth was so close Jaime could have kissed him almost without moving.

The next morning they found the moose, which was indeed gargantuan, roughly three times the height at the shoulder as Jaime’s warhorse. Grey Wind got so excited he charged ahead, jumped onto the thing’s back, and set his teeth in its neck. The moose promptly bolted; they had to chase it for two hours before they got close enough that Jaime managed to put a lance in its eye, and when it collapsed, Grey Wind stood on top of the body panting with pride, obviously convinced he’d brought it down himself.

Jaime was all for just taking off the antlers—they were the size of a decent shield—but Robb couldn’t stand leaving the meat to go to waste, so Jaime ended up helping him to butcher it, and they piled the meat and bones into the skin and dragged it back with them to the crofter’s house, leaving it for the volubly grateful man and his wife to preserve.

The crofter did not have a bathtub, decent or otherwise, so they had to ride back to Winterfell completely covered with blood and guts. Jaime was planning to order a bath to his chambers immediately, but Robb got off his horse in the courtyard and looked at him and laughed helplessly and said, “I think we’d better go to the baths before we touch anything,” as if he meant to just go to some communal bath instead. Jaime followed him and discovered to his strong indignation that Winterfell had a massive hot springs underground, which nobody had bothered mentioning to him at any point.

Robb was only bemused at his complaints. “It’s why the castle’s here. Otherwise it wouldn’t make much sense to have it this far from the river.”

“Why don’t you pipe it through the walls?” Jaime groaned, sinking in up to his neck; the water was spectacularly wonderful. “You could make the place actually livable.”

“We do, when it gets cold,” Robb said.

Jaime glared at him. “When?”

Robb grinned at him. “Southerner.”

#

Jaime ran seven or eight more little errands for him over the next two weeks. The best ones were the ones where Robb came along himself, of course, but even if he didn’t, he was almost sure to be in the great hall when Jaime came back, ready to appreciate a detailed step-by-step accounting of the interesting bits, and it was all highly satisfying until Jaime came back the last day of the month to cheerfully tell Stark about how he’d hunted down another band of thieves raiding small crofters through the forest, and after he was finished, Robb said to him, almost laughingly, “You’re spoiling me. Whatever the trouble is, you ride away and come back in a day’s time and it’s all sorted. I don’t know what I’ll do when you’ve gone south again,” and Jaime realized it was one month left, one month before he’d have to leave Robb Stark and his cold clean fortress of black and white and endless hard and honest work, to go back to King’s Landing and spend his days standing around in a golden cage watching as a gross slobbering drunkard neglected his duty and insulted his queen, and he couldn't bear it.

He stared at Robb stricken, knowing he was almost certainly looking pathetic and unable to care about that enough right now to hide it, and Robb—didn’t look at all surprised, actually; he only looked sorry, and he put out a hand and cupped his head and said softly, “Forget I said it. Come, you should get to the baths; I’ll go with you,” with understanding, because he knew, after all; he had recognized the terrible useless waste Jaime was making of his life and his gift and the dazzling hard-won prime of it, and why.

Jaime followed him blindly, and in the baths Robb sent him into the hot soaking tub and then went away and came back with cold ale for them to drink, nothing fancy, only simple and freshly brewed, and Jaime poured two cups of it down his throat and then told Tyrion, who wasn’t there, “Sorry, brother,” and when Robb said, “What?” Jaime turned and caught his head and kissed him.

Robb made faint muffled noises of confused protest under his mouth, because of course he was also a good chaste young man who meant to come virgin to his wedding bed, until Jaime let him go and said savagely, “Take me.” Robb stared at him, then understood what he meant, and instantly his eyes went almost glazed with lust, the real hunger summoned.

Then Robb was on him, devouring his mouth with kisses, their naked bodies grappling together, his cock sliding against Jaime’s in the pool, and Jaime pushed up against it eagerly, his arms around Robb’s body, and then Robb broke off and panted out, “Turn around,” and Jaime gladly bent over the lip of the pool for him and spread himself on the hot wet flagstones and both of them groaned desperately as Robb worked into him, rocking back and forth to get inside, their hands intertwined on the stones, his cock thick and irresistible.

It was exactly what Jaime wanted, the glorious sense of being possessed, and even better after Robb started fucking him, the hard insistent pressure deep inside his body, driving through him, as if he could be taken, as if he could hand himself over completely, and he managed to believe it long enough to come blindingly, even though he knew, sprawled gasping next to Robb on the ancient worn-smooth stones, that it was all a terrible illusion.

He went slowly back to his chambers afterwards, and sank onto his bed with his face in his hands. He’d never had this before, to miss it. The minor houses of the Westerlands kept enough men at arms to secure their borders and their keeps; there were no Wildlings creeping over the Wall into their lands, and ordinary bandits were beneath the notice of landed knights, much less the eldest son of Tywin Lannister. He’d been able to become a great knight because he’d never had any other real work to do; no one had needed to give his tasks to others, to free his time for six hours of drill a day. He’d still been young and stupid enough, at sixteen, to think that tourneys meant something, and three years in Aerys’ Kingsguard after that had been enough to make him grateful, at first, for the quiet of Robert’s reign, for the mere absence of men screaming as their flesh roasted beneath his eyes.

But now he’d had it: he’d had one single month, of which he’d wasted an entire week, doing the real work that a worthy lord could find for a man like him. He hadn’t spoiled Robb, he’d spoiled himself, because when he was gone, Robb would find other men, good trustworthy honest men, who would be glad to serve their good and trustworthy lord, and he’d value them and honor them as they deserved, and give them the work to do in Jaime's place, and if it took a few days more and a few men more, that wouldn't be much of a difference to him in the end. But there wouldn't be anyone giving Jaime work to do, and if someone honored him, it would only be a piece of malicious mockery, and they’d call him Kingslayer while they did it, an insult, as if that hadn’t been the best thing he’d ever done.

And in a few years—or even sooner, the way Robert was determinedly drinking himself to death—in a few years, Robert would die, and Father would make his move. It had all been decided on their last visit home to Casterly Rock, where Father had studied Joffrey with a cold, narrow, assessing look. After the third day he’d stopped paying attention to Joffrey and had spent another day inspecting Tommen, and on the next day after that, he’d said to Jaime with heavy disapproval, “One a vicious fool and the other a weakling. Little enough to choose between them,” and after dinner, he’d sent the children to bed early, took the three of them into his study, and told them flatly, “There’ll be a war when that boy comes to the throne, so we’d best make sure it’s the right one.”

And the obvious choice, with winter on the way, was the North, which would be heading out of the realm at the least provocation anyway. So Sansa Stark had been acquired, as a lever and a hostage and possibly even as the source of a direct claim, if all the Stark men ended up dead; and Lord Eddard had been drawn south, to leave his realm in the hands of an untried boy if he couldn't be made to bend. And Father wasn’t going to be able to outfight Robb Stark in the field, which would be an unpleasant surprise for him, but it wouldn't really matter, because if he couldn’t do that, he’d just murder him instead.

Jaime would be standing by the door of the king’s bedroom when it happened, the door of another bad and unworthy king, when someone went in past him and he’d overhear, on the other side of a door, that the worthy lord he’d once served had died in some blood-soaked grotesque way, shredded to pieces for the unpardonable crime of giving his father any trouble at all. And—and the three Stark children he could hear now, outside, laughing with his son—whom they’d taken in not for scheming, but only because they’d found a small wounded cub on their stoop, and so had licked his hurts and helped him grow, because that was what Starks did; they took care of the weak and the helpless and the old and the young. So his son would leave here stronger, healthier; braver and more willing. And in thanks for that priceless gift, House Lannister would come back here and murder the children who’d had the temerity to play with lions.

He’d known even before he’d ridden through the gates that he was coming into a doomed house, Castamere before the fall. He hadn’t cared, and the more reasons he’d been given to care, the angrier he’d been: how dare the Starks make him sorry, how dare they be anything that he could look upon and want in the world, when they were going to be torn apart and devoured. But they were, and he was sorry, and he didn’t know anything at all he could even try to do about it. He did know that anything he tried wouldn't do any good, just like that inexorable campaign marching across the Westerlands: he could know every move his father would make, and there still wouldn't be a way to stop him in the end.

#

He got up the next morning and went to see if Robb had any work for him anyway. The damage was already done, the mortal wound taken. When he went back to King’s Landing, it would all be over. He’d crawl into a bottle like Robert or a brothel like Tyrion, or maybe he’d find something else more exotic to numb the pain, but whatever it was, he’d stop keeping up his drill properly, because what was the fucking point of it; he certainly didn’t need to be a great knight to shove a sword into Robert’s belly if that was ever called for. He’d be good enough for that for as long as Robert lived, even if he drank himself blind every day from now on.

