I'm so very grateful to TopShelfCrazy for still wanting to be my beta and for helping me out with this chapter.
Thanks everyone for reading, favouriting and following this story.
Special thanks to everyone who reviewed. It is you who mostly keep this going.
xx
Brienne
The white dragon glided peacefully across the sky, flying from the Vale of Arryn to Gulltown, as removed from the image of a bloodthirsty tower-burning monster as a dragon could be. Leathery, golden wings rested flatly on the morning breeze.
Brienne's stomach was miraculously at ease as she held onto a deadly pale-white spike in front of her so as not to fall. I am no longer new to this, she tried to convince herself. Yet she could find no love for flying in her heart. Would that I could ride to Meereen. But she couldn't, and that was the end of it.
Oh, mother, if the great salty sea were a demon road, I'd gallop on it day and night... It was some sort of rhyme from a singer of the Free Cities who once came to Tarth. Brienne wondered if such road existed in Essos. No, she dismissed the notion. Any other way would just not be fast enough. It has to be... this...A hundred centipedes immediately started crawling in her tummy. Dragonback was more tolerable when she could think of something else.
Therefore, instead of flying, she immensely enjoyed the view of Jaime, who had positioned himself two spikes ahead, walking on the dragon while in the air. She had to suppress the memory of how reckless and dangerous that action was to make the centipedes in her belly come to a halt. Now, her husband's shoulders and upper arms flexed with quiet strength. Jaime was bending left and right, anticipating the flowing movement of the dragon. Brienne imagined running her hands down his bare back. Soon. We will land soon. You just glimpsed the sea.
Distances meant nothing for the wings of a dragon.
Jaime's soft, wavy hair had grown tremendously since they left King's Landing, cascading half-way down his back. She had always admired it. A field of golden rye. Brienne's own prickly mane had also advanced in length.
He didn't let me cut my hair.
She had always considered her long hair cumbersome and homely, and she had shortened it as soon as she left home. But Jaime's recent inexplicable infatuation with it softened her heart in that matter and the unruly hay was spared.
For now.
Jaime was more handsome than ever when he felt at ease.
His gaze roamed in the broadness of the windswept sky, occasionally stopping on Brienne with feverish intensity. We are both stealing glances at each other. The sensation was almost nourishing. Dark-grey clouds sailed steadily on the ocean of sunlight, announcing an imminent storm.
Viserion exhaled lazily. A stream of flames pierced a black cloud in front of them; a shroud hung from the heavens, barring their way. When they passed through it, on the other side, there was only light.
From high above, the narrow sea loomed close. Soon, they would arrive to Gulltown. In just another handful of flaps of mighty wings, shining with the light of the morning, they would reach their destination... And outfly the storm closing on our heels... or talons..., Brienne hoped, queasiness gaining in force. She didn't relish being sick and soaked at the same time.
The world started spinning. The unsettling softness in her belly worsened. Centipedes became a herd of aurochs, stomping madly in her innards. Her vision was no longer of light, nor of the glimmering sea; it was filled by the dull grey of the rocks approaching, mingled with some brown and green of the earth.
"Seven hells! Get up!" Jaime cursed and commanded the dragon in vain.
Viserion must have decided to dive all of a sudden for no obvious reason. Unbidden, he landed them in front of a lowly hut on a forested slope populated by some tall and evergreen, slender trees, the likes of which never grew in Tarth. Sentinels? Ironwood? Brienne did not know. The forest floor was inhospitable and barren, covered with a thin layer of old snow.
At least there is a break from flying.
"Why did you do that?" Jaime asked the dragon, in utter disbelief.
Viserion was a gallant, well-behaved dragon, who mostly obeyed his rider. Mostly, however, did not mean all the time as Brienne had just learned. At present, he elegantly recoiled his scaled, spiked tail and carelessly puffed rings of smokes at the cold air. Insolent, like Jaime. Smoothly, he lifted flight again and in a moment he was gone, leaving his rider and his rider's wife to their own devices. It was not exactly the kind of stopping for rest and intimacy Brienne envisaged in the air.
