A/N: Well this is a long one. Looking forward to reading the reactions on how the ... events... were handled. Enjoy the chapter!
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Year 300 AC
Kings Landing, The Crownlands
The stench reached them long before the city came into view, a layer of smoke over the sour tang of hundreds of thousands of unwashed bodies pressed together in terror. Jaime Lannister guided his mount to the crest of the Rosby road and pulled the reins with his left hand. Bronn halted his gelding a pace behind, and three soldiers from Jaime's Riverlands escort, chosen for their ability to move quietly, fanned out into the scrub brush to watch the tree line.
King's Landing lay below them, and it was dying.
From the ridge, the siege looked like a map come to life. Connington held the southern approaches with the Golden Company, his trenches drawn with a meticulousness that made any sally from the Mud Gate a certain death. The camps were a study in contrast where the pristine tents of the mercenaries sat well out of bowshot and the Tyrells sprawled across the Roseroad in a sea of green and gold. Above the Reachmen, the wooden skeletons of three great trebuchets rose into the air, crawling with men who looked no larger than beetles from this distance.
The city gates were barred with timber and iron, Marbrand's work, and the Red Cloaks walked the battlements in watchful lines. Visenya's Hill was a different matter entirely. A great pillar of smoke still rose from the summit where the sept had once stood. It used to catch the light and burn with gold and crystal, but the fires had done their work. Everything atop the hill was a jagged, blackened crater now.
"Connington has the patience for this," Jaime said. "He means to starve them until the gates open from the inside."
Bronn leaned over his saddle pommel and spat into the dust. "Patient men live longer. Usually."
Jaime watched the field, weighing the progress of the siege. "The assault hasn't fully started yet. The Tyrells are still building, which gives us some time."
Or not. He notied the fourth trebuchet he missed on his first pass, as it sat half-assembled behind the treeline where the Roseroad bent south. Connington had hidden it well.
Jon Connington was the true obstacle. He had loved Rhaegar too well to ever grant Jaime Lannister a hearing. Should Jaime approach the camp even under a banner of parley, the Lord of Griffin's Roost would likely strike off his head and hurl it over the castle walls.
"You spent years drinking in the worst gutters of this city before my brother hired you," Jaime looked at Bronn. "Tell me you know a way inside that does not end with our deaths."
Bronn smiled. "There is a cove on the Blackwater shore that smugglers use to bypass the harbormaster. I brought some illicit Myrish pale through it during the Greyjoy rebellion." He pointed a gloved finger south. "We leave the horses here and circle wide to the east, past the edge of the Kingswood, then wait for the sun to drop."
"And when was the last time you navigated that path?"
"It had been four or five years since he last saw the place. The grate was already rusted and the bars cut back then. Smugglers never care to find their way barred."
Jaime took a moment to consider. "We wait for the dark," he said.
They retreated down the reverse slope and into the shadow of the tree line.
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A cold wind blew off the Blackwater as night fell. Finding a fisherman's skiff abandoned among the reeds of the northern bank, they set out with Bronn at the oars. The sellsword steered them by memory, his eyes on the jagged silhouette of the shore beneath the starlight.
A jutting overhang of limestone concealed the narrow inlet which masked it from the heights above. Even from the water, the cove appeared as nothing more than a solid wall of shadow until the skiff neared the rock face and Bronn steered them straight into a hidden crack.
With a low scrape against the stone, the skiff ran aground. Bronn was over the side in an instant, wading through the knee-deep water to haul them onto a slick shelf of rock as Jaime and the others climbed out after him.
An ancient drainage grate marked the back of the cove which was set deep into the foundation of the city wall. Decades of saltwater had corroded the iron, leaving the bars thick with barnacles and rot. Two of them had been sawed through and bent outward long ago, creating a narrow gap that would only take a man sideways.
Bronn was already at the grate, his hands working the rusted iron as he spoke. "So," he said, keeping his voice low. "The dragon."
"What about him?"
"I'm the one wading through shit for you, Lannister. I'd like to know if that flying lizard of yours plans to burn the city while I'm inside it."
They levered the grate together causing the iron to scream against the stone with a sound loud enough to wake the dead. Jaime froze, his heart hammering in the sudden silence of the tunnel, but no shouts followed the noise. The city above them remained quiet.
"There is a reason he sent me here," Jaime said after a moment. "Aemon wants Cersei removed, not the city leveled."
"Level a city, eh?" Bronn mused. "You know what your father would have given for a weapon like that? Gold. Hostages. His own children, probably. No, definitely."
"My father is dead, Bronn. What he would have given doesn't matter anymore."
"Just as well," the sellsword said, adjusting his belt. "I don't imagine the dragon's mercy is a thing that extends to Tywin Lannister, even if he did let you keep your head."
No, he wouldn't have.
Beyond the bent iron bars lay a stone gullet designed to vomit the city's waste into the sea. Jaime's stomach clenched as the air reached him, a foul slurry of human filth and dead fish. Bronn showed no such hesitation, wading into the dark as if he had spent his life in the sewers.
"And after?" Bronn's voice drifted back from the gloom, disembodied. "After your sister is dealt with. What comes then?"
"Then I'll hold the city until he arrives," Jaime said. "Or until the gods find a more creative way to kill me."
"Hold it with what? Marbrand's garrison and my winning smile?"
"That's the idea."
Bronn walked in silence for a few strides as the water sloshed around their knees. "The things I do for a castle," the sellsword muttered.
Light filtered down from a street grate above, a pale vertical shaft cutting through the gloom. Bronn came to a halt and gave a sharp nod toward the surface.
