Tarth's turquoise sea breaks apart into churning white foam that flows into the sand beneath Jaime's feet. Rocks press into his soles, sharp beneath the leather of his boots. They'll raise blisters later, and he will be grateful. The sun's bruised body arcs through the sky, and sweat settles on his skin. .
Above him, the air should sing in a blue full and bright—but it gives Jaime only silence.
Sky and sword weigh upon him.
His gloved hand rests on Widow's Wail. As he walks, he moves his hand to let his fingertips brush Oathkeeper's hilt. Even through his glove, the metal burns. He pulls his arm away.
He dares not touch Brienne's sword with his bare hand.
The first time after, it should be her father.
Sand becomes grass, and Jaime's feet sink into the soil of rolling hills, meadows green and warm. Mice feed and fight play, darting through shrubs tipped with tender buds to feed and fight and play. Wildflowers festoon the fields. Nature's needlework stipples the hills in bright threads of yellow, purple, and red.
Jaime climbs a hill blossoming with blue. A cabin perches atop the flowers, a proud and quiet bird.
He'll meet Selwyn alone, and go back to Winterfell on a ship full of strangers. He'd not ask the ones he'd fought with to bear him. Tarth soaks in his stillness, the meadow grasping at him, gentle enough to squeeze him into pieces. The flowers blight his heart with their beauty.
I'd rather some bloody snow.
The sky silently blue above him, the sun softly arrogant in its certainty of light.
How dare the world fall into spring.
In his chest, a cold crevasse cracks open to eat his heart.
Under his feet, the wooden steps creak. Let them speak for me. His heart falls into the pit of black, and every step is heavy as ice.
Don't knock, Selwyn had written.
Jaime pushes the door open, and it swings wide on a small, cozy room. Chairs generously appointed with worn, plush cushions dot a wooden floor shining with fresh polish. Beneath a wide window, sun brightens a shelf bursting with books filed alphabetically, their dust-free spines a rainbow of colour.
From the window, light falls on a corner table, where Selwyn sits, his squat, muscular body resting lightly on his chair as he works, his head bent to a pile of papers. In the sun, his hair is nearly white—Brienne inherited his hair, if not his height. His fingers flick with precision through the papers. He smooths them with his palm, then stops, looking up at Jaime.
The crevasse Jaime falls into is the deepest blue. He will be stronger for climbing out, for staring into the eyes that look upon him with Brienne's wise caring.
Red webs the whites of Selwyn's eyes. Around them, the skin is bruised blue-black. He gestures for Jaime to sit.
"It's finished, then."
Wind blows softly through the curtains, and Selwyn's voice matches its tenor.
Jaime nods. "She'll rest well."
Clearing his throat doesn't smooth the hoarseness in his voice. Others had cried for her—Pod and Tormund and all the Starks—and their tears had soaked the soil beneath Winterfell's melting snow. What tears Jaime might have shed, if they had escaped from him, had dried.
Their dust chokes him.
He will be hoarse for a long while yet.
"I'm surprised you didn't want her here."
"She was her mother's daughter; she'd go wherever good needed doing." Selwyn smiles, soft and rueful. "I'm sure they're speaking of the war." His fingers trace worn pages. "She did so much for the North; let Winterfell keep her."
Jaime closes his eyes, his fingers clawing at the maw of cold.
He opens his hand and pulls the swordbelt from his hips, laying it on the table. The swords gleam in the meadow-scented sun.
"When that bloody ice spider scurried into Winterfell," Jaime says, "Brienne laughed as she put out its eyes and cut off its legs."
"She wrote of that, among other things." Spring brightens Selwyn's smile. "She wrote me of your proposal before you did."
They'd lost many ravens to the cold, but not all. Brienne had warmed one half-frozen and given the bird her gentleness. All wild noise and whirling feathers, he would circle her for the last bits of corn she could scrounge from the larder.
Selwyn hands him the letters, and Jaime shoves them into his pocket without looking.
Even paper burns him.
"Did she write of the swords?"
Surely Brienne had written of the blades, every cut another festering wound for family born with winter words; every cut another path for Jaime to take, snow swirling around him. Surely she had written of Arya's rage-red storm, Sansa's cloud-cold gaze, Bran's sight of every sky. Brienne had been a warm wind that calmed them, while Jon had watched and listened.
Jaime's pledge had been a long rain falling from a great height.
"She did." Selwyn's eyes soften. "She wrote of your pledge."
To Winterfell, Jon and Daenerys and all the rest, and—much later—to Brienne.
It was only the Warrior, not the Maiden, who had any sense of adventure at all, Jaime had found.
Brienne cut through ice spiders like she was slicing bread for a meal, laughing with bloodthirsty joy, her smile beautiful and ferocious.
She had flinched and paled at the touch of his hand.
It was not the touch of a captive staying her wrath, but the touch of a man captivated and free.
When the last shovelful of soil had fallen on Brienne's grave, Jaime had taken off his swordbelt.
Jon had only shaken his head.
They've fought for enough living now that they could belong to anyone.
Let her father remember how Brienne lived and fought.
"I don't know how much Tarth needs Valyrian steel," Jaime says, "but you have it."
"And you have her letters."
Jaime's glove is soft in his teeth as he draws it off his hand.
Oathkeeper's hilt is hot on his skin, and the lion's face etches itself in red on his palm.
A blue crack pulses through his heart.
The sword screams, gold and silver and steel.
The crack deepens, filling with blood.