'Fuck!'
Jaime spat out another ten obscenities before slamming Tyrion's chamber door shut and cursing his lying bastard of a brother for being four feet tall and impossible to find; and without warning, the entire, endlessly long corridor in the Tower of the Hand began to shake as though heaven and earth were being rent asunder. A thundering, powerful, harrowing screech pierced the air and crashed into Jaime's mind like a tidal wave of grief and horror, and he was flung off his feet and into the opposite wall as every window around him smashed. He felt shards of glass hitting his face; some cutting him; some glancing off him like raindrops. And he heard that infernal cry on the air once again and could not allow himself to contemplate what it might mean; but he leapt to his feet nonetheless, blood streaming down his face, and went to a window, a window frame, and he saw them, all three of them, huge, infernal shadows against the stars; circling, then diving, then opening their jaws.
Mountains of fire were exploding from the mouths of the dragons and roaring into the walls of the Red Keep like missiles. Glass no longer exploded, glass melted, and turrets and battlements and the white sword tower and the entire west wing were burning and collapsing; and suddenly the hordes of Northerners roaming the halls screaming 'Justice for the Starks' and the fact, not lost upon him, that every troop of black cloaks he had met that night had tried to kill him, no longer mattered; only the memory and the boiling rage of Casterly Rock and Lannisport and what those fucking dragons had done.
A chorus of laughs and roars and shouts made him step back from the window into the path of the group of black cloaks that were rounding the corner at the far end of the corridor, and as another shriek sounded from the beasts in the sky above them, Jaime drew his sword and faced them down; not caring how many of the fuckers there were and determined to drag as many of them down to hell with him as he could.
'Come at me, you cunts!' he roared.
The men obliged him; the dragons on their breastplates glinting coldly; and the sight made him grip his sword harder and grin at the thought of the blood inside them. But they were freezing suddenly in their tracks, abruptly and in unison, and crying gruesomely out as though they had all been felled by the same great, unseen blade, and crumpling to the floor and hitting the floor and dying; and Arya was standing behind them; her left hand flung out in front of her as though she'd just thrown a dagger.
Jaime was thrown off his feet and landed hard on his back as the corridor was gripped by another spontaneous earthquake; the child of dragon screams, or the collapse of the halls around them. He tried to rise, and couldn't; the pain in his back turning his bones to powder. Arya appeared half-upside down in his vision; ignoring both him and the dust raining down on her head, and crouching down beside one of the corpses; dagger at the ready. The image of her swam as Jaime blinked and fought and called the pain into himself, and she was wearing a brown leather belt that he'd never seen before; extending diagonally across her body from her right shoulder to her left hip, and decorated with a dozen battle scenes imprisoned one below the other in embroidered frames no larger than tinder boxes. The tinder boxes soon turned out to be compartments for the storage of the gods only knew what, and Jaime stared silently as Arya wordlessly began to dig…something…out of the spine of each corpse and deposit it in the top compartment of her belt; each something still covered in blood and gore.
She remained at work when the air once again filled with the shouts of men at arms, and Jaime had scarcely wondered where the fuck these people found the energy to climb all the stairs in the Tower of the Hand when there must have been easier killing to be found elsewhere, when another group of black cloaks appeared, and Arya kept butchering the corpse she was occupied with as though nothing in the world was the matter.
'ARYA!' Jaime shouted; almost screaming aloud at the pain as he tried to sit up, and she rose with an eerie kind of calm; her dagger still clutched in her hand, and stood quiet as stone as she watched the men in black and red, and waited for them to come to her.
Her speed was incredible. He could see every muscle in her body twisting and stretching taunt and filling up each thrust she made with the might of her entire body and mind working together in the power of a single, diminutive point of the blade that she held in her hand. She moved from man to man like a wraith; her form blurring as her dagger, her true hand, jabbed tiny, identical, deadly holes in the throat of one man, in the inner arm of the next, in the wrist of the one after that; and life would shoot from each man in crimson fountains and jets of blood that made each of them fall rapidly to earth like sacks of meat; murdered by the strength of their own heartbeat. It was the kind of game that had no time for second thoughts, or maiming, or chivalry, or tourneys, or legendary duels that lasted for days. It was designed only for death; for killing and killing quickly, and she was death's pale and beautiful child in Kingsguard leathers, who danced through airborne drops of blood, faster even than them; her work cold, methodical, alien, glorious. As the last man fell to earth, she inexplicably knelt beside her victim and plunged her dagger into his throat a second time; and at the death rattle of his breath her eyes flashed upwards to Jaime's like the glint of sunlight on Valyrian steel, and in them he saw the fire that he had been searching for in the seemingly glacial way that she ended life. It was a fierce joy that he knew; that he lived for, and he could see it burning bright in her and parting her lips and making her breathe deeper as she slowly pulled her dagger from the corpse.
The floor rattled once again, and the night sky screamed with dragonfire, and Arya was sheathing her dagger and glancing in horror at the shattered windows; then back at him.
'Can you stand?' she asked.
'Of course I can stand!' Jaime snapped.