But in three years, maybe less, he’d no longer be the kind of man that Robb Stark would look at with covetous eyes. And that would be better; it would be better not to be a man like that, when he wasn’t really. The best sword in the world was nothing but a piece of shit if it was being held by someone who didn’t know what they were doing, and it was something worse if it was held by someone who did, and used it to do murder. And those were his only options, so he’d be better off rusted and shattered into pieces as soon as he could manage it.

But that wasn’t any reason not to take this. He had one month left, which would be more time than he’d had in his entire life before now, and he was in his prime; as if the gods had decided to give him this one small reward, for his life spent working to reach this gleaming pinnacle of skill and protect the honor of his sister and his house: he’d get to be used properly at his very best, even if only for a little while. He’d take every last shining minute of it.

When he got downstairs, though, Robb was in the hall listening to an anxious boy from a holdfast two days’ ride away, there to tell him their well had frozen solid. That shouldn’t have been possible from anything Jaime knew, unless they’d done something incompetent and dug it too shallow, in which case it shouldn’t have been much of a well in the first place, surely. But even apart from that, he hadn’t any idea why they’d come to complain to Robb about it. What did they think he’d do to thaw it out for them?

But Robb listened frowning, and said, “I’ll ride back with you. Maester Luwin, I’ll need you to hold the court tomorrow for me, with Bran—no,” he amended. “With Rickon. I’ll take Bran with me. If there are any you can’t answer, have them housed until I’m back.”

“Very good, my lord,” the old man said, and Robb headed for the courtyard as if he meant to go at once.

“Does this really strike you as something for you to handle personally?” Jaime said, following him out. “What are you even planning to do about it?”

“I’ll find out when I get there,” Robb said, distractedly, between giving orders; someone had gone to ready his horse and someone else had gone to pack food, and he was, demonstrably, about to ride out and disappear for more than half a week. Bran was coming in from the fencing yard, looking a bit wide-eyed; Robb told him, “Run and fetch your bow. You’ll practice archery on the way.” Bran nodded and ran off.

The other three children had trailed him; Arya immediately said, “I want to come too! Robb, please! I won’t be any trouble,” which was a massive calumny; she was trouble every other minute of the day, but it was just as well, because Tommen looked over at Jaime and said tentatively, “Can I, too?”

Jaime said, “Why not?” before Robb could manage to tell them no; Robb looked over at him startled. Jaime shrugged insouciantly. “An overnight jaunt will be good for them. You there, ready our horses, too,” he called after the stableboy. Robb was staring at him surprised, only it wasn’t surprise exactly; it was more like a deep bafflement, as if Jaime had suggested they all sprout wings and fly there. “What? It’s a frozen well, not a horde of bandits.”  

“You don’t want to come,” Robb said.

“I—what?” Jaime said, trying to make sense of that. “Do you mean you don’t want me to come?” He hoped it hadn’t come out sounding like it would hurt his feelings. 

“No, I’m glad for you to come, but,” Robb said, and then paused and finally said, a little slowly, as if Jaime had missed something, “Wells don’t freeze.”

Jaime stared at him. “You think they’re lying about it?”

“No, they’re not lying,” Robb said. “But wells don’t freeze, and theirs has.” It presumably showed on Jaime’s face that he remained unenlightened by this bizarre conversation, because Robb added, with the faint sense of explaining something obvious, “It’s going to be a matter of the gods. The old gods. So you’re welcome to come, but I don’t think you want to.”

Oh, religion. That made a little more sense of it all: claiming your well was frozen was part of some kind of ritual? Jaime did grimace inwardly a bit, but that was considerably better than not being wanted. “Why not? Is there going to be human sacrifice or something gory and unpleasant?”

“I don’t know,” Robb said, without batting an eye. “But don’t you follow the Seven?”

“To be perfectly honest, I’ve never really spent much time with them,” Jaime said. “In any case, I’ve been in the north almost two months now; surely it’s time to meet your gods. It’s only polite. And it’s just as well for Tommen to know all the gods of the realm.”

Still dubious, Robb looked down at Tommen; he and Arya both instantly put on their best beseeching expressions. “If you think his mother and father won’t be angry.”

“Blame me if they are,” Jaime said, and told them both, “Run along, get your things,” and Arya didn’t wait to be told twice; “Come on!” she said to Tommen, and they dashed off, leaving only Rickon to turn a woebegone face up at Robb, who knelt and said to him gently, “There must always be a Stark at Winterfell. That’ll be you, while we’re gone. Do you think you can help Maester Luwin hold court tomorrow for me?” Rickon brightened and nodded, eagerly, and Robb sent him running off to the old man.

They had to keep to the pace of the boy’s farm nag, so it wasn’t an especially quick journey. Jaime didn’t mind. The air was crisp and clean, the sky an astonishing blue, and the direwolves frisked around like puppies through the fresh snowdrifts. The children practiced their archery, taking several rabbits and squirrels—Arya got most of them, but Tommen nabbed one, and Bran got a respectable two—and he and Robb talked of a dozen different things, books and battles and histories. Once Jaime rode over a hill and glanced back, and Robb was at the crest looking towards the horizon, dark against the snow, his heavy grey-furred cloak wide on his shoulders, the wolf at his side. He was straight out of a painting in the book Jaime had been given as a child about the Age of Heroes, The King In The North, tall and proud with his winter realm stretched out all around him, and it didn’t matter that he was doomed. The heroes had all died, too, and were gone, and surely it had to matter anyway, that they’d lived.

They camped for the night at the base of a truly enormous tree that was hollowed out enough that the farm boy and the children could all fit inside; they packed the snow down around it and built a fire, and the fresh meat went into the pot with their salt pork and dried oats. They ate and, as the embers died, looked up at the stars, astonishingly clear and brilliant: Bran knew the names of all the constellations, pointing them out and telling stories about them, full of old gods and wights and White Walkers and giants and ice spiders, some so terrifying that Tommen’s eyes got big, and Robb put a stop to it and sent the children off to sleep snuggled inside the tree in a heap, with direwolves on either side.

And then Jaime lay down with him again in their own nest beside the fire, only this time he did lean in and kiss Robb, and Robb slid his hand into Jaime’s trousers and got hold of his cock and kissed him back and stroked him, murmuring, “Keep quiet,” so Jaime had to stifle himself as he rose and rose and crested in Robb’s hand. After he caught his breath, he squirmed over inside the huddle of blankets and worked his trousers down, offering, and Robb pushed his face against Jaime’s shoulder and made a small desperate noise muffled into it. He pushed his hose down, and his cock came nudging in between the cheeks of Jaime’s ass, iron-hard and hot, and Jaime deliriously reached down between his own legs to help Robb push into him, both of them panting with wide-open mouths to keep from making noise. Robb couldn’t move enough in the tight tangle of blankets to really fuck him, but it didn’t even matter; he did manage to get it in him, slowly working at it. By the time he was all the way inside, Jaime was fantastically warm; his whole body aglow with pleasure, and Robb’s breathing was pained with the struggle of a boy of eighteen not to just come. Jaime tipped his head over and murmured to him, “It’s all right, just let go,” and Robb groaned very very softly and spilled in him at once, and that was just as good as being fucked in its own way. Afterwards Jaime turned back over and they cuddled in again, and he slept better than he had since at least the last war.

#

The holdfast was only half a step up from a village, the compound walled round with a stone wall barely waist-high, with large pens in the center to provide safety for a herd of sheep. They arrived near sunset, in time for a hot supper at the bannerman’s house, which was only slightly bigger than the rest, and afterwards the creaky old man—a relic of the reign of Edwyle Stark, Ned’s grandfather; he’d done some service or other enough to be granted the right to hold—had the boy, his grandson, take them to see the well. Jaime peered down the long shaft of it to see a solid frozen surface of deep glossy black ice, with a few pale clouds captured in it, still and unmoving, that showed him his own face back. He wondered if they put something in the water to make it happen.

He almost asked, but Robb was already straightening up with a grim expression. “We’d better get some rest,” he said. “This won’t be a matter for the dark hours.”

They bedded down together again on the floor before the hearth, after piling the children into the second-best bed; Robb had refused to let the old man give them his. Partway through the night, the cold crept in under the covers, and Jaime roused with something of an effort, struggling out of deep sleep. He raised his head: the place next to him was still warm, but Robb was out of bed, bending and speaking softly to rouse Bran; outside the snow was lit brilliantly by the full moon. Jaime got up too; Robb glanced at him, his face serious, and didn’t speak, but didn’t tell him to go back to bed, either. Jaime belted on his sword, though Robb had left his, and put on his cloak to follow them outside.

