The Kingswood was quiet around Father's tent, so quiet that even the leaves did not stir; the trees green and dead; soundless and wordless. Jaime did not like silence; and stillness such as this the night before a battle would have troubled him in another time and place. But the argument the Stark girl had put to him shortly after midnight, while they sat watching Father staring at his maps, was so blatantly absurd that he had forgotten almost entirely about the ominous silence. And only a deaf man would deny that the two of them were more than making up for it.
'I still don't agree with you!' Jaime insisted.
'Then you're stupid!' the Stark girl retaliated.
'What kind of idiot goes into battle without armour?' he demanded.
'What kind of idiot doesn't listen when I'm talking?' she shouted back at him, 'I didn't say that soldiers should dispense with armour altogether, just that wearing so much of it weighs them down and gets in the way. How can you not see that?'
Jaime leaned forward in his chair, his wine glass threatening to break in his fist.
'Maybe I'm too busy worrying about any idiot in the world suddenly gaining the power to chop my arm off while I'm busy with something else!'
'Plenty of arms get chopped off in battles when their owners are busy with something else!'
'Don't change the subject!'
The Stark girl threw up her hands in exasperation.
'I'm not!' she persisted, 'if you weren't trapped in layers and layers of boiled leather and plate and steel and the gods only know what else, you'd be so fast that Ser Any Idiot In The World wouldn't get anywhere near you in the first place!'
'I'm fast enough with my armour on, thank you very much!' Jaime snapped.
She snorted.
'Having seen you how you move with your armour off, I don't want to know how slowly you move when you've got it on!'
'Stop this at once!' Father snapped from his traditional place behind his desk, 'your quarreling sets my teeth on edge.'
'He started it,' the Stark girl insisted.
'Quiet, girl!' Father barked, and she settled back into her chair, pouting sullenly.
She'd stop doing that soon enough if she realised how funny it makes her look, Jaime thought.
They were a day's march from King's Landing, and most of the afternoon and evening had been spent finalising battle plans with the Tyrells; the most spectacularly boring collection of people that Jaime had ever met. The Stark girl had poured wine for the last few hours of war council, Father having reduced his new cupbearer to a fit of hysteria after the boy spilt wine on the same map three times in a row, and none of the armoured men about the council table had spared her so much as a glance, even after meeting her as Arya Stark.
Knowing the name of the person pouring your wine doesn't necessarily make you want to know them better, Jaime thought, but still. She's a high born girl. The average lord would be horrified at such a thing: a noblewoman serving wine like a common servant.
Then it occurred to him how adept the girl had become at making herself invisible; at throwing off her name and bearing none at all. That sort of thing did not disappear overnight. Nor did the effects of it.
You haven't considered that the Tyrells are rather occupied with the salvation of the realm at present, not to mention with the advancement of their House. You're only noticing these things because you look for her and look at her and do a lot of other things to her that you shouldn't be doing in the first place.
'Girl,' Father said, pulling Jaime away from his thoughts, 'tell me what you thought of Mace Tyrell.'
'He's the dullest person I've ever met, my lord,' the Stark girl responded.
'And how does his being dull affect his ability to help win battles?' Father asked testily.
'Not in the least,' the girl acknowledged, 'not this time, anyway, because he isn't leading the vanguard. If he were, you'd be in trouble.'
'Why?'
The girl shrugged.
'You need a personality to lead a van.'
Father's lips twitched slightly, a sure sign that he was fighting down a smile.
'Lord Stannis doesn't have the tiniest pinch of what you could call a personality,' Father continued, 'and yet he has twenty thousand men, and poses the greatest threat to the capital since Robert's Rebellion.'
'He has twenty thousand men in his whole army,' the girl drawled, 'not just in the van.'
'And what of his numbers?'
'The majority of his so-called numbers are miserable cowards that are only his because the Red Priestess and her magic were so good as to stick a sword in Lord Renly's back.'
'We have spoken of this nonsense, girl.'
She ignored that, and continued.
'Stannis' men don't love him, and they don't fear him. That will bite him in the arse at some point.'
If Cersei or Tyrion or I had ignored him like that, he would have murdered us. Murdered us.
But Father took a sip of wine and made no comment as the girl opened her mouth to speak again.
'Did I hear you say that the Red Priestess has not remained at Dragonstone, my lord?' she asked.
'You did,' Father replied, 'though Littlefinger's spies, and Varys,' have reported that she is not with Stannis' host either.'
'So where is she?' the girl pondered, not sounding too concerned by the question.
'Maybe she's casting spells on a beach somewhere.' Jaime interjected mockingly.
'Oh will you shut up, Kingslayer?' the girl snapped at him.
Jaime watched her glaring at him, her eyes harder than castle-forged steel as she pronounced the name; her lips seeming to revel in every last syllable of the name that wasn't truly his; her jaw tightening – King – her tongue rolling beautifully off the back of her teeth – slayer – just as it had rolled off the back of his earlier that day, tasting like battle, and fury.
Shall I take you right here on the carpet and teach you my name till you scream it aloud? Jaime challenged her silently, my real name?
