#whoops plot

What's this? They found an entry in a later journal. The handwriting is shaky and tear stains litter the yellowed paper, a complete difference from the rest of the books.

Akari was found dead atop of Mt. Coronet, in a similar way to many other bodies across Hisui, by Warden Ingo of the Pearl clan. A v carved into her. The killer was never caught.

Well now Ingo has to solve a murder in the past before it even happened with the help of Johanna. This only strengthens the bond between Ingo and Johanna.

Jaime has ridden with her every day through deepening snow and treacherous ice until finally they reached their destination and made camp here, her and Podrick and Hyle Hunt and the Hound, alongside all of the other travelers who have come to rest at the Gates of the Moon. 

The Gates are no more promising than anywhere else they have arrived. There is an extensive encampment here of hopeful hedge knights and nobles from the highlands, but none have time for an odd woman in armor and her questions about red-haired girls of four-and-ten. There are no further rumors of Sansa Stark here, or of her sister, although there are a great many more interesting rumors about the rest of the kingdom in the progressing winter.

Jaime collects these rumors and opinions with some interest, mingling himself with the men at camp over food and drink for several days running. Turns out there are a great many things that a person will tell a traveler in the Vale that they would not tell to Lord Commander Lannister. Some of those things are pure nonsense, but others are rather illuminating. 

It is not so bad, being dead. He gets many more smiles and greetings as a dead man, and not so many sneers and whispers. He keeps his stump shoved under his travel cloak, has muddied his hair and beard so that they are not quite so golden, and it makes him nearly invisible. He is another middle-aged hedge knight trying to relive his glory days at tourney, so far as anyone knows. 

Not so far off. He could not hope to compete there now. Left-handed these green boys could take him, and without his fearsome reputation to dissuade them his life would be in real danger. 

He sits at supper and looks at the farm boys and young lords, in the spring of their youth and the peak of their skills. He imagines Brienne defeating them all, beating them down into the mud until they beg for mercy. It’s a shame she won’t enter the tourney; he’d like to see that. Would any one of them be a match for her, at her full power? They are nearer her age, their reputations as spotless as their unbloodied swords. If she had awakened from her long sleep married to one of them, would she be so aggrieved?

The competitors like to talk, and the spectators even more so. They spin tales about the fighters who have come hoping to be Winged Knights, their family connections, their sweethearts and patrons. They tell him all about Lord Baelish and his natural daughter Alayne Stone, who have organized the tourney.

These tales in particular catch his ear. If Littlefinger has a natural daughter I’ll eat my boot. The man is too careful for that. Only the Spider is less likely to produce a bastard offspring, and only out of physical impossibility. 

He asks questions about the fabled daughter, and her upcoming marriage to Harold Hardyng.  An awfully advantageous match for a Stone, marrying the next in line to the Vale. Conveniently Petyr Baelish seems to have gotten charge of little lord Robert, and rules the Eeyrie as Regent. Jaime wonders if there might be an accident in store, once that wedding is complete. Maybe several accidents. Sweetrobin and Harry the Heir cleared away, and the Vale belongs to Lord Baelish.

He would very much like to meet this Alayne Stone. 

That’s more difficult than he would like. She will attend the tourney when it begins, but thus far has remained out of sight. He will have to wait for the tourney and possibly for the very final rounds to lay eyes on her, and that is likely to happen after his deadline is passed. Not that it makes any difference – the one has nothing to do with the other, no matter how persistently his mind makes the connection. Finding Sansa will not stop the marriage from ending.

It will be a relief to have it over and still he is increasingly agitated at the thought. He lies in his tent each night and he thinks on the Hounds Tooth inn when he had shared a room with Brienne as his bride. He had passed that evening most pleasantly, and even though nothing of import occurred he finds himself thinking on it fondly. Brienne asleep and unguarded in his bed while he sat by the fire. Friendly strangers wishing them well, simply for having one another. Your lady wife. It was a night stolen from someone else’s life, a life he is never going to have. 

