Brienne I
Brienne had just finished the washing up after breakfast when she heard a wagon rattle down the drive. Morning chores had been done before sunrise, even— after so many years of doing it, she could her way around the barn blindfolded. Drying her hands on a tea towel, she wandered out onto the front porch and found Arya Stark careening into the yard between their modest house and equally modest barn, a young woman sitting next to her on the wagon's buckboard, hand clamped to her head to hold her mantilla on.
Brienne had heard of the deaths of Ned Stark and Jory Cassel during the previous day's trip into town for the mail. She had been upset by it, not only because Sansa was her closest friend, but because they were both fine men, always kind to her and her family. She had not heard of Sansa's injuries, however, and when Arya revealed the purpose of her visit, Brienne sat down hard on the front steps, shocked.
"Of course," she said numbly. "Let me go ask Pa, I'm sure he'll say yes."
"I brought Claudia to sit with him while we were at the funeral," said Arya.
"You're very kind," Brienne said to the girl. "Thank you."
"I am happy to help," said Claudia in her soft, Spanish-accented English.
Brienne bid her to enter the house, and quickly explained the situation to her father. He agreed right away that Sansa needed his chair more than he did, that day. Brienne took a few minutes to make sure it was scrupulously clean, and greased the wheels, even polishing the wood and rubbing a little neat's foot oil into the leather upholstery. It wouldn't do for Sansa, or her conveyance, to look shabby on the day of her father's funeral. Once tidied to her satisfaction, she hoisted it into the wagon Arya had brought.
Spiffing up the chair meant Brienne had less time to dude herself up, but since that was a lost cause, it made little difference. She switched her rough trousers and one of Galladon's old shirts and beat-up boots for a severe black skirt, black half-boots, and white shirtwaist pinned at the high throat with a jet cameo of her mother's. Her hair, hip-long and moon-pale, was braided into a tight plait, then wound into a tighter bun, jabbed full of so many pins to hold it there that Brienne felt as if her head was bristling like a porcupine. Her hair did not enjoy being constrained, and more than once, she had contemplated hacking it all off. It was only her father's insistence that it reminded him of her mother's, and he did miss her so, that kept Brienne from indulging in the impulse.
She stuffed another paper of hair pins into her reticule, knowing she'd lose half of them on the ride into town and would have to take a moment before entering the church to ensure her plait wasn't listing to starboard or falling down entirely.
They left Pa sitting in his rocking chair on the porch while Claudia settled onto the porch swing, knitting, and soon were hurtling down the drive in the direction of the Northpoint.
"She looks terrible," Arya shouted over the clatter of the iron-bound wheels over stones and the clopping of horse hooves. "Be prepared. If you cry, she'll start crying, and it hurts her chest. So don't cry."
"I won't cry," Brienne promised, but proved herself a liar because the moment she entered Sansa's room, pushing the chair ahead of her, and glimpsed her friend's injuries, she burst into tears.
"I'm better today," Sansa told her even as tears cascaded down her cheeks and she winced with each breath. "I can walk, it's just the poppy milk, I flop all over."
She used her left hand to pat at her cheeks with a handkerchief since her right was bound closely to her side to support her bruised rib. She couldn't wear a corset, but was unable to fit into her own frocks without one, so she was in one of Catelyn's gowns, a chocolate-brown crepe that deepened the tone of her hair to russet and made her eyes seem even more blue, like the hard bright sky overhead that very moment. That hair and those eyes were shockingly lovely against the mess of her face, bruises stark against its pallor.
"Are you sure you should go?" Brienne asked hesitantly, after giving her nose a good honk in her own handkerchief, a big plain square three times the size of Sansa's dainty, lace-edged scrap. "Everyone will stare, and whisper…"
She knew intimately what it was like to be gawked at like an oddity or a horror.
"Let them," Sansa said fiercely. "Let them see what Joffrey did to me. Let everyone know what the Lannisters have gotten away with, all these years. I'm not going to miss my fa-father's fu-fu-funeral…"
She stopped and wept a bit more, and Brienne joined her.
"Arya says Brienne is here—" said Robb as he came to the door, knocking briefly on the frame to announce himself. "Ah, hello." He gave her a tight smile of welcome, which she returned. She knew he didn't want to hear "I'm sorry" yet again, so she settled for conveying her sorrow with her eyes, and his smile widened, just a little, understanding. "Thank you for the loan of the chair, it will be helpful."
