Chapter Text
“No,” Brienne said, flatly. “I’m here to protect Lady Catelyn, and I can’t do that without my arms.” Which was true, but she also knew perfectly well what would happen if she did put aside her arms: she could see it in the narrow leering eyes of the Frey man who was whining at her, not wanting to be bilked of his prey. They’d be at her all night, with jibes and insults and groping hands, and when she tried to go to her bed, two or three of them, deep in drink, would come after her.
So she held firm, and when the Frey tried to force the matter, reaching for her blade with his own hand, as if he’d ever do that to another man and not expect to lose fingers for it, Lady Catelyn came to her rescue and spoke sharply to him, and ordered him to leave her be. “Unless,” she added, in a tone of withering contempt, “you think the strength of your arms isn’t enough to face a single woman.”
The man yielded, and Lady Catelyn gave her a small private smile before she went on into the hall. Brienne followed her in gladly. Surely this was a little bit of what it would have been like to have a mother of her own: a woman who could have shown her not only how to kill men but to handle them, like sharp blades, without cutting herself to ribbons. It gave her once more the deep satisfaction of—having made the right choice; of having found a clear-flowing wellspring of true honor to protect, and that would refresh her as well. Until Lady Catelyn had said the words to her, you shall always have meat and drink at my table, she hadn’t thought of the other side of the oathtaking, of the care that should come in answer for her service.
It was a sweeter drink than the too-strong wine that the Freys put on their table. Brienne left her cup untouched the whole night, and ate little; she stayed back against the wall near Lady Catelyn’s seat, and to her gratitude, the men stopped noticing she was there and let her fade into the background with the music. She wasn’t greatly worried: her only small fear was that perhaps the Lannisters might have paid some assassin to try and kill the Starks at the wedding. But she stayed alert anyway, until after the bedding ceremony was over and the feasting was winding down, she saw Lady Catelyn stiffen and look down at the arm of the man beside her, flicking aside a bit of sleeve, to expose bright mail beneath.
Brienne had her right-hand sword drawn at once and was going to her, even as Robb Stark howled, “Talisa!” and the screaming began. Brienne stabbed the man next to Catelyn before he could get up off his seat, and reached to get her shielded behind her body, looking down the hall towards the doors, trying to see a way out. But Lady Catelyn turned around, her face stricken in horror, and caught her by the arm and said, high and ringing, “Forget me! Get Robb out! Nothing else matters, only get Robb out!”
It was a plea, a mother’s plea, and Brienne understood at once that Catelyn was asking for the lives of all her living children, not just Robb but her daughters, who’d be helpless prey to their enemies when the King in the North was dead.
Behind her back the musicians were dropping their instruments and rising up with crossbows, and Brienne had only a moment to decide: she gave Catelyn a nod and went, up over the table and down again next to Robb, who was on the floor cradling his wife’s body, and she dropped her sword and seized the edge of the table in front of him with both hands and with a snarl of effort she heaved the whole thing over and raised it up into the air. The crossbow bolts came smashing into the tabletop and even piercing through it, a few of them, but even those were spent: they fell clattering to the floor and didn’t reach flesh.
“To arms!” she bellowed. “Stark, to arms! Treason!” and she reached down with one hand and seized Robb under his arm and jerked him up; he staggered, looking up at her blankly, his hands red with blood, and she said, “You can’t avenge her if you’re dead!” an echo of the words that Lady Catelyn had used to save her, to bring her out of a horror of murder to go on and do some good in the world. He was a fighter, too; his face hardened and he swiftly bent to take her sword from the ground and seized the table with his other hand to help her: together they turned and charged forward behind it into the mass of struggling, fighting men, while behind their backs the crossbowmen were still trying frantically to wind their bows again.
“To the doors!” Robb shouted, over the din. “To the doors!” His men were drunk and slow, but many of them were good fighters. Lord Umber smashed a chair over one Frey man’s head, then bodily picked him up and hurled him into two others, and got his hands on a blade as well. “To the doors!” he bellowed also, taking up the cry, and all the Stark men were fighting to get to the doors then, falling in behind the battering ram they’d made of the table. Halfway down the room, Robb jerked his head to her, and they pivoted to make it a wall of defense instead, to shelter his remaining men from the Freys—and the Boltons, she realized with a jerk of surprise; the Bolton men were killing the other Northmen too, and Lord Bolton was organizing a charge at them, while Lord Walder was howling spittle and useless orders from his seat. “Kill him! Kill the Stark boy, you fucking useless idiots!” he was yelling.
Robb was staring at them over the table, his wife’s corpse still sprawled in a puddle of blood in the aisle; his eyes were wild and brilliant with rage, a terrible kind of frenzy coming into them, and for a moment Brienne thought he might leap over the table and hurl himself at them, throwing away the chance of his own life only to try and tear away theirs. She reached for his arm and gripped it. He turned on her in fury, but then above the voices she heard Lady Catelyn call out, “Robb! Robb!” and he jerked to look at her instead.
Catelyn was standing all the way to the front of the room, near the high table: no one had paid her any mind, with fighting going everywhere, and she had made her way there and seized one of the smoky oil lamps behind the high table. “Get out!” she called to Robb. “Get out and live!” And then she turned to the dingy worn tapestry behind her, and taking off the lid of the lamp she hurled it, oil and flame, onto the old dry weaving.
