8. Gendry

They had left the Kingsroad nearly two weeks ago, and were taking back roads, sometimes little more than paths, through the Riverlands. Anguy and Lem determined the route for the most part, drawing on their many years wandering this country with the Brotherhood, but occasionally Kyra would suggest an alternative, usually even smaller path, to cut around a town, or to avoid a popular river crossing. The trees were mainly bare now, so thankfully there was little underbrush to cut through; far worse was the mud, that stopped the horses and sometimes meant laborious, difficult detours over rocky, wild ground.

Every night they shared a bedroll. She would slip in beside him and press her back against his chest, tucking her head into the hollow between his collarbone and chin, her hair tickling his beard. He would wrap an arm around her, his big forearm easily spanning the distance between her navel and her shoulder, and listen to her heartbeat. She was so small. It never took him long to fall asleep.

She didn't seem so small during the day, when she made lewd jokes and argued with Lem over the best way to go, lazing in her saddle like she was born in it. She didn't seem so small when they were making love, encounters that were as a rule brief and frenzied, in a clearing on a bed of leaves, by a stream, against a tree. Encounters that left both of them marked. Gendry flushed when one of the men noticed a bruise on his neck, or the scratches on his back when he changed his shirt. He was glad they couldn't see the marks his fingers left on her thighs, or the faint bite marks on her breast. He told himself, every time, that next time he would be gentle, but then she would bite him, or grab his hair, or insult him. She somehow always knew how to make him angry, and she used it to get what she wanted.

He caught her once, at night, when it was just beginning to get light. He woke to find her still asleep but squirming against him. She was cold. The blanket had slipped, exposing her shoulder to the night. He pulled her close and wrapped the blanket around both of them, and waited until her breathing became even, her chest gently rising and falling. Then he slipped a hand past her shirt, under her breeches and her smallclothes, to find the little nub in the soft hair that grew there. He started to make little circles with thumb, watching her eyelids flutter and her lips part slightly. When he slid his index finger inside her eyes flickered open, and he put a finger of his free hand on her lips. Lem was still snoring a few feet away.

She tried to bite his finger but he took it away and stoked her cheekbone and accelerated the circling of his thumb. She arched her back and rolled her eyes upward, her breast pushing into his chest. He could feel her starting to come apart. His arousal pulsed against her thigh. When she opened her mouth to moan he leaned down and kissed her, gently. He pulled her smallclothes off her hips and slipped inside her, and followed her in a few swift strokes.

He kissed her again when it was over and when he pulled away her expression was dreamy, her mouth soft and her hair spilled around her head. She looked at him with a half smile for a second before seeming to realize that she had been taken advantage of. Her expression turned angry and she shoved him away and pulled on her breeches before rolling out of bed.

He'd smiled all morning.

Twice, after they'd stopped in the evening, she had told them that nearby was a hiding-place that her family had used to store coin and other essentials, to restock if they were robbed mid-journey. She walked into the woods by herself and would be gone for several hours, returning the first time with a purse of silver and a sturdy dagger, and the second time with two small purses of gold. They'd used the money to buy provisions — which cost four times what they had three years previously — and to coax a farmer into trading saddles with Anguy, whose seat had split a week out from King's Landing. Edric had promised to repay her from the vaults of Starfall as soon as was convenient.

She still unnerved him. She never seemed to get upset about anything. He knew she was tired; they all were. But she never complained, about the lack of food, about the cold, about the mud that seemed to be everywhere on everyone and everything. She told marvelous stories about her childhood traveling up up and down trading furs, and her family, but she never seemed to miss them; at least, Gendry thought, not really. He liked her best when in the early morning, when she was still cranky from sleep, or when they were making love. She seemed more herself then, although Gendry couldn't have said exactly why. At night he sometimes caught her watching him practice with Oathbreaker with a kind of hunger, a longing that didn't seem to fit with the rest of his personality.

She had with her a long, lumpy sack that during the day she kept rolled in her bedroll, latched to the back of her saddle. One morning Gendry picked it up to hand it to her, and found it to be surprisingly heavy. She snatched it from him quickly and rolled it in her blankets. When he asked her what it was she had leaned in conspiratorially and told him that it was silver, candlesticks and spoons and a few dishes, that she'd stolen from a lord's house sometime after her family was killed.

"Promise you won't tell the others," she'd said, looking afraid. Odd, Gendry thought. He'd never seen her afraid of anything else.

They went out of their way to visit the Inn and they found it abandoned, doors hanging from hinges and windows smashed. Gendry dug up a bottle of spirit that he'd buried behind the forge and they all got roaringly drunk, and told stories about Tom Sevenstrings and the whores at the Peach.

