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There was never enough wood. The builders spent all of the murky twilight hours that now passed for day cutting down the Wolfswood north of the castle, boys too young to swing a sword piling wood high in the trench that encircled Winterfell, protecting the castle. Yet the fires could only hold back the dark, not the cold. Even the hot springs that warmed the castle walls had seemed to cool.
Brienne’s breath steamed out before her as she fed more wood to the bright little fire in her hearth. Its warmth kissed her fingers, caressed the back of her hand, but inside she remained frozen. Even the pyre in the yard with its hungry flames did not warm her anymore. It was easier that way, when the corpses wore familiar faces. The crow who’d boasted he’d slain two White Walkers, the wildling girl who’d offered Brienne a medicinal salve when her hands cracked and bled from the cold.
This chamber was impossible to heat, and large enough for at least four men. Still, Brienne slept here alone. The bed was pushed against the outside wall, but the mattress lay on the floor before the fire, piled with ancient, musty furs. She’d slept with the other fighters until the night she woke with a man’s filthy hand wrapped around her throat while his other hand fumbled at the ties of her breeches.
Jaime had woken and beaten the man half to death before three others pulled him off. She’d recognized him, that was the worst of it. They’d spoken just the day before, about sending a hunting party into the Wolfswood for fresh meat. He was a farmer from somewhere on the far side of the Wolfswood, who had lost his family twice, first to the cold and then to his own axe when they rose from their cairn.
Thoros was wrong. It wasn’t the war that made monsters. It was winter. The cold made people desperate, hungry. The old rules fell away one by one, and noble blood no longer provided protection or favor. Jaime slept among the fighters same as the lowest smallfolk, flea-bitten and hungry as the rest.
Brienne didn’t need to count their men each morning. There was more space at the tables each meal, more food for each man. Their numbers were dwindling, while the Others had a seemingly endless supply of wights. Men disappeared regularly when they went on patrol or to cut wood, fleeing south or lost to roaming wights. The end was coming, she could see it in Jon Snow’s eyes, and in Jaime’s.
The soft knock on her door didn’t surprise her. She’d been waiting for it, padded across the stone floor to throw back the bar and let Jaime slip inside. By the time she’d barred the door and scuttled back to the fire, Jaime was sitting on the mattress, wrapped in furs. He was the one who’d insisted she sleep here, and Jaime checked on her most days. Neither of them slept well of late, but she slept better after he’d visited, leaving behind his warmth and his scent. She dreamt of him sometimes, so vividly she expected to find him there beside her when she woke.
“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked softly, once she was tucked beside him under the furs.
“No.” Sleep eluded them all when the sun stopped rising, but most had grown accustomed to it, as much as one could. Brienne could not seem to quiet her mind, and when she did fall into a fitful slumber, sometimes she wished she hadn’t.
“Why not?”
She didn’t answer immediately. When she left Tarth, she dreamed of glory in battle, her deeds remembered, her life made worthy by serving a cause greater than herself. Now she dreamed of those she loved, those she protected, shambling and blue-eyed and trying to kill her. “Ser Hyle gave me the most beautiful book, back at Highgarden, full of stories about valiant knights and noble quests. He told me someday children would read tales of the Maid of Tarth. I was a fool to believe him.”
Jaime sighed heavily, no doubt irritated with her self-pity. Brienne was weary of it herself, but couldn’t seem to shake it. “You’re in the White Book, though I doubt you’ll thank me for adding savior of the Kingslayer to your legacy.”
“Perhaps you’ll forgive me for adding rescuer of giant freakish maidens to yours,” she countered. Harrenhal. She’d heard a thousand versions of the tale by now, most so far from the truth as to be laughable. Brienne had fought naked, or she’d torn out the bear’s heart just like she killed Renly. That version, more than any other, had stripped away the last of her illusions about the tales she’d devoured so eagerly as a child. Brienne had been thrown into a pit to die by tooth and claw, but the bards painted her as a joke or a villain. An ugly maiden could not be innocent, not in the tales. No one wanted a story of an ugly maiden unless love transformed her into a beauty.
“How are you a fool?” His smile was fond and indulgent. Somehow it made her feel worse. “Dragons live again, and we succeeded in our quest.”
“The dragons are of no use when they’re in the south, and those girls are living in exile.” Brienne had thought it so many times, even as they’d bid the girls farewell on the dock at Gulltown, Pod and the Hound shepherding them to Pentos, but the words tasted like ashes in her mouth. “And we’re going to die here. No one will be left to tell our story, much less listen to it.”
“All men must die, or so the Braavosi say.” The lightness in his voice was forced, but she heard the acceptance in it. Jaime had never feared death. She’d once thought he merely refused to show Lady Catelyn any weakness, chained as he was deep in the dungeons of Riverrun, but she believed him now.