It went up at once, a wall of flame climbing to the ceiling, and Catelyn turned and seized another lamp and hurled it onto the next tapestry beside it, right next to Lord Walder’s seat, and set it burning too. In one more moment, she had pulled the burning tapestry down from the wall onto Walder Frey’s screaming head, and the floor rushes and then the tables and chairs were catching, smoke billowing up in dark clouds that swallowed her from view.
Brienne’s throat was tight with horror, but it was too plainly the right thing to do, the only thing to do. Robb had tears pouring down his cheeks, but he let her draw him back into the fighting behind the table: the resistance between them and the doors was fading away as some men began to flee the fire, and others went running to try and put it out, or save Lord Walder. Retreating with the table before them, they fought the rest of the way to the doors and out through the streaming smoke, and together Brienne and Lord Umber forced them shut again while Robb and the other men held the table to keep the rest of the men penned inside the burning hall, stabbing those who tried to climb over, or hack at them. As soon as they managed to shut the doors, the rest of them seized anything they could find, spears and flagpoles, and shoved them through the handles to keep the doors shut, while black smoke came pouring out around the frame and through all the thin cracks.
Then they all ran together to the gates, meeting few enemies: any men in this keep who’d imagined themselves brave had surely been inside the hall, ready to murder their unsuspecting guests. When they came to the courtyard of the keep, Robb pulled up short and stared with a blank expression at his poor direwolf, which lay dead in the large cage where it had been kenneled, a dozen crossbow bolts in its body. The Frey household guards were fighting with his own men at the far end of the court, keeping them from escaping through the still-open gates, and the fields outside the keep were full of more fighting, more murder, the clashing of blades ringing clear to them even from the tents.
As they stood there, hesitating, the Blackfish burst up out of the passage to the latrines, a sword dripping blood in his hand, and seeing Robb, rushed to join them. “Cat?” he asked, and when Robb shook his head a little, he snarled, “The bloody butchers. We have to get out of here.”
But Robb said, in answer, “We’re not going to.” His voice was hoarsened with smoke and shouting, and yet there was a crisp certainty to his words: a thing he’d seen through the confusion. “This wasn’t Walder Frey’s doing alone. Tywin Lannister is behind this, and that means there’s a Lannister army out there waiting for us to run into their arms, if we do escape the trap.” He paused a moment, looking at the fighting ahead of them, and then he said, “We can’t get out. So we must get the rest of our men in.”
He led them in a charge across the court, gathering up any of their surviving men. The Frey men who saw him were shouting at once, “Don’t let Stark get out! Stop him!” and they immediately fell back to the mouth of their own gate, pulling all their men together to block the way out, expecting a charge. But instead Robb took them all straight at the gatetower on the right, with the controls of the bridge and the portcullis, even though it was still raised up at the moment. They stormed inside past almost no resistance: all the Freys were outside at the gates; Robb waved the Blackfish to take charge of holding the controls, with half the men. “Keep the portcullis up and the bridge open!” he said. He led the other half of the men to the stairs. Brienne managed to keep just ahead of him all the way up the stairs and onto the roof, and even as she was killing the last of the archers who’d been waiting to shoot them on the drawbridge, Robb was bellowing into the night, through cupped hands, “To me! Stark, to me!”
Across the field, the Stark men heard it. Some began to break away from their own struggles and come fleeing towards them, to the keep. More and more followed them; Robb turned and cut a tabard off one of his men, and put it on a spear to wave it like a direwolf flag from the ramparts, and Brienne and all his men raised their voices together with him, shouting, “Stark! Stark! Stark!”
Thousands of Northmen had been murdered already, and others were fleeing for their lives, but the shouting called the survivors in: hundreds of men, thousands, some of them stumbling-drunk and unarmed, but still strong fighting men, and any of them who weren’t too drunk to move knew they had nowhere else to go. Robb had been right: along the crest of the hill at their backs, massed ranks of Lannister infantry were marching out of the trees.
The Freys inside the keep had all come to block the door of the gatetower, and now were just waiting there for them to try and come out: it was plain they hadn’t yet understood what was happening. They didn’t want to come and face the blades of the Stark men inside the narrow spaces of the tower, and they didn’t think they needed to. They thought they had Robb penned up in a hole from which he couldn’t escape; in their minds, their keep was still a deathtrap for him, when instead it was about to be stormed through a wide-open breach they’d left in the walls.
On the roof, Brienne snatched up one of the fallen archers’ bows and began shooting Frey men in the courtyard; in a moment all of Robb’s men were doing the same, and then the Stark survivors were charging in over the drawbridge. As the Frey men blocking the tower door turned in too-late panic to try and defend the keep, Robb went running back down the tower himself. Brienne followed him out into the press of the fighting on the drawbridge, keeping herself and her armor between him and the enemy as much as she could.
Smoke was still pouring out of the hall into the courtyard, and many of the household were fighting the fire, also not realizing their peril: it was a window of opportunity, and even as the men at the gates began to yell for help, they were being overwhelmed, with enemies on every side. Lord Umber cut down the last Frey standing, and then Robb ordered them all to move aside and let the Stark forces come pouring into the keep like a river bursting its dam. Robb was shouting, “Go on in! As far as you can! Get any weapon you can find and kill every Frey and Bolton man you see!” waving them in past him, and even as the rest of the Freys finally did understand what was happening, they were being overrun.
