Chapter Text
OVERTURE:
In the shadowy kitchens beneath the Red Keep Jaime Lannister rubbed sand and ashes into the pommel of his sword. As much as he’d have liked to leave it behind, he couldn’t in good conscience throw away a weapon supposedly capable of killing the dead. Was it killing? Was something dead able to die again?
A question for the Greyjoys , Jaime thought, turning the sword this way and that, watching to see where it would catch the light. It felt right, as so few things did, to take this sword North. The rippling Valyrian steel had been stolen from the Starks by his father; it was theirs more than his. It didn’t matter that the hilt was gold, that the thing had been named by Jaime’s cunt of a bastard son. The blade held the ice of the north and had never come easily to Jaime’s hand.
When the hilt of the sword was nearly as dark as the blade Jaime felt his task was complete. He strapped the sword to his side (the wrong side, it would always feel wrong) and stole down into the cellar. Dried meat hung from the rafters between hams and sides of venison, and Jaime took that, a block of hard cheese, and dried apples. From the pantry he took coarse brown rolls and, on impulse, a skin of fine wine.
His bounty went into the saddlebag slung over Jaime’s right shoulder, and then he was striding out into the pale, weak light of an early-winter dawn. In stolen black armour and boiled leather Jaime padded across the familiar cobbles of the Red Keep. He’d walked this path a thousand times on a thousand mornings. Many times he’d slipped out of Cersei’s bed, buckled on his white Kingsguard cloak, and had reported for training with an easy conscience and a bounce in his step.
Jaime wasn’t bouncing now. He wasn’t wearing the white of the Kingsguard or the crimson of Lannister. He was in black- he’d worn white for the act that had damned him in the eyes of all who heard his name. He’d wear black for the only decent act he had left to do.
He chose a tall, sturdy black gelding known for endurance and saddled him. He stole the saddle and bridle as well, because (he’d only now realized) everything he owned carried the Lannister Lion or crest of the Kingsguard. He’d spend his life as Tywin’s son, Cersei’s twin, the Kingslayer.
For the first time since he’d been made Kingsguard, Jaime rode out of the Red Keep with no insignias, no orders, and no companions. Alone he traveled through the waking streets, and alone he watched the winter’s first snowflake land on his gold hand and quickly melt. For the thinnest fraction of a second Jaime thought he could feel the cool, gentle brush of the snowflake against his skin.
The hand. It had been Cersei’s idea, meant to cover his repulsive deformity, the thing that had made him imperfect in his lover’s eyes. Now Jaime tugged on a leather cover, hoping to make it as many miles as he could before he was recognized.
Without titles, without illusions, and without much hope Jaime Lannister cantered north. He had exactly one thing left that could be called his own: his future.
~~~
A girl floated in a dark fountain of truth and patience. It was calm in the fountain, endless and cool. It was easy to ignore the occasional bubble of fear or rage that would float to the surface. Besides, everyone knew it was safest to drink from moving water.
The girl waited patiently by the old man’s side. So many of his family had already received the Gift, and yet the Many Faced god had continually passed him over, this gnarled and wrinkled man, this proud little lord in his hole.
The girl noticed the bubble of loathing floating in the calm pool of truth and popped it. Death didn’t love or hate. He came for all, one by one, bringing his Gift to the flowers of the field and the beasts of the land and sea. So would she be: a girl would be the autumn coming for the harvest, the arrow coming for the doe.
The old man chewed his pie, working fitfully with his remaining teeth. “Where are my sons?” he groused.
“Here, my lord,” said the girl.
The old man squinted: his eyes had gone as well. Truly, death would be a Gift.
“I don’t see them,” he said, always suspecting women of tricks and stupidity.
A girl took a slow breath. Death was neither male nor female, old nor young. “Here, my lord,” she said, gesturing to his portion of hot water crust pie. The crust… had been tricky. The girl had used up most of the tender cuts of meat in her first few experiments.
“What?” snapped the old man.
The girl peeled back the top layer of crust to reveal the finger (complete with dirty fingernail, did men never wash?) within the old man’s luncheon. “ Here, my lord,” said the girl, pride leaching into her voice.