The wolves were all up and waiting for them—they’d spent the evening gazing wistfully in at the unhappy sheep—and they padded after Robb and a yawning Bran through the entire holdfast and out the other end, into a small godswood: the moon was shining directly on the pallid white of the weirwood tree standing there with its carved drowsing face. Arya and Tommen caught up before they quite got there, although Tommen was almost falling asleep on his feet, and as they went, two other men and two women came out of the cottages, rubbing sleep from their faces as well. No one spoke, and when Tommen would have whispered something, Arya frowned at him with a hard shake of her head.

At the godswood, Robb gestured to stop them all, perhaps six paces back from the tree, and went onwards himself, Bran one step behind, and the two of them knelt before the tree. “I am Robb Stark, son of Eddard, Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North,” Robb said, his voice clear and steady. “I come before the gods this night to offer my service to right a hidden thing gone wrong. Will you guide me?”

Almost as if in answer, there was a low soft rustling overhead, wind whispering through the rattle-dry red leaves of the tree; nothing moved, and then there was a long deep sighing, as of a great breath taken, and the eyes of the tree opened, red as blood, and looked into Robb’s face.

Jaime saw it happen and didn’t entirely believe it; he had his hand on Tommen’s shoulder without remembering the act of putting it there, and felt the trembling through his body. All the northerners were silent, just looking on. The mouth of the tree moved a little, a mumbling too soft to make out the words. Robb frowned a little, then drew off one of his heavy leather gloves, and took a knife from his belt; he sliced his own left palm open, and smeared the blood, glistening black in the moonlight, over the mouth of the tree.

The tree breathed again, strange and terrible and deep, and then it spoke, a low whispering thready voice like the wind in the leaves, and said, “Look there.”

Robb stood up. The eyes and mouth shut again, on a final sighing-out, and as they did, one of the leaves of the weirwood detached itself from the tree, and went blowing in an eddying gust of wind. It kept going, a twirling dance into the trees, and Robb followed it perhaps a few yards, no more, before it settled down gently atop the snow at the base of another tree. He made a small beckoning gesture: Grey Wind came bounding over to him, and dug into the snow. Bran’s wolf and Arya’s joined him, and in moments they’d cleared the snow. Robb knelt down and put his hand into a dark hollow in between two large twisting roots, and drew out a piece of fabric.

He brought it into the moonlight: a threadbare white shift, not very large, with a large stain of dried blood on it. Still looking at it, Robb said, “Arya, take Tommen and go back to bed.”

“But I—”

“Now,” Robb said, and it was a voice of flat command, as pure as anything Jaime had ever heard out of his father’s mouth, and Arya shut up and took Tommen’s hand and went back to the village, her head sullenly bowed but obedient. Robb waited in silence until they had vanished inside the house, Bran uneasy beside him, and after they’d gone, he looked at the people from the village. “How many maidens are there in the holdfast?” he said quietly.

“Four, m’lord,” one of the women said, her voice low and grim, looking at the shift.

“Go and bring them,” Robb said, and the two women nodded, and went back to the cottages.

“Robb, what is it?” Bran asked softly, when they’d gone.

“There’s been innocent blood shed, and more blood will need to pay for it,” Robb said. “That’s why I had to give my own, to be guided to it. Do you understand?”

Jaime didn’t, in the least, and didn’t want to; his own heart was pounding as if he’d run a race, and his stomach was tightened into a knot. But Bran nodded, swallowing. He looked pale and afraid, and he whispered, “Will you…will you have to…”

“I don’t know yet. If I must, I must,” Robb said, and Bran dropped his head, his mouth miserable.

The village was small; the women were already coming back. There were four girls with them, scared in the dark, clutching cloaks or blankets around themselves. Robb said, “I believe one of you here is holding a secret that the gods would bring to light. If you’re innocent, you need not fear. If you’re guilty, it’ll still be better to have courage, and speak now. Can you come forward?”

He looked into their faces as he spoke, one after another, and when he looked at the third, she made a flinching small gasp, and put her face in her hands. Robb nodded to the women, and as quickly as they’d rounded the girls up, they took the rest of them away again, herding them back to their homes, and didn’t come back themselves, either. The last one stayed there, making faint whimpering sniffles, tears dripping from between her fingers, and Robb stepped towards her. “What is your name?” he said.

“Lissa,” she whispered, without bringing her face up. “Please, m’lord, my da can’t know. He’d try and kill him.”

Robb’s face was bleak, but unsurprised, as if he’d half guessed already. “This isn’t for your father to avenge anymore. The gods have called me here, and put it in my hands,” he said. “What’s his name?”

“Horin,” she said, and the men from the village stiffened.

Robb looked at them and gave a small nod, and after a moment, the men turned and went back to one of the cottages nearest them, knocking; the door opened after a moment, a square of light, with the shape of a stooped old woman framed inside. After a moment, she stepped back, and a tall man came out, and walked between the two of them to the weirwood. He was big and broad-shouldered, taller even than Jaime, with a hard mouth under his sandy brown beard; perhaps ten years older than the girl or so. He didn’t look at her.

Robb said quietly, “Innocent blood has been shed in the godswood. Speak now, and know the gods are listening. Was it yours?” Lissa nodded, wiping her wet face without raising it or meeting Robb’s eyes. “Your maidenhead, taken against your will?” She snuffled another sob and nodded once more. He turned to Horin. “She’s named you as the man. Speak now, if you’d deny it.”

Horin stood a moment, his chest heaving, and then he burst out, his voice ragged with anger, “M’lord, I’m no raper. I needed a woman in the house. My mam’s old, and I’ve two bairns, nobody left to look after them since their mam died this summer. So for six month I courted her! Ask anyone, they’ll tell you. And she took all my gifts, let me hunt to feed her family. She came to the tree with me, I asked her proper. Then it was she said no.”

The girl flinched, her shoulders hunching; the men behind Horin exchanged looks, disapproving. Robb looked at her. “Is this true?”

Lissa swallowed and said in a whisper, “My mam has five mouths to feed, and my da’s leg is gone bad. She wanted me to take him. I thought I could, I tried…Wasn’t til he asked I knew I couldn’t. I said I was sorry, and I was, but then he…” She trailed off into another gulped sob.

Robb nodded. “Have either of you anything else to say, before I pass sentence?” They both shook their bowed heads, without looking up, and Robb said, “Six months courting is long to hear no for the first time only at the end. For that, Horin, I judge you have a right to all your gifts back, and the meat you brought their house. Lissa and her kin must repay the fair worth in full. But you hadn’t a right to her, because she hadn’t said yes. And for taking her against her will, you are a raper, and there is only one sentence I can pass. You may go to the Wall and take the black, you may die clean by the sword, or you may be cut and die as a man.” Horin flinched, and the two men both looked away. “Which do you choose?”

“Mercy, m’lord, the bairns and my mam, they need me,” Horin said, his voice thick with pleading. “There’s none to look after them but me.”

“Did she not ask for mercy while you hurt her?” Robb said, cold and stern, nodding to Lissa. “And when it was done, you left her to suffer in silence, knowing she couldn’t ask her father to avenge her, if she had as much care for her own kin. If you’d acted only in heat, and made amends after, the gods wouldn’t have needed to call me in. It’s too late to ask now for what you didn’t give. Make your choice, or I’ll choose for you.”

Horin shuddered and looked with desperation back at the small cottage, the light on in the window. His face twisted into a mask of sudden flaring anger, and he threw a savage accusatory look at the girl, who cringed away from him, flinching in fear. Robb said sharply, “Don’t look at her. Face the gods and the truth. You’re the one to blame. She gave you cause for anger, but she didn’t make you rape her. That’s what you’ll be punished for. Should the other women of this holdfast have to go in fear of what you’ll do in a temper, so your kin can have your help?”

Horin looked away from her, and hung his head. Robb paused and drew a breath, and said more quietly, “You went astray and lost your honor. That doesn’t mean you can’t find it again. Either in going bravely to your death, or spending your life in service to all men on the Wall, or choosing to be cut so you can stay and serve your own family. Any of the three will clear your way. It’s for you to decide where your truest course of honor leads.”

Horin shuddered all over. He had tears gathering in his eyes and running down his face to drip off onto the snow. After a moment, he whispered, “I’ll—I’ll be cut.”

Robb nodded, and said to the other men, “One of you go and bring him strong liquor. Is there a man skilled with gelding horses?”

“Me, m’lord,” one of the men said, heavily.