The bulk of the Frey forces out in the pavilions had been only standing around in confusion for most of the same time: they’d finished murdering any man who hadn’t run, and they must have thought themselves victors of the field; the Lannisters behind them also had kept holding their positions, thinking the same, and waiting for any survivors to come to them. Now they were all belatedly charging for the gates on the heels of the last Northmen. But Stark bows were singing at them from the tops of the gate towers and in the mouth of the gate, firing over the heads of the men rushing in. Robb himself had taken one up, firing steadily past Brienne’s shoulder. “Blackfish!” he shouted. “Be ready! Lower the portcullis on my word, but leave down the bridge!”
“Aye!” came the answering call from the tower. Robb kept them all shooting until the last Stark man was inside, then waved them quickly out of the way, to either side of the gate—and waited. Frey men were now running in on the heels of the Stark men, swords in their hands and panting. Half hidden in the shadow of the gate tower, Robb watched them coming past him into the courtyard like a man judging the flow of water into a jug, and then he called, “Now!” and the portcullis came smashing down onto the heads of four men still running unwarily in.
The men who had been stopped outside on the drawbridge began banging and howling protests on the heavy iron grating as they watched Robb’s men butchering the Freys he’d allowed inside. Robb kept watching as well, his face cold as stone, until there were only a handful of Frey men left, and then said, “Raise it again!” to the Blackfish.
The Freys on the drawbridge plainly imagined that their men inside had taken back the gate: as soon as the portcullis began to lift, they were diving beneath it and rolling inside, easy to stab, and as it went higher, more of them went charging wildly into the courtyard, until Robb gave the order to cut them off again.
He did it three more times, each cluster of men making the same mistake over again, too far back to have seen what had happened to the men before them and running just as urgently inside when it was their turn.
The courtyard was covered with corpses and his own men were staggering with fatigue when Robb gave the final order and the drawbridge at last went cranking up instead, spilling men off to either side into the water: the breach sealed up, with only a handful of Frey soldiers left on the far bank, and the Lannister force behind them too late to be of any use at all.
The battle ended, abruptly and strange: one moment full fighting, the next a sudden quiet, save for the final screams of the last few Frey soldiers being cut down. But Robb didn’t let his own forces stop and sink. He quickly sent every man who could still pull a bow up onto the walls, to harry the Lannisters and keep them back, then gave orders for the lightly wounded go to into the towers, and bring out all the surviving Frey women and servants into the courtyard.
Men went into the smoky towers and herded them out in frightened clusters, many spattered with blood and soot and weeping, others clinging to each other. He set them to drawing water and tending to his wounded, and the strongest to the grisly task of dragging the corpses of the Frey men into a heap in front of the gates. The air was grey and bitter with smoke and ash, but the fire had been halted; in the open courtyard they could still breathe well enough.
Robb turned and said to her, “The Kingslayer was chained in a room under guard, in the top of the tower there.” He pointed to the leftmost tower, away from the fire. “I had ten men on him. Go and see if he’s still there, and bring him if you can.”
She nodded and went, and found the corridor full of dead men: it looked like the Freys had made a try for the Kingslayer, but had been held off long enough to hear the fighting outside start to go badly, and go to help. There were two Stark men still alive on the door, wounded too badly to have followed themselves. She did what she could to bind up the one whose sword-arm was cut open from shoulder to elbow, and gave the mercy blow to the man who was clutching his entrails shut and nodded without opening his eyes when she asked. Then she and the wounded guard opened the door and found the Kingslayer on his knees panting and bloody from straining desperately at the strong chain that bound him by the neck to the wall: he'd been hurling himself against it, so hard he’d nearly cut his own throat.
The guard dug up the key from one of the corpses, and she stood with her sword drawn as he unlocked the chain from the wall, and held it with his good arm while she took up position in the corridor and ordered the Kingslayer to walk ahead of them down to the courtyard. He was glaring at her from the doorway, a lion with bared teeth only just held back, and snarled, “What the hell is going on?”
“Walder Frey made a traitor’s bargain with your father,” she said coldly. “He betrayed guest-right and tried to murder the king and his men at the wedding.”
“And he missed?” Lannister said, far more incredulous at the failure than the crime.
Brienne glared back at him with all the rage and disgust she felt. “I suppose you’ll be glad to hear that at least he didn’t miss Queen Talisa and Lady Catelyn,” she said, icily. “Murdering helpless women and children seems to be what Lannister servants are best at. Now move, or I’ll start letting more of your blood out until you do.”
He stared at her a moment, taken aback. He didn’t ask any more questions. He came out the door and went down the tower stair ahead of her, into the courtyard full of dead. Robb was standing in the middle of it, and as they came out and he turned towards them, the Kingslayer’s steps slowed, as if he feared what he was going to meet. He wasn’t a fool, if he did: Robb was grimy with blood and soot, his eyes red-rimmed and his mouth a thin bloodless slash in his face, a barely-leashed savagery more violent than Lannister’s, and there wasn’t a chain around his neck.