For Brienne it was impossible to tell whether the dragon replied to Jaime. The conversation between the beast and his rider mostly occurred through their minds unless Jaime forgot himself and spoke out loud as he had just done. Brienne could not hear Viserion talk. Yet the dragon could somehow perceive when she called him brother in her head.
The words for brother and husband were the same in the language of the dragons. Viserion seemed to have accepted Brienne as sister because of her marriage to his rider. That was the utmost extent of their mutual ability to understand each other. Beyond that, Brienne was ignorant and she wondered if the dragon felt the same way about her.
According to Jaime, Viserion exhibited superior intelligence and the cunning of a crone on rare occasions. But at many other times, like right now, the dragon seemed more innocent and unlearned than a swathed babe.
"Today he has a maiden's sensibility," Jaime joked dryly as he did in adverse situations. His wife had known him long enough to see that he was worried.
Quite a lot worried, at that.
"Maybe he is a she," Brienne dared voicing what she had been thinking about for days. She had to set her mind on something to better ignore flying sickness, didn't she? In truth, the gender of the dragon was not at all visible, and much less recognisable on his growing body. Among so many scales and spikes, who could tell? The Lady of Tarth could not, and she doubted very much that Jaime could, his arrogance be damned.
Jaime shook his head. "I don't think so," he rejected her supposition in a tone between mirth and queer, uncharacteristic embarrassment.
"Why not, pray?" she challenged him to finish. Brienne would never be a meek wife, especially not when Jaime was being a real ass.
"He has some very untoward thoughts about another dragon. The green one, maybe, or some other colour that doesn't exist. He doesn't let me see everything. But what I do see would surely shame most ladies I had the honour of meeting," Jaime smirked.
Brienne was still not convinced about Viserion's sex.
Since she stopped being the Maid of Tarth, Brienne had a very strong suspicion that her thoughts about Jaime's body would shame most ladies she was acquainted with. Yet she didn't feel less of a lady for that reason. Maybe more, she thought absurdly.
I'll run my hands down his naked back and press my bare breasts into it. I will not let him turn around until he yields to me. Soon.
"Let's go inside," she said.
There was precious little in the house. The floor was strewn with old rushes and there was a heap of cut firewood piled neatly alongside one of the walls. Brienne thanked the Seven for winter and the related absence of roaches and similar vermin. A small hearth was empty, but there were some old ashes in it. The door was a flimsy, creaking screen of several boards nailed together that could not close properly.
"There must be a village nearby," Jaime said, "this is some woodcutter's cabin where he stores the excess of logs until he needs them."
The dragon returned before they could indulge in any shameful activities, screeching at them to come out. Tonight, Brienne thought.
Viserion had hunted a deer and a boar, and presented them proudly to Jaime. Brienne had the strangest impression that the monster winked one of his golden eyes at his rider, or he would have done it if he had eyelids to begin with.
Jaime stared at the two carcasses and the trees with darkly green eyes, not returning the dragon's playful sentiment. He is feverish and not from wishing to share a marriage bed. Brienne loved it when Jaime looked at her that way. But now it set her on edge. Something was dreadfully amiss.
And not only with Jaime, perhaps.
Viserion crawled to the clearing behind the hut, coiling his tail around several young trees as he went. A giant snake on the move or a ship being tied to a pier. He took good care to fasten himself before closing his lidless eyes of molten gold. There was no visible hurt on his body.
The dragon fainted as a man passed out from too much wine with an earth-shaking thud.
"What's wrong?" Brienne inquired.
"I wish I could tell you," Jaime muttered, nervously rubbing his stump with his good hand, an unconscious gesture he adopted whenever he felt inadequate, his wife knew.
They both tried to rouse dragon in vain. Viserion was as movable as the harsh soil he collapsed upon. This can't be true, Brienne thought, the dragons are supposed to be strong and invincible!