"What was it like, with Lady Catelyn," whispered Kyra that night, in one of the big creaking beds on the second floor. "Did she let you go to the Peach?" All four of them had spent hours regaling her with tales of the Brotherhood, of fights and hideaways and close escapes and Lord Beric's talent for coming back from the dead. She'd told them that she had heard rumors of the Lady in King's Landing, although she said that most people there didn't believe it, and thought it was a tale made up by locals to scare the Freys.

Gendry paused and stared in to the darkness, trying to find the words to explain. "She didn't—care really," he said. "She didn't care about anything except killing Freys. If we were not there when she wanted us, or if we failed to do what she asked, she would get terribly angry, but where we were in between, she didn't care. So yes, we went to the Peach. Or they did. Mainly I stayed at the Inn."

"Was she really grey, like they said she was? Her skin all leathery?"

Gendry nodded. "She had to hold her hand over her mouth so she could speak. It was still kind of a croak." He smiled suddenly. "It would have been funny really if she hadn't been so terrifying."

"Sansa is alive though," she said, like a fact. "Why didn't she look for Sansa?"

"I don't know, Kyra. I don't know."

Almost three weeks after leaving King's Landing, the land around them began to turn into swamp. Gendry's horse got stuck and they had to spend an hour pulling the animal out, and later that same day Anguy sprained his wrist when his horse stepped in a sinkhole and panicked, throwing him off onto a rock. Kyra wrapped his arm and then announced that there was only one way through the swamps, and that that was the Kingsroad, and the causeway.

They were apprehensive, but given the thickening mud, they knew they had no choice. The farmer they had traded saddles with had told them that the battle between Stannis and the Boltons had finally come to a head, and that Stannis had lost, partly because of the desertion of a significant portion of his troops, who had fled the frozen, famished camp before the snows broke for long enough to let Stannis set the siege. Roose Bolton was dead, and his bastard son ruled alone at Winterfell. The way south was littered with groups of armed, hungry men.

"I'll take on a Stannis man over a Sparrow any day," Anguy had proclaimed. "At least they won't try to make you repent before they kill you."

They decided that it would be safest to cross at night, when running into any deserters seemed most unlikely. They slept for a few fitful hours until Kyra woke them a little before midnight. They saddled the horses and set out from their cramped and boggy campsite near the road.

The causeway was in bad disrepair. Most of it was littered with holes, and in between the holes were icy patches; they dismounted and led their horses around them as best they could. Anguy's especially was skittish. About a third of the way across, a wide section of the road had sunk into the swamp, and they had to urge their animals across, all of them sinking about waist deep into the briney muck. They had only gotten about halfway when the sun began to rise.

To the east the land was flat until the ocean, a muddy, rocky, brackish plain where only a few determined plants grew. The first light lit up the rim of the world for miles in either direction, casting an eerie pale light over the shore, and glinting off the chunks of ice that had formed on the shore. Gradually the light grew and turned from pale to pink to a violent red, shooting tendrils up into the sky over their heads. Ahead of them they could see the three broken towers of Moat Caitlin, underneath a host of stars burning in a red and magenta sky.

Kyra looked behind them, one, twice, then three times. Gendry followed her gaze. To the south the sunrise was streaked with orange at the horizon, and Gendry thought he could see an animal in the distance, silhouetted against the blaze. A fox, he thought.

The sun was had risen into low clouds by the time they made it to Moat Caitlin, transforming the dramatic landscape into a monochromatic wasteland. The castle ahead sunk into the grey mists, seeming to become less, not more solid as they drew nearer. They saw no signs of life on the ramparts, although Gendry doubted that the castle was deserted. Moat Caitlin was not quite as unavoidable as the Twins, however; there was a solid rim between the walls and the swamp on the western side of the castle that was just wide enough for one, or possibly two horses to pass. The fog at the base was thick enough that Gendry hoped anyone looking casually from the edge of the castle would miss them. A decent archer who was paying attention, however, could pick them off in a hurry. Maybe Moat Caitlin was abandoned.

They made it around the walls unharmed. There was only a short bridge separating Moat Caitlin from a wall of trees: the North. Mounting the bridge from the rim they had been walking on required a short climb, and Anguy's horse refused to cooperate. Gendry could feel sweat rolling down his shirt. They pushed and pulled, shouting angry whispers at the animal and at each other. When the horse reared its head to bray, Gendry clapped its mouth together and yanked it up by the head; finally it followed. They started on the bridge and Gendry started to believe they had made it when six men stepped out from the forrest in front of them, blocking their path. Behind, he heard the sickening crunch of metal as the rusty gate creaked upward, and another ten stepped out of the gateway. They were dressed in a motley of furs, leather jerkins, and helmets; most had wrapped their hands in bits of cloth and a few had similarly bundled their feet. More than half of them held short infantry swords; the rest held spears, and one, a battle axe. No arrows, Gendry thought.