The Kingslayer stopped a little way short of him. Robb looked at him, and Lannister stared back, and neither of them spoke. Then Robb turned to her and said, “Bring him.” She beckoned two more men to help, who took his arms, and together they followed Robb into the tower and back up onto the walls again. “Cease firing, and call for parley,” he ordered the archers, and soon all the bows stopped, and the arrows coming back as well. They went out onto the ramparts. The Lannisters had surrounded the keep: it looked like twenty thousand men at least, fully armed and fresh, ready for battle; higher up on the hill, some of them were cutting down trees, to make a battering ram.
A man in gold-washed lion armor was on a horse just behind the front lines, and came forward to parley. “Lord Stark,” he called up, “I am prepared to offer you terms of surrender—”
“Be silent,” Robb said, his voice a snarling. “Foul murdering cowards. You and your lackeys betrayed guest-right and all your last pretenses of honor. You’ve murdered my wife and my mother and sent ten thousand men of honor into the dirt. Gods grant me the chance to avenge them. Now listen. You’ll fall back at once and stop preparing to storm the keep. When the morning comes, I’ll send five men out to you. They’ll ride behind your force all the way to the kingsroad, and see you go south again. One will come back to me each day to tell me that you’re still marching. And if you don’t, I’ll send another piece of Tywin Lannister’s son over the walls to you every day until there’s nothing left of him but brains to bowels. And then I’ll feed the rest of him alive to all the rats I can find in this keep before we come out and kill you all.”
He drew his sword and jerked his head to make them bring the Kingslayer to him; he seized Lannister’s right hand and put it on the wall, the wrist lined up at the stone’s edge, ready for the blade to fall. “Well?” Robb snarled down at the commander. “Or will you have his sword-hand as the first piece, to know that I mean it?”
Brienne had to swallow her gorge to help hold the Kingslayer in place, a fight: it took her and both men. He was struggling wildly, pushing against them and staring at his own hand in horror, strangling out, “No! No!” and the Lannister commander below was staring up in equal horror.
There was a moment, and Robb raised the blade, and the commander shouted up, “No! Wait!” and then opened and shut his mouth twice more, as if he’d thought of some answer, and recognized before he spoke that it wouldn’t serve, and then at last his shoulders sank, giving way; he turned and called, in a shaking voice, “Fall back! Fall back from the walls!”
Slowly at first, and then at speed, the Lannister ranks began to ebb away, up the hill. The men at the trees had only paused where they were, but after a few uncertain moments and a vigorous wave from the commander, they abandoned their work as well. Robb stood on the wall, the sword naked at his side and his hand still clamped on the Kingslayer’s, waiting and watching, until not a man was left in bowshot. At last he turned to the men on the walls. “Every second man, and anyone wounded or ill, go down and have a rest,” he said. “I’ll relieve the rest of you in a few hours, and have water brought. You’ve saved our cause this day. Keep watch, and shout together if they move towards the keep at all.”
The Kingslayer was shivering as they drew him back down the tower to the courtyard. Brienne could feel the fine trembling through his arm, and he was staring at the back of Stark’s head with something more like terror than rage: a wild beast made to cringe before one still more terrible.
By the time they reached the ground, the smoke had thinned to a trickle, and the doors from the courtyard to the hall had all been opened wide to let it clear. Robb halted, staring down the long stretch: the walls blackened with soot into a dark tunnel, littered with corpses, leading to the hall at the end. After a moment, he walked down it, and Brienne said to the men holding the Kingslayer, “Get two more men to help you, and take him back to his cell,” and went after Robb.
They left pale footprints on the stone, smudging away the soot, until they came back into the hall. It seemed a ruin from ages past, rather than the room they’d been in, only a few hours ago—if it had even been so long; everything had happened with break-neck speed. Brienne had no idea of the hour. It was almost too dark to see with no lamps or candles. Only a little moonlight was coming in through the broken windows.
There was nothing left of the tables and benches but charred lumps. Smashed plates and dented cups littered the floor. There were piles of corpses standing on each other at the windows, flame-withered hands like reaching claws clutching at the sills. At the head of the hall, the remnant of Walder Frey’s throne stood draped with a half-fallen shroud of ash over a sagging corpse, the weight of the skull bowing it gradually forward: soon it would fall from the seat.
Robb walked down the central aisle to the charred corpse of his wife, lying alone on the floor near the front of the room: the hair and clothing burnt away, the skin seared to crackling. He stood looking down at her a moment, and then knelt beside her on one knee, and carefully tried to gather her up into his arms. But the body began to come apart when he moved it. He stopped and instead let himself down the rest of the way next to her, little by little, a wounded animal slowly easing itself down to rest, until he lay his head down on the ground only a little distance from her face. He put his hand out to touch her cheek lightly, as if he saw the living woman in place of the charred corpse.
Brienne looked away from him, tears coming into her own stinging, smarting eyes. There was no one else living in the hall, and she’d hear it if anyone came towards them. She walked away from him, to the dais, and climbed the steps, looking. Catelyn’s body was huddled there on the stone of the fireplace behind the throne that had kept Walder warmer than his guests: she wasn’t burnt so badly as the rest of the corpses, lying with a dagger in her hand, half-naked as if she’d cut off her own burning clothes; her hair scorched off her head, patches of charred skin mingled with glistening patches—and then Brienne gasped and was running to her, shouting, “Your Grace! Your Grace, she’s alive!”