“M’lord,” the girl said, a trembling of tears in her voice, “please, m’lord, I don’t want him cut.”

“That’s not for you to say,” Robb said. “I can see you know you’ll suffer for this too, both in paying him the debt you owe, and in the judgement of your neighbors. That’s the price you’ll pay, for taking six months of a man’s labor, with winter on the way, that he could have given to another who’d have been glad to be his wife. But no man in our lands has the right to revenge himself upon a woman with rape, even if she has done him wrong. And I must punish him not only to avenge you, but to keep the law. Go home, now.”

The girl stumbled off, as one of the men came back from the village with a jug, and took Horin aside to let him drink, in big swallows. Robb turned to Bran. “You don’t have to watch this. It’s worse than the other,” he said, quiet and grim.

“Robb,” Bran said, waveringly. “Couldn’t we… we could take his family in, at Winterfell. And then he could go take the black…”

“And what would happen if we took in the kin of criminals, just before winter, when those outside our walls are likely to go hungry?” Robb said. Bran dropped his head. Robb reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “Go back to the house. And make sure Arya doesn’t sneak out again,” he added dryly, and Bran nodded and went away back through the trees. And then Robb turned to Jaime and said, “There’s no need for you to stay, either.”

Jaime was cold all the way through; his body wanted to shiver, and he wanted almost more than anything to be out of this wood, and back inside a house, back inside the mortal world, with an ordinary fire burning and a cup of wine. “But you will.”

Robb inclined his head. “I passed the sentence. I’ll not wield the knife, because I’d hurt him worse, but I must see it done.”

He sounded as final as the septon at Casterly Rock, the good one with the rich voice who could pronounce sonorously for half an hour on the will of the gods and make you enjoy it, like theater—only Jaime felt suddenly and clearly, it was theater, trying to imitate this: a lord who’d knelt before the gods and offered them his service and his own blood to see a terrible and hard justice done, and wouldn’t walk away before it was over. “I’ll help you hold him,” Jaime said, and Robb swallowed himself, and nodded a short thanks.

They took Horin to a broad flat stone near the weirwood, brushed the snow from it; there were old dried stains on the rock, in the crevices. He was stumbling-drunk by then, his eyes glazed, and they gave him a strap to bite on and held him down together in the night clearing, shoulders and arms and backs straining to keep him still, their breath rising in clouds. The village man had been honest: he was good at it, and it was over quick. Horin wasn’t crying after, his face only red and stunned. One of the village men helped him stumble away, back to his house, and the other dug a hole and buried the bits of flesh. Robb stood by the rock a few moments longer, breathing deep, his eyes shut. Then he went slowly back to the weirwood and knelt and said, low and heavily, “I thank the gods for their guidance, and for the justice they’ve brought.”

He stood up, a little grey, and strode back to the village. Jaime went after him with one final involuntary glance back at the sleeping tree: he hated to turn his back on it, and once he had, he wanted to look over his shoulder with every step. Halfway through the village, Robb paused at the well, and looked in; Jaime caught up with him. In the bottom, their faces were reflected in a rippling pool of clear water, and the soft lapping of it echoed up towards them.

#

You don’t want to come, Robb had said. He’d been right. After they’d all crawled back into bed, Jaime lay wide awake staring at the ceiling, uselessly trying to convince himself it had all been a dream, or something staged, a trial with all the evidence and the witnesses planted beforehand. He sat up finally and rubbed his face hard with both hands. Robb lay beside him curled on his side, head pillowed on his arm; in the faint orange ember-glow, his face was drawn, looking somehow exhausted even while he slept, and his other arm was buried in the fur of his wolf, who had padded in and stretched himself along the line of Robb’s body, tucking in close: the way he’d lain on the floor of Tommen’s room to chase his night terrors away. Jaime stared down at him, and then he lay down again, up against Robb’s back, and put his arm over him, his own hand just brushing the wolf’s fur, to hold him from the other side.

They left early, the next morning. Jaime had hoped the sunlight would make it all go away, or at least push it into the far distance, but it didn’t. Arya and Tommen rode ahead, playing fetch with Nymeria, but Bran was hunched in his saddle, and Robb looked like he’d ridden out of a storybook again, only too much so; there was an inhuman hardness in his face. It bothered Jaime by seeming familiar, and then he finally recognized it: Eddard had that same rigidity, a sense of stone beneath the flesh. Robb didn’t look much like him otherwise; he had his mother’s eyes, and the Stark coloring, which had skipped Ned over entirely only to come right back out in his sons, as if the gods had been giving him back the father and brother who’d died on the floor of Aerys’ throne room.

When they stopped for a midday meal, Arya beaned Bran in the head with a snowball, and it jolted him loose; he yelped in protest and got revenge by going straight up a tree—he swarmed up quicker than a monkey—and soon was going from one branch to another as fast as Arya and Tommen could run on the ground, to shake heaps of snow down on their heads while they yelled and tried to lob more snowballs up in return.

But Robb sat in front of a tree by the small fire and let his head tip back against it, his eyes shut, and didn’t take any food. Jaime got up and dug the flask of brandy out of Robb’s saddlebags. “Have a swallow, and eat something,” he said, holding it out; Robb opened his eyes and looked up at him, his face for a moment young and wounded. Then he nodded and took the flask, and a moment later was wolfing down some bread and cold meat.

Jaime sat back down next to him. The children were squealing distantly; they’d started building snowmen, now. He didn’t want to talk about it in the slightest, but he could feel the words climbing his throat anyway. “You’d think they could have left well enough alone,” he said finally, letting a few of them out.

Robb was silent, and then he said, low, “It wouldn’t have been well enough. There were only eleven houses in that holdfast, and a secret hate between two of them that no one else knew or understood. It would have brewed there, all winter, and something worse would have come of it. Sometimes you have to lance a wound to let the poison drain, even if it leaves a scar.” He took one more swig from the flask before he capped it and put it back with his things.

Jaime started and failed to say a dozen other things before he managed any part of another, and even then they all fell over each other. “How is—how did—and this is what you do, you go talk to a tree and it tells you—” He stopped, furious at himself and possibly the world, and glared at Robb, who was eyeing him quizzically. “That happened. How often does it happen?”

Robb shook his head, half-bewildered. “Why did you come?” he said, instead of an answer, as if that was the real mystery.

“I didn’t expect to actually hear the gods speak!” Jaime said through his teeth. 

Robb actually laughed a little. “That’s your own fault, Lannister,” he said. “You’re the one who said you wanted to meet them. Our gods take you at your word. I tried to leave you behind. Why didn’t you let me? My mother’s lived in the North twenty years now, she’s borne five Starks; I don’t think she’s ever heard the gods. She slept while Father named us at the tree. Maester Luwin, Ser Rodrick—none of them have ever pushed hard enough to come. What were you after?”

You, Jaime almost said, actually out loud; he only barely managed to swallow it while Robb went on looking at him, expectantly, as though there had to be an answer to the question. And maybe that was the answer, Jaime realized, like the touch of a cold finger on the back of his neck: he’d set himself at Robb’s side, so he’d had to be taught that he couldn’t follow a lord of the North if he couldn’t follow him there, to the gods sleeping in the trees.

“If your gods have so much power, why aren’t we all still kneeling at trees?” he demanded, instead of answering.

“You were there, last night,” Robb said, incredulous, as if that was an absurd question. “You saw what it means, to follow the old gods. Is that something you’d choose, if you didn’t have to?”

Jaime stiffened, staring at him, and Robb shook his head a little. “My mother loves the Seven. When she prays to the Mother, it gives her comfort, sometimes even joy. I don’t love my gods. I honor them, and I respect them, and I’m grateful to them, but they drive hard bargains. And they have to, because they’re real, and that means the world binds them as it does us. Whatever power they have to lend us, they can only do it if we cleave to their ways all the time, even when it cuts us to the quick.

“And you don’t need to make that bargain, in the south. The Seven—I don’t know if they’re real gods or not, but I do know they’re not acting in the world. They won’t heal anyone’s hurts. They won’t bring the rain or sun, punish the guilty or reward the good. But that doesn’t matter in the south. The rain and the sun come, often enough, all of their own. Your fields grow, and your cattle thrive, and a man can be a liar and still also mostly a decent man, because a few lies won’t kill anyone. None of that’s true here in the North. There’s times enough in winter where the help the gods can give us, however dear, is all that saves an entire holdfast from going into the dirt. And if a man doesn’t have honor, you can’t lean on him, and then you won’t let him lean on you, and you’ll both die, and take others with you.”