One of the men, who missing his right ear and had a grizzly, not-quite-healed scar along his jawline on the same side, stepped forward. "Now then," he said, "I don' see no need for fightin' on this fine morn. We'll just be needin' yer weapons, and yer horses. Any vitriments you got, we'd be much obliged. And yer boots, o' course." He smiled, and Gendry could see that was missing most of his teeth. No boots and no food in this country was as good as a death sentence. The man squinted at Kyra, seeming to notice her for her for the first time. "Is that a lassie? Oh, we'll be needing her too."

Two things happened at once. Lem swung up into his saddle and dug his heels into the horse's sides, drawing his sword as he went, and the man with the missing ear crumpled to the ground, a dagger sunk into his chest just below his collarbone. Edric grabbed his horse, who had started slightly and mounted to follow Lem. Gendry saw Kyra run towards the gate and slide nearly under the feet of the closet man, leaving a knife in his groin and causing him to double over, a river of blood spouting from his breeches. A second man from behind them charged Gendry and he cut him down with the sword that he didn't remember drawing. Anguy was trying to draw his bow with his broken wrist; Gendry shoved him before pivoting to block the sword of a third man, and he toppled off the bridge into the swampy moat.

Kyra had taken a dead man's sword and was using it to fight three attackers; she held the blade expertly but Gendry could see that it was too heavy for her. The remaining five closed on Gendry. He was furious. The mists around him seemed to grow thicker and all he could see were the men in front of him, the men that were blocking his way to Kyra. He slashed and thrust, his muscles remembering the exercises and the sparring, but this was something else entirely. Oathbreaker made contact—an arm, he thought—and he heard a man scream as he thrust the blade into another's stomach. The Valerian steel sliced neatly though the leather jerkin.

Gendry felt a sharp pain in his leg and he heard a thud and a cry from the other side of the bridge. Kyra's sword was spouting from a man's shoulder and she and was on the ground, rolling away from blade. Gendry swung Oathbreaker above his head and brought it down on the man whose spear had cut his leg. There was a crunch of metal on metal, and the blade cut through helmet and bone as one.

He looked up, and the man on top of Kyra was gone. In his place was the largest wolf Gendry had ever seen, with something that looked like a leg in his mouth. Of the three men left standing near Gendry—one clutching an arm that looked only partially attached— two ran. The third was slumped against the gate, his helmet askew, his eyes unfocused. Thrown by the wolf. Gendry charged.

The wolf sprung towards Gendry and Oathbreaker sliced its side before Gendry was thrown to the right by the force of the animal hitting his shoulder. Oathbreaker fell out of his hands and clattered on the stones in front of the gate. Gendry landed next to the body of the dead spearman; he grabbed the weapon, and got to his feet facing the beast. Incredibly, Kyra was, he saw, alive, and she was getting to her feet and saying something, he couldn't tell what. She was covered in blood. Gendry raised the spear but before he could throw the wolf was gone, running down the bridge and following the four remaining deserters, who were running as fast as they could towards the woods. The man whose arm Gendry had cut tripped, and the wolf ripped off his head in one clean motion before bounding out of sight.

To Gendry, it seemed that everything had at once become very quiet and very in focus. He could hear a the soft lap of the brackish, muddy water against the earthen bridge, and a sloshy, sucking sound that Anguy made as he moved toward the heap of men and horses at the far side of the bridge. He felt a breath of wind as Kyra ran lightly past him towards Anguy. Behind him were six bodies, their blood a sharp contrast against the dark grey of the castle stones. His thigh was bleeding freely from a long gash.

He heard a ripping sound; Kyra was kneeling, tearing someone's shirt. Gendry felt a lurch in his stomach and stumbled toward her. She was kneeling over Edric, who was lying on the ground in a pool of blood and groaning, one eye already swollen shut from a gash on his cheek. A jagged bit of wood was coming out of his shoulder, the end a spear whose point was buried in his shoulder.

He saw the edge of Lem's cloak a few feet away; he was trapped underneath his horse. Anguy, covered in muck from where he had fallen in the swamp, was trying to pull the wounded animal away and Gendry went to help, but Kyra cut him off. "Don't bother," she said. "He's dead."