Robb was there, his side and half his face outlined black with soot, before Brienne had done more than carefully turned Catelyn over; he lifted her in his own arms and carried her out to the courtyard, shouting for help. A timid woman of the household in a septa’s robes was brought over, and under her ministrations they bathed Catelyn’s burns in cool water, over and over, and trickled a little water down her throat. A bedchamber was hurriedly got into decent order, in the tower least damaged, and when it was ready, Robb carried her there too, refusing to let anyone else have the task.
He lay her down very gently on the bed, and then as he stood over her, staring down, Brienne could see the first flush of relief and hope fading out of him, along with her own. Catelyn was still breathing, but—there was little more to say. Her face and hands were swollen hideously, and much of her skin was seared shiny, like a wound burned shut.
“I can make a dressing with—with honey and grease, Your Grace,” the septa said in a quavering voice.
“See to it she has all she needs,” Robb told the guards, who nodded back.
Brienne wanted to stay at the bedside, and yet she knew Catelyn wouldn’t be grateful for her presence, not now: there were many Frey servants and women alive, and though she could hardly imagine that the men of this house had been worthy of much grief, one of them might still put a knife in Robb’s back, taking a vengeance of their own. Instead she went out when he did and followed him into the courtyard, where the Blackfish was rising heavy and grim-faced from another body that had been brought out of the keep and laid straight along with the rest of their dead, which he’d shrouded with a cloak. He said to Robb, “Edmure’s chamber burned, with him and the girl in it.”
Robb put his hand on the old man’s shoulder, and then he shuddered, hunching a little, his face contorting, as if it was a last straw being laid gently upon a burden already too large, and he put his hand up over his face. The Blackfish reached out and took him into his arms, pressing Robb’s head down into his shoulder, and Brienne moved to stand to block him from any other sight while he shook.
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Jaime had an excellent view to watch his army marching away the next morning, with five Stark men on their heels. Robb had ordered him brought up to the ramparts again, presumably just in case he needed to start chopping off parts of him after all. When the last man vanished over the horizon, Robb had the gates opened, still without going back down himself, and below them the Stark men started going out into the empty field, dragging Frey corpses with them to throw into the tents, and bringing their own dead out in their place to line up one by one in the field.
It seemed a waste of effort, really; one corpse was surely much the same as another. Jaime almost said so. But in the end, he stayed silent. The work went on, the mass heap and the tidy line of Northern dead both growing steadily. The men finished cutting down the trees that had been meant for battering rams, chopped them into firewood and piled it around the bodies. As the day wore on, more men began to come out of the woods to help: Stark men who’d presumably fled in the panic at the start of the fighting, coming back. Jaime amused himself, or rather didn’t, by counting heads; it looked to him by the end of the afternoon that almost two thousand men had come back in before at last the pyres were lit. A solid garrison and a strong keep, and the Twins were easy to supply. Father wasn’t going to pry Stark out of this place anytime soon.
Robb stayed up on the walls watching for the entire day. His expression stayed utterly blank: no triumph or satisfaction. Perhaps he was a bit sad about his wife being killed. Otherwise it seemed clear from everything Jaime had overheard that the King in the North had pulled off another smashing upset victory. If he could have spoken to Father, he’d have roared at him in rage. How had he let Frey get away with killing the woman first? Except Jaime knew the answer: Father had wanted Robb to watch her die and see death coming for him after; he’d wanted to bat his prey around a bit before the killing blow was struck, and leave a lingering taste of horror behind for all his other enemies to whisper about and fear.
Only now instead Father had made them into the villains in a melodrama, equal parts grotesque and stupid, and he’d made Robb invincible. People already told ludicrous made-up stories about him, but they weren’t going to have to make up anything when they told this one, because the bare bones were ludicrous enough. Betrayed and unarmed at a wedding, surrounded by foes, and instead of being killed the way he obviously should have been, he’d taken the enemy keep and butchered nearly their entire house in just vengeance, and sent a Lannister army slinking away with their tails between their legs. And no one could even doubt it, because Robb was demonstrably alive. Not to mention now a widower, ready to make what could only be a much better match. If he didn’t have offers from Stannis and Dorne by the end of the week, it was only going to be because the ravens couldn’t fly that fast.
Then it occurred to Jaime that if he knew his father, and he did, Joffrey and Margaery weren’t married yet. Because he would have been waiting for the news of his final crushing blow to come, to make the wedding a celebration of his victory. So it was entirely possible that Robb was also going to get a quiet little offer from Highgarden.
He wanted badly to say something to Robb, to prod and needle him and try to pry something out, a bit of information or even just anger. Words came into his mouth a dozen times over the long, tedious course of the day, but they all died there, with the memory of his hand pinned against the stones in front of him like a sacrifice on an altar, because they kept turning into the same single panicky question: so what are you going to do to me? Jaime knew that he’d already have heard the answer if Stark hadn’t desperately needed to use him to save his entire army. Which was why the threat had worked; everyone in earshot including Ser Porbeck had known without the slightest question that Robb Stark had been half an inch away from dismembering him anyway and just going at them in a frenzy of killing rage.
But Porbeck had given in, so now Robb wasn’t going to do it after all. Probably. Before last night, Jaime would have felt reasonably comfortable betting his life on that; now he wasn’t so certain. There were five corpses laid out on tables in the courtyard who hadn’t been burned on the pyres with the rest: Talisa Stark, Edmure Tully, Donald Glover, Maege Mormont, and a massive direwolf. When they came down off the walls at last, Robb stopped at their feet staring down at them in silence for a long time; he put his hand on the direwolf’s head, stroking the fur a little, and something terrible moved in his face, like the wolf had gone inside instead.