Death didn’t take pride in his job, and the girl’s face had begun to itch. She felt for the little… seam, the silvery thread that connected the girl to the face she wore. It was easy to feel now, and smoothly, happily the girl peeled off the face of the serving girl.
Arya Stark-ness rushed in to fill the nothingness, the internal dark fountain being replaced by a wellspring of rage so deep and hot it might have been forged in the heart of Old Valyria. Arya shivered at the sensation, her grin wide and wolfish. “I want you to know,” she told Old Walder, “That winter came for House Frey. My name is Arya, and I want you to know that you’ll die with a Stark smiling down at you.”
When the blood hit her cheek, hot and sticky, she smiled.
The next day, when Arya rode out of the keep on a stolen horse, her saddlebags full of food, the wailing of women rung sweetly in her ears.
CHAPTER ONE: A CHANCE MEETING
Arya smelled the smoke of the campfire before she saw it. Darkness came early now, something she’d never experienced, but she knew it was winter tightening its grip on the kingdom. She was still on the Kingsroad, and there wasn’t a town south of the Twins for some time. Whoever had started the fire was traveling, just like her.
To Arya’s surprise a lone figure sat by the little fire, and only one horse grazed nearby. Only fools traveled alone- fools or desperate men. With some amusement Arya wondered into which category she fit.
“Hullo,” she called, pitching her voice just a little lower than it naturally was.
“Hello,” the figure replied: male, southron, high-born.
“Can I join your fire?” Arya called. She dismounted so that the man could see how small she was, how non-threatening she appeared. Arya didn’t mind being born a girl; she hadn’t in a long time. Her body was a permanent disguise, for who would suspect a small, slight woman of deadly skills?
“You’re welcome,” said the figure, his vowels round and rich.
Arya stepped into the circle of light and froze. She knew her face didn’t give anything away; the Waif had beaten the reactions right out of her. But she froze unnaturally, and it was long enough for the golden-haired man to get a good look at her as well.
“Arya?” he asked, shock clear on his face.
Arya wouldn’t have forgotten that jawline, those green eyes, the air of easy, well-earned confidence that oozed from the Kingslayer’s every pore.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” he said, pushing himself to his feet.
Arya noticed then that the fingers on his right hand and his right wrist didn’t flex, and once he was upright he held it awkwardly, close to his stomach. That combined with his sword on the wrong hip…
“And you’re supposed to be the greatest swordsman in Westeros,” she drawled.
Arya turned her back on him, confident that she could still get to her sword faster than he could reach for his. She untacked her horse, dragged her saddlebags over to the fire, and staked the horse out to graze.
“Where have you been?” he asked after she sat down cross-legged by the fire.
“Here and there,” said Arya. She dug in her bag and pulled out a couple biscuits. “Want one?”
He nodded and she tossed it at him. He caught it with his left hand, but barely, a fumbling grasp. She noted this comfortably- she could rest easy here tonight, and if she decided to kill him, it wouldn’t be too much trouble.
“Here and there,” the Kingslayer repeated, looking down at the little lumpy piece of bread in his hand. “Gods, if I’d stumbled across you four years ago…”
Four years ago Arya had left the Hound where he lay and had sailed to Essos.
“Good for me you didn’t,” she said cheerfully around a mouthful of stale biscuit.
“Yes,” said the Kingslayer. They sat quietly for a moment, listening to the crackling of the fire, before he asked, “Why are you riding south? You do know your family is that way?” he said, gesturing north.
“I’m going south to kill the queen,” said Arya, casually as could be. Would he mock her?
He laughed, but not cruelly. “Oh, gods this is rich,” he said. “Cersei… well, she once said something very similar about you.” He stared into the fire, seemingly caught in memory.
“What family do I have in the north?” asked Arya. She’d heard rumors about Sansa, about a marriage bargain, but had discounted them as false. The Lannisters would never have let her leave alive.
“Your brother- excuse me, half brother,” drawled Jaime. “We can’t forget dear Ned’s bastard, can we? Your half brother and your sister, Sansa. Last I heard they were holed up in Winterfell, turning the place into the next Dreadfort.”
