The Mountains of the Moon were kingdoms of greyness and snow and ice that stretched miles and miles above the rest of the world, making Jaime feel a stranger and a child. The earth, the sky, the very stones seemed a contradiction of natural law and basic common sense; traps to keep the unwanted out and to make them turn away. Every step that he and Arya took brought them to higher ground – he knew it – it made sense – but no part of the colossal circle of white, wild, terrible beauty that they navigated together ever seemed to suggest it; the fog and Jaime's uncertainty turning the mountains themselves into a stone anteroom: an anteroom to another world.

One particularly grey morning, they came to the edge of a lake so swallowed-up by mist that the other side was invisible. Leagues and leagues of water stretched on to dark eternity, great tendrils of mist forming a monstrous mouth in the air that might have been a gateway to the Night Lands. Arya stood staring grimly into the mist; her short hair curling from the humidity, her face deathly pale, and Jaime's heart sank for the first time in days as he was reminded of how cold she had been when he had pulled her out of the Trident; her body limp and bedraggled; her breath, when it had started to return, heavy with words of welcome from the Stranger; and how he had felt a sacrificial knife hover over his entire life as he had watched her go to the darkness, and return, and go, and return.

But she had returned; and as he stood on the edge of that immense body of water at the edge of the Vale of Arryn, thinking of what might have been her death and his, the lake before him turned a deep cobalt blue with the sun, the mountains on the other side rose green and white from the mist, and Arya's alabaster skin flushed red and beautiful as she watched the sun come out and clouds race playfully over the surface of the lake. She looked at him, then, without the slightest trace of guilt or awkwardness, and the corners of her mouth turned up.

'I'm sorry for being so stupid,' she said.

'You're forgiven,' he replied, 'now come here.'

As her slender fingers laced through his and pulled herself closer to him, Jaime remembered watching her face change as Riverrun tore itself apart in the distance; and how he had suddenly seen, in her eyes and her lips and in every curve and line of her face, that it was over; that her love for him was stronger than memory, as his was for her, and that the struggle between them was done.

Of course that didn't mean that the day-to-day bickering and fighting of their togetherness was done. Those returned with a vengeance – and with relief.

Jaime had lived most of his life at Casterly Rock and at King's Landing; in seaside humidity and blazing sun. He was old enough to have known cold, of course – the capital and the Westerlands were bloody freezing in both autumn and winter – but neither of them had been this bloody freezing, this bloody high up or this bloody fucking uncomfortable.

The cold and the altitude of the Mountains of the Moon annoyed Jaime to the point of his taking their very existence as a personal insult. They didn't, however, annoy him half so much as the way that his betrothed seemed to adore both the cold and the altitude as though they were family or old friends. She waxed lyrical about them to the point of tediousness, and she soon got into the habit of laughing like a maniac and pelting him with snowballs whenever they came across one of the crops of snow that seemed to fall overnight on one patch of mountain while completely ignoring its immediate neighbours. Jaime only wished Arya would pay him the same courtesy.

'If you throw another bloody snowball at me, I'm throwing you into the next ravine that we come to!' he growled at one point.

'Nonsense, snow is wonderful!' she shouted back at him, and threw two snowballs at once, hooting as they caked his hair in silvery whiteness.

Arya had never been playful before – except when making love – and though Jaime found her constant obsession with the fucking snow madly irritating, he also loved the rawness and the heat of this new (and, he suspected, old) part of her as it bubbled wildly out of her, like a spring that had been stopped up for centuries.

The snow reminds her of home, he thought, it brings back some of who she was before.

But just as the thought occurred to him, Arya came running to him; her clothes and hair sopping wet; her cheeks flaming red like life, and she whispered to him quite earnestly:

'Wherever you are is my home. It doesn't matter if there's any stupid snow.'

Jaime knew that she wasn't the sort who usually made grand declarations or speeches. He wasn't the sort either. Silence was always better, because the best things didn't need saying every day. So he touched her cheek and said nothing in return; letting her see, in his face, that he was glad it was one of those days.

Jaime knew that she wondered and worried constantly about Sansa, and about what they were going to do when they reached the Eyrie. He did too, though he never breached the topic. Almost from the moment that they had left King's Landing, their journey had become a race after themselves rather than after a missing girl; Sansa fading from their minds and becoming lost along the way as they had hurt each other, pushed each other away and crashed together again in a circle of despair and misery. But the circle was over now, and so was the hurt; and Sansa had once again taken her rightful place at the centre of their journey. The next step would be admitting that neither of them had the slightest notion of what to do when they found her, but neither of them was ready to take it yet.

One day shortly after noon, they entered a wood to shelter from a vicious eastern wind that was stinging and slicing into exposed and unexposed skin with such Valyrian efficiency that remaining in the open air would have been both unwise and impossible. They found snow fighting a beautiful war with the sun and the trees; sparkling whiteness dripping off the branches of the elms like diamonds and covering the ground in lakes of ice while the sun exploded inside them; making the ground slippery to walk on and Jaime regretful for the loss of the horses. Arya was enjoying herself tremendously; sprinting ahead of him until she was just out of sight, agile as the grey northern wolf that she was, before reappearing and jogging rapidly back to him again; never requiring him to come to her.

The deeper they went into the wood, the thicker the labyrinth of leaves above them became. An emerald darkness began to smother the sun, and eventually, Arya was running to and fro across a forest floor of hard, brown earth; the seconds between her disappearances and reappearances growing ever more numerous, and to Jaime, ever more worrying.

'Stark!' he called out during the last of these breathless pauses, 'could you stop fooling around for two seconds together? You're making me nervous!'