"Perhaps he has to sleep from time to time," Jaime offered. Yet his heart was not in his words, and his complexion was becoming greener, just like his now purposefully frivolous and always beautiful eyes.
Brienne cooked some deer outside of the hut. Making an outdoor fire in the cold helped her keep her wits together, weaving her frightened thoughts in a tight fabric that would not tear and betray her uneasiness. In the end she ate in silence, alone. Jaime had no appetite.
Before nightfall, Jaime found it impossible to stand, sit, or stay awake. With Brienne's help, he crawled inside the hut and lay helplessly on the dead rushes. Brienne hastily placed some logs in the hearth and lit another fire. It's all I can do and it is so little, she realised.
"I'm not cold at all," he waved her efforts away with a weak gesture of the stump. "It's just that..." he was uncertain what to say and Brienne's heart was breaking. "This dishonourable knight is in need of sleep, or of saving... I don't know from what... or maybe I am saving someone by this..." he told Brienne, only half in mocking. "I trust you will be here when I wake."
She bent over him, very close to him, and was about to swear an oath that she would be there for him, always, but the final conscious movement of the still clumsy fingers on his left hand was to place them gently on her mouth and prevent her from talking.
"I love you too, sweet wife," were the last words before the same imperturbable slumber which took the dragon overwhelmed his rider.
Brienne felt abandoned. She was left to ponder the illnesses of dragons and the strange human sickness called love.
How am I to care for a sick dragon?
Neither Ser Goodwin nor Septa Roelle could have trained young Lady Brienne in that art. Or rather, no living soul had any need to be learned about it in the Seven Kingdoms for more than a hundred years.
Lord Selwyn, her father, became interested in dragons in his later years when it became hurtfully clear that he would not be able to sire more children. Some men would drown their disappointment in wine, but he chose to inebriate himself with dragon lore. Little enough of it was available on Tarth. The books and scrolls discussing dragons were forgotten or ruined during King Robert's reign.
Therefore, Father travelled to the ruins of Summerhall to learn about the dragons firsthand. He had found an unburned dragon egg, sheltered under the shield of the legendary Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, Ser Duncan the Tall. He never bothered his daughter with this discovery, and kept his findings in his treasury; a blue stone and an insignificant coat of arms that Brienne later painted on her own wooden shield in the riverlands, innocent of knowing whose sigil it was... Ser Duncan was a hedge knight who chose a blazon of his own before embracing the immaculately white one of the Kingsguard.
A single elm on the sunset field and a falling star.
Her shield was now lost, but the egg was with Princess Daenerys, and it had helped Brienne plead for Jaime's life with the king.
Surely, it was not all for nothing...
Except that maybe it was.
The storm came down in force then, washing over Viserion's brilliant body. The deluge did not stop for days, a cold shower mingled with velvety flakes of snow in the crisp mountain air. Neither dragon nor Jaime woke...
Brienne had let the larger part of the two carcasses freeze. She had been patiently consuming only a small portion of the meat from the dragon's kill every day. We felt powerful and it was wrong. They were going to Meereen with too little food, hung in a saddlebag between the shorter spikes where the dragon's body ended and the tail began. They had little spare clothing, no armor and two castle-forged longswords.
Once, as a consequence of a ruthlessly ingenious idea of the late Lord Tywin Lannister concerning gifts to his family, Jaime and Brienne each carried a shiny half of a famous Valyrian steel blade for a short time. The two halves had now been reforged into Ice, the ancestral sword of the House Stark. The sword of winter was on its way home now. Brienne wondered who was going to wield it. The broad two-handed greatsword was very heavy. Despite being freakishly strong, as so many men disapproving of her existence would put it, Brienne preferred a somewhat lighter blade.
She and Jaime hadn't been sparring properly since they were married... If anyone attacked her now, she would be an almost easy prey. They could be taken or murdered, the dragon could be enslaved again... She thanked the Seven for the storm.