For his own good the marriage must dissolve. It is inane to cling to an illusion and he has done that quite long enough with Cersei. He is never going to be somebody’s husband; he is a knight and he is the kingslayer and that is that. 

He is chewing on just this thought as he rides back to his bed at sunset. He knows when he comes back to camp Brienne will be surprised to see him again, as she has been every day that he has not left their party. She knows very well he has other places to be, and is waiting for him to remember it and ride away. Yet he is lingering here and unwilling to leave, though what he is waiting for he cannot imagine. Brienne cannot imagine it either, clearly. 

It’s making him cross, and distracted. He does not notice the riders gathering to his flanks until it is too late to evade them. 

Jaime is pulled from his horse before he can draw a blade, and thrown to the ground.

Sellswords, plainly. Not expensive ones. Five of them, looking like they’ve slept rough half their lives and just barely know how to hold a blade. He’s a little insulted that anyone would think him no match for these.

He leans back on his elbows and contemplates them in a relaxed pose. “I haven’t any money, and if you want a fine horse, you’d be better off feeding mine to the one you’ve got. This one’s slow as molasses.” 

“No money eh?” A skinny, toothless alley cat of a mercenary points a rusty longsword at him. “No Lannister gold?”

Jaime frowns. Clearly his disguise has not been so effective as he’d hoped. 

Some of his mates are skeptical. “Can this be the golden lion? He looks more like a weasel.” 

“No, it’s ‘im.” The tallest one spits a dark stream through his teeth and stands over Jaime. “Lord Baelish pointed him out to me personally.”

Well that’s irritating. Apparently Littlefinger was in the same room with him and Jaime never laid eyes on the man. Clearly he can cross “spy” off his list of potential careers after “swordfighter”.

“If you’re seeking out a ransom, you may have to wait some time to get it. Only ravens travel well now, and they don’t carry quite so much gold.”

“We got the gold already,” Toothless tells him. He jingles the money bag that hangs beside the knife on his belt. “Lord Baelish pays us well, and he only needs your head.”

Of course. He has asked entirely too many questions. And whatever his plans, Littlefinger has no intention of anyone outside the Vale hearing of them until it’s too late. 

“The Crown will have all your heads for it,” he says confidently.

“You’ll be buried right here, Kingslayer, and they will never know. The Crown believes you dead already and no one will miss you.”

Belatedly, Jaime realizes he is right. Not one of his compatriots in the Kingsguard or the Lannister Army knows where he is, and his own house has already forsaken him for the grave. Next to no one will notice if he dies now rather than two months ago. And even fewer than that will mourn him. Possibly none.

He lunges.

The knife comes easily out of Toothless’s belt and into his side, spraying Jaime with blood. But the remaining four sellswords are on him in a moment, and it takes only a few kicks in the stomach before he lies still in the snow again. He knows this routine. 

The tall man has his sword out now. “If you’ll tell us where to find the giant bitch, I can make it painless.” 

“Nonsense.” Jaime brushes the snow out of his hair as carelessly as possible. “Let’s make it hurt. I can only die once, after all.”

“Happy to oblige.” The tall one shoves his face back into the snow and stands on him. Jaime doesn’t even know who he is. Some no-name cutthroat sent by Petyr Baelish. What a stupid way to die. 

“What in the living fuck is that?” one of them shouts.

Horses approach. Abruptly the boot on his neck lifts, and Jaime spits out mud. Is there someone else here trailing him, after the Brotherhood and the Vale Guards? With any luck they will kill each other. 

He wipes snow from his eyes and sits back on his heels. Two riders approach very rapidly, and one of them has a sword raised. It crashes into the sellsword who had just been standing over him, with such force it knocks him off his feet.

Brienne dismounts in a strikingly graceful motion, her sword drawn, and she stares them down.

