At first, Arya was much surprised by the excellence of the jousting; her decision made as she and Loras Tyrell stood fuming at Aegon and Daenerys' side, about to scream in frustration that they were not participating themselves. But as the tournament progressed, her anger began to abate, somewhat, as she slowly realised that all the knights riding in the tourney held in celebration of her sister's upcoming wedding, had fought in the war of conquest and had lived to tell the tale; meaning that they were either cowards, mavericks or extremely good fighters. All three qualities were sure-fire guarantees of an outstanding show, and Arya reasoned that if she was going to spend an entire day being miserable, she might as well be entertained while the proverbial storm thundered above her head.
A few short feet away from her, Sansa, the sister that she could not avoid forever, seemed to be having similar thoughts. She sat enshrined in a gown of grey brocade; all beauty and grace as her red hair shone like copper in the sun and illuminated the paleness of her cheeks with a silent internal glow. To an outsider, she might have been any bride radiant at the prospect of her wedding: she laughed and bowed her head, chattered delightedly with her ladies, clapped her hands enthusiastically at every victory, and courteously showed concern for each of the many knights injured or brought to the ground as the day progressed. She looked like a young girl living a dream.
She was an excellent actress.
The same could not be said, however, for the thousands of people, both high and lowborn, who merely a year after the end of one of the most vicious wars the kingdoms had ever seen, had turned out not to witness the bringing about of a peace that almost none of them believed in, but to see the spilling of more blood in a setting like a maiden's dream, full of brightly-coloured pennants that snapped in the wind, gorgeously-crafted armour that flashed blindingly in the sun, and ladies in beautiful dresses with handsome lords beside them; an illusion in which the spilling of blood became a worthy and desirable thing, merely because it was done politely, chivalrously, hypocritically.
Arya would have done anything to be a part of that hypocrisy, for however short a time. Competing in a tourney was something she had wanted to do since the day she had learned to ride; since she had discovered what it felt like to feel the might of a horse between her legs. But before the tiniest wisp of that dream had been allowed to come to fruition in her calm and tangled mind, she and Loras had been placed firmly on duty for the day, like naughty children being punished without reason.
'It's no use looking at me like that, Arya,' Ser Barristan had said to her earlier that week, though she had not once voiced her thoughts on the matter, 'His Grace has determined that tensions are running high enough already without a woman competing too. All these enemies congregating in the same place is causing more fighting than the city watch can deal with.'
'Why did His Grace feel the need to punish Loras too?' Arya had replied.
Ser Barristan had looked pointedly at her, and she had understood.
Holding only me back would set the tongues wagging.
Arya looked to the side at Aegon. His face was pale as ivory, and his eyes were bright with monarchy. He looked back at her. And she felt nothing but anger and mild annoyance.
She remembered the first time that she had stood guard over him; on the first night spent at Storm's End after the siege. The entire room had been black and gold with Baratheon livery and half burnt-out candlelight, and Aegon had sat alone at his desk writing letters, with Arya just opposite him at the door.
'What is your name, my lady?' he had asked her.
'Arya Stark, if it please Your Grace,' she had replied in a heavy voice.
At the mention of her family name, he had started, but he had not pursued it. He had returned to his letters as the waves had crashed and roared inhumanly outside; the eternal music of the gods' vengeance. Arya had listened, and watched, and felt, and tried with all her might to ignore the blistering pain in her left arm where an arrow had partially penetrated the plate during battle; each steady beat of her pulse sending splinters of fire roaring agonisingly up into the wound. Then Aegon had begun to pause intermittently in his letter writing, and to cast his violet eyes up at her, and each glance had hurt worse than that accursed hole in her arm, because she had known, immediately, what that glance had meant; and her memory would not let her endure the sight of another person looking at her like that. Still, she had endured it – she had had little choice – and had looked blandly back at His Grace with nameless eyes that did not see, or feel.
As a child, Arya had never been good with sigils, or House names, or House words, preferring instead to give knights and ladies her own names: 'the blue man,' 'the scowling man,' 'the one with the nose,' 'the one who shouts.' Her skills had not improved – for a decade, she had been accustomed to assassinating people named only to her as 'the man who sells insurance,' 'the man who beats his wife,' 'the man who sits before such-and-such a tavern at the Purple harbour,' 'the man who serves the Sealord.' And today, as the tourney progressed, and Loras, bored, began to propose bets in her direction each time two new knights faced each other, she continued to do as she had always done; cataloguing their childish nicknames in her head even as her brother Kingsguard shouted out what he thought would happen to them.
'This one will go down on the first tilt, Arya!' Loras declared of the man with the sun-darkened skin.
'I think not,' Arya protested coolly, 'he clings to his horse like nothing on earth.'