“Make sure I burn, Jaime.” She smiled grimly. “Do all men need to ask that?”
He clasped her arm under the furs. “You’re not going to die. I won’t let you.”
“It should have been me last night. I slipped in the snow, and the man next to me went down instead.” To her horror, she felt tears welling up in her eyes. When had she last cried? On the Quiet Isle? When they found Sansa? She couldn’t remember.
His eyes widened, and his hand drew back. Jaime had never been comfortable with her more tender feelings. He’d outright avoided her while she’d mourned after the Red Wedding. “Rest, my lady. You’re tired.”
Brienne reluctantly lay down, drawing the furs tight around her, and tried to hold back the tears. She was shaking, couldn’t help that. The cold was sunk so deep into her bones that only the pyre could touch it. When the time came, they would throw her body into the flames and she would melt like candle wax.
She felt Jaime shuffling around behind her, and then the firm bulk of him was tucked against her back, his breath tickling her neck and his hand resting lightly on her hip. He’d told her once that he wasn’t good at comforting anyone, but his closeness was more soothing than pretty lies. Her shaking subsided slowly, the furs and Jaime’s warmth doing their work. This was all she had left: greedily drinking in what little heat remained in the world before she froze inside and out.
Without his eyes on her, it was easier to confess. “I don’t even look at their faces anymore, when I’m at the pyre.” She didn’t need to. She counted their hands.
His breath ghosted over the nape of her neck. “I do.”
“I wonder, sometimes, what my life might have been like.” She couldn’t explain why she said it. Jaime was the last person to express regret or remorse.
He sighed before asking, “If what? If you hadn’t come north? If you’d never followed Renly?”
“After my brother died, my father betrothed me to Lord Caron’s second son. He wanted nothing more than to see me safe behind the walls of Nightsong, children clinging to my skirts.”
“Did you want that life?”
“I was a child myself. I thought I did. I was supposed to. Did you long to be Lord of Casterly Rock?”
His laugh puffed warm air across her neck. “No, it seemed deadly dull. I wanted to fight. By the time I thought to want more, I’d tossed all my choices away to stay close to Cersei.”
Jaime stiffened, and Brienne scarcely dared to breathe. They never spoke of the queen’s fate, even when he was clearly thinking of her, thinking of their children. Finally Brienne reached for his hand, knit their fingers together. It was a precious gift, one she treasured, to know he would allow that touch, even welcome it.
“I was thirteen when I met Lord Renly,” she said softly, wanting to assure him he wasn’t alone in his folly. “I didn’t care how, I just knew I wanted to always be near him.”
“So you became his Kingsguard.” Jaime relaxed behind her. He understood her in this much at least.
“I spent a year as a cupbearer at Storm’s End first.” She must have looked a fool, her adoration of her lord writ all over her homely face, but in truth Renly spent little time at Storm’s End. The castellan, Ser Cortnay Penrose, had been fond of her, though.
Jaime’s thumb rubbed lazily over the back of her hand. “Tell me you didn’t spend the whole time inside the castle embroidering and watching the boys training in the yard.”
She shook her head and allowed herself to burrow closer to him beneath the furs. Her toes were thawing, just a bit, and her feet might not be blocks of ice should they brush against his. “The master at arms wouldn’t let me train with the boys, said it wouldn’t be fair, the boys wouldn’t want to hit me.” They did hit her, out of sight of the knights of the castle, but she hit them back. What wasn’t fair was that she had a head or more of height on all of them for much of that year, until seemingly overnight they started to shoot up like flowers in the spring.
“Ser Cortnay ordered him to train me separately,” she continued before Jaime could grumble about the man’s shortsightedness. “It was better that he didn’t like me. He never went easy on me. Broke my nose once.”
Jaime nuzzled his face into her shoulder, a liberty she could not recall him taking before, not perhaps since they were prisoners lashed together astride an overburdened horse. “No one ever went easy on you, did they? Least of all me.”
Brienne squeezed his hand. “I’d be dead without their scorn, because it made me train harder. Without it, I might’ve married the last man my father betrothed me to. I’d have been tripped up by my skirts while I ran away, holding a babe not a blade, cut down by one soldier or another long ago.”
Jaime barked a laugh. “Is that what you think? Save you, the fiercest women I’ve ever known were all mothers. Catelyn Stark would have ripped out my throat with her teeth to save her children. Did you ever meet Maege Mormont? Ruled Bear Island for years, fought with a spiked mace and bore five daughters, named them all Mormont even though no one had the faintest bloody clue who their fathers were.”