"Of course," said Brienne. "Anything I can do…"
"You can help me get Sansa from the bed to the chair, and then from the chair up into the carriage." Robb knew that Brienne did not shy away from exertion or lifting. She had always appreciated how he didn't try to treat her as fragile just because she was a woman.
Together, they supported Sansa to stand, pivot, and sit again. Outside, Brienne and Robb simply hoisted the chair down the few steps to the yard to where Jon waited with the wagon.
"We're going early to make sure we have enough time, since we'll only go at a walk so Sansa doesn't get jostled." He gestured to where he'd filled the back of their wagon with straw, then covered it with blankets, and the smile he aimed at his sister was warmer than Brienne was used to seeing from him; clearly, the incidents of the last few days had caused some other changes in the Stark family. "Miz Catelyn will take Bran, Arya, and Rickon in the surrey, and the help will come in the other wagon."
"I feel like a queen," said Sansa, attempting humor as she stood, pivoted once more, and sat on the wagon's lowered tailgate.
"In you get, Your Majesty," quipped Robb, and they shared tiny smiles.
Brienne climbed into the wagon and, with an apology, put her hands under Sansa's bottom so she could shift her friend into place without grasping her injured torso. It worked a treat, and soon Sansa was deposited on her throne of straw, Brienne at her side, sweat prickling her back and between her meager breasts and her bun already threatening to topple. Robb and Jon climbed onto the buckboard, Robb clucked at the horses to go, and off they went at a glacial pace.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Brienne asked, deciding to take down her plait on her own instead of waiting for it to collapse. Perhaps she could salvage some of the hairpins; they were darned expensive, and she had to make every penny count.
"No, thank you," said Sansa with exquisite politeness, and Brienne nodded, unbothered. She was not one to share her feelings, herself, so she understood.
"Glad you're back safe," she said to Jon, tilting her head back to direct to comment up to him in front of her. "No problems?"
"Thank you," he said, flashing her one of his brief little smiles. "No problems. Wish I'd come back to…" He trailed off, at a loss for words. "Not this," he concluded.
The Starks had been kind and helpful in their quiet way when first Mama and Galladon had died; she had an idea of what they could be comfortable with.
They rode in silence the rest of the journey into town, the only sounds the susurrus of the wind through the meadows' tall grass and how the wagon's wheels would grate against pebbles they rode over. The rest of the Starks overtook them just as they entered town, and Brienne suppressed a shiver at the icy look Catelyn aimed at Jon as she deftly steered the surrey past them with an insolent little cloud of dust. The wagon with the ranch hands and servants was following right behind. Most of the townspeople stopped what they were doing, as if by prior arrangement, to watch their short little parade as it made its way down Main Street to the church at the far end, where Reverend Brother awaited them for the funeral.
Other mourners began to arrive, more and more surreys and buggies and wagons pulling up and disgorging their black-clad occupants. Ned Stark, and even the honest, hard-working Jory Cassel, had earned much admiration and respect in their years, and it was touching to see how very many people were there to recognize their lives.
Unless it was more from morbid curiosity than recognition, Brienne allowed as she shifted Sansa back to the tailgate and clambered down, uncomfortably aware of how very many eyes were fixated on the spectacle they provided. The gasps of shock, at the sight of Sansa's poor face and how it took two people to get her from the wagon to the chair— that she needed a wheeled chair in the first place, that she was unable to walk unassisted— just kept coming, one after the other.
Then there were the whispers. About Sansa— mostly about her face, lamenting the distortion of her beauty and speculating if she'd be permanently marred, and wasn't that a shame, as if there weren't more to her but how pretty she was— and about Jon, and Robb's new burdens as owner of the Northpoint, and Arya's lack of girlish appeal, and Catelyn's frosty appearance making it seem as if she weren't bothered in the least to have lost her husband of nearly a quarter-century.
And, of course, about Brienne herself: even though these people had known her for almost fifteen years, knew her father, had known her brother and mother, still they exclaimed about her height, her paleness, her freckles, her plainness. She wondered when the shock of Brienne being Brienne would finally sink in and they'd no longer be so amazed that she could possibly exist.