She didn't even stay to watch him do it; leaping to her feet as he painfully rose to his, and dashing to a window frame. The largest of the dragons was circling, and preparing to attack once again, and as Jaime joined Arya at the window and observed the tightness in her lips and suppressed remorse pulsing in her throat, he asked her, though he already knew the answer:
'How did they get out?'
'I let them out,' she replied without hesitation; her eyes still fixed on the dragon.
Jaime stared at her in disbelief and did not even try to conceal his fury.
'Why the fuck would you –'
She turned to face him; her fury matching his.
'If you think for one second that I would let that little shit Aegon have them –'
'Are you completely mad?'
'Fuck yourself, Jaime!'
'Do you have any idea what you've done?'
'No, I'm blind, deaf and stupid!'
'I couldn't agree more!'
The dragon attacked; the fire dislodging and melting stone far closer to the Tower of the Hand than was comfortable, and tremours once again began to shake the corridor around them and dislodge red dust from the ceiling that plummeted down onto the pool of corpses and covered them like earth.
Jaime blinked as another screech of triumph rent the air, and Casterly Rock was burning around him and turning him cold each time he closed his eyes; making him angrier at himself and far angrier at her.
'I didn't know that they would do this!' Arya was protesting hotly.
'You decide to loose three fucking dragons into the largest city in Westeros and it doesn't occur to you that they might start burning things down?' Jaime shouted at her, 'are you fucking insane?'
'Thousands more people would have died if I had left them where they were!' Arya yelled in reply.
'Bullshit!' Jaime spat.
'I did what needed to be done!' Arya shouted; a kind of cruelty creeping into her voice that Jaime suspected was intended for herself as much as for him, 'and I don't give a fuck if you don't understand why!'
That statement reminded him far too much of himself for his liking – particularly the blatant untruth of the last part – and ignoring it; he continued to make furious enquiries as to the state of her mental health.
'Since we're on the subject of insanity,' Jaime said, 'what are you doing up here in the first place? Shouldn't you be in a secret passageway somewhere; helping those silver-haired shits run for their miserable lives?'
'Why aren't you running for your miserable life?' Arya scoffed.
'I had to know that my brother hadn't been burned to a crisp!' Jaime barked.
'So did I!' Arya shouted; the fingers of her left hand beginning to twitch uncontrollably.
That made Jaime pause.
She's lying. At least partially.
No matter. So was I.
Arya was trying very hard to stare out of the window and appear absorbed.
'Is – is he here?' she asked; cocking her head towards Tyrion's door, 'in his chambers?'
'No,' Jaime replied shortly.
There was a slightly awkward silence, and cessation of movement; except for Arya's fingers; which seemed to have acquired a life of their own as they danced like spiders on a sheet of ice. And as the idea of lying once again entered his mind, he began to remember the words that Arya had just spoken to him and not spoken to him, strange words and absences of words that he should have questioned, but that had disappeared beneath anger and amazement as soon as they were spoken, or not spoken: if you think for one second that I would let that little shit Aegon have them…the no-answer, the question, with which she had greeted his inquiry about the king and queen that she should now be protecting, instead of standing up here with him watching the world end.
'Arya,' Jaime said, 'where are the king and queen?'
She did not reply for a moment.
'The queen has been injured,' Arya responded, 'Ser Barristan and Loras are seeing her out of the castle. She intends to declare war the moment she can find a pen and paper.'
'On whom?' Jaime growled.
Arya did not reply.
Jaime watched her wrestle with the words as they disappeared on the way to her mouth, and he thought. He thought of the mysterious desire each black cloak seemed to have acquired for seeing his head on a spike. He thought of the screeching, triumphant cries: 'Justice for the Starks.' He thought of the talk at the wells that Lady Sansa shared more than just her ideas with King Aegon. And he thought of the thousand contradictory reports he had heard from the countless terrified wedding guests and servants that had crossed his path in the halls: 'the North was offended that the king retired before the bedding,' 'two lords had a quarrel over a courtesan,' 'an assassin tried to kill the queen and missed,' 'Lady Sansa ordered her Northerners to kill every man in the hall,' 'a Northern lord stabbed a Southern lord and war came again.'
The queen has been injured…
'Someone wants a war,' Jaime ventured.
'The king wants a war,' Arya corrected.
Jaime cocked an eyebrow at her.
'He'd start a war just to kill the queen? That's rather –'
'Stupid?'
'Or brilliant.'
'What do you mean?'
'Nothing. It's the sort of thing Tyrion would say.'
Arya glanced rapidly out of the window at the flames devouring stone and sky, and then at Jaime. Her eyes were wild.
'We have to find him.'
Jaime nodded.
Arya turned away from him and set off down the corridor without another word; stepping gingerly over the corpses with far more care than any of them deserved. Jaime was about to follow her when the window frames began to shake with more power than ever before, and the screeches of the dragons to seem louder and more terrible. The sensation tore his gaze away from Arya's slowly retreating form; drawing it out of the window and towards the sky, and the black dragon in his sight began to dive downwards, to the right, to the foot of the adjacent wing of the Tower of the Hand, where it opened its jaws and vomited a hurricane of tall, screaming flames through the great iron doors.
They melted.