He was silent a little after he’d finished speaking, and then he sighed, deeply, and stood up; some of the hardness had gone out of him, as if saying the words had helped. He went into the woods, calling to the children to come back and mount up again. Jaime sat staring at their small fire, a strange new kind of fear sour in his mouth. He’d never believed in the Seven at all. It was painfully obvious that prayers were nonsense; the guilty usually died fat and comfortable and the meek and innocent usually ended up on spits, roasting for the benefit of others, which was why they needed to be promised their make-believe heaven in the future.

And he’d been serving Robb for a month now, but he hadn’t believed in his gods either. He’d still thought Stark honor was—a mistake. A wonderful mistake, yes, but still nothing more than a deliriously beautiful and shining soap-bubble mirage, better than the real world and something he’d dream about for the rest of his life, but also something that would vanish under the swipe of a lion’s claws.

But it wasn’t. It was the cold hard sensible price the Starks grimly paid for the help they needed to survive in the North, a vast tangled network of secret roots growing beneath their lives, completely invisible from the surface but deeper than the mines of Casterly Rock. The Starks had gods on their side. And his father was about to pick a fight with them.

#

Jaime had no better idea for saving his own house than he’d had for saving the Starks. He could just imagine trying to tell Father that he couldn’t have his war because there were real gods in the North. He would end up shut in a tower somewhere with anxious maesters dosing him with potions, which he’d need by the end, because he’d be locked up waiting to hear about the horrible ways his entire family had died. Stark’s gods had just sent him to cut off a man’s balls for raping a girl who had even asked not to have him punished. What would they do to his house, full of oathbreakers and sinners: Father, Cersei, his children—which they surely knew about, because they were gods.

And for the crowning glory, Jaime could also be absolutely certain that when the Starks won—because of course they’d win, they had gods—it would be almost as horrible for them as for his house, because their gods weren’t kind to them. One of those charming stories Bran had gleefully told them all the other night had been about a winter where everyone had been starving and the King of Winter had gone to the gods for help. They’d told him to die on the tree, so he’d hanged himself on a branch and then strangled there slowly for three days and nights before he finally died. And then the tree had borne magical fruits, each of which could be cut up into tiny pieces, any one of which would make a pot of soup that fed the entire castle. Bran had even claimed there were five or six dried scraps left in the kitchens at Winterfell somewhere.

Up until the very night before, Jaime would have confidently assumed that the story was a fairy tale they’d told their children before feeding them soup made out of their own dead, and now he was absolutely unquestioningly convinced that the Starks’ gods had told the king to kill himself in exchange for magical fruit, and he’d done it. If Robb had to beg the gods to save his little brothers and sisters from House Lannister, and they told him to slit his own throat, he’d be a bled-out corpse before the next falling leaf hit the ground, because he’d know the bargain would be kept, and then his gods would slaughter Jaime’s children instead.

He rode back into Winterfell with the fear going round and round in his head, pacing the boundaries of his narrowing cage. He only had one thin desperate hope to cling to: Tyrion was coming back. And Jaime could see his face right now, as plainly as daylight, when Jaime told him what he’d done, to and for and near Robb Stark, and Tyrion would want to stab him repeatedly and with enormous violence, but Jaime would beg him for help anyway. He didn’t know if Tyrion would believe him about the gods, but he’d at least be willing to try to head off the war. He was the only one of them who’d objected in the first place.

“Wars have unpredictable outcomes, and wars with the North are more unpredictable than most,” he’d said. “And yes, winter’s going to hit them first and hardest, but that’s all the more reason to leave them in the North, instead of giving them an excuse to come south, where the snows will be trivial to them and a serious problem for the rest of us.”

But Father had dismissed it: they were hoping to keep the Baratheons, the Reach had too many men, and the Dornish were too far away, so it would have to be the North, with a side of the Riverlands. And Jaime had more or less agreed, although he hadn’t especially cared; whoever it was, the Tyrells, the Storm Kings, the Starks, he’d beat them.

Now, of course, he spent the rest of his last month of joy by riding around the North, doing his best to serve the Starks instead. He killed Wildling raiders and wolves and on one memorable occasion, he met a terrified boy on the road to Winterfell with a plea for help with a monster roaming the Wolfswood. Jaime assumed it would be another giant moose, and instead it turned out to be a grotesque unnatural creature that looked like a bear at first glance but had six legs and two mouths full of fanged teeth. As soon as he’d finally killed it, the creature disintegrated into glowing green sludge, so he couldn’t even prove it.

But Robb believed him without the slightest doubt as soon as Jaime came home and told him about it, and immediately dragged him to the baths and made him scrub, then submerge himself in the hottest bath and stay in it until he turned lobster-red and came out lightheaded and staggering. He took him straight into the godswood and had him strip naked and roll in the snow to cool off; when he started to shiver, Robb took him back to the second hall, where one of the old biddies by the fire was already stirring a hot posset of some kind that Jaime was forced to drink down to the absolutely foul dregs.

“I don’t mean to complain about your traditional course of treatment,” Jaime said, which was a lie, as he crept nauseated and exhausted in Robb’s wake back to his chambers, “but I think I feel worse instead of better.”

“Good,” Robb said grimly, and sent him to bed. Jaime jerked awake half a dozen times in the night with his heart pounding, sweating. Each time, Robb was there by the fire, Grey Wind at his feet and a naked sword across his lap, and Jaime fell back asleep after seeing him, until just before morning he woke up again and then vomited what felt like half his intestines into a chamberpot that Robb brought him, a few thin streaks of almost-glowing green showing in the mix, and afterwards he sank back into the pillows and fell asleep again and didn’t wake for an entire day.

“What the hell was that thing?” Jaime demanded, when he finally woke up, while polishing off an entire tray of food; he was starving.

“There are unclean places in the Wolfswood,” Robb said, quietly; he was sitting on the edge of the bed. “And beasts that go in come out different, and they carry it with them.” He set the emptied tray aside and put the back of his hand to Jaime’s forehead, and his cheek. “Don’t try to fight another one alone, if you see them. We usually take twenty men to kill them, so we take turns being close enough to hit it. If it had got a tooth on you, or if you’d taken a few more days to come home—” He shook his head a little.

“Twenty men, really?” Jaime said, narrowing in on the important part, which was just how many ordinary fighting men he was worth; this sounded like a fairly substantial improvement over his own past assessment.

Robb gave him a narrow glare and said, very firmly, “Don’t do it again,” and Jaime smirked at him and stretched himself and said, “You might need to reinforce that command a little.”

“Oh, you’re asking for it, aren’t you,” Robb said, half laughing, his face taking on light, and Jaime said, a little hoarsely, “Yes,” and Robb stopped laughing and stood up and took off his clothes, and then came into the bed and fucked him, only he did it slowly, tenderly, coming into him and back out again in long, drawn-out waves, and he murmured, “You will do as I say, won’t you,” and Jaime groaned and said, gasping, “Yes, my lord,” and Robb made a small whimper and came before he could push back inside, spilling hot and wet all over Jaime’s ass and back and the sheets.

#

Jaime tried his best not to count the days, but he couldn’t help it, and then his count turned out to be wrong: Tyrion had been hurrying, and he and his escort came out of the woods three days short of the end of the month. Jaime was in the courtyard teaching the children a drill for wrists and hands, better than the one Rodrick knew, when one of the boys from the gate came running to tell him. Jaime had to fight the impulse to run for his horse and get out of the castle before they arrived.

Robb stopped work early to make Tyrion welcome, and host a midday meal that wasn’t quite a feast, but more lavish than everyday fare. Jaime couldn’t manage to speak in more than short syllables. Tyrion could carry six tables of conversation all by himself when he had to—literally; Jaime had seen him do it in public houses every so often, going from one to the other to start topics going and nurse them along, when he wanted to hear what a lot of smallfolk had to say—so it didn’t leave a lull, but Tyrion certainly noticed, and he made excuses of fatigue afterwards, and asked Jaime to show him the way back to his quarters.

“All right,” Tyrion said, pouring himself a glass of wine and pulling himself into the good chair by the fire in Jaime’s room; he made an ostentatious point of putting a sheathed dagger on the table next to him. “I’m ready for it. What have you been doing with Robb Stark?”

“Well, I’m fucking him,” Jaime said, because what was the point in dragging it out, really.

Tyrion’s eyes bulged, and then he folded his lips together over visible outrage—possibly just rage, actually—and spent several long minutes breathing through his nose before he took a swig from the wine and then put down his glass and said through his teeth, “Anything else?”

“I might more or less have sworn fealty to him.”

Tyrion let his head fall back against the chair and banged it softly a few times. “Jaime, would you please explain to me what you think you’re doing? Are you trying to make yourself miserable for the rest of your life?”