Loras rolled his eyes.
'A hundred gold dragons?'
'How about twenty?'
'I'll take it.'
And so they carried on.
She lost a lot of money. She knew how to see, but he knew how to joust, and loved it, and before too much time had passed, Loras was falling just short of bouncing on the balls of his feet with glee each time he won; his fair sister-in-arms remaining upright and disinterestedly poised despite sharing in his delight at the proceedings.
'Arya, he's going to fall!'
'Why?'
'His horse is terrified of him.'
'Is that a bad thing?'
'Yes!'
'I've heard many other knights say the contrary.'
'Many other knights are idiots.'
When the knight in question fell to the ground, Arya swore under her breath, even as Loras smirked like a Dothraki sacking a city, and suddenly Ser Barristan's voice was thundering in disapproval from behind them; the wrath of the gods in his eyes.
'Loras. Arya. You will focus your attentions on protecting your king, or I shall set about finding Kingsguard who can.'
'Yes, Lord Commander,' Arya and Loras mumbled, and turned back to the tourney; their hearts heavy again.
No sooner had they done so that Loras began to chuckle under his breath along with many of the nobles and commons present, and Arya followed the scent of their laughter to the right end of the lists. The man who had looked inside her, legions of blood swimming heatedly in the magnificent steel of his Lannister armour, was mounting up and accepting a lance from his squire; gripping it powerfully in his left hand as he awaited the beginning of the first tilt. His helmet covered most of his face, but Arya watched his eyes as they focussed serenely and severely on the knight opposite him; measuring and calculating and determining with the precision of a mathematician. He seemed oblivious to the taunts of the crowd, but Arya felt them for him as her blood rose slowly and reluctantly to meet his. And sensing it, his eyes flashed to hers; a spurt of wildfire in her chest, before his opponent became his world again; his opponent, and the lance gripped firmly in his hand.
Arya took a breath as the embers of the flame slowly died, then surged again. And still the crowd hooted and mocked, and Aegon and Daenerys sat quietly on their royal behinds, making no move to stop it.
Apparently they're deaf to their own folly as well as blind to it, Arya thought.
'This will be a fine show!' Loras was jeering, 'I'll bet you fifty dragons he falls off his horse before he so much as meets his opponent!'
'I'll bet you a hundred dragons he doesn't,' Arya graciously proposed, half-bowing to him.
'Are you touched?' Loras chuckled in reply, 'he's past forty. He's old.'
'A hundred dragons, Loras!' Arya half-insisted, half-snapped, sullenly folding her arms and half-choking on the uncharacteristic anger that was suddenly consuming her no one-ness and dining upon it like a pack of wolves.
Loras stared at her.
'By all the gods, you're angry with me,' he exclaimed with undisguised astonishment, 'I didn't even know it was possible for you to be angry.'
'Do we have a deal or don't we?' Arya drawled, ignoring him.
Loras' expression clearly suggested a belief that she had gone mad. Nevertheless, they clapped hands at a bargain and watched intently as the first tilt began.
Ser Jaime was facing a knight in gold and blue who rode a black horse. The horse took the knight forward in a rush of slowness and speed, even as Jaime's horse did the same, and the crowd roared out like all seven hells at once. All the world seemed to contract into the space between the two knights, and they flashed across the space between them in the dreadful, inevitable magnetism that exists between steel and blood.
The force of the first blow of Jaime's lance sent the knight flying out of the saddle at a velocity that was almost comical. When he struck the ground, the sound of his bones shattering within his armour was like the rattle of dice in a cup, even as he lay still and childlike and choking agonisingly on the tip of the lance that was lodged like a dagger in his throat.
His blood stained the sand red. Jaime gave him a cursory glance before trotting away without comment, and once the body had been taken away; the crowd jeering as it was quietly removed from the lists, Jaime Lannister progressed to the next set, and began to carve through the tourney (and through each of his opponents) like a knife through butter; offering his adversaries up like sacrifices.
He was a painter. A painter who only used red. The crowd marvelled at his art, and screamed at it, and called his name as he grew faster and deadlier, even as his lance seemed to grow sharper and harder with every passing tilt. He killed every one of his opponents with a single stroke of his brush; laying their throats and chests and heads bare as summer snow before drenching them in the awful, mighty, beautiful colours of his House.
He might have killed me just as easily when I was a child – and just as beautifully. And I would have known nothing of it. I would only have known the fear, the pain and the darkness, like these men that he is slaughtering now. I would not have thought of beauty. I should not think of it now.
Surely unseating his opponents was enough. Killing them was unnecessary…cruel, even. From what Arya had heard, he had jousted for most of his life – he must know how not to kill just as well as he knew the opposite. But the louder the crowd screamed, the thirstier for blood he seemed to become. He spilled more of it onto the ground, and then more of it. It was horrifying to watch. It was mesmerising.