Jaime watched, mesmerised, disbelieving, as the inferno blasted its way through antechambers and halls and corridors; up flights of stairs and down them; blowing out windows and showering the night air with stars made of half-melted glass. A new serpent, a serpent made of fire, snaked upwards and upwards with an unholy, unquenchable, unstoppable speed, as though every floor in the tower were nothing but a fragile wooden step in a treacherously flammable spiral staircase, and Jaime felt the floor beneath his feet beginning to hiss and crack seven hells, everything beneath us is burning too, the entire tower is burning, and as the windows, walls and battlements level with him in the adjacent wing went up in flames; he realised what that meant, and his heart stopped in his chest.
The shock to his body made him jerk away from the window, and turn.
Arya, clearly still determined to find Tyrion despite the chaos, was halfway down the corridor and running; running straight into a place that was empty, and howling, and waiting, and that would soon be smothered and crushed under the weight of fire; and the world around Jaime was plunged into darkness; as dark as it had been the first time that she had run from him; nine years old and wild; a little girl that he had tried to kill because his fucking sister had told him to. He had let her run, all those years ago, but if he let her run now, she would do more than sprain her ankle. She would die.
He had no idea how he reached her in time. He might have shouted…or perhaps he simply ran faster than he had ever run before…or maybe she hadn't been as far away as he had imagined. But whatever he did, however he did it, he could hear the flames tearing through the nearby walls and corridors like paper, with the might, with the power, of an approaching army; and in the split second between seizing Arya's elbow and beginning to run back the way that he had come, the wall of fire came roaring around the corner; its jaws extending from floor to ceiling, and he was yanking Arya around, and running like a madman, and propelling her straight through the door of Tyrion's chambers as though she were a battering ram.
They dashed through the anteroom, the council chamber and the solar; Arya slamming each door shut behind them, though she must have known that it would buy them split seconds at best.
As the sound of fire demolishing the anteroom door ripped through the air, they reached the bedchamber that had once been Father's. Jaime tore across the room to the hearth, reached out for the hidden mechanism and prayed to the Seven that Cersei hadn't somehow convinced herself that sealing the secret passageway after Father's death would discourage defiance.
She hadn't.
Jaime seized Arya by the collar and roughly shoved her through the hole in the fireplace floor; and as he followed suit; almost falling as he slipped down the first rungs of the ladder and released the catch that pulled the entrance closed above him, he observed Arya several feet beneath him; holding onto the ladder with one hand and glaring up at him; her feet dangling precariously into the empty air.
'Next time there just happens to be a twenty foot drop,' she growled, 'tell me first.'
She gained a proper hold and soon disappeared from view; gliding into the darkness beneath him like a sailor descending a rope. Jaime could hear the sound of the dragonfire as it decimated Tyrion's bedchamber, and the threat of it roared above him as he slowly and awkwardly followed Arya down into the black; screaming at himself to hurry up, and expecting, every moment, to feel flames bursting into the space above his head and melting the stone of the entrance; the steel of the ladder; Arya's flesh; his flesh; their bones; and sending both of them crashing and burning to their deaths.
Nothing happened.
He could hear the flames, he could feel their heat on his face, he could smell their destruction, and yet they had no power here; inexplicably kept at bay by one, miserable piece of stone when the entire fucking Red Keep was burning.
Bloody Targaryens, Jaime thought; the stench of burning stone hot in his nostrils and the stench of failure black in his mind.
Tyrion was in the castle somewhere; out there somewhere; alive…or turned to ash…dead, most likely; of course he's fucking dead don't delude yourself don't be a fool he's dead and you didn't save him. Because he wasn't the first person you thought of when you realised what was happening, was he?
At the bottom of the ladder, when his self-condemnation had reached the point of self-cruelty, he found Arya standing against a wall with a face like horror, and stubborn grey eyes full of tears that she couldn't allow to fall, and he knew that she was thinking the same thing. The shirt-cuff peeping out from beneath the right sleeve of her white leathers was blood red, and a stream of the stuff was leaking gently across her hand, down her index finger and dripping onto the floor. Nothing in her face told him if it was her blood, or someone else's.
Looking above him, to the smell and the heat of the dragonfire, and the sight of the ladder leading from chaos down into darkness; he saw fire glinting in the small dragon sconces above their heads; lighting up stone eyes, jaws, teeth: little infernos that could not destroy; that could hardly maim at all. And he remembered the last and only time that he had come to this place; when it had been so dark that his hand had been invisible before his face, and he had not known if the ladder extended for ten feet, or a hundred; he had not known if he was descending to a single chamber, or to a labyrinth. Then the guards had lit the sconces with torches, and this chamber, at least, had been flooded with light; and Jaime realised that today, now, he shouldn't be able to see at all, because he and Arya had brought no torches with them; because when he had opened the entrance to this place, the world beneath him had been black as pitch.
'I lit the sconces,' Arya mumbled.
Jaime looked at her, then up at the sconces, and down again.
'How?' he demanded.
She shrugged, sank to the floor, and didn't reply, and Jaime watched, silent and helpless, as the colour drained from her face and the guilt tore out her tongue.