“Unhand my husband,” Brienne growls at them.

Jaime grins. A more wonderful combination of words he cannot imagine. 

“Already done,” he points out, waving his stump. “The bloody mummers beat them to it.”

She doesn’t hear him, swings directly into action. 

The fight is brief. She holds Oathkeeper with both hands and leads with her left, with her right arm still healing. It should discomfit him how easily she switches her lead hand, how one left-handed blow knocks the blade from her opponent, but instead it makes him smile. She makes short work of their weapons, knocking them from their hands, and their owners from their feet, while Jaime kneels untouched among them. 

He hadn’t known how pleasant it could be to be rescued. It’s really quite wonderful. Someone fighting for him, bleeding for him, spilling blood. When the immediate threats are downed she stands in front of him protectively, Oathkeeper in hand, and she looks like a song. A song only for him, for his sake. 

“Kingslayer’s Whore!” one of the downed men moans from the ground.

“That’s Kingslayer’s Wife, I’ll have you know,” Jaime says irritably. “She’s made an honest man of me.”

“Hush.” Brienne advances on him. In the time it takes Jaime to stand, Brienne has the man under her boot with a sword pointed to his neck. “What do you want with him? Robbery?”

“Execution,” the wretched man spits. “For crimes against everything good and decent. Kingslayer, Oathbreaker, great golden cripple.”

“That’s right, you do not deserve to say his name,” Brienne tells him. “None of you do. Call him what you will, but you will not be half the man he is.”

Gods be good.

Jaime is pierced by those words, a clean wound right through his chest. It hurts like every time he heard the name and no one spoke up for him, all together, all at once. Paired with the balm of her defense it is almost unbearable.

At a moment’s notice Jaime knows what he wants after all. He wants to keep her. He wants to stay her husband, and her to stay his wife. Never to part again. 

He wants her.

“Kingslayer’s Whore,” the sellsword repeats, spitting at her. “Got his cock out of your mouth long enough to ride? After murdering your liege lady Stark for him?”

His blade is drawn before he’s even thought to do it, and he’s walking briskly to Brienne’s side. 

Jaime aims the end of his sword directly at the man’s mouth, descending until it falls between his teeth and the man is choking and whimpering against it. 

“I don’t suppose sword-swallowing is one of your skills?” He pushes it a little further in, and the man gurgles in terror. “I hear in Braavos there are men who can take a sword right down their gullet and all the way to the hilt, and pull it out again right as rain.”

“Ser…” Brienne speaks up, cautiously.

“I wonder how you learn to do a trick like that - a little at a time, or all at once? Let’s find out.”

“There is no need,” she says quietly, putting a hand to his arm.

He meets her eye only briefly. She threatened the man herself only moments ago, but this is too far? 

“My lady wife would have me show you mercy. Can you keep a civil tongue in your head?”

The man makes an eager noise, too afraid to nod his head, and Jaime pulls his blade back.

The scene has not gone unnoticed - they are not far from other encampments, and other fires. There are onlookers now, and among them Podrick Payne on his horse, his little sword drawn in their support. He threatens the onlookers with it, having them keep their distance.

“They were tipped off,” Jaime tells Brienne. “Littlefinger is here - Petyr Baelish. I don’t know what he’s up to but he wanted me dead, and you as well.”

“I have no dealings with him,” Brienne says quizzically. “Could it have something to do with Sansa Stark?”

Unwisely, the man on the ground speaks up. “There’s no Starks in the Vale, whore. No Starks anywhere anymore, thanks to you and yours. They –”

He is interrupted by a swift kick in the face. 

Jamie hasn’t yet sheathed his sword, still thinks of feeding it to the man. He’s still angry. He has brought even more abuse on Brienne simply by his association and it infuriates him. His voice sharpens to a deadly point. “You will address the lady properly. Or you will keep no tongue in your head at all.”

“Lady Lannister –” the man corrects himself quickly.

