Six months had passed, and still the swords had not fallen from the wall. Brienne knew they would not, as surely as she knew Jaime's golden hand had melted in his pyre. She'd mounted the blades herself, and placed his golden hand beside his body to ruby of Widow's Wail was a gleaming eye, hot and swollen. Oathkeeper's pommel was a golden mouth, roaring. She came here to watch the way they cut the air, and how they framed the shafts of sunlight that hung between them.

In Winterfell, her sword with all its lion's teeth had bitten through the dead. But she had stayed a shadow until Jaime had peeled away her armour and forced her heart into its dawn.

The sun would rise. Brienne would watch it fall on the blades that had been theirs. Perhaps she would allow herself a few more tears. After, she would put on her armour, the outer and the inner. Every word she spoke in this city layered another plate over her heart.

Brienne's fingers wrapped around the last piece of Jaime she had to hold. She held his ghost in her palm, jagged and golden. How many times had he locked himself away? To grieve for his children, to yearn for Cersei, to rage at his father, to ache for his brother's hurt?

A knock sounded at the door. The knob rattled, then the lock. The door creaked, easing open, followed by muted but sure footsteps on the stone.

"Brienne." Tyrion's voice was as soft as she knew it would be, as it had been with her since he had handed her Widow's Wail and Jaime's false hand. Since she had cradled Jaime's cold face in her hands and later, watched his body burn.

Dawn is for pain. Day is for duty. She breathed deeply, drawing in the sun. Then she squared her shoulders. She turned to the brother of the man to whom her soul had been wed. "Tyrion. What news?"

He blinked up at her, eyes red-rimmed and dark with exhaustion, curls as messy as the rest of him, tunic and breeches rumpled. "It's too early for news." He stepped towards her. His gaze was gentle, his voice soft. "I came to see how you've been keeping."

Steel slid between her ribs, cold and sharp. Her pain was too much for anyone else to bear, though she shared her tears only with the rising sun. A latch sealed her hurt away from those it was never meant to touch. Amour crafted of calm settled over her. From that same calm came the will to steady her voice.

"If the king is unhappy with my service, I will speak with him myself."

For the smallest moment, she saw a shard of Jaime's soul in Tyrion's long-suffering gaze, the wry quirk of his mouth. "You believe I am here to tell you that your work, Ser Brienne, has been far less than exemplary, and that your service after hours is no longer required." He wasn't quite as obvious as Jaime when it came to rolling his eyes, but he had his brother's finesse in the art. "After all, we have more than enough bodies to haul rubble from one place to another."

Brienne waited, a silent pillar of stone. Tyrion's wit buffeted her, an ocean crashing against her strength. Jaime's words would've become more acid, goading her to spar with him in words, because he knew she would not. Later, alone in the candlelight of their bed, he'd spill soft words of reverent worship with every touch.

"Brienne." Tyrion's voice was quiet, careful. "You haven't rested."

"My quarters are well-appointed, and I sleep comfortably." I wake every day knowing it is another in which children will never again burn. Not in this city.

"You'll work yourself to death." He was close to her now. "I've tried many things for the want of forgetting." Staring up into her eyes with a soft earnestness, he said, "Work won't make you forget."

"I know."

If she was tired enough, before collapsing into sleep, she could imagine Jaime's warmth against her, shadow made sun. She'd never had to question herself before knowing him. His sun was trapped in a land she could not visit, and so she'd returned to what eased her. Knowing and doing what was right, even as his ghost followed her. How do you know? How do you know what's right? Those among a thousand questions pushed away in work and sleep.

She'd not asked this question before; of Tyrion, she knew she could. "If I'd been in Jaime's place, what would he have done?"

"You would've died fighting valiantly in the Great War, Ser Brienne," Tyrion said, a proud grin on his face. "My brother would've watched your body burn." He took her hand, and in the touch of his fingers was the same gentleness that fell upon his face. "If circumstances had become the same, he may have returned to King's Landing for Cersei's sake. To plead for her surrender, to protect her as they both died, to sail with her into exile. But if she had not surrendered, if she had died, and somehow he had lived, I don't know if he'd want to be part of this city. Not if he'd had to watch it burn. I think he might want to be alone for a while."

He doesn't mean―

"Jaime hated the North. He told me."

"He knew of your affinity for it." Tyrion's tone was firm. "It certainly would've been quiet enough for him to have many vociferous arguments with your ghost." On the end of Tyrion's finger, the key shone. "Jaime almost never let himself have quiet. I think he'd travel North if it meant he'd be left alone."