He pulled her closer, the heat of him seeping through her clothes, warming her back and her legs. “Even if you can’t, I can see it. You’d be on the ramparts with your men, clad in leather and mail, brandishing your sword. And your children, all seven of them tall as trees and trained to fight, would tell tales their whole lives about how their mother was fierce as a bear, how she cut down any man who dared to take what was theirs.”
A surprised laugh burst from her throat. “Seven children?” She could see them, though, just as he said, bright blonde hair, fierce little scowls on their faces, training with wooden swords while her father looked on. She couldn’t see their father in this fantasy, or perhaps she couldn’t let herself see him.
“You’re young, strong. You could have as many babes as you wish.” He sounded so certain, as if all the obstacles in the way of such a ridiculous outcome were nothing.
“I’d need a husband for that, a man at least. And that will never happen.” Brienne was grateful that Jaime couldn’t see her face. Idle daydreams were one thing, but even he could not think they were anything more than that. A gust of icy wind rattled the heavy shutters, and the vision in her head broke apart and scattered like burnt parchment. Marriage, motherhood, she wasn’t fashioned for such things. Love and passion were even further from her grasp, one more indignity heaped on the rest, to live and die a maid. Though not to live much longer if they could not break the Others’ siege.
“I’ve never even been kissed,” she whispered, more to herself than to him. The awkward, momentary press of lips she’d suffered in Renly’s camp didn’t count, she’d scarcely felt a thing before she’d shoved him away.
She felt Jaime’s sharp inhale against her back. “Are you asking?”
Did pretty girls need to ask? Brienne thought not. Between the serving girls and the the wildling spearwives in the castle, she’d heard plenty of chatter about stolen kisses and much more. Brienne had noticed a few curious looks directed her way, from wildling men, and perhaps they might have considered stealing her away for an evening. At least, those who weren’t wary of Jaime might consider her. But she didn’t want them anymore than she’d wanted Owen Inchfield, the Bloody Mummers, Vargo Hoat, or Ser Hyle. “No. I’m not asking.”
“You should.”
“I don’t want pity,” she scoffed. Jaime made it sound easy. Of course. He didn’t need to ask. Any woman he turned his eye to would fall into his arms, into his bed. Perhaps they had. Brienne had never seen him leave the great hall with anyone, never heard whispers about him, but Jaime had spent a lifetime discreetly satisfying his needs.
He pulled back just far enough that she could feel the cold air spilling between their bodies again, and shivered with the loss of his warmth.
“You should ask.” His voice was as rough as the wool of her shift. Both teased at her skin as her breath quickened.
Turning around was simple, but nothing had ever been so hard. His face was dappled with flickering firelight and deep shadow, his eyes glittering brightly. She’d released his hand but he only dropped it to her hip, his fingers flexing against the hard jut of her hipbone.
The fire popped and smoked. A green stick must have worked its way into her wood pile. She was amazed there were any left. It was hard to believe the world would ever wake from its winter slumber. Impossible to believe any of them would live long enough to see it.
“You should ask me.” Jaime’s emphasis on the last word was unmistakable. As if she would ask anyone else. His lips quirked in a small, sheepish smile. “I may have promised to cut the cock off the next man who tried to touch you.” She wouldn’t put it past him to make such a threat, even knowing that the wildlings would look on that as Jaime stealing her for himself. Even they had heard of the Kingslayer. Who knew what he was capable of?
She did. In the dizzying heat of the Harrenhal baths, Jaime had bared body and soul to her. Curse me, kiss me, or call me a liar.
Brienne moved before she could think, eyes slamming closed, lips meeting his hard and off-center. Lightning struck inside her, a white-hot bolt searing from her mouth down between her legs as he responded, his mouth gentling hers, slowing the kiss to something less frantic. She pulled away with a gasp, her heart pounding and her whole body tingling as she opened her eyes.
His expression made her breath catch. His eyes were dark and heated, but not predatory, unlike any man had ever looked at her. Jaime’s hand left her hip, and she mourned the loss of his touch until his fingertips skimmed across the scar still tight over her cheek, his thumb tracing her lips. “You’re smiling,” he whispered.
Brienne felt it then, the pull of her scars stretching. She could only manage a lopsided half-smile, but she smiled so rarely it mattered little. He cupped her cheek in his hand, and before she could even think to pull away, his mouth found hers again.
Jaime’s lips were soft, his beard tickling her cheeks and chin. His heat soaked into her skin and bloomed in her belly. Brienne wrapped a hand in his tunic, dragging his body against hers again. He smiled against her mouth, a soft little chuckle escaping his lips, and his hand slipped from her face to wrap around her waist, anchoring her against him.
She kissed him like the world was ending, greedy for every moment she could steal from the dark. He kissed her like they had all the time in the world to explore all the kisses a man and a woman could share.
For the first time in at least a moon’s turn, Brienne felt warm.