Jaime startles at that, and Brienne stiffens beside him. Then he laughs. “Oh, we haven’t settled that bit yet. Lady Brienne will do for now. But there will be no more of this ‘Kingslayer’s Whore’. She is a noble lady, and a sworn blade of your precious Starks, and no one will speak so crudely of her in my presence and keep their tongue. Understand me? Tell that to your noble compatriots.”

The man whimpers agreement and Brienne lifts her boot, allowing him to sit up and rub his throat nervously.

The city guard, Vale soldiers, approaches in a thunderous pack. Brienne is cheered by their appearance, but Jaime knows better. Littlefinger will own them too; he is thorough like that. 

Exactly as expected they take him by the arms as soon as they dismount holding Jaime between them. Guards will have to make a show of arresting him, so that they can murder him in private.

“Sers, these men attacked us,” Brienne tries valiantly to explain, appealing to the guards with her sword lowered. She still thinks they will listen.

One of them shoves her aside. “Quiet, you ridiculous bitch.”

So of course Jaime had to headbutt the man in the face, which hurts, but it drops the man like a sack of flour, which is satisfying enough to be worth it. For his trouble he is slung into the back of a wagon, a jailer’s hearse. 

“For what crime?” Brienne questions them loudly. “We were defending ourselves from these sellswords.”

“Attacking a city guard,” the guard says.

Brienne considers that, visibly, head cocked to one side.

Then she smashes the man in the face with the hilt of her sword, so that his nose produces a most astonishing spray of blood, and is immediately thrown into the wagon right next to him.

*******************

“You could have stopped them,” he grouses to her later.

They are seated on the cold stone floor of a dungeon, daylight barely peeking into their cell.

“If by that you mean killed them, we would hardly get anywhere finding Sansa Stark if we run about murdering city guards.”

“We’re not going to find her in here!“ 

She is unbothered. “They will keep us but a night.”

“And wake us with a knife across the throat.”

“Pod rode for help,” Brienne says stubbornly, staring straight ahead. “He will find Ser Hyle and Ser Clegane. They will think of something.”

Time is passing fitfully as the light slowly fades. Their cramped cell is barely big enough for the both of them and it's freezing besides, and they sit just near each other, not touching, their breaths visibly hovering in the air around them. Brienne pulls her knees closer to her chest, for either warmth or protection. Without her armor she is probably short of both.

A dozen things to say flit through his mind, and he says none of them. Instead Brienne speaks up next, some time later. 

“You did not have to do that,” she says softly. “To threaten the man on the ground. Or attack that guard.”

He snorts. “Certainly I did. What else would I do, the dishonorable Kingslayer.”

“I mean that you did not have to defend my name.” She shifts, angling her face away from him. “I am accustomed to being insulted.”

So is he. But Jaime is not accustomed to her being insulted, at least not by someone other than him. “Where did that particular insult come from, I wonder? Kingslayer’s Whore. The Brotherhood said it too, well before the Quiet Isle. Did you ride about declaring that I had sent you? Not a great stratagem.”

“The lions on the sword might have had something to do with it.”

“Ah.” 

He swallows and thinks about the rope marks around her neck. Perhaps it had not happened because she had any great feeling for him, but it is his fault all the same. He gave her a sword covered with lions and sent her after Sansa Stark, and they broke her arm and tore her face and hung her. 

“If you are going to attack anyone who calls me names, you will have to fight the whole of Westeros from one end to another. Do not bother.”

She is so calm. He wants her to be angry and rage about it, and it isn’t in her. She is resigned to this. It makes him want to shake her. 

“If people must make arses of themselves it is one thing. But for you to take abuse on my behalf… that I do not like. Your reputation should not suffer for things that you did not do.” 

“It’s my reputation too, now,” she says mournfully. “Already the Vale knows I killed my liege lady and disbanded her Brotherhood. I did do that, and I can hardly dispute it. It will be everywhere before long.”  