Good luck to anyone who tries to move Viserion from here, in this weather.
Under the flood released from the seven heavens by the gods, the white dragon seemed to be growing every day in his slumber. Just like hair these days, Brienne thought. She would call his sleep fevered if the dragon's body had not been constantly hot and not only from his ailment.
The king was right to send Jaime to find Tyrion. The dragons were supposed to be fierce at all times. Not lay down and hibernate like bears. Or sleep in order to increase their size. If Tyrion had knowledge to help understand what they did and why, it would be invaluable in the coming war against winter. The simple soldiers in King Rhaegar's army whispered that the enemy in the north was not human. Who better to defeat it than the dragons? They were not men. But what if the dragons cannot be relied upon?
Brienne had no answer for her questions, growing in number day by day, just like the body of the sleeping dragon.
Jaime didn't fare much better than his new ferocious steed. Pale and petrified, terribly warm to touch, he persevered in a dragon-sleep during short winter days and cold nights, with green eyes open. Brienne tenderly touched his brow every now and then and smeared his mouth with water. She kissed him and she shook him, she cursed and she prayed, afraid that he would burn out with fever... or die of hunger and thirst.
Her husband was right about one thing before he fainted; there was a village nearby. Did the dragon know? Did he land us here on purpose? Or on a whim?
The village was twenty houses and a tiny sept, whose seven outer walls were built of unmortared, grey mountain stone meeting at irregular angles. All the houses had seven-pointed stars painted on the doors. Brienne needed food other than meat so one day she ventured in. When they saw her, the people started making signs of the Seven and praying to the Father to judge them justly.
In the sept she realised why. The crude statue of the Father was beardless and tall; he was a young blond man with long hair, resembling Brienne. She realised she could ask the villagers for anything and they would give it gladly. So she did take some food, but avoided blessing anyone.
She could only play a deity for so long. It was Jaime who looked like a god, not Brienne...
Most inhabitants of the tiny settlement were tall and fair of hair, though no one quite as tall as Brienne. One orange-haired man strolled around only in his breeches despite the winter cold. The seven-pointed star was a drying, still raw scar on his chest where he must have cut it in with some sort of knife.
"The Winged Knight will ride to war," he prophesied to anyone willing to listen. "It is time to take the Faith to the confines of this earth."
Brienne wondered if the news was serious. Maybe little Robert Arryn won the legendary name in the short time of his youthful lordship, and decided to sail north to the Wall together with the part of the crops he was supposed to send. Or maybe the half-naked man was merely hallucinating.
She hurried back to the hut where she had left Jaime. Nothing changed in the time of her absence. Why would it? What did you expect? She breathed out in both relief and resignation. The blunt pain was back in her middle, this time not from flying. On time, as always.
I am most certainly not the Father, she thought. I stopped being a maiden, and I am much too young to be a crone. I should probably be... mother... in this part of my life.
Moonblood came and went regularly since she was a woman wed, for as much as Brienne had never tasted moon tea. Lady Lannister's face fell as she fitted a cloth in her male smallclothes once more, disappointed and comforted in equal measure. The duality of the sensation bothered her. Why can't I feel straight about this?
Jaime already has children, she tried to tell herself. He won't mind if I am less of a woman and cannot give him more. They never talked about it. Surely he would have told her if he wanted more children. Her hips were narrow despite her freakish height and muscled legs, and she had heard many times how those needed to be broad to birth a healthy child.
Her intimate attitude toward having a child of her body was very intricate. That was the ultimate reason why she never, ever discussed children with Jaime. On one hand, she yearned to bear him a child. Brienne may have been perceived to look like a man. She had a man's courage and strength in battle, but she was a woman in the marriage bed. She was curious about feeling a babe growing inside her and holding one in her arms...
At the same time she honestly wanted to fight in the coming war. And no known hero from history or songs vanquished the inhuman enemy with a swollen belly or a babe in their strong arms. Selfishly, Brienne concluded she was glad for her moonblood and suppressed her womanly cravings. Maybe there will be time later on.