Jaime stood watching him, his heart thick in his throat, fear pounding there back and forth. The guards held him tight. None of them would have hesitated for an instant if Stark told them to chain him down on the tables next to the corpses, carve him up a bit, and leave him there to rot slowly to death beside his father's victims. He felt the possibility of it, of worse, of the kinds of things that Father would have done, hovering in the air around them.
The tall blonde woman came out of the keep and went to Stark’s side: she’d been trailing after him most of the day. She said quietly, “Lady Catelyn is resting a little more easily, Your Grace. The poultice seems to be helping. I’ll send men to the woods tomorrow to find more honey: Septa Alayce says it’s best if fresh.”
Stark nodded a very little bit without looking up. Then the woman turned and told Jaime’s guards, “Take the Kingslayer back to his chamber and see he’s given water and some food.” The men glanced at Robb, who didn’t say anything to contradict, and then obeyed. Jaime tried not to feel grateful to her as they led him away from the wolf and to his prison cell, but oh, he was, he was.
#
Robb went out of the keep himself, the next morning, when the men went out to forage. The first of the men he’d sent after the Lannisters had come back that morning, to report that they were still on the march away. And he’d needed to send huntsmen out anyway: their supply had been spoiled and their lines shattered, and they were emptying the Freys’ larder at a fast pace. It would be weeks yet for anything to come, though he’d already sent the Blackfish with a party of Tully men racing south to Riverrun, and on the way they’d ask the riverlords and every town they passed to send supply.
Ask, or rather demand, in his name: “You’re Lord of Riverrun, now, not me,” the Blackfish had said, when Robb had asked him for the aid. “Your grandfather meant it so, if…” He shook his head. “Besides, I’m an old man, and I’ll have no sons. No; it’s yours.”
He hadn’t meant to be cruel. He’d only been thinking of what he could save, and imagine being saved, from the wreckage of their family and their hopes. But Robb had gone away to his chamber and been sick to his stomach, there where no one could hear or see him. To be Lord of Riverrun, because his poor stupid uncle was dead, in this slaughterhouse that Robb had led him into. To think of heirs, of sons, when Talisa and their child had been butchered before his face.
When he’d finished vomiting, he’d opened the door to go and get a cup of water, and he’d found a jug waiting outside, and Brienne standing watch at the end of the corridor, her back to the chamber door, far enough away not to overhear, and close enough to hear a cry for help.
She followed him out into the woods that morning as well, a silent looming shadow on his heels: another gift the gods were shoving into his unwilling hands, his mother's bannerwoman, sent to save him, to get him out, and who’d done so good a job of it that he’d come through all the fighting unscathed, while his mother herself lay deep in a poppy stupor, swathed in dressings and so dreadfully scarred that she’d not know herself if she were ever able to look in a glass again.
Robb couldn’t bear it; he couldn’t bear any of it. He’d managed to keep going while there had been fighting to be done, vengeance to be taken, the lives of any of his men to save. But the last of his enemies had slunk away out of his range, and the only prey left him was the Kingslayer, whose life and agony he’d traded away in exchange for the retreat he hadn’t truly wanted. Robb had thought of it a hundred times since, lying awake at night with Talisa’s face before his eyes: not her beautiful smiling face but the look of horror and agony as her hands reached towards her belly, and in the dark he’d thought of getting up and taking a knife and going to the Kingslayer’s cell, and putting the memory of his final agony into its place.
There wasn’t any one thing that had stopped Robb from doing it yet. Partly he hadn’t done it because he didn’t want to risk losing Talisa entirely. It was the only memory of her that he could make come into his mind’s eye, and if he purged it, perhaps nothing else would come back to take its place. Even seeing her in agony would be better than having her fade away from him completely, as he knew, he knew, all the world would want her to. It wouldn’t only be the Blackfish thinking of his sons to come. He was still a king; a king who’d defeated Tywin Lannister in the field and survived his best attempt at murder. There would be offers flown to him on raven wings before the month was out. And he’d take one of them, to get more men and arms and money, so he could take the Red Keep and make Tywin watch him butcher his son in front of his face.
That was the other reason he hadn’t done it yet, of course. It wouldn’t be anything close to enough just to watch the Kingslayer die, even under his own hand. Tywin hadn’t killed him. He should have, oh, gods above, he should have, but he hadn’t. Tywin had made him watch instead, helpless, useless; he’d had to hold Talisa in his arms as she died, as their child died with her. So Tywin had to watch his son die, and that couldn’t happen if Jaime Lannister was already dead.
And Robb hadn’t done it because the one time he’d got up out of the bed and taken the knife from beneath the pillow and gone to the corridor, he’d stopped at his door, because Brienne was outside sleeping in front of it, as if she meant to take Grey Wind’s place, and when she’d looked up and yawning asked him what he needed, he’d said, “Nothing,” and he’d gone back to bed.