He rode them all down like a god of death; the power of his horse's body wedded to his own: hardness and endurance and strength. His armour fit him like a second skin; like a shroud drenched in the blood-stained skins of those he sent to meet the Stranger, and his lance was an annexure of himself, as Arya was sure his sword was also; its tip a truer end to his arm than his fingertips. The final tilt, set between him and an enormous knight in green armour, ended with Jaime's lance punching a large, bleeding hole in his opponent's hauberk. The point of the weapon slammed straight through the knight's body and exited on the other side; skewering him like a wild boar. The crowd bellowed out its approval, and the unfortunate knight expired just as noisily; his screams turning to moans, then to gurgles, then to whispers: a cry of pain turned softly and gruesomely into a prayer for death. And while Arya's masters had taught her that death should be a quiet thing, a merciful thing, painless, a Gift, this was…oh seven hells, this was breath-taking.
Her senses felt raw and stricken, and her mind out of focus and shaken. Her heart was pounding hard with lifeblood rediscovered, her breath was trapped dizzyingly in a place between her chest and throat, and as Ser Jaime tore his helmet off and flung it into the dirt, his silver hair emerging from the steel, streaked with blood, she recognised the warmth and the wetness that were aching inside her, and the realisation turned her pale.
No.
As the crowd, forgetful of their earlier disdain, continued to chant Jaime's name, he also flung down his shield, and looked around him at the screaming crowd and applauding courtiers with the face of a lion who did not need their praise. He trotted forwards to the appointed place before the stands where King Aegon and Queen Daenerys sat silver and regal in their rich Targaryen red and black; his lance still clutched in his hand as he faced them.
King Aegon rose to his feet. The lords of Westeros rose with him.
'You are a great warrior, Ser Jaime,' Aegon declared, 'and everything that your legend promises. The bards will sing songs of the feats you have achieved today, and of the role your victory has played in bringing peace to this realm.'
Jaime smirked, and bowed his head in acknowledgment, and from the king's hand he gracefully accepted the champion's purse, and the crown of winter roses which he was to lay in the lap of the woman that he would crown queen of love and beauty.
Tradition, courtesy and the need for peace dictated that it should be his wife-to-be, and as Jaime turned his horse rather obviously in Sansa's direction, Arya knew, with a darkness that she assumed was relief, that since their conversation in the dead of night with the dragons growling in the pit beneath them, he had realised that there was no going back; that peace, or even the faintest possibility of it, was more important than his own desires.
The crown of winter roses dangled from the tip of Jaime's lance like a severed head, and swayed slightly as he suddenly turned his horse about and trotted away from Sansa and back towards the king; an impish grin lighting up his scarred face. He came to a stop directly in front of Arya and Loras, and, because the former was standing upright at guard, offered the crown to her on the tip of his lance with an air of indescribable insolence.
Arya stared hard at Jaime as the crowd fell silent; silently smothering the outward manifestation of her anger as it tightened the muscles in her jaw and threw her entire body into a raging desire to draw her sword and decapitate him where he stood for such a blatant act of provocation. The king, the queen, and the lords of the North and South were all looking on in deadly and unbearable anticipation; some looking at her; some looking at Aegon; all waiting, on the edges of their seats, to see how she would respond to the insult against her sister; how she would face the threat of war that hung heavy in the air like a bloody spectre, waiting for her on the other side of whichever decision she would make.
If she accepted the crown, the North would be offended. If she declined it, the South would be offended. Both sides would rush to defend themselves. And all Seven Kingdoms would once again sink into the blood-stained comfort and familiarity of war, and once again steer clear of the uncharted waters of reconciliation.
Jaime knew this. He knew all of it, and he didn't care; smiling at her as one would at an enemy that one had trapped in a corner.
I was wrong about him, Arya thought, he really does care for no one but himself; for nothing but his own freedom.
And yet the way that he had fought had been beautiful – so unspeakably, achingly beautiful – and in his face she could see that beauty; that beauty, and the space inside him, the missing thing, the missing thing that he had and that she had too.
That's all very well; Arya thought, but none of those things make the man any less of a jackass.
She knew that she should have looked to her King to tell her what to do: to accept the crown, or to reject it, to accept war and to reject peace. She was only a servant of his will, after all, and such a decision should be his alone. But the crowd was beginning to fidget, and Jaime to look surer and surer of himself; and the King and Queen were whispering frantically together; saying nothing to her, doing nothing. And seizing Loras' arm as she murmured something about feeling hot, Arya took a step backwards and quietly pretended to faint.