The North Gate

Brienne woke to cold sheets and knew, before she opened her eyes, that he had gone. She lay still and let herself know it. The fire had burned to a red seam in the grate. Outside, a raven complained on the battlements, and someone in the yard was dragging something heavy across the flagstones. The place beside her was not warm. It had not been warm for hours. The raven had come last night, and by supper everyone knew. Euron Greyjoy's fleet off Dragonstone, a dragon brought down with bolts, Missandei taken. She had watched Jaime's face across the half-empty hall while Lord Royce's steward read the letter aloud, and she had seen something close in it, the way a door closes in a draft. She had not said anything. She had pressed her face against his shoulder in the dark and told herself that a man who could close a door could open one again. Brienne sat up. She dressed the way she always dressed, without hurry, because hurry was for people who had somewhere to be. Breeches, shirt, the padded jerkin. She buckled on Oathkeeper last, and her hands were steady on the buckle, and she was proud of that, in a small, mean way. His clothes were gone from the chair. His boots were gone from beside the door. The golden hand was on the table. She stood and looked at it for a long moment. It lay on its side next to the candle stub, fingers curled a little, as if it had been reaching for something and given up. He never took it off except to sleep. He had told her once, half-drunk and laughing at himself, that he felt more naked without it than without his breeches. And there it was, on her table, in her room, a thing of real weight and real gold, the kind of thing a man would come back for. Or the kind of thing a man would leave behind, if he meant to leave everything. She picked it up. It was cold. She put it in the inside of her jerkin, against her ribs, and went down. Winterfell in the weeks after a victory was not a joyful place. The pyres outside the walls had burned down to black ground and the smell of them still came in on the wind. Men moved slowly, mending, carrying, sharpening. A Northern woman with a basket of linen gave Brienne a nod. Two Northern boys passed with spears on their shoulders, too young to have fought, and they stared at her the way boys always stared at her. She looked at the stables first, because that was where you looked for a man who had left, and the stable door was open, and the groom inside was asleep on a pile of straw with his mouth open. She asked him anyway. He woke, wiped his mouth, and said yes, Ser Jaime had come for a horse in the night, he'd saddled the grey himself, one-handed and all, and the groom had wanted to help but had been told to go back to sleep in very colorful language. "Did he ride out?" The groom blinked at her. "He rode out, my lady. Ser. Through the north gate." "North." Not south. The road to King's Landing did not go north. "You're certain?" "I'm certain I opened it. He came back through it too. An hour before dawn, maybe." Brienne did not remember crossing the yard after that. She remembered the cold on her face and the weight of the golden hand against her ribs and Podrick saying, "Ser? Ser Brienne?" somewhere to her left, and not answering him. Jaime was in the godswood. He sat on the roots of the heart tree with his back against the white bark and his legs stretched in front of him, and he looked like a man who had been sitting there for a long time. Frost on his boots. Frost in his hair, though that might have been grey. The carved face of the weirwood wept its red sap above his head, and he had his eyes closed, and for a terrible moment she thought he was dead, frozen, some foolish lion who had never learned to dress for the North. Then he said, without opening his eyes, "You found the hand." She stopped at the edge of the pool. Steam rose from the hot spring and drifted between them. "You left it on my table." "I did." He opened his eyes. They were red-rimmed. "I thought, if I take it, I'll keep going. If I leave it, I'll have to come back for it. It's very expensive, you know. Tyrion would never let me hear the end of it." "So you rode north." "I rode south first." He looked at the black water. "In my head. All night, lying next to you, I rode south. Down the Kingsroad, past Moat Cailin, past the Twins, all the way to the Red Keep. I knew every inn. I knew where I'd change horses. I knew what I'd say to her." His jaw moved. "And then I got up and saddled the grey, and I sat on him in the yard, and I couldn't make my hand turn the reins toward the south gate. So I went the other way. I thought if I rode far enough into all that white, I'd stop thinking about it. I got to a stream and stopped and sat there until my arse froze to the saddle, and then I came back." Brienne came around the pool. Her boots broke the thin ice at the edge. She sat on a root a little way from him, not touching him, because she was not sure yet what touching him would mean. "She's your sister," she said. "She's carrying your child. I'm not a fool, Jaime. I know what it is you're choosing between." "Do you?" "I know that I can't make you stay. And I know I shouldn't want to make you." "But you do." Brienne looked at the weirwood face. It had been carved by people who had died ten thousand years ago, and it looked at the two of them as though it had seen this exact conversation many times and expected nothing new from it. "Yes," she said. "I do." Jaime laughed, once, low and wet. "You know what I kept thinking, by that stream? I kept thinking about the bath at Harrenhal. You, coming out of the water like some sort of outraged sea monster. You remember?" "I remember you telling me about Aerys." "I'd never told anyone. Not Cersei. Not my father. Not Tyrion. I told a woman I'd known a few weeks, who'd beaten me bloody on a bridge and called me Kingslayer every chance she got." He turned his head and looked at her for the first time. "I was so tired. All I'd done my whole life was go back to her. Every time. Every time I swore I wouldn't. I've gone back to her so often I don't know if I'm doing it because I love her or because I don't know how to walk any other road. And last night I lay there thinking: I've already been to King's Landing a hundred times. I know exactly how that road ends. I've never once been anywhere else." The wind moved in the red leaves. A few came down onto the black water and floated there. "If you stay," Brienne said carefully, "you'll hate yourself. When the news comes. Whatever it is." "Maybe." He held out his stump to her, the leather cup over it worn soft from the strap. "And if I go, I'll hate myself sooner. I have more practice at that one. It hardly hurts anymore." She took out the golden hand. It was warm now from her body. She took his arm and fitted the hand over the cup and pulled the straps tight, the way she'd seen Podrick do it, the way he must have done it himself a thousand mornings with his teeth and his one good hand. Her fingers were clumsy on the buckles. His breath stirred her hair. "I'm not going to forgive you," she said, still buckling, "if you change your mind next week and leave in the night." "I know." "I'll come after you." "I know that too." He was smiling, a little, the cracked crooked smile she had once hated. "That's rather the point." She finished the last buckle and did not let go. Her hand stayed on the gold, and his good hand came up and covered it, and they sat like that under the weeping tree while the steam rose off the pool and somebody at the far end of the yard started ringing the bell for breakfast. "I'm told," Jaime said, "that the Starks have a custom. You eat porridge. Every day. Forever. No lemon, no honey. Just the porridge." "You'll survive." "That remains to be seen." She stood and pulled him to his feet. His knees cracked. He swore. The frost on his boots broke into white dust on the roots of the heart tree, and Brienne kept hold of his golden hand as they went back across the godswood, toward the noise of the yard and the bell and whatever would come up the north road next, because whatever it was, he was here to see it.