Jaime swallowed against a hard knot of unshed tears in his throat, a deep sharp stab of pain, and said, raggedly, “No, actually. Just—trying to be happy. For a very little part of it,” and Tyrion’s whole face fell, straight out of anger and exasperation and into a deep, sorrowful sympathy, far worse and harder to bear; Jaime had to turn away from him and go stare out the window. “Tyrion—if we start a war with the Starks, we’re going to lose.”

Tyrion sighed heavily. “Because Robb Stark is brilliant and wonderful?” he said, dry. “Jaime, you know it doesn’t matter. If armies won’t do it, there’s assassins and poison and treachery, and probably things I haven’t even imagined. Father will find a way to get him.”

“He might get Eddard, and he might get Robb,” Jaime said. “He might get half their house, or more. But none of that’s going to matter, because when the last of the dust clears, House Stark will still be standing, and House Lannister will go into the dirt. Tyrion—” and the words were there on his tongue, clear in his head: the old gods are real, and they protect the Starks.

But the words didn’t come out. He didn’t stop himself saying them, he didn’t find it hard to speak; they just simply wouldn’t come. “Tyrion,” he said again, but it was like trying to walk through a solid stone wall, and he turned back and stared down at Tyrion, who was looking up at him quizzically now, clearly wondering what the hell Jaime was doing, as if—as if he couldn’t be told.

My mother’s lived nearly twenty years in the North, and she’s never heard the gods speak, Robb had said, and that surely wasn’t because Eddard Stark didn’t want his wife to know. It was because she hadn’t chosen to hear them. And Tyrion wasn’t going to, either. He wasn’t a child being raised in the North, and he wasn’t going to ask for it the way Jaime had, handing himself over to the Lord of Winterfell and trying to follow him everywhere he went. The old gods would take you if you came, but they weren’t interested in converting anyone. They existed whether anyone prayed to them or not. Just like they could destroy you, whether you believed in them or not.

Jaime swallowed and said, “Tyrion, please trust me,” instead. “Please. We have to stop it.”

Tyrion stared at him, a small frown creasing his brow between his eyes. “You know I didn’t think it was a good idea in the first place. But Father’s set on it…”

“What can we do?” Jaime said. “There’s the two of us, and Robb—there’s got to be something we can do.” Tyrion was starting to look a little baffled. “What if I stay, with Tommen? If we’re here, Father can’t start the war—”

“If Robb Stark takes you and Prince Tommen as hostages, that will start a war,” Tyrion said.

“Tommen’s meant to stay here, to foster!”

Tyrion waved impatience. “Yes, but you’re right, Father can’t start the war while you’re here, so if I go back to King’s Landing without the two of you, Father will do something about it. It won’t even be hard! He’ll write to Robert to invite Tommen to foster at Casterly Rock instead, and Cersei will harangue Robert without end about how terrible it is in the North in winter, and he’ll give in after a week or two when she doesn’t give up. And then, if Robb refuses, he is holding you hostage, and we’re off to the races.”

“Then what else can we do?” Jaime said. “You could take Tommen, and I can stay here—”

Tyrion heaved a breath and said brutally, “And if Cersei writes to you and tells you Robert’s started beating her, you’ll just stay?”

“You can get her a guard,” Jaime said, through his teeth.

“No guard in the Seven Kingdoms is going to stop the king from beating his wife,” Tyrion said. “The only reason Robert lets you stop him doing it is because you’re literally a kingslayer, and our father’s son. You know that!” And Jaime felt his stomach clench with two decades of misery and rage, because Tyrion was right, of course; Tyrion, and Robb, and he was right; if he wasn’t there, if his sword wasn’t in easy reach of Robert’s guts, to guard the honor of his sister and his house, that cowardly slobbering beast would hit Cersei, the very next time she spoke to him as he deserved.

And Jaime would see his whole house go into the dirt, and House Stark too, sooner than stand by and let that happen; he’d set the entire realm on fire before he’d let Robert abuse Cersei while he drew breath. Only it was horrible to know that was the choice he was making. He sat down and put his face in his hands.

Tyrion got up and came over to him and put his hand on his shoulder. “I could—write to Cersei and tell her I want to detach Tommen more thoroughly, I—want to arrange some sort of falling-out with the Stark children, before we go—”

“Tomorrow or a week from now, what difference does that make,” Jaime said, leaning his forehead in his hand. “It won’t start until Robert’s dead, anyway.”

“I’m quite certain Robert’s not long for the world when we get back,” Tyrion said. “Cersei’s much more fed up than you are, and that’s saying a great deal. She’s only been enduring it for the sake of the children; now that Father’s signed off on a plan that gets Joffrey on the throne and keeps him there, she’s not going to wait any longer. That’s why she was so angry about Tommen staying behind! We’d just gone to all this trouble to acquire Eddard and Catelyn and Sansa and set up our play, and now she suddenly had to wait until we got back.”

Jaime stared at him. “What do you think she’s going to do?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Tyrion said. “But I’m sure she’s not going to let us have much more time.”

After Tyrion left, Jaime sat alone in the room for a little while, staring at the fire, and then he got up and went into the other part of the keep, to the lord’s quarters, where Robb was writing letters in the good afternoon light; when he opened the door, Jaime said, rawly, “You can’t let us leave.” Robb stared at him, and then stepped back and let him into the room, and Jaime went to stand by the fire, so he didn’t have to look at Robb’s face, and said, “My father’s planning to go to war with you.”

Robb was silent a moment, and then he said, “We were beginning to think so,” and Jaime turned and stared at him. Robb was looking back at him with worry, but no surprise. “He’s been moving supply and men towards the Riverlands ever since last year. My grandfather sent us word; my great-uncle Brynden has been scouting their positions. We didn’t know why.”

“He thinks—that Joffrey’s going to be a weak king,” Jaime said.

“Who’ll need his grandfather ruling for him,” Robb said. “And those houses that won’t lie quietly when House Lannister usurps the power of the throne will have to be brought in line.”

Jaime swallowed. “More or less.”

Robb nodded a little. “We don’t want war. My father’s gone south to try and help King Robert, and to strengthen the realm. He’ll do his best, for him and for Joffrey after him, if the king does die. But if your father wants to use his grandson to rule Westeros himself, and means to start a fight unless we all give way before him, then—he’ll have a fight. And we can’t help that.”

“Joffrey won’t be able to rule a dinner table on his own, and Cersei won’t stand for your father holding the reins for him, instead of ours,” Jaime said. “But she’d have to stand it, my father would have to wait, if you could just find some way to keep me and Tommen here—”

Robb said, without the slightest pause or hesitation, “You know I can’t do that,” and Jaime shut his eyes and clenched his jaw, because he did know that; he knew that Robb couldn’t do it, even if it meant both their houses being put to the torch, and only a handful of survivors left behind, covered in ash, to creep back to Winterfell and rebuild. Robb came to him across the room and brought their heads together for a moment. “Go to my father, when you’re back in King’s Landing,” Robb said softly. “I know there’s no love lost between you, but I’ll write to him. Perhaps you’ll find a way,” and Jaime didn’t bother telling him that it was pointless, and his father was going to be an absurdly incompetent Hand of the King, because why shouldn’t Robb get to have a little bit more hope while it lasted.

Jaime went out into the corridors and wandered aimlessly a while before he sat down on a bench in a dark passageway, his head sagging over his clenched hands and his thoughts going in useless circles. He couldn’t think of anything to do but stay, and he couldn’t stay, and Robb couldn’t keep him. And if he couldn’t do anything, then it was all going to happen, and he was going to have to watch it coming every step of the way—for his family, for Robb and his, and all of them were going to go into the yawning maw.

He squeezed his eyes shut harder and then he stood up again, feeling exhausted. Straight across from the bench, the window before him was open to the air, barely larger than an arrow-slit, and in the narrow rectangle, framed, looking back at him, stood the pallid white weirwood tree, with its leaves of blood almost glowing in the golden hour. Jaime stood staring at it, his heart pounding in his throat with terror—but after a moment, he turned, and went jerkily downstairs again, through the almost-deserted hall, only the servants cleaning up the tables. His breath frosted in the air as he unbarred the doors and went outside, but he didn’t bother to go get a cloak. He walked straight through the keep to the godswood, and along the curve of the pond to the sleeping tree.

He didn’t hesitate. There was a reason the Starks made their bargains. Their gods weren’t kind, but they kept their word, and it would be better; it would be a thousand times better to die, knowing that he’d stopped the war, than to live and watch it happen. Dying would be absurdly easy.