Once Sansa was situated in the chair, the Starks grouped up and approached the church en masse. Jon, of course, stayed back with Brienne. He would not be welcome to make an entrance with the rest of the family, and she knew he would not be allowed to sit with them in the front-and-center pew the Starks customarily inhabited, either.
"I'm all by myself here," she said to Jon. "Will you join me?"
In truth, she didn't mind being alone— was used to it— but she couldn't bear the expression on his face at that moment, watching his siblings join together in a tight little knot, knowing he could not penetrate it. He nodded, the muscles of his face easing a little.
"Oh, I should—" began Brienne when the Starks reached the half-dozen steps leading up the the church entrance. Robb by himself could not get Sansa up the stairs; he would need Brienne, since Jon was clearly not permitted in the vicinity if the way Catelyn was sending chilly glances at him were any indication.
Sheriff Clegane straightened from where he'd been slouching against the corner of the church, watching everyone with blank, careful eyes.
"I'll do it," he said. He bent behind Sansa's chair, grasped its frame through the spokes of its wheels, and lifted her several feet into the air. She gave a startled eep that caused her to giggle nervously, and then whimper in pain.
"Alright?" he asked her.
"Yes, fine, thank you," she replied in a reedy little voice, and he climbed the steps, then set her down at the top. He dusted off his hands on the thighs of his trousers and then descended the steps to return to his position at the corner of the church. He wasn't breathing hard, or looking as if he'd exerted himself in any way.
"Th— thank you," Sansa called to him, then coughed, then moaned in pain.
Most everyone had turned back to the drama inherent in watching a grievously assaulted young beauty and the rest of her bereaved family enter the church for their father's funeral, and so they all missed the expression that flitted across the sheriff's face. He looked… pained, as if Sansa's suffering caused his own, possibly even worse than she herself felt it.
"Did you see that?" Brienne asked Jon, wanting validation that she really had witnessed such an unlikely thing, but he was staring in the other direction.
"What?" he said distractedly. "What is she doing here?"
Brienne turned and saw a petite figure approaching at a brisk pace along the boardwalk. She wore a mourning dress of black bombazine, the overskirt of which was gathered and opened at a jaunty angle to one side, revealing an underskirt of figured taffeta. It had very fine lace wrought in black silk around the cuffs, the low square neckline, the bottom edge of the basque, and the hem of the underskirt. With every step, a tiny foot appeared from under the deeply flounced taffeta, revealing one— just one— of the long line of buttons surely running up the neck of her boots. Her platinum hair was done in an elaborate network of coils and loops, none of which appeared to be in any danger of mutiny, unlike Brienne's.
Brienne sucked in a breath as she remembered she'd undone her plait in the wagon.
"Drat," she muttered, and scooped a handful of pins from her pocket. With nowhere to set them while she wrestled with her long plait, she held them out to Jon. "Will you hold these for me?"
"…yes?" He blinked at her, and reached out a cupped palm.
She twisted and twirled and pinned, but this time her plait would not cooperate at all, persisting in collapsing every time she lifted her hands away.
"I can't go into the church with my hair down," she grumbled in response to Jon's suggestion that she just forget about it.
"Excuse me," said a cool little voice from a foot below Brienne's head. "May I be of assistance?"
Daenerys Targaryen stood there, shooting Brienne an arch look, as if it were every day the richest woman in town, from the most elite family, offered help with hair-dressing to the poorest woman in town, from the least elite family. Now it was Brienne's turn to be nonplussed.
"…yes?"
Daenerys marched over to where the boardwalk ended a few steps above street level, and climbed them. "Stand before me, please," she said, very businesslike, and Brienne obeyed, moving into position and facing away from her new beautician. To Brienne's horror, Daenerys unfastened the string used to tie off her long plait and loosened it, causing the long pale skein of it to fall in a loose, straight sheet past her hips.
Quick, not-quite-gentle fingers combed the tumbling tresses, separating them into thick locks before performing some elaborate maneuvers; not only plaits but twists and loops and swirls and tucks, all done at a dizzying speed.
"Pin," said Daenerys. Jon, standing nearby, half amused and half irritated— it was his father's funeral about to begin— held a single pin up to her. She took it and secured the lock of hair to Brienne's head. "Pin," she said again, and Jon offered another. Thus it went, pin after pin and lock after lock, until the entire mess had been transformed, or so Brienne assumed, if Daenerys' and even Jon's admiring gazes were anything to go by.