Gendry touched Kyra's neck and his fingers came away bloody. "It's not mine," she said, pushing his hand away without looking at him. She grasped the splintered wood jutting from Edric's chest with both hands and pulled. Edric screamed.

Everyone was angry. After moving Edric off the bridge into a half-sheltered recess near the tree line. Gendry and Anguy had rolled the dead horse off of Lem and wrapped his crushed body in his dirty cloak and buried him in a shallow grave. Anguy said nothing the entire time and continued to refuse to speak to Gendry when they rejoined Kyra, who had built a fire and was boiling rags for bandages. She had put some moss on Edric's chest and he was breathing shallowly, dripping in and out of consciousness. When she saw the blood-soaked rag that Gendry has wrapped around his leg she made him sit and cut a wider hole in his breaches, cleaned the wound quickly with one of her still-hot rags, and tied another to tightly that Gendry yelped. She didn't apologize.

"Stay," she said harshly, as if talking to a dog.

At this Gendry felt his own anger well up uncontrollably. He understood Anguy. If they'd been in opposite places he'd be just as angry too. But they both knew that Anguy would have been dead before he could have landed a shot, and Anguy would come around eventually. But Kyra made him boil. Was she angry because he hadn't fought well enough? He'd killed three men trying to get to her. Not that she'd needed much help. Why didn't she tell him that she could fight like that? And the wolf. And Lem.

And so Gendry sulked on one side of the fire, leg propped on a rock, and Anguy sulked on the other, while Kyra washed the blood out of her hair with the leftover boiled swamp water, and then returned to the bridge to loot the pockets of the dead men, her expression never changing. Gendry's anger blended with fatigue as he watched her bend among the bodies.

When she was finished, she dropped two pair of boots, a large, bloody pair of breeches, three small purses and four short knives at Gendry's feet. The mist had thickened and the grey light had gotten a shade darker. Anguy had fallen asleep next to Edric, his back to Gendry. Kyra put her hand on Edric's forehead and then walked without hesitating towards the woods.

"Wheer'do you think you're goin'?" Gendry slurred, shaking off sleep and starting to get to his feet. Edric whimpered slightly and tugged at his bandage.

"Herbs," she said coldly without turning around.

Fuck her, Gendry thought, letting his body fall back to the ground. Fuck her, fuck my leg, fuck this. He was vaguely aware that he should stay awake, but the fatigue was too heavy, and he drifted off.

He dreamed about a man with a golden broach in the shape of a hand, and underneath another silver one, shaped like a wolf. When he'd tried to look at the man's face it had melted, and become another's, older, whiter, also with a golden broach; and then the face had melted again to become a face that he had tried to forget, a face that he had once saw wiped clean as easily as if real life had been a dream.

He woke with a start. Anguy was still asleep and Edric seemed to be also, his breathing more even, his hand on his chest. One of their four remaining horses was chewing on a boot Kyra had taken from a dead man. A soft snow had begun to fall from the grey sky, and the fire was slowly choking on the thick white flakes.

Still tied to the saddle of Ary's mare was her bedroll, the sack she kept concealed for most of the day just peaking out underneath. Gendry stood up, ignoring the pain in his leg, which was, thankfully, still stable, and unrolled the bedroll. He fumbled with the complicated knot at the top of the stack and then drew his knife and cut it, shaking out the contents; a large, lumpy mass wrapped in what looked like a dress; and several smaller bags, one the smelled vile; and two wads of human hair. Wigs, Gendry realized. Inside the dress were two blade. One was tiny; a child's sword, but made of hard, unrusted steel. The other was blood red with back streaks and a golden handle encrusted with jeweled lions; the twin of Gendry's own.

He hung the small sword in his belt besides Oathbreaker, and carried the red and black blade — the Widow's Wail, Brienne his said — naked in his hand. He moved quietly into the wood, his feet muffled by the snow. He didn't have to go far until he saw her. She was standing next to the wolf, her cloaked back to him, her face buried in the giant animal's grey fur.

"Arya."

Both the wolf and the girl's attention snapped to him. It was Kyra's face. Her look was angry and aggressive, but Gendry could see that there were tears on her cheeks. Her eyes dropped to the sword he held, her expression hard. The direwolf—Nymeria? he remembered—growled. Cautiously, Gendry lowered the sword. "Arya, why didn't you tell me—" he began.

Her expression softenened suddenly, and she ran toward him, and threw her arms around his neck. He heard her whisper "I'm sorry," before something collided with his skull and he dropped to the ground.

**NOTES

Action scenes! Surprisingly fun to write! Lots of blocking!