He knelt down and bowed his head and said, “I am Ser Jaime Lannister, son of Tywin, Lord of Casterly Rock. I come before the old gods to ask for help to save my house and House Stark from war. And I will give anything I have in return.”

He paused. There wasn’t an answer. The eyes didn’t open and look at him, and the gods didn’t speak. But there was a strange heavy silence in the air around him, and after a moment, the slow sense crept over him that it was—a listening silence, as if he hadn’t said enough to be answered.

He tried to think of what to say; he tried to remember. Robb hadn’t said anything more; he’d knelt before the tree, named himself, and asked to be guided—

But Robb—Robb was a Stark. Who had cleaved to the old gods all his life, even when it had cut him to the quick. They already knew him, and they respected and honored him, their good servant, as he deserved, and would answer him when he asked.

Jaime swallowed and said, slowly, “I know—I’m not a Stark. I haven’t lived by your laws. I’m—” and he was panting, the breath coming as ragged as if he were running a race, but he knew; he knew now what he had to do, for the gods to answer him. “I’m—not—a man of honor,” and his voice shook as he said the words out loud, tears springing hot into his eyes; it hurt to hear them, not from the enemies of his family, not from smirking courtiers and lesser men, but from himself, the one condemnation he couldn’t shrug away. “I’ve betrayed—both the kings I swore to serve, and—I shouldn’t have sworn to either one of them in the first place, because they were worthless shit, and I did it for—” His face twisted helplessly; he felt as if he was stripping off thick layers of his own skin. “I did it for—cowardice,” rasping almost into a sob, “because I’m afraid of my father. So all my life—I’ve lied and hidden what I wanted, instead of—facing him. Because I knew I’d lose.”

And he’d been right; he would lose. The only way he could ever possibly have defeated his father would be if he picked up a sword and killed him with it, and he couldn’t bear to do that; he hated his father and he was afraid of his father and he loved, helplessly loved, his father, who was merciless and cruel and also the closest thing he’d ever known to a god.

Until now. And he knew flat out that the old gods were even more merciless than his father. They didn’t give a shit if he’d lose. They’d expect him to stand up and hold fast, and then lose and be destroyed, and if there was enough of him left afterwards, to stand up again, and keep holding fast.

“And if—if you can’t help me,” he whispered, bowing his head and shutting his eyes, “I’ll go south, and face him. I’ll try to stop the war. I’ll help Eddard Stark, and—I’ll protect King Robert, even against—Cersei, and—I’ll try to teach Joffrey, even if it’s too late. I swear it. But—I will lose. And—and my house might deserve it. I know you’ll save the Starks anyway. Maybe there’s nothing I can do—nothing I can give you. Maybe I’m not worth enough myself. But if there’s anything you’d take to spare my house, and to spare House Stark whatever pain the war would bring—I’d give it. Please,” he finished, in a whisper, and then he lifted his head, and the tree was looking at him.

He’d wanted it, he’d just flayed himself alive to get it, but he was still more terrified than he’d ever been in his entire life; there were tears leaking from his eyes, and he couldn’t even dare to blink them away.

“Yes,” the tree said to him, low and deep and sighing, and then it closed its eyes again, and was still.

Jaime stayed on his knees shaking with cold and terror, his face wet, the edges of the tear-tracks crisping with cold, trying to freeze on his cheeks. He stared at the tree, and then he staggered up onto his feet and went blankly back to the keep. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t have any sense anymore of something left to be said, or even done. He felt the opposite: it was done. He’d offered and the gods had said yes. They’d do their part. And then—they’d take the payment. Whenever they wanted. Anything they wanted. Because that was what he’d offered them. And he understood abruptly—they weren’t going to make it something he had to give them. They wouldn't tell him to hang himself on a tree for three days and nights, because he wasn’t trustworthy. They were just going to take the price themselves.

Jaime went back to the yard, where Tommen and Bran were sparring again; Bran was still only mediocre, but Tommen was actually starting to get the idea: there were glimpses of a little stumbling coltish grace, beginning to come out. He was going to make a swordsman after all. There was a strange bittersweet pleasure in watching it: he might not be there, to see Tommen grow up, but now Tommen would grow up. Perhaps he’d even be a knight, someday, and occasionally think of his uncle.

Robb came out of the castle to give his letters to the maester, to be sent on, and then came to stand beside him at the fence, the two of them together leaning on the top rail, shoulder to shoulder. A deep lustful pleasure coiled in Jaime’s body, a hunger without urgency. In a few hours, after dinner, he’d go to Robb’s bedchamber and get himself as thoroughly fucked as possible. Maybe he’d suck Robb’s cock; he hadn’t tried that yet, and oh, he wanted to.

It occurred to him he could tell Robb about that plan now, and watch him anticipating it all the rest of the evening, how he was going to just fuck Jaime’s mouth, and he’d be wild by the time it actually happened; he might even get a little rough. Although possibly they wouldn't make it to dinnertime; the hunger was starting to be urgent after all. Jaime turned to murmur in Robb’s ear, but he couldn't. Robb was standing with his head tilted back frowning at the sky. He drew a long deep breath in through his nose, his eyes shut, and then he opened them again and turned to look around the keep in—alarm.

“What is it?” Jaime said sharply, putting his hand to his hilt; he looked around, but he didn’t see anything.

“We’re not ready,” Robb said, and there was an edge of something almost like panic in his voice.

“Ready for what?” Jaime said, but he was speaking to empty air; Robb had gone running, and he was calling up to the men on the walls, shouting, “Ring the storm bells! Open up the gates!” and the men—the men, who had also been sniffing the air, stopped and turned down to nod to him, their own faces alarmed, and a moment later deep clanging bells were going, not the clear high ones that rang for the sept services, and the castle gates were being hauled open as far as they could possibly go.

Jaime stood helplessly at the door of the fighting yard with his sword drawn, standing guard over Tommen and Bran, wondering what the hell to do. Servants were pouring out of the keep in a torrent, worry in all their faces, and Bran, clinging to the fence from the inside, called in his own alarm, “Dorrin! What is it? What’s happening?”

The servingman stopped—he was carrying an armful of firewood, towards the back of the keep. “Winter, m’lord,” he said. “Winter’s here.”

Jaime stared at the man. “What do you mean? It barely turned autumn three months ago. The white raven came?”

The man just stared at him blankly. “Don’t need a raven to know, m’lord,” he said. “Can’t you smell it?” He hurried onwards, and Jaime stared after him and then closed his eyes and tried: he drew in a long breath through his nose. He had learned the smell of snow; that had become familiar by now, after all this time in the North, and it was there. But there was something—different about the air, although he couldn’t have said exactly what. Thinner somehow, more sharp—

The whole back section of the keep was being opened up; Jaime had never even been there. “What’s there?” Tommen asked Bran, pointing.

“That’s the winter town,” Bran said. “Everyone from Oldtown will come up and stay inside the walls. They’re coming, look,” and Jaime looked out of the gates along his pointing finger and saw that down at the base of the hill, people were leaving the ghastly backwater, and starting to toil up the road towards the keep.

Even as he watched, the trickle turned into a running brook, and by the end of half an hour, the road was solidly packed with men and wagons and cattle, all marching inside and being sent to one place or another by their lord: Robb was standing in the midst of the flow, a steady boulder in the stream, men coming to him and going away again full of purpose.

Jaime had taken the boys to the great hall—also a bustle of activity, tables coming together rapidly, made of trestles and large tabletops that were appearing out of the depths of the keep, to fill in all the empty space—and then he’d come back outside. “What can I do?” he asked Robb, who looked at him blankly a moment, struggling out of the tide, and then said, “Keep the peace,” with a gesture along the line of the crowd, which stretched from the winter town all the way back to the town below. Jaime nodded and went to his horse, rounded up ten of Robb’s men and rode along the whole line from one end to the next, settling dozens of quarrels and setting the men on helping anyone who was slowing the progress.

The snow started to fall, gently, after an hour. The crowd had thickened, and people began to get more anxious, pushing others on ahead of them. Jaime had to actually hit a couple of men with the flat of his sword to make them mind him, and there was an argument around one of the wagons carrying elders and women with small children; they’d loaded it too heavily, and when it got stuck, there was a quarrel about who needed to get out. He had five of his men get off their horses and put the heaviest of the elders on, and walk them alongside. 

In two hours, there was a foot of fresh powder on the ground, and the snow was only getting thicker. Blasts of icy wind were slicing through Jaime’s cloak and his leathers beneath, so sharp they took his breath away when they hit, and then Robb came riding down from the keep with a handful of men in heavy fur cloaks and ordered the last people on the road to leave everything behind—at this point the stragglers were the ones trying to bring all their worldly goods along—and just get up to the keep, because the gates were going to be shut for the storm. He didn’t need to say that being left outside the walls would be a death sentence; Jaime could feel it in his own body.