Jon, Jon, Jon. Arya hadn’t even dared to hope that he still lived. Would he welcome her home?
“Why is he home?” Arya demanded. “He was a brother of the Night’s Watch, they serve for life.”
Jaime pulled a face and lifted a skin to his lips. He drank a few sips, awkwardly corked the skin, and set it away from him. “Rumor has it that he did serve for life,” he said. “But we southroners are always being told queer stories about the northroners; about how you bed down with wild creatures to stay warm, about giants and snarks and grumpkins.”
Arya didn’t rise to the bait. Jon was alive, Jon was home.
“How did you recognize me?” she demanded. “And why are you out here alone?”
“I could ask you the same things,” said Jaime, rummaging in his saddlebag. He came up with a few strips of dried meat, and he tossed one to Arya. She gnawed a piece off with her teeth and tucked it into her cheek to soften.
Arya shrugged. “That’s easy: you still look like a Lannister, even if you aren’t dressed like one. I’m out here alone because that’s how I’ve survived, and besides: who would help me kill the queen?”
“Me, on the right day,” said Jaime in an offhand way.
“But-”
“Yes, yes, ‘but’,” said Jaime. He waved Arya’s interruption away. “As for you: you bear a striking resemblance to your Aunt Lyanna. Something about your cheekbones and the shape of your eyes. The color too, of course,” he added. “You northron lot even have grey, bland eyes, just like the rest of your godforsaken kingdom.”
“Not all of us,” said Arya calmly, methodically chewing. “Just a few of the Starks. Just me and Jon, now.”
No, thought Jaime. Just you. Jon was all Ned Stark’s son, at least he had been five years ago. He’d had old Ned’s fingerprints all over him; Arya… Arya was like her aunt. They’d both been something other, something wild that didn’t seem to come from their staid northron parents. Lyanna hadn’t resembled Rickard or Lyarra, not in the least, nor did Arya remind him of Cat or Ned, particularly now; now when she moved so queerly, so fluidly. They were something of the North itself, the oldest and largest and strangest of the kingdoms.
“Why are you heading north alone?” asked Arya.
“Because I promised your half brother and his dragon whelp that I would.”
Arya leaned forward- dragons. She’d heard the rumors, everyone in the House of Black and White had heard the rumors. Magic had been stirring, and dragons had been spotted over Slaver’s Bay, or over the Shadowlands, or over the Dothraki sea.
“Tell me,” said Arya.
Jaime shrugged. “I was summoned to the Dragon Pit, along with most of the other remaining nobles in Westeros. Tyrion sent for me- he’s serving the Targaryen girl now.”
Arya could hear that there was no pain or regret or dislike in the Kingslayer’s voice. He was almost as good at masking his feelings as she was.
“Were there dragons?”
He barked a laugh. “Oh, yes. Big bastards, and the Targaryen girl came riding in on the largest.”
“I’d like to ride a dragon,” said Arya.
“I bet you would,” said the Kingslayer. “But the dragons weren’t the strangest thing I saw that day. Your brother was there with a walking dead man, his eyes glowing blue even though the flesh had rotted from his bones.”
Arya scooched forward, wishing that she had the gift of mindwalking or greenseeing, because she wanted to have seen it, too. “What was it like?” she asked in the voice of a supplicant asking for a blessing.
“Like nothing I’ve ever seen,” said Jaime, snapping a small twig into increasingly tiny bits. “He ran out of a crate, his knee bones clicking where the flesh was gone. He would have charged Cersei, but Clegane had him on a chain.”
“Clegane?” asked Arya. Clegane, the Hound, a huge frame and scarred face masking a soul as lost and dark as hers was. She remembered him lying in the dirt, slurring his words, asking for the Gift, a Gift she’d withheld. Had she hoped he’d live? Had she wanted him to die? Arya Stark had never known, not even when she’d been beaten for it.
“Turned out the Hound lived; had disappeared into the woods much like you did,” said the Kingslayer. “Is there some hidden village of misfits the rest of us don’t know about?”
“No,” said Arya, cooly.