He took some small pleasure in the beautiful flush that filled the Stark girl's cheeks as he felt his thoughts burn into his face. Then she looked up, to a point beyond Jaime's shoulder, and the red began to drain rapidly out of her; turning her to paleness and greyness as she rose slowly to her feet, her arm seeming to pull through water as it moved to the Valyrian steel dagger at her waist, yanked it from its sheath and threw it with deadly precision. By the time a sharp clang of metal on metal announced that she had missed, the sound of it like a death knell, Jaime had risen from his own seat, turning, feeling as though he were walking through mud, his eyes searching for whatever she was attacking; his gaze falling on it, not comprehending it.
It had no shape, and hardly seemed to have substance; just a shadow spreading across the floor like a cloud of soot erupting from a fireplace and bringing the wind and the cold with it. The Stark girl was turning, and Jaime was moving, and by the time both of them had looked across the room towards his father, the shadow had coiled its way up the old man's body to his back, where it emerged as an unnatural, faded ghost of a man that roared menacingly as it drove a sword into Father's back and out through his chest.
As the blood spurted; as the leaves outside began to rustle again; as the Stark girl threw another knife, time returned to its usual shape, and passing. Her dagger was buried up to its hilt in the tent pole, having passed right through a dark thing which now no longer existed; leaving no sign that it had been there at all except the blood on the floor and Father slumping forwards in his chair, falling.
Jaime leapt forward and caught him as he fell, seizing his shoulders and pushing him upright again; the heat of Father's chest beneath Jaime's already-bloodied fingers, his ice blue eyes alive…and blazing.
'He's still alive,' Jaime muttered, his heart leaping, 'he's still – get a maester!'
But the Stark girl was running for the flap of the tent already, and as he heard her shout for the maester's tent and bark at the guard to allow no one to enter, Jaime felt his father's hand seize a fistful of his shirt and pull him closer; his voice as firm as it had ever been, distorted only by the blood spilling out of his mouth and onto his chin.
'Listen to me,' Father growled fiercely, 'you listen to me. Cersei will kill her. She'll kill her.'
Jaime pressed harder on the wound with his fingers, more blood flowing with every heartbeat, his father's face pale and perfectly calm as he repeated the words:
'Cersei will kill her. She'll kill her.'
'Father, what – '
The old man cut across him.
'Cersei will support a new sibling only as long as I live to command her to. When I no longer do, when I can no longer bring her to heel, she will discredit the girl and kill her without hesitation and we cannot let that happen; you can't let that happen. Do you understand?'
Jaime shouted over his shoulder for the fucking maester to hurry up as another wave of blood surged over his hands and out of his father's mouth. The smell of blood had never made his head spin before. Never. Before.
'The maester's coming,' Jaime heard the Stark girl say from right beside him, and she clasped her tiny hands roughly over his as another swell of blood pulsed out of Father's heart; leaking between Jaime's fingers and trickling onto the girl's, painting them the same colour.
He's going to die, Jaime realised, even if the maester comes, he's going to die.
Father looked perturbed and unafraid, as though being stabbed in the chest were the greatest inconvenience in the world, and he glanced once again at Jaime, his eyes commanding him, begging him.
'Don't let it happen,' he repeated, his voice growing weaker, 'you do not let it happen.'
'I won't,' Jaime replied, his voice perfectly steady as Father's eyes came to rest on the girl, his eyelids growing heavier, blinking less often.
He has such long eyelashes, Jaime thought, I'd never noticed before.
Father smiled briefly at the girl.
'You resemble her,' he said.
Then his eyes closed once more, not flickering open again, and the thunder of his heartbeat exhaled hoarsely beneath Jaime's fingers, rasping, coughing, and stopping.
Jaime seemed, then, to be looking at himself from the entrance to the tent as he tried to lower his hands again and again, the girl stopping him each time, her eyes the colour of night.
'No,' she said, pressing her hands down harder, 'no.'
'Arya – '
'No.'
The maester arrived, and still she would not let go, her hands bathed in Lannister crimson; as her mind had been for four years; drowning in it, learning from it, becoming it.
'Arya,' Jaime murmured.
She shook her head vehemently, tears pulsing down her cheeks.
'Arya,' he repeated gently, 'let go.'
'No.'
Jaime slid one bloodstained hand from beneath her palms and covered both her hands in it, trying to coax them away. Her fingers burned worse than all the seven hells put together.
'Arya,' he said, 'he's – '
'No,' she growled, her fingers clawing painfully into the hand that still remained beneath hers.
She's going to break.
'Guard,' Jaime called.
'No…'
'Guard!'
'No, Tywin, NO!' she screamed, screaming louder as she was pulled away, struggling fiercely and feebly, wanting to do damage, too distraught to remember how.
'Take her out,' Jaime ordered, his voice shaking as the guard finally achieved a firm grip on her waist, 'please take her out of here, take her away from here – '
'No!' the Stark girl screamed, 'no! Let go of me! Let me go!'
Her cries were all he heard as men began to enter the tent, men in cloaks and armour the colour of his hands, his dead father looking as concentrated and stern behind his desk as he had looked five minutes ago; the maps of King's Landing still spread out before him, his wine glass still half-full, the shadow of his lips on the rim.
'Jaime.'
Uncle Kevan's face was white as summer snow, his eyes the colour of dust settling in on fallen stone.
Jaime glanced down at his hands and pressed them together. The blood felt an inch thick.
He was being asked what happened. He was being asked who did it. He was being asked where the weapon was. He was being asked what the fuck they were going to do next.
'Fetch me some water,' Jaime said, 'I need to wash my hand.'