Or not.
Jaime does have children, she told herself a hundredth times. Yes, but I still want to have children... His children.
Just as I still want to be a knight... Protect and defend the weak... Honour the sacred vows...
She ought to know better after everything she had been through, but the old dreams of valour were engraved too deep to vanish overnight. They could not be easily abandoned. Not by the Lady Brienne of Tarth, wed or not, guardian of the beloved lion and the sleeping dragon.
More days came and went spent tending her husband and his dragon, days of being offered food in the village.
There must be something I can do, she thought, short of leaving them, finding a horse and riding to Gulltown or to the Vale to find a raven and send him. Where? To the king? She didn't know where the king was.
And Jaime had begged her to stay. So she stayed and felt useless and loved him more with every new day, determined that she would see him awake and well. Because... because...
Love never fails...
Or if it does fail and fade, it is not love, but its poor imitation of courtly wooing; a pitiful, simpering emotion unworthy of that name; a lie invented by the talentless bards, whose tongues a king like Aerys would have had pulled out with hot pincers.
Where a mere quest for honour could not succeed, love just might.
After all, Brienne thought to herself, she had never found Sansa Stark. It was Sansa who found Brienne and Jaime tied together in the firepit of the Lady Stoneheart, awaiting execution.
And it was the king who changed their fate; the quiet, iron voice of the king, invoking the good will of the Seven.
The voice of a man who had nearly died for love.
xxxxxxxx
When her moonblood was gone, Brienne scrubbed the last cloth she used clean in the newly fallen snow and hung it out to freeze. Later she would let it dry over the fire. The cloths turned cleaner that way. After labouring in the knee-deep snow, she planted herself in front of the fireplace, waiting to feel warm again.
She lowered the damp breeches she was wearing to her knees and placed her broad, strong hands on her hips. She examined the narrow hipbones, feeling out of place and freakish once again. Ludicrous words to be engraved on her tombstone came to mind, Brienne of Tarth, invincible on the battlefield and defeated in childbed.
She pressed her hips hard as if a forceful touch could reshape and widen them. A voice spoke from the rushes, startling her.
"Your legs are perfect and you know it."
"Jaime!"
All thoughts forgotten, Brienne almost choked an unresisting Jaime in a crushing embrace. Slowly, she remembered she should check on Viserion as well.
Outside, the white beast stretched its tail and opened only one of his two eyes, staring at the needles of the tree above. Brienne let him be. Soon, she and Jaime were cooking meat over the fire. Supper tasted so much better in his company.
"A boar killed Robert, remember?" Jaime said, swallowing the crispy, cooked bite of the beastly kingslayer's distant cousin, "What a happy day it had been! The city bells tolled so joyfully!" Brienne cringed at the sentiment of rejoicing at someone's death, but the return of Jaime's arrogance was a most welcome occurrence. It meant her husband was well.
"Cersei served the pig at the feast in the her late husband's honour. And on every feast after that and after that, from what the court whispered, whenever she could find a boar... Robert was not entirely without merit though I did want to kill him on occasions when he backhanded my sister, but-" Jaime's words suddenly faltered.
"He was not Rhaegar," Brienne finished the sentence. The prince whose trust you betrayed as a boy knight. Or that is what you believe. She surmised Jaime never discussed the matter with the king.
"No, he wasn't," Jaime shook his golden mane, "Robert would have had my head, dragonrider or not, if I had killed his father. Or if he learned that I..."
That you sired his children on your sister. I know, my love, I know. Could you stop reminding me if it pleases you? And you still shouldn't have pushed Lord Stark's young son through the window. It would have been the boy's word against yours... You should have risked more to regain honour.
I love you dearly.
"...I wasn't trying to justify my known crimes," Jaime objected, as if he could see the whirlwind within her head.