Jaime shrugged, a sinuous motion that highlighted the grace that Arya had admired when she’d first seen him nearly six years before. “Snow burned the hand, which killed that bit of it, but the dead man- your brother called it a wight- still fought. Dragonglass can kill them, and Valyrian steel as well.” He paused and fingered the pommel of the grubby sword beside him.
“Snow told us that if we didn’t unite now and stand against the foe to the North we’d all be united in death. We agreed, Cersei and the Targaryen girl and Snow and my brother and me, that the Wall where where the real fight would be. We’d pool our resources, preserve humanity for another generation, and then sort out our land squabbles.”
He scooted lower in his spot, resting his head against the log behind him, and closed those shockingly green eyes. “I went back to the Keep with Cersei. It had been nearly a year since I’d seen her… she told me that I was the stupidest Lannister after all; that Tyrion and I could go to all the seven hells while she saw the name of Lannister restored.’
“She won’t fight,” he said. “She won’t send troops to the north, and she made it clear that if I was to take men I’d be hunted down and hung as a traitor.”
Arya looked at him and cocked her head. “The Kinslayer siblings,” she said. “It’s got a good ring to it.”
Jaime turned his face away from her, a muscle twitching in his jaw. “I made a promise,” he finally said. “And this one I mean to keep. If I go alone, so be it.”
Arya tossed a branch on to the fire, and they listened to it hiss and snap.
“Most people wouldn’t believe you, you know,” she said. “They wouldn’t believe that you’d seen a dead man attack.”
“And you do believe me?” asked the Kingslayer, his voice mocking again. “Why?”
“I can tell,” said Arya.
“You can tell,” said Jaime. “Do they teach you that in ...where were you, again? Invisibility training?” He sounded bitter, like one small girl shouldn’t have been able to so effectively hide among a continent’s worth of strangers.
“Yes,” said Arya, because truly that was what she’d learned in the House of Black and White. She’d learned to be unmemorable, unremarkable; to be anyone and everyone, just a face in the crowd. It was a form of practical invisibility: she hid in plain sight.
Syrio Forel had taught her about truth in the small chamber in the Tower of the Hand. Syrio had been chosen as the First Sword of Braavos because he could see the truth of what was in front of him. It’s how the Faceless Men remained secret as well: most people bumbled through life half-blind to the things around them. They saw what they expected to see or what they wanted to see. Life was more comfortable that way- they didn’t have to be confronted by ugliness, by surprises, by the hard truths that cut more deeply than swords.
Arya had had her own self-deceptions beaten away by Weese, by the Waif, by all the strangers who’d found a blind girl an easy target. Now like it or not, Faceless or not, Arya was confronted by the truth, bare and unadorned.
Jaime Lannister, Kinslayer, Kingslayer, and Oathbreaker, was telling it.
She gave a one-shoulder shrug and thought of Jon. If she’d been able to sail north four years ago…
“I’ll ride north,” she said. Ayra told herself it would be faster and easier to ride north together. It would be tiresome to fight all the way through the Neck, for two people were less likely to be attacked than one. She certainly wasn’t interested in discovering how the Kingslayer had come to find himself in dirty boiled leather and missing a hand.
“Good,” said Jaime. “Then I’ll be able to keep two promises.”
“What’s the second promise?” asked Arya.
The Kingslayer wrapped himself in his cloak and pulled his saddle blanket across his legs. “Go to sleep, wolf-girl,” he said.
Arya curled up next to the fire, wrapped her hand around the hilt of her sword, and closed her eyes. She’d be riding with the Kingslayer for weeks: plenty of time for her to learn his secrets.
~~~
They rode north together for four uneventful days. Jaime spent the evenings shivering in his too-thin cloak, with Arya across the fire from him, twitching in her sleep. He asked her once, concerned, if she had a history of the shaking sickness and she’d laughed and told him she just had vivid dreams. He wondered what they were about.