“You cannot possibly be troubling yourself over that.” Jaime grimaces even to think on it, it makes him sick inside, in an entirely familiar way. “You had no choice.”

“I did have a choice, and I made it. I chose to break my oath, and I knew the consequences. I learned them from you.” She looks over at him finally. “You made a choice as well. And you have still carried the guilt all these years, haven’t you?”

His mouth goes bone-dry. Only Brienne has ever seen how he blames himself for breaking that oath, even all these years later. Despite every reason why he could not have done otherwise.

“Yes,” he says quietly.

“Sansa Stark is my last chance for honor too. I can only make up for my failure by her mother by keeping my promise, and seeing her safely returned to Winterfell.” She leans her head back against the wall, closing her eyes. “At least then I can hold up my head and know that I did the best I could. I was no kind of knight, and I failed from one end of it to the other, but I cannot go back to Tarth until I have found her.”

Brienne looks so bone-tired and forlorn at that moment that it aches to look at her.

The protective instinct in him rises up, the most powerful instinct he has, and Jaime is totally unable to resist it. Something is hurting someone dear to him and his most natural reaction is to fling himself at it. He doesn’t have a sword and the enemy is nothing he can protect her from, but Brienne is hurting and he cannot think how to make it stop.

So he grasps her shirt at the collar and pulls her to him, kissing her. 

Brienne goes very still and softens all at once, melting against him. Her mouth is warm and sweet and his heart is racing and he is pulled by a current far more powerful than he can swim against. The world rushes by very quickly, a blur.

Her hands struggle up to his chest as if to push him away but they only sit there preparing, always about to.  

The thought floats by without his leave. With this kiss I pledge my love. His lips speak it to hers.

But then she does push him back. He stands against her hands catching his breath. Her eyes are so blue and so wide and so full of hurt.

“How could you?” She chokes out the words painfully. 

“Like this,” he says, trying to kiss her again. 

“Don’t.” She jumps up to her feet, backing away from him as though he had attacked her. “Why would you do something like that?” 

Because he wanted to, that’s all he can think of. And he can’t tell her. To simply say, out loud, what he wants? Jaime doesn’t do things like that. A person cannot just admit to the things they want, not out loud. If you reveal what you really want, someone will take it from you, someone will use it to get what they want from you. A person keeps those things inside, and they try not to think on them, so that no one will discern their secrets. With enough practice a person will not even remember the things they want. Or know what they are in the first place.

“I wanted you to stop talking,” he says, too frustrated to think of anything better. 

“You…” she sputters angrily, and paces over him. “Did you think you can do as you like because we are still married? Did you think for a moment that I might not want my first kiss in a filthy dungeon…?”

“Your first?” That had not occurred to him. 

“Oh, gods.” She covers her face and he can see she’s blushing all down her throat, where it disappears down into her shirt. 

That old instinct again. How can he make it better?

“I wanted to. I wanted to kiss you.”

"You wanted…?” Her face tightens painfully. “Why?”

Jaime thinks of Red Ronnet and his rose, and he would very much like to find the man and hit him again. 

“I lost my senses, all right?”

“Stop talking,” Brienne snaps at him, and shoves herself down into the farthest corner away from him, still blushing. 

Jaime congratulates himself silently on making everything infinitely worse, and then things get worse again, all on their own. 

A woman walks into the dungeon. They know immediately it is a woman, well before they see her, from her carefully measured, delicate steps. She is tall, though not so tall as Brienne, and she walks to the bars of their cell and looks down upon them calmly.

She takes down the hood of her winter cape, standing over them, and it reveals rather than a noble lady a young girl, no more than five-and-ten, if that. She is dressed plainly but elegantly, in fine homespun clothes of a lovely warm caramel color that matches her hair, and looks quite out of place in a filthy dungeon. 

Jaime searches out her face in the dim light. “Alayne Stone, I presume.”