"The tempest killed King Robert's father, Lord Steffon of cherished memory, not you," Brienne heard herself repeating a well known story about Tarth's former liege lord, eager to steer the conversation away from Cersei. "On sea. Right in front of Storm's End. Only a fool survived it. He is now with Stannis' daughter, I think." Brienne's lips thinned because the story she unwittingly brought up suddenly made her remember Stannis. She hadn't thought about him for so long. He did kill Renly, somehow he had done it... A shadow wielding a magic blade...
Brienne knew now that what she had felt for Renly was not love. But what Stannis had done was surprisingly devoid of any emotion. He merely believed the throne was his by rights. By the grace of the Seven, the Lady of Tarth cursed in silence, Renly was his brother and Stannis should have known better...
If my brother had lived, I would have protected him with my life, and with my dying breath as well.
"I think..." Jaime stuttered, "I think... I really think I should sleep now."
Her dread must have been plain beneath her freckles because he immediately reassured her, "Not like that, I swear. Just rest. Come here, wench, don't make me beg."
As always, she believed him, though the idea of Jaime begging did not entirely lack in appeal. Was the beginning of her trust the beginning of her love for him? Love always trusts... Or was that another forgotten song?
Brienne lay quietly in her husband's arms, observing Viserion folding and unfolding his wings through the crack on the door, which resisted closure. Glad that the hibernation time of dragons seemed to be over for the time being, she sank softly into light sleep. The rushes stirred at night, rustling with sad inhuman voices.
The next grey morning she woke in a tight embrace. All Jaime's muscles were taut, and a familiar stump nested somewhere in the small of her back.
He was wide awake.
"There you are," she said sleepily.
"How long have I been asleep before yesterday?" he inquired, sounding and not only feeling awake, unlike the day before.
"Longer than you care to know," she said sheepishly. "How is Viserion?"
"Up and about since first light. Chasing his tail. Burning squirrels from their holes in the trees. Hunting rats. Itchy to leave, I'd say."
With every nonsense Jaime mentioned, Brienne's goodwill grew more intense. "No maidenly sensibility today?"
"No," Jaime laughed, "not at all..."
"What was it?" she blurted. "Were you both ill?" The confused expression came back to Jaime. "Don't tell me now," Brienne decided to interrupt his chain of thoughts, afraid that he could pass out again. Cold sweat popped under her too-long hair. "You'll tell me while flying. The Seven know I will need a distraction."
Brienne rose giddily from their bed of rushes. She packed their belongings and the remaining provisions from the village. Jaime could hardly succeed in that task one-handed.
She hoped that if Viserion needed to succumb to sleep one more time for whatever reason, he'd have the grace not to do it in the middle of the narrow sea.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The egg was blue with thin veins of bright silver woven into its stone-hard shell, recalling the colour of the new king's and his sister's hair.
Lady Brienne of Tarth was no stranger to ships, though most vessels calling to her island home were not that impressive. There was depth enough for large ships to anchor in the waters of the sapphire island, but there were no riches or gold to foster trade on a large scale.
Now, she stood on board a masterfully constructed galley from some faraway kingdom, and a blue dragon egg was offered back to her.
"My lady," Ser Barristan spoke with calm conviction, "we have had no news from the queen... my pardons, Princess Daenerys, I was so much used to calling her my queen... We haven't heard anything for a moon's turn and that is longer than is her custom since I have been serving her. Viserion is the first dragon we have seen since she's left us. I am sailing for Eastwatch to uncertain destiny, having lost two ships and half of their manning to foul weather. And I would rather that a dragon guards this treasure from avid hands and eyes..."
Daenerys' fleet did not make it far from Gulltown since the princess and her dragon had flown north. A long lasting storm, such as it had never been seen in the small city by the swearing of its citizens, ravished the surroundings. Maybe Viserion just wanted us to weather it when he passed out. The explanation was wishful and probably untrue.
Over her head, Jaime was making loops with Viserion, tearing the fabric of the sky with dragon wings. Brienne could see the shadow of the flying monster through the white tent roof Daenerys had had mounted on the deck, above her private quarters.