How had she survived so long? Where had she been? She carried a sword, a light little thing that could never have pierced armor. She even slept with it, curled around it like a mother with her child. She moved like no one he’d seen, every movement full of purpose and grace. She was an oddity, but at least she was easy to travel with. She didn’t complain, didn’t babble, and was practiced at setting up a camp. Maybe she’d lived with the Crannogmen; no one would be foolish enough to chase after her into the swamps.
Several times Jaime had slipped and almost called her Lyanna. He’d been fascinated with the Stark girl when he was a youth. She’d ridden astride, her dark hair a banner behind her. When her father and brothers had chased after her, laughing and cursing, she’d only bent low over her horse’s neck and urged her mount on faster. She’d been just as frustrated with a woman’s role as Cersei, but there was no bitterness there, none of the rage that had made Cersei’s lips thin and her eyes wrinkled.
Jaime briefly wondered why every woman he was attracted to was less-than-feminine, but had quickly shoved that thought away for two reasons. Firstly, it implied that he was interested in masculine women, and despite his long tolerance for men who took their pleasure with each other (after all, who was he to throw stones?) he didn’t like what it implied about himself. Secondly, and more disturbingly, it implied that Jaime was attracted to the child traveling with him. She was a child, he told himself firmly. A child with thousand year-old eyes, yes. A child who moved like she had the flexibility of a Lysene whore, the speed of a snake, and the confidence of thrice-damned Barristan Selmy.
Things finally got interesting on the fifth day.
They’d stopped for the night, the wolf-girl going off to collect branches and scrub that they could burn. Jaime could brush down a horse with his left hand, so and he was left to watch the saddlebags and their mounts. They were slightly south of the turnoff towards Greywater Watch, maybe ten days from Moat Cailin if the weather held.
Arya returned, silent and sylph-like, and efficiently built a fire. They were companionably gnawing dried venison and apples when a group of men crested a small hill on the Kingsroad and spotted their fire. “Hey!” one of them called. “Can we join?”
“Come on,” said Jaime, knowing by now that welcome was more likely to result in a peaceful night than amity. Unfortunately, he didn’t get his wish.
As soon as the men, four in total, hit the little ring of light cast by their fire the strangers drew their swords.
Arya was faster, and Jaime had been prepared for something like this, but four to two… “Now’s your chance to prove you know how to use that little sword,” he mumbled to Arya.
She snorted, her sword held unwaveringly towards the four men on the other side of the fire. “Now’s your chance to prove you can fight with your left hand,” she said, and then leapt across the fire and attacked. The first man fell instantly, a fountain of blood lurching between his fingers from a hole in his neck. Jaime missed what the wolf-bitch did next because one of the men was lunging at him now, the cheap iron of his blade warping as it crossed with Jaime’s. Now, in the light, Jaime could see the leaping fish embroidered on the soldier’s tunic beneath layers and layers of grime.
“You’re a Tully,” he said, clumsily parrying a blow that he’d have had no trouble sidestepping at sixteen.
“And you’re dead,” said the other man, crowding Jaime back.
Jaime had trained with Ser Ilyn for more than a year now, trying to force some of his previous skill into his left hand. On dark nights, when the moon didn’t shine and sleep didn’t come easy, Jaime thought that maybe all he’d been- his skill, his beauty, his name- had lived in that hand. The practice had helped; at least he usually remembered to stand with his left foot forward now.
Stand with my left foot forward, he thought. He’d started practicing footwork with his father’s retainers at the Rock the week after his mother’s death; he wasn’t relearning it now. Everything he did was backwards, everything he did was wrong, and it would be the death of him.
The Tully man clearly knew it because he smiled, the rotting stumps of his teeth catching the orange glow of the fire. “You’re not good enough for that sword,” he said, stepping closer to Jaime and batting the next sword blow away easily. “I think I’ll take it.”
They were trading blows nearly hilt to hilt now, the blades pointed sharply into the air. Jaime was taller than the other man, his arms were longer, he could do this. He dropped his sword, ducked the following blow while reaching for his boot, and rose to jam the dagger into the Tully’s eye before the man could recover from the massive swing that had nothing there to meet it.