"Look in a window reflection," suggested Daenerys, motioning to the closest, and Brienne did so, stepping up to it. It was small and high off the ground, inaccessible to most people due to their not being a giant as Brienne was. Her eyes widened in surprise to see how comely her hair looked, how smooth and elegant. The loops and twists did not look overwrought, as she had feared, just sophisticated, a suggestion that she cared about her appearance and took steps to make herself presentable.
Then a face appeared on the other side of the glass, and Brienne reeled back with a little scream before she recognized it: those piercing green eyes, that granite-hewn jaw, those sculpted lips, the busted nose that kept him handsome instead of edging into prettiness…
The window Daenerys had chosen? Was the window of one of the jail cells. Specifically, the jail cell in which Jaime Lannister was currently the reluctant occupant.
Brienne took another step back, horrified to have had her face mere inches from his, even if there had been a sturdy pane of glass between them. The man's reputation had been mud even before the revelations of the last few days; now, it was sewage. Lower than sewage, if something existed that could be; the man had not only fornicated with his sister, but fathered multiple children with her. Brienne could never have even imagined such a thing, let along comprehended that it had actually occurred.
He stared out at her, looking weary and bored and so, so beautiful. Brienne took another step back; it was unsafe to be too close to him, for reasons of propriety and sanity and possibly a few other things she hadn't words for.
"Don't go," he said, barely audible through the glass. "Stay and talk to me. It's so dull in here."
And then he smiled at her, and Brienne's heart seized in her chest. The closest she'd ever come to seeing something like him had been in a museum in Chicago, many years earlier, when they'd stopped there on the way from her birthplace in Wisconsin to their destination of Kingsland. The arrogant arch of brow and finely-hewn angle of cheekbone, permanently etched into her memory it would seem, had been drawn by the hand of a long-dead, far-away master, incomparably lovely, and its model could have been the man grinning at her from a jail cell.
"Brienne?" said Jon. He thrust out the handful of unneeded hairpins. "We really should go in, now."
"Of course," she murmured, backing away, somehow unable to tear her gaze from Jaime Lannister's. His grin faded, but he didn't leave the window, staring back at her with a frown starting to pucker between his eyes. "I'm sorry," she said, but was unsure which man she was saying it to.
She wrenched herself around and took the hairpins from Jon, to his relief. When she looked up, it was to find Daenerys watching her, a faint moue of amusement curling her lips.
As they three fell into step together, Brienne felt a trifle desperate to inject some normality into the situation, since she felt anything but normal. She asked, "Miss Targaryen, will you sit with us?"
"You may call me Daenerys," the other woman announced, as if granting a priceless gift. She probably thought she was. "Yes, I would like that. Thank you."
"I'm surprised you've come," Jon commented from Brienne's other side. Probably he should have been in the middle, escorting both women, but it seemed too awkward to switch around now that they were nearly to the church.
"Are you?" Daenerys replied in a wintry tone. "I don't see why. There are few decent men in the world, and fewer honest ones. Your father was both, the rarest of the rare. The least I can do is honor him for it."
Jon did not respond to that, and Brienne shot him a glance, finding him frowning, bemused. They climbed the stairs to the church, and the sheriff— still malingering at the building's corner— sauntered over and ascended behind them, last into the church after they stepped inside. He closed the tall doors behind him, and the cool interior of the church fell abruptly into shadow as the morning sun was blocked.
A single pew in the back had been left vacant, for the misfits and outcastes, Brienne thought uncharitably. They filed in one by one: she herself, Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, Sheriff Clegane. Rabble, bastard, eccentric, flunkey.
Jaime Lannister, she added to the list, the memory of his face persisting in her mind's eye, that impish grin gleaming fit to blind her. Reprobate. Degenerate. Rogue. So many words to describe just one man, but such a man… something told her that he could not be adequately described even if one used a hundred words. A thousand.
Reverend Brother stepped behind the pulpit. "If you could all turn to Ecclesiastes 7:1…"
Brienne settled back against the unforgiving oak pew and let the comforting words wash over her, trying valiantly to focus on the matter at hand instead of that lewd, carnal, wicked man.
She failed.