The dragon had grown too large in his sleep to land safely on the princess' flagship despite the galley's considerable size. Daenerys had commanded, knowingly, that two of her largest ships of Volantene design were about to accompany them over the narrow sea. They should be able to offer shelter to the dragon in need.
If he grows a bit slower...
"Are you certain this is what the princess would wish?" Brienne expressed a mild doubt. Jaime had not been in the mood for talking so Brienne had to revive her shaky courtesies.
"My pardons, my lady, but it was Viserion who found the egg in Tarth, and it was you who brought it to King's Landing. Who better to take care of it?"
It irked Brienne that Ser Barristan purposefully excluded Jaime from the equation. Jaime was the dragonrider and the first one whom Viserion brought to Tarth to rescue the egg. Jaime didn't know what it was, but still. Aerys can rejoice in seven hells, she thought bitterly, his shade will truly follow Jaime forever...
Where perhaps he should have been haunted by the shade of a boy, flung through the window and crippled... Brienne shivered and told herself Jaime still had many years to live and prove to everyone he did have honour. Will the others see? Or is it only my love for him that makes me see all the truth of him? Of what he is, what he was, and what he could be...?
"The egg," Ser Barristan continued, breaking her reverie for the better. The ways of the world would not change no matter how much Brienne wanted it. "It loathes to be touched..."
Two copper-coloured warriors in leather garb were holding a thick silky cushion where the egg lay, helpless and seemingly bluer than before. She felt as if it were speaking to her in colour when it could not do so in voice, neither of spirit nor of body.
Brienne would have never thought she would be proclaimed a caretaker of the blue dragon egg her father had stolen from the ruins of Summerhall on an idle quest of a suffering widower. The notion was more outrageous than the most fanciful of songs.
She'd also never dreamed that she would marry the Kingslayer, or ride the white dragon with him and be so sick from it that she could scarcely breathe...
Jaime. I love you no matter what.
Brienne stretched her arm. It is a child as well, of sorts, she told herself. It might... it might hatch. It never did in Tarth in many years, but with three dragons in the skies of the world, who could swear that there wouldn't be a fourth one soon? Brienne had no idea what Daenerys Targaryen had done to bring her children to the world. Perhaps we should have asked.
Viserion roared a salutation of orange flames in the russet sky above. The short winter day had not yet fully yielded to dusk. A falling star on the sunset field. Jaime's shadow was a thin line on the dragon's neck, hanging upside down, a position he enjoyed tremendously. Ser Barristan craned his head outside the tent. He studied the daring manoeuvre with the look of disapproval from old age to the follies of youth.
And I am so much younger than my husband and more foolish, good ser. You will see one day.
She touched the egg. The cool blue stone soothed her large palms moulded on weapon hilts. Jaime's skin feels better still. The egg almost turned softer at her thought as if it wanted to appeal to her.
It is blue.
She could think of little else.
When she won a blue cloak in Renly's Rainbow Guard, she was devoted to it. She would protect King Renly, wearing that cloak, until the end of her life. And she had never quite gotten over the loss of her fine blue armour. The armour of cherished memory, just like dead Lord Steffon Baratheon resting on the bottom of the deep grey sea, may the Seven take kindly to his soul.
"I will take it," she said, "I will keep it safe. As I would my own child."
"The Targaryens of old used to put dragon eggs in the cradles of their heirs," Ser Barristan duly noted, "so that they would hatch for a newborn child."
"Then I will keep it safe until such time that there is a baby in the family," Brienne said with nearly insolent determination in case the remark was meant as a slight.
She regretted her defensive words as soon as they had left her mouth. I should have spoken to Randyll Tarly this way, instead of letting him in peace with his thinking of me as a mistake of nature. I wouldn't have changed his views on women who want to fight but I might have at least ruined his day. He deserved it. Not Ser Barristan Selmy.
Ser Barristan gave her a quizzical look of appreciation and a silent approval. A nod of equals.