"Is that what you think I need?" She heard the catch of anger in her voice, anger because despair was so close. It waited for the night. Waited for her to be alone in her room, stripping off her armour. Waited until she'd had a calm day, her sleep easy, Jaime's golden shadow unable to cradle her.

"Yes." The firmness in Tyrion's voice remained. "Let yourself grieve for him. Away from here. He followed you North. Why wouldn't his ghost?"

That night, washing away the mental grime of council matters, putting down the weight of leadership, and soaping off the ash of the city, she considered Tyrion's words. He was right, of course. She couldn't deny what was sensible. She'd hoped that work would ease her pain. That it would be a balm for her ache, as it had always been before.

But that had been before.

~o~

Far beyond the Wall, shadows of the fallen trailed her.

In the Riverlands, she'd tethered Jaime to her with a rope around his wrist. The world had been lush and green and her purpose had been clear.

Now grief wrapped a golden thread around her wrist and she followed its pull. Her purpose was another step through the snow, following the stars. Following the sun's path through the sky. Hunting spring's meagre game. Gathering what wood she could find. Making sure she stayed warm while she slept.

She'd known she was being followed for several nights now. There was no reason to fear. A southerner so far North was merely a curiosity. They'd come together to fight, and they'd returned to their homes to rest. Those in the South had their griefs, and those in the North had theirs.

Stepping out from the brush was a man who'd felt both, and more since, if his looks were any indication. Jon had shed the dark leathers and cloak he'd worn at Winterfell for the grey and brown furs of wildling dress. His hair hung loose in curls that caught the firelight.

"Brienne?" He swept the snow from his hair. "What in seven hells are you doing up here?"

"Someone much wiser than I am suggested I might enjoy the quiet here for a while." She sat on one of the stumps she'd found, and gestured for Jon to join her. The rabbits were still warm. She pulled them from the fire, passing one to Jon as he sat.

Jon smiled, small and sad. The expression fell onto his face only for a moment, like a flake of snow. "I don't know if Tyrion would call himself wise anymore," he said, biting into the meat, "but it was kind of him to make the suggestion."

She knew the broad strokes of Jon's story: how the Dragon Queen had burnt the city to ash, how he'd brought her to justice, how he'd been exiled to the Wall. But he was beyond the Wall now. She'd known Jaime for long enough to have learned that the same story was different depending on who told it. Perhaps that was her purpose in the North. To hear another story, and learn another truth.

They ate thoughtfully for a while. Brienne watched the fire spark against the snow. At her feet, a green tendril curled, fed by a pool of meltwater. The sun set in a calm sky. Her tiredness was the easy exhaustion of a long walk through melting snow under the stars. It would not summon Jaime's memory to her. She would sleep softly, and alone.

You haven't rested, Tyrion had said, and it was true.

But in that rest, the painful tenderness of true memory would come, of all the gentleness she and Jaime had shared before he had left, and died. All the ways he had found her beneath her armour. All the ways his ghost could not. She would not let that rest come.

She threw the last of the leavings from her meal into the fire. "You're far north."

"Aye." Jon's smile was sharp, but still as fleeting. "Crossed the Wall as soon as I could." He wiped his hands on his furs. "Tormund had the right idea, I think." His laugh was soft. "He said I needed to be alone for a while, too."

Brienne had spent long enough in the company of Northerners to come to terms with their attachment to the region. The wildlings she'd met at Winterfell had all been kind to her in their rough way. In Jon she saw their steadfastness and their silence. In their company, he'd roughened more himself. Even his quiet was more of the dark northern glaciers than the rivers that ran south. A stiffness had marked his body all through the war, a hesitancy. She'd seen it leave him only when he spoke with his family or his people, when he swung his blade, or spoke a soft word to Daenerys. Now it was gone, and he moved easily within the bulk of his furs.

Ease of body was not ease of mind or heart. It was easy for those who did not understand a warrior's life to assume otherwise. She had known that all her life. Jaime had reminded her in their last night together, the grace of his body drowned in the anguish in his eyes before he turned to mount his horse. Long before, when he'd broken her silence, she'd learned something new, that simple words spoken in truth could bring more than comfort, under the right circumstances. She could not ease the heart of a man she did not know. But perhaps they could share their simple words with each other.

She poked at the fire with a long branch. "I'm sure it's been ― difficult for you." Please, Jaime. Help me find the words. Beneath the wood, the dying coals stirred. "I'm glad ― you seem to have found some measure of comfort here."