Jaime expected to hear a testy reply, or at best a laugh at his 'nervousness.' What he heard instead was a tremendous, primal roar and the sound of swords being drawn. The air around him evaporated so quickly that he gagged on it, and his heart surged poison instead of blood as he tore across the space between them; the din of it almost drowning out the sounds of the blades clashing viciously together just beyond his vision.

'Arya!' Jaime shouted, drawing his weapon as he ran, 'Arya!'

An inhuman scream answered him, and an equally inhuman silence and

Oh gods. If something's happened to her, if something's happened…

'Does anybody else want to die?' he heard Arya roar out into the trees, his heart soaring as he heard her voice, 'I'm right here! Are you afraid of a little girl?'

He came upon her moments later, unharmed and in a state of indescribable anger; standing, sword bloodied, over the bodies of two Hill tribesmen that she appeared to have chopped in half. She ran to him before he could speak, her hands clutching his elbows hard.

'There are more of them; run back and hide!' she commanded ruthlessly.

'Like hell!' he hissed, his blood roaring in indignation.

'You can't fight yet, stupid, you're not ready!'

'Tyrion says talking to them helps.'

'We're past talking, now will you please go!'

'I will not!'

There was a sudden, manmade rustling from the trees all around them, making Arya whirl around and draw her sword again, but still their enemies did not appear, and they remained alone among the sighing trees. Jaime held the tip of the sword up, and slid backwards into his water dancer's stance.

'They're playing with us,' he murmured, Arya bristling with anger and wolf blood beside him, and she spat onto the bodies of the tribesmen she had slain and whispered to him with genuine fear in her voice.

'Jaime. Please. Go.'

'I. Will. Not.'

No sooner were the words out of his mouth that fierce, fur-clad warriors, some of them taller than Gregor Clegane, began to melt rapidly out of the mist; their steel raw and diseased and their armour just as bad; ten of them, fifteen, twenty; far too many to defeat; but as they charged, Arya was chuckling under her breath, just as Jaime would have done at her age. She stood rigidly still and watched them come, and when she struck her first blow, sending a man's head flying clean off his shoulders and into the dirt, Jaime could tell that she clearly intended to take the whole lot on by herself.

She must be mad.

Jaime gripped his sword in his left hand and sent blood showering and gurgling and gasping as he impaled his first kill since the loss of his hand. He danced through the fierceness and the strength and the clumsiness of the enemy as the sounds their feet made against the earth and their steel against the air were painted onto their living forms before his eyes, showing him what to do and where to strike; and his mind was as wide and gloriously open as it had been on the day that he had finally disarmed Arya; his blade against her throat, and her words in his mouth, and the heat of her body on his. He concentrated madly as he killed, on the shapes and the words and the rightness of the sword in his left hand, his left; and for a while the rightness was there like a song in his blood as he maimed and killed and knew that he was good at it. But then the void began to open up; the void where his right hand had been; and he called desperately on the words and the thoughts that Arya had taught him and that he had taught himself; calling on them to fill up the thing that was wrong as it howled louder and louder with each new man he killed.

A mass of contradictory signals began to pass through his mind and choke it up. The dance of Westeros invaded his instincts and spread to his body like a plague; his muscles singing one song and his mind singing another until moving and thinking and fighting became such an excruciating conflict that he wanted to fall to his knees and vomit from the nausea. As he struck a clumsy blow that glanced off a man's helmet, he felt his body turning to face his opponent and his knees beginning to straighten, and 'Side face!' he heard Arya scream; every muscle in his left arm unravelling and weakening; each blow he struck as painful as hitting a hot iron with his bare hands.

He heard Arya cry out again, this time in pain, and as he turned and took his eyes off his own opponent, knowing all the while that it would probably mean his death, he saw her disarmed by a formidable-looking warrior who twisted her wrist to the point of snapping it in half. He jerked her upwards to face him; his fingers fastening around her neck as he drew his dagger and as Jaime felt the wind knocked out of his body; his attacker's weight crushing all remaining breath from him as he hit the ground. A wild-eyed face appeared mere inches from his, and a knife, ragged-bladed and recently-bloodied, plunged so rapidly towards his throat that he swore he could hear the air being torn asunder.

The man's eyes were the colour of moss, and had something of the inevitable in them that made Jaime think he might have been staring into the eyes of the Stranger. But then the tribesman's body was knocked from his in a riot of grey fur and gnashing teeth and blood, and his enemy was screaming horribly and gurgling like a stuck pig as Jaime slowly turned his head, afraid of what he might see, but curious nonetheless.

It was a wolf.

A bloody wolf, grey and beautiful and wild…and making a veritable feast of tearing the tribesman's throat out.

Jaime sat up slowly and warily, the beast not paying him the slightest attention; and, unconvinced that this lack of interest would be lasting, he felt panic rise in his chest as he looked about him and saw that the entire thrice-damned wood was full of wolves, knocking men over like dolls and carving them up for supper; their muzzles red and their eyes bright.

'What in seven fucking hells – '

Jaime scanned the woods for Arya; his heart leaping as his eyes found her alive and sitting upright against a tree trunk; her arms clutching her knees to her chest and the wolves ignoring her for the time being. Jaime leapt to his feet and tore across the forest floor towards her; intending to take her and run before the beasts got it into their brutal lupine heads that they were still hungry.

Arya gave no sign that she saw him coming, though he must have been in her view all the time, and as Jaime flung himself onto the ground in front of her and took hold of her shoulders to shake her, he cried out in horror; his voice warping and shattering inside him as he looked into her eyes.

They had turned white.