"You are valiant as you are fair, my lady," he said. "Ser Jaime is not the only one to see that."
Brienne smiled at the unexpected compliment from an old man, hoping that the unwanted concession to emotion did not make her very homely.
When Jaime confessed to feeling numb pain in his entire body after his winter sleep, and not having his habitual strength for verbal sparring, Brienne had hoped to look serious, not pretty, when she faced Ser Barristan. She donned a clean black tunic and trousers on the outskirts of Gulltown before they flew to meet the ships. Very light blond, prickly hair was falling to her waist. The wind had messed it during flying. As usual, a woman like her never looked quite as she intended.
The dragon's sickness had shown one thing. Brienne needed new armour as soon as they reached Volantis and before they went to Meereen. Her family needed her to be able to protect them if illness came again.
And we truly are dragon-kin if Jaime is Aerys' bastard. What she had told Ser Barristan was not meant as a lie, whether Aunt Genna was ever found alive to confirm it or not. She wondered briefly if Jaime's last name should be Hill or Waters if the king did not proclaim he should keep his mother's name and remain a Lannister. I could give him my name if he didn't have one of his own. The notion was entertaining and she thought her husband might hate it. She clutched the dragon egg tightly to her chest.
Next to her, a copper-coloured youth stared at her as if he had seen a woman for the first time in his life. He was at least half a head shorter than her. One of Daenerys' handmaidens eyed her as well. What are they now looking at? Brienne did not understand. Her feet jumped to the fighting stance on their own and she had to make a conscious effort to release her posture. I am among friends or I should be.
A sharp look around revealed a mirror in the back of Daenerys' barbaric tent. Brienne looked into it briefly and saw a lean, tall woman, with slightly tanned skin. The fully black attire and her excessive height made her look more slender than she truly was. Her hair hid the hideous scar on her cheek and her freckles melted into the somewhat amber-pink tan she must have acquired in the air. Her lips had more colour than she had ever seen on them, appearing even larger than the gods had made them.
Must be from all the kissing...
She fought the tendency to cringe and hide. The luminously white-blond hair, washed out by sunlight on dragon's back, was in such remarkable contrast with the blackness of the male garments she wore that its unpleasant sharpness could be overlooked. She looked... intimidating, but in a different way than she was used to.
She may have looked beautiful and she had no idea how a beautiful woman should act so she just behaved like herself.
"Farewell, Ser Barristan," she said very curtly, unable to withstand further the new looking glass judgement of her person. "Until the next time we meet if the gods are good."
A bendable end of the long spiked tail coiled gently around her waist as it did during the days of sickness grasping the trees. She was being lifted up in the air and the sensation was not that unpleasant, not truly. Better than waiting for the hovel roof to fall on your head in a tempest.
Yes, she thought, hoping that the dragon could hear her, I will protect you too, and Jaime, and your unborn brother.
A white invisible presence she hadn't encountered yet carefully considered her words before it withdrew from her head as if it had never been there. Viserion? She shouted inside her mind, but the dragon, if that was him, was gone.
Brienne slowly retook her newly established place on dragon's back, two spikes behind Jaime; the blue dragon egg tucked safely under one of her arms. The space to sit on had become significantly larger and more comfortable since the dragon's latest spurt of growth. She observed the egg, comfortably blue, and then, she knew who the new woman was, the one she nearly failed to recognise in the mirror.
She had never liked to be called Brienne the Beauty even if the name were not only a cruel jape at her expense. And she was not playing a mystery knight in Renly's camp anymore, the fighter who had to hide her face in the melee to make herself acceptable and accepted.
I will not defer to others from now on, in either thought, word or deed. I am who I am.
There had been another name she found more fitting, the name she could wear proudly and openly, as the knight she had always been in her heart, and the lady she had become.
A name not quite ladylike, yet not quite manly, just like she was, almost worthy of a new song.
Brienne the Blue.
xx
Next one up, Davos or Daenerys. Any preferences about the order?