Jon's eyes were sharp on her face, stinging like the cut of a dragonglass blade. "They don't ask about her."

"You're lucky, then." Brienne's voice was flat. "Tyrion sent me here because of him." The stick she held crackled in the coals. "He's spent too much time learning how to read people."

"The wildlings do that quite well themselves," Jon said. "They just know when they've done enough." He looked up at her, his face gentle. "He asked you about Jaime, then."

"Yes." There was too much memory in that word. A weight Jon must've learned to hold himself, for he nodded and watched her, his gaze quiet in the glow of firelight and the setting sun.

"You didn't kill him, Brienne."

"I sent him to his death." I saw what was in him, but he couldn't see it in himself.

"Did you swear an oath to him?"

"What I said, when Jaime first arrived—it was as much of an oath as he would've ever wanted." Except, perhaps, marriage. "You all heard."

"Aye, we did." Jon grinned then, soft and rueful. "Jaime never was one for oaths, was he." His lips thinned. "He tried to tell me as much, years ago. But I was only a boy."

"And he was—well." Insufferable, I'm sure. Beautiful, and insufferable. After the war, his body long turned to ash, they'd all learned what he'd done to Bran. "I suppose he'd thought his death would be a kind of justice for your family." She could speak this cold truth beneath the sky, far from the memory of Jaime's warm mouth.

Jon squeezed his eyes shut. "I don't know what I'd call justice anymore." Rubbing the bridge of his nose, he sighed. "As for family—I don't know what that is anymore, either."

"I imagine that the idea of family is – difficult for you to think about just now." The words came more easily than she'd expected, but they still felt clumsy in her mouth. What family she'd had on Tarth she'd left long ago. The ties she'd built since then had been tenuous at best.

Jon shuffled his boots in the snow for a while, his gaze on the icy flakes. He broke a branch from the brush and joined her in stirring the coals. The branch trembled slightly as Jon held it, so slightly that only those whose deepest knowledge was physical would sense it, and so Brienne did.

What her heart knew was not so vast—only enough for her to feel it was more than grief that made Jon shake so quietly.

A thread of smoke spun its way into the sky. With Jon's tending, a coal flared to life, and he shoved the branch into the spurt of flame. After it turned from brown to black to grey, and they had fed the fire with more wood, Jon spoke.

"Daenerys was family." He turned his face away from her, half in firelight, half in starlight. "Sansa, Arya, Bran, they were all family too, but I bloody well didn't ask for that." His hoarse hush faded away to meld with the crackling of the flames. Then he laughed, harsh and short. "Well, I did, didn't I, for years."

It had been common knowledge in Winterfell, of course, Jon's bastardy. Brienne had seen how he'd wrapped it around him, an invisible cloak of fur. How in the Great War, it hadn't mattered, for he had drawn them all together. Enemies had made what peace they could with each other, and in the war room, planned their final stand. She could say something about that. She'd been there, she'd known, she'd seen, she'd fought.

But she hadn't known this; none of them had but for a few.

Brienne's hand rested on her thigh, and her fingers flexed. If Jaime sat beside her now, she could pull him to her, wrap her arms around him, quieting him as he grieved, let him feel how she would bear any of his pain. In her room in Winterfell, or his in King's Landing. But this was not her place, or his. She sat by a warm fire in a land strange to her with a man whose pain was as much a stranger. As strange as Jaime had been all those years ago, tethered to her by a length of rope, whose tether had turned to gold and led her to this place.

"I thought," she began, softly, "she seemed quite alone." Daenerys was a warrior who fought without a sword. Fighting is lonely when those you fight for think you can only be hurt by a blade.

"I thought she wouldn't be," Jon said. "I thought they'd want to know her like I did." He turned to her, a wolf's fierceness on his face. "Without her, we'd have all been dead before Arya reached the Night King."

That same fierce wolf, Sansa had held closer than ever as her sigil. Brienne had seen the wolf's lashing tail in her, and how she'd come to bear her teeth.

"Sansa never confided in me," Brienne said. "I don't know what I would've said." There had been no use speaking to her of the Dragon Queen, of the strengths they both had, and the strengths they could share, for Brienne's strength was in swordplay rather than politics. She could speak of her now to the man beside her, mourning the woman he had lost. "Daenerys could've put Jaime to death. She didn't. She didn't need to bring her armies to the North. She did. I saw her dragons burning thousands more dead than we could've ever fought alone. She was brave."