The Tulley man dropped and Jaime searched the ground for his sword before rising to find Arya. He didn’t know what he’d expected- likely a dead wolf-whelp- but what he found was even more worrisome. Arya was grinning, fighting both the remaining Tully soldiers. They were larger than her, their swords longer, and yet she spun between them like the breeze, toying with them, making them spin in stupid slow circles and swing their swords into air that had contained Arya Stark for no more than a moment.
It was beautiful. It was art. And Jaime should probably help.
He lunged towards the nearest man, but Arya’s blade was quicker, her little sword darting through the first man’s eye, then through the second’s white throat.
They gurgled as they died, and Jaime stood with his mouth open, his brain consumed with the force that had been Arya at work. “You-” he started.
“You’re useless,” Arya hissed, casually wiping her blade on the tunic of one dying man. “I should leave you here to get eaten by a bear!”
That stung and surprised him. Once he’d have loved nothing more than to spar with her, to dance the bloody dance with an equal, but now he had nothing except a name universally hated by every man, woman, and child in Westeros. Bewildered by her anger, furious at his lot in life, Jaime shouted back.
“Fine, go!” he said, retrieving his dagger from the dead man’s skull. “Take your scrawny arse north, wolf-girl. You don’t need anyone, do you? You’re Arya Stark, you’re a brilliant fighter! Let me tell you something, Stark bitch: your name won’t protect you, and you can’t win forever.” He waved his stump at her. “That family of yours doesn’t know you’re alive, and if I remember correctly, there’s no love lost between you and your sister. You think she’ll welcome you back home? She’s been married to half the men in this kingdom, all of them on the wrong side of the war. She’s sitting in a precarious seat, and having a daughter of the North return won’t help.”
Jaime turned and strode off towards his saddlebags, hoping to get his horse saddled and to ride away from this carnage before someone else came along to find them.
When he stood with his saddlebags in hand Arya was still there, her grey eyes mirror-blank. “You’re still here,” he said. “Your invisibility training is lacking, wolf-bitch. Run off to wherever you came from. I don’t need you to protect me.”
Jaime turned and angrily saddled his horse. He was a knight, Jaime thought. He should be protecting her , he should be returning her to her home like he’d promised Catelyn and Brienne so many years ago. Instead… instead here they were, four men dead at their feet, and he’d killed one with luck and a trick.
Arya was there beside him when he pulled himself up onto his horse. He didn’t say anything, and neither did she. Together, each keeping their own silence, they rode north.
~~~
Arya didn’t know why she’d stayed. He hadn’t scared her with his bluster: everyone died eventually, and Arya would welcome the Gift when it came. She hadn’t wanted to be saddled with a riding partner, but she’d enjoyed those first days with Jaime. He was quiet and clever and uncomplaining, and likely he was the only man in Westeros who would ride with her without asking why she was wearing breeches, where she’d been for five years, and how she’d planned on dispatching the queen.
And then he’d gone and revealed his weakness to Arya. She’d hated him for it in that moment, in that flickering, firelit fight. He’d been all wrong, off balance and unsure and too slow to survive on his own. He’d revealed himself to be as suited to the fight ahead as Old Nan, and Arya had hated him for his bravery, for his attempt at honor, for the sheer idiocy of riding alone to Winterfell in a country that had been decimated by a war started and funded by his own family.
The weak were weak and that was fine- but the weak should stay home to be guarded.
He’d snapped back- roared, more like, the lion of his house in truth- and had told her that one day what had happened to him could happen to her. She could be made clumsy and vulnerable, for truly there were worse things than death. Arya would kill herself if someone took away her ability to fight, but… would she really?
She’d gone through so much to live. She’d learned three new languages, had taken more beatings that she would ever have been able to recall, had splintered herself into a wolf-self, a mouse-self, a Faceless-self; so many facets and personalities that this Arya Stark felt like a stranger. Would she void all of that out with one quick swallow of poison or slash of a knife?
She looked over at Jaime as they rode. He’d worried her with his talk of Sansa, but more than that, she’d been reminded that in every way Jaime was alone. He’d lost his hand, his pride, and his pack, and yet still he fought. And yet still he rode north to die on an unwinnable front.
Arya didn’t know what to do with that information, but together they rode on.