They closed the gates half an hour later, and Jaime discovered he needed help getting down from his horse; snow and ice had built in a layer over his legs and literally frozen him into the saddle. Robb got him inside and down to the baths and put him in the cold one first, which felt warm, before moving him up to the almost unbearable heat of the warm bath instead. Jaime was shaking by then, his whole body shivering wildly. “I shouldn’t have left you out there so long,” Robb was saying, low and worried. “You’re not used enough to the cold. I have to go to the winter town and see to things; stay here until the water starts feeling only warm again, but don’t go into the hot bath. Just dry off and go to the great hall, and stay near the fire.”

He called in a servant to stay with him, and vanished; Jaime didn’t see him again for a few hours. He was sitting at the lord’s hearth in the great hall with Tyrion and the children; the vast room was full of people, huddling around the lower hearths or just with each other, in cloaks and blankets against the sharpening cold, with servants bringing mugs of soup in waves.

Robb finally came in, shedding a thick fur cloak in the antechamber and keeping on another one of wool beneath. He came to the fire with a hand out for the mug of hot wine one of the servants held to him, and sat down heavily in the chair Bran had just jumped out of and was holding for him anxiously. He drained the mug, then shut his eyes a moment leaning against the back, and breathed out.

Then he sat up and looked at Maester Luwin, who was sitting in one of the chairs with a heavy tome across his lap. “You have the numbers? Can I afford to keep the working men on full rations for a week?”

Luwin nodded. “Yes, my lord. Not much longer than that, but a week—yes.”

“Good,” Robb said. “We’ll speak in a few days, then, about the rest of it. We managed to get the water flowing into the winter town at least, and the second hall. We’ll get the pipes open in here and the glassgardens tomorrow.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, Lord Stark, how long will this storm last?” Tyrion said.

“A day or two perhaps?” Robb said. “The first ones usually aren’t that long. But…I’ve never heard of winter coming on so fast.” He looked at the maester, who shook his head.

“I’ve been looking for records, my lord, but so far I have found none. There are reports of early snowstorms coming in late autumn, but—still not so soon, and the temperatures did not fall.”

“I’m guessing we won’t be leaving in the next few days, then,” Tyrion said. “How soon before the kingsroad will be open again?”

There was a pause; all the Starks looked at him surprised. Robb said slowly, “Lord Tyrion, this isn’t a matter of a single storm. This is winter. The deep cold has come. It won’t be safe on the kingsroad for ordinary travelers for months. You’ll need to wait until a false spring comes. Six months or more.”

Jaime stared at him almost disbelieving, and Tommen sat up with his whole face lighting. “We’re staying?” he said. “We can stay, for winter?”

“Aye,” Robb said, but he didn’t sound enthusiastic, and after a pause he said, gently, “I don’t want to frighten you. But it would’ve been better if you’d gone home. This will be a hard winter. We’ve lost our last harvest, and much of the grain and cattle and firewood that we’d have gathered from our bannermen hasn’t arrived. This early storm will kill the yearling fawns, and other game. We’ll be on short rations right away, and for the whole winter.”

Tommen’s face went stricken. “You—you won’t—you won’t have to—” Robb looked puzzled. “The tree,” Tommen whispered.

Robb smiled a little, and shook his head. “No, Tommen,” he said gently. “We’re going on short rations so we won’t run out of food. We might have to kill most of our cattle, but we’ll do that if we have to, and we have our glassgardens. When the first false spring comes, we’ll be able to bring in more supplies. We’ll manage. But…we will be hungry, and cold, while we do it.”

Jaime stared at Robb with the first slow understanding starting to leach in, a different kind of cold than the deep chill that had been struck into his body outside. He’d been half confused, when Robb had started speaking: he’d been given everything he asked for, but the payment hadn’t been taken. He’d been wondering how it would happen; if his heart would just stop, or if six men would come in the dark tonight and take him out to the tree and carve him open. But that wasn’t how it would happen at all. It had already happened; it was happening, and it would be happening, slowly, all winter long.

He was still aching and spent from the time spent outside, like an old man, and he could feel in his body what it would mean to spend six months starving on short rations, in cold like this, and still having to work, all the time, because Robb couldn’t afford to feed idle muscle. And it wouldn’t be six months, because six months wouldn’t be enough to stop the war. It would be—years. As many years as it would take for Tommen to grow up as a true foster son of House Stark, making a secure bond of alliance. Because then it wouldn’t make sense to go to war with them anymore, even after he finally came home, and then Father would change his plans.

“Forgive me asking the truly important question,” Tyrion said after a moment, “but are we going to run out of wine, too?”

“Maester Luwin can look at our stores for you,” Robb said, dryly.

He gave orders for the servants to bring down bedding, and they settled the children into a pile by the warm hearth, the direwolves snug around them. “The chambers will be warmer tomorrow, after we’ve got the water running,” Robb said to Jaime and Tyrion, low, as the children squealed through another horrifying bedtime story that Bran was telling them. “We’ll put Tommen in with Bran and Rickon; he’ll be all right. I’ll work out with Maester Luwin how to get them enough to eat so it won’t hurt their growth.”

Jaime gave a short jerk of a nod. When the story ended, he went to Tommen and settled him in, a hand on his forehead. Tommen smiled up at him drowsily. “I’m still glad we’re staying,” he whispered. “Even if it’s a hard winter. I’ll try to be brave.”

“I’ll try too,” Jaime whispered back, and bent to kiss him, his golden cub, who’d grow up into a young lion here, sheltered behind impassable walls of snow, out of reach of the terrible game of thrones.

Tyrion took himself off to find company for the night; Jaime went slowly upstairs to his own chamber. It was unbearably cold; the fire in the hearth barely warmed the air a few inches away, and he had to wrap himself in a heavy blanket from the bed just to sit beside it. He could tell it wouldn’t work for long; he would start shivering, soon. He couldn’t get up the energy to move around the room, and he couldn’t face getting into the cold bed.

The door opened behind him, and he glanced back as Robb came into the room. He came to join him by the fire and stopped, standing at the side of his chair, and looked down at him, serious. “It seems you got your wish after all,” he said, low, a question.

“It does, doesn’t it,” Jaime said.

Robb drew a breath and let it out. “What did you do?”

“I asked the gods to stop the war,” Jaime said. “To spare our houses. And I offered them—anything I had.” He swallowed hard. “And they’re going to take…” He held up his sword-hand, before the fire, and watched it trembling, his throat tight. He couldn’t even argue. It was, after all, the only thing of true worth he had.

Robb was silent a moment, then said gently, “A fair bargain well-struck,” and put out his hand and closed it around Jaime’s, lacing their fingers together. Jaime shut his eyes and leaned his forehead against their hands, trying to feel the same way, even though in his heart there was nothing but a wailing of loss; he would so much rather have died instead, even if it had meant three days of hanging on a tree.

“I’ll write to my father, when the ravens can go again,” Robb said. “I’ll ask him to have a care for the queen on your behalf. He won’t let Robert abuse her.”

And as soon as he said it, Jaime knew that Cersei would let Stark help her, because she’d be alone, otherwise. She’d be savagely furious at both him and Tyrion for getting themselves trapped up here, but there wasn’t a way to get them back before spring, and Father would just tell her to keep things quiet until then, so Eddard Stark would be the only ally she had at all, the only man at court she could use. And once she’d started to rely on him—well, it was hard to give up Starks, wasn’t it, once you got used to leaning on them. Even Robert with all his crassness was still trying to hold on to Ned and the lost Lyanna, as if he’d dimly recognized in some animal way that they had those endless roots going far away deep down, strong enough that even a man without honor might cling to them and hold himself upright.  

Jaime kissed Robb’s hand silently in answer, and then stood up and caught his head and kissed him, hard and a little desperately; he wanted to go on clinging, too, even if he wasn’t going to be, for much longer, the kind of man that would bring hunger into Robb’s eyes.

Robb’s hand came around his head, kissing him back, but softer, a few times, gentling, and then he broke it off, stroking a thumb along Jaime’s cheek, and said, “It’s too cold in here. Let’s take your things.” Jaime raised his head to look at him, startled, and there wasn’t hunger in Robb’s eyes anymore, but instead a different kind of warmth, looking on—something that was already his. Something worth having, that he meant to look after, and keep.

“Take them where?” Jaime managed.

“My rooms,” Robb said. “You’ll need to share with me now. You can’t sleep alone in winter.”

# End