"She was brave." Jon's breath misted into the chill of the night. "I could've had less to drink, after we'd won. I could've held her." His hands fisted in the thick furs of his coat. "I thought she'd find her way through. I thought they'd see her the way I did, even if it took time." He ran a hand through his hair, and in the firelight and starlight Jon looked at her for a moment, his eyes wet, then turned his face to the sky. "I tried to do right. I always try to do right, and come up wrong."

This wasn't the slashing of swordplay. It wasn't a dialogue that could be ended with the cut of a blade. This was an entirely more delicate entangling of weapons. Two kinds of grief, and she'd not even known how to fight with Jaime's. Her care had not disarmed him.

So it would not be care she approached Jon with, then. Delicacy, but not care. "She would've burned far more cities to the ground if you hadn't." In the air was that shared unspoken knowledge: Daenerys was brave to have fought at Winterfell, but later, she'd done wrong. "But her father wouldn't have come to Winterfell. Wouldn't have fought. Would've watched Jaime burn and laughed."

"Is that what fire and blood is?" His voice was fierce. "Power saves the world, and it's right and beautiful. She was. And then," he said acidly, "someone else has to do another thing that's right because his bloody honour commands it."

"I don't know much about fire or blood or power," Brienne said, softly. Her fingers flexed again. She pushed away the hurtful wish that it was Jaime who sat with her, Jaime whom she could reassure. She pressed her fingers to Jon's arm. "I've tried my best to learn about honour."

"Oh?" A sharp laugh from him, that dark acid, and before she could speak, "I renewed my pledge to my queen and put my dagger in her heart! What would your honour have to say about that?"

They were two broken swords clashing, and there was an awful, glorious rightness in how their jagged edges matched. "My honour was a killer, for all I didn't ride after the man I—"

The word was a jagged thing too. She and Jaime had not needed to say it, for it had always been there. Now it cut her voice away for the want of being said. Jaime's ghost would never hear.

Their self-hate had slashed them both open, and now they bled. Jon was as delicate as she was; she knew it by how his hand had shook. Her hand was still on his arm, and the furs of his coat were warm beneath her palm.

And now his hand fell on hers and shook, in that soft and nearly imperceptible way. Not out of caring for her, she knew, but out of a warrior's grief.

And yet, that was what they shared.

They were two broken blades locked together.

Jon wouldn't say again how she'd not killed Jaime, and Brienne wouldn't say again how Daenerys was brave, and how Jon had done what he'd thought was right. Words couldn't polish their broken blades, only deeds.

When she placed her other hand on his, he covered hers, til there was no more thought of honour or grief or ghosts, only the shaking warmth of a near-stranger whose broken sword had met hers, and the blood that beat in both their hands.

They sat and watched the dark sky with its spray of silver stars for a long while, until Brienne broke the silence. "You're welcome to sleep by my fire tonight." She pressed Jon's hand beneath hers, gently, and found the trembling of his grief had transferred to her own. They were broken swords sharing their edges, even in their exhaustion. "We should get some sleep."

They arranged their bedrolls on opposite sides of the fire and Brienne stretched out, warm within her cocoon. There was no guessing what would happen to her tonight; if her pain would summon Jaime's golden form to her again.

A jagged sword could still cut, and she had needed this wounding.

She waited for sleep to come, and ached for Jaime's touch.

Perhaps it was too cold here for Jaime's ghost to find her, despite what Tyrion had said. And perhaps that was a blessing, though she yearned for him. It was her yearning that had broken her blade in the end. And yearning was a feeling, not an act. For the moment, she'd rather act than feel, for words that sprang from feeling had been only words, and his ghost would never hear of her feelings.

As she fell carefully into sleep, the golden thread around her wrist burned comfortably warm, then loosened, slipping from her.

He'd find her again, but now all his gold was in his burned city, his key and their swords and her armour, and he'd lock his ghost away in his chamber to read all she'd written for him.

There was some comfort, though, in knowing that across the fire a dark-eyed man ached with the same kind of yearning, how they both trembled with it, so they'd never again have to use words to describe what they'd lost.

Perhaps she'd spend some time with the wildlings after all, for they seemed much more focused on what honour did rather than what it said, even if they'd never deign to calling it that. And if she took fur as her armour for a while, and will as her word, then her oaths would be her own, to change with the seasons and their people. Oaths had shaped her; let her shape them for once, and fight with a broken sword.