But it wasn’t honor that had stopped him. Honor hadn’t anything to do with it. He was truly sorry for executing Lord Karstark, after all. He’d already learned to regret the harm it had done to his forces, as a practical matter, but he had still thought it justice, and the old man a monster. He’d thought he understood pain and grief and the hunger for revenge, because he’d lost Father, and Bran, and Rickon. But he hadn’t understood at all. Now he did, and honor seemed a joke suddenly, a fairy story told to children, as silly as grumkins stealing your lost tooth and leaving a sweet behind. What more could honor be, when he was alive, alive and well and victorious, and his innocent wife, his innocent mother, his innocent uncle, had all paid in his stead for the promise that he had broken.
Robb couldn’t bear it, and so he’d come out into the woods, and with Brienne trailing him he walked a mile north from the keep, to the small copse of trees he’d seen three years before, riding south to the Crossing with a stupid boy’s dream in his head of saving his father and his sisters, defending his house. He’d gone into the grove that time, too, to ask for a blessing, and he followed in his own footsteps through the trees, until he came up to the weirwood at last, and stopped in front of its sleeping face. He didn’t kneel this time. He stood there before it and said, low, “Why Talisa?”
The tree didn’t answer. There wasn’t so much as a breath of wind, a rustle of leaves; not a bird darting out of the upper branches. Not any of the signs that the gods were listening. He clenched his fists and stepped forward and hit them against the trunk. “Why Talisa?” he snarled. “Talisa, Edmure, Mother—why them? Why any of them, and not me?” He hit it again, and then he picked up a stone from the ground and struck the tree with that instead, cutting it across the carved face, because his fists weren’t doing enough. “It was my oath!” he howled in its face. “If you wanted to punish me, if you meant to destroy me, you could have. Why her? You foul, murderous—why her? Why do I live, and not her?” He’d slashed the face of the tree a dozen times, gouging it deep, and still there wasn’t a single sign. The whole world might have been trying to tell him outright that the gods didn’t care, weren’t listening at all. He let the stone fall from his hand as he sank to his knees and beat his fists on his thighs, as if he could force an answer out of his own flesh.
He knelt there breathing hard, and gradually it crept into his attention that Brienne was still standing there on guard, just at the corner of his sight, silent, but frowning down at the ground, her brow furrowed. “What?” he grated out, and when she looked up at him and hesitated, he snarled at her, “If you’ve something to say, say it.”
She was silent a moment longer, but she was only choosing her words. “You’ve a right to grieve and to be angry,” she said finally. “But you’re not being punished by the gods. You’ve been hurt, by a cruel and wicked man who’ll stop at nothing to destroy his enemies. He killed your wife. Not the gods. They spared you, and they did it with your mother’s voice. Not just for your sake, though she loves you and wanted to save you. But because you’re the one who can do something about it, about him. Not just for yourself, but for your sisters. For everyone,” she added, with sudden force. “For every woman in this realm, who knows that the man who rules us thinks of us as cattle and whores, and that he’ll send us and our children to torment and slaughter without a second thought, as easily as if he really were a wild beast, ravening the weak.”
She finished and went silent again. Robb stared at her, a little blankly. He hadn’t really thought much about her before. He’d been glad to have her protecting Mother; he’d assumed she was good, if Mother had taken her as bannerwoman. But she’d only been another face, another soldier in his army. One of his men. But she wasn’t a man.
It recalled things Talisa had said to him; Talisa and Mother. Urging him to stop the war and the killing; to trade the Kingslayer for his sisters and a truce and just go home. In some part of him, he’d been dismissive of it: womanish thinking, to fear war and death, and let it make you bend; to think of soldiers as children, who had taken years of some woman’s labor to bring into the world and raise to manhood, instead of brave men who would ride behind you to battle.
But now he’d tasted the fear of death, for himself and those he loved, when he couldn’t do anything. As soon as the treachery had begun, he’d seen Walder Frey’s course of murder laid out before him as plain as any plan of battle he’d ever made, and he’d been helpless before it. He’d known there wasn’t any way out. The only reason there had been one was because the men around him, too, had dismissed his mother and her servant, and thought nothing of what she might do—not to save a king, but to save her children.
The grove was still quiet and unstirred: not a breath of wind, not a single whirring beetle, a heavy silence that only Brienne’s voice had broken. They saved you with your mother’s voice, she had said, and now they’d spoken to him with hers, to tell him his duty in plain words.
For he’d been a tearing wolf himself, going at his enemies with tooth and claw, and if not heedless of the death in his wake still thinking foremost of how to win, how to destroy his foul enemies. And his enemies were foul, and wicked; he’d been right to go to war against them. But he’d only looked for his own victory, and everything he wanted from it. He’d wanted decent things: to avenge his father’s murder, to get back his sisters, to go home and make a family with the woman he loved. He’d meant to rule justly and honorably. And yet he understood, now, that mere decency wasn’t enough to make it worth the gods’ while, to give him victory. Not enough to make his victory worth the cost of war to the families who had to give their children to see it done.
But now Tywin Lannister had laid a vicious lash across his back, and taught him what it was to be powerless and subject to the cruelty of powerful men. And the gods had left him in the world, when his mother and Brienne of Tarth had given what they could to keep him there, to see if he’d learn from the lesson, and do better. He looked into the scarred face of the tree, anger and sorrow tangling in him together, and then he bowed his head before them. “Yes,” he said, low. “I’ll do something about it.”
He made the promise and pushed himself slowly up to his feet, and went back to the keep with his shoulders bowed forward, the rage burned out and only exhaustion left in its place, and uncertainty. He knew that he couldn’t yet kill Jaime Lannister, who had been and would be useful, a tool to save the lives of other men. He couldn’t make a hasty and brutal war only to have vengeance on Tywin the quicker. But he didn’t know what he could do, or how. All he truly wanted to do was go back to the keep and lie down beside Talisa’s body and sleep.
As they came in sight of the keep, a man on the walls was waving to him, calling, “Your Grace! Your Grace!” the urgent sound carrying. There was a small knot of men gathered in the field, just past the range of bowshot: they turned towards him as well, and he gathered his strength and tried to have courage; he made himself raise a hand to them, and quicken his pace.
Brienne drew her sword and put herself slightly before him as they drew near the group. Three of them were his own men, who parted to let him see they were talking with a stranger, a tall badly-scarred man, familiar, standing with his own sword drawn, and a boy holding his horse—
Robb jerked to a stop and sucked in a deep shocked gasp. Arya dropped the reins and ran straight at him, and Robb put out his arms to catch her up as she leaped; he caught her close and put his hand around her head and crushed her against him, bursting into tears he couldn’t hold, turning away with her so no one would see him weeping as she clung to him: not just for his sister, not just to have her safe, but to know the gods would show some mercy, when they could.
#
Father didn’t tell anyone what had happened at the Twins, even as the rumors went boiling through the Red Keep, which was a measure of just how enormous a disaster it had been. Tyrion had to learn the details from Varys, over what turned into several glasses of wine, and afterwards he went and lay down on his bed and stared at the ceiling for half an hour, and then he got up and went climbing all the way up to the Tower of the Hand.
“What?” Father said, as short as a dagger blade going into your ribs, without raising his head from the papers he was pretending to be reading.
“I’m not surprised you’re in a bad mood,” Tyrion said. “But I think you’ve indulged yourself enough, don’t you?” Father’s head came up, rage brilliant in his eyes, and Tyrion just barely managed to stand his ground before it, and only because that ground was nearly unassailable. “If you’d told me what you were planning to do,” he said, “I’d have protested, and argued, and at the end of it, you’d have gone ahead anyway, but I almost certainly would have talked you out of murdering the wife first, because I’d have forced you to recognize that it was a bad idea. But you didn’t want to be talked out of it, which is why you didn’t say anything, and so now we’re fucked. Tell me I’m wrong!”
Father went on glaring at him, his fists and jaw all clenched around an eruption of fury, but he didn’t say anything, because of course Tyrion wasn’t wrong, and they both knew it. Tyrion took a deep breath and went for the wine jug on the side table, and brought it back to the desk and poured himself a glass. After a moment, Father’s jaw slid back and forth, a small grinding motion, and he took it and poured himself one as well. “Well?” he said, bitingly.
“Robb Stark is no longer just a dangerous enemy of our house,” Tyrion said. “He’s now an implacable foe bent on our total destruction, and what’s worse, he doesn’t need to have the slightest consideration for honor or decency anymore, because no one in the world would look askance at it even if he butchered every last Lannister down to the smallest child: you’ve given him too much of an excuse. So he has to die, and as soon as possible.”
Father’s eyes were hard with impatience. “And I suppose you’ve contrived some way to accomplish his death.”
“The same way you did it yourself. You knew where he was going to be, and you put an army there before he arrived,” Tyrion said. “We just need to do it again, and not take any chances this time.” He swallowed before he went on, having to fight down the unpleasant sensation of sticking a knife into a small helpless kitten trapped in his hands. But there wasn’t a choice, not anymore. Father had seen to that. He’d made this a war to the death, and it wasn’t going to end until Robb Stark or all of House Lannister was in the dirt. Given those two options, there was only one side for Tyrion to be on. “If I take Sansa home, and claim Winterfell in her name, Robb will come for her. And when he does—we’ll be waiting.”
Father gave a small grunt and sat back in his chair, studying him narrowly. He motioned a little with his hand: more details.
“Robb will need another month or two before he can fully secure the Riverlands. I’ll go catch our forces coming southward, and take them back along the kingsroad to Winterfell,” Tyrion said. “The late Lord Bolton’s bastard has the keep at the moment, but I’ll make him a better offer: I’ll legitimize him and send him home to the Dreadfort, as our ally, leaving me to become Robb Stark’s main target. Then I set myself up as Lord Paramount of the North with Sansa as Lady of Winterfell, a direct challenge to Robb’s authority and rights, and settle in to wait.
“I imagine the Starks have a secret back door in somewhere; Robb will surely be expecting to take us by surprise. But you’ll quietly ship me another twenty thousand men by sea, and they’ll come overland from the coast in small companies. Winterfell is huge: we can cram the place full of soldiers and have them sleep in shifts, so there will always be a large force awake and on duty. And the instant Robb pokes his head out of the cellars, we chop it off.” He spread his hands. “At least that’s the best I’ve been able to come up with.”
Father was silent for several minutes, going over it in his mind and trying to find any holes in the plan, and then he said flatly, “You leave tomorrow.” He took up his pen and bent back down over the papers, a sharp dismissal. And Tyrion got off his chair and walked out of the office to go and tell a fifteen year old girl—a stupid girl, who’d trusted him when he’d promised not to hurt her—that she was going home, without mentioning that it was all so he could use her as bait to lure her brother to his death.