The meager light slipping through the grating found the gold on Jaime's right arm which brought up another problem. He needed to hide it. Gripping the hem of his heavy riding cloak with his left hand, tore it and wound the woolen strip around the metal fingers. When he finished, it looked like nothing more than a bulky stump in a dirty bandage.
It was a poor disguise but good enough for a city too busy dying to look twice.
Bronn went up the shaft first and kicked the grate out of the way. Jaime went after him, his boots skidding on the slime while his one good arm did the work of two. He hauled himself into the light of an alleyway somewhere in the gut of Flea Bottom.
They moved into the lower city, and Jaime finally saw what his sister had made of her capital. This was no scar left by a siege. This was something she had built, stone by wretched stone.
The smell of burning tenements hit him before he turned the first corner, and three streets down, a bread riot raged. Refugees had crammed into every available space away from the walls and families huddled in doorways under ragged blankets. The gutters overflowed with refuse and corpses that no one bothered to move. When a child with hollow eyes tugged at the armored leg of a Lyseni mercenary to beg for scraps, the man simply kicked the boy away and kept walking.
They passed the crater where the Sept of Baelor once stood, now only a blackened earth. Wildflowers had begun to grow in the ash, little patches of purple and yellow pushing through the ruin.
The ghost of his right hand began to throb. He had killed one king to keep the city from burning but his sister decided to continue Aerys' work without the fire.
Jaime put the chaos of the streets behind him and looked up at the Red Keep.
They climbed the winding streets toward the castle, the common crowds thinning near the base of the hill to be replaced by armed patrols. Bronn and the others fell into a wedge behind him as they reached the heights.
Jaime walked directly toward the massive bronze gates of the Red Keep as torchlight flickered across the armored guards manning the barbican. This city was held by Lannister gold and Lannister steel, and he was the Lannister who had come to claim it. He ripped the dirty rags from his right arm letting the torchlight catch the gold of his hand.
"Open the gates," Jaime commanded.
A guard leaned over the battlements, squinting into the gloom until his eyes widened. He shouted a frantic word to the men below, and the courtyard surged to life with the rattle of iron chains and the pound of boots against stone. The heavy doors groaned inward as Jaime walked through the archway with the guards snapping to attention at the sight of him. A young captain took one look at his face and sprinted toward the inner bailey to spread the word.
The Kingslayer had come home.
The courtyard was too empty for comfort, the servants few and fearful. Those Jaime passed scuttled by with their eyes to the stones, as if looking at a Lannister might be a sin. The whole place felt like a hollowed-out shell.
It took less than five minutes for Addam Marbrand to find him. The commander of the City Watch was a wreck of scuffed steel and week-old stubble, held together by nothing but habit and a soldier's discipline. The exhaustion was etched into the dark hollows beneath his eyes, yet they brightened the moment he saw Jaime by the armory.
"Jaime," Addam breathed. "Seven hells, it's good to see you alive."
Jaime caught him by the forearm with his good hand. "Addam. You look like a man who has forgotten what a bed is for."
"I haven't." Addam's eyes were bloodshot and weary. He lowered his voice toa whisper. "Where is your army, Jaime?"
"Coming. I rode ahead." It was the same lie he had told Bronn, and it sounded just as thin. "Give me the status of the city."
Addam gave it to him straight. Connington was ready to strike within the day or so, backed by massive numerical superiority and fresh siege engines. The walls could withstand the first assault if the men rallied, but a second would likely break them. It didn't help that the sellswords Cersei had bought were already turning sour and demanding double pay before the first stone had even been flung.
"And Cersei?"
Addam's expression soured. "She's barricaded in the Holdfast with no one but Qyburn and her monster for company. Every command is filtered through him, and half of them contradict the rest. She wants the gates braced until she decides to pull the defenders back to the Keep. Meanwhile, she's emptying the granaries to pay for sellswords who can't even understand their own officers."
"What of the Kingsguard? Or whatever remians of them?"
"A fiction." Addam sounded as tired as Jaime felt. "Robert Strong is a statue at the Holdfast door. He doesn't eat, doesn't sleep, and hasn't the wit to speak. Meryn Trant is off hiding from the walls with a skin of wine for company. Boros Blount found his courage three days ago and used it to walk out the Mud Gate dressed as a spice merchant. Osmund Kettleblack is rotting in the dark beneath the Sept. The white cloaks are just a ghost story now."
Jaime had believed in that brotherhood once, but the white cloaks were just another ghost story now.
Addam hesitated and glanced around the empty courtyard. When he spoke again his voice had dropped so low that Jaime had to lean in to catch the words.
"There is a larger problem, Jaime. The wildfire."
The word alone was enough to make Jaime go rigid.
"She means to set it off," Addam said. "All of it. If the walls fall, she is going to make sure the Targaeryen's inherits nothing but a mountain of green ash."
"Where is Tommen?" Jaime demanded. The question had nothing to do with duty, and everything to do with the hollow ache in his chest.
"The boy is in the royal apartments with Qyburn. I have tried to see him three times this week and been turned away at the door each time. The last time, Ser Robert Strong was standing in the corridor and I took the hint." Marbrand looked away. "I got one look at him five days ago. He was sitting in a chair by the window, petting that black cat of his. He simply looked... lost."
"Has she been hurting the boy?"
"I don't know, Jaime. That is what frightens me. I have no idea what is happening behind that door, but he has lost weight."
"Lost weight..." Jaime's fingers tightened on Addam's shoulder. "Go to the royal apartments and take twenty men with you. Secure the boy and check for poison immediately. If he's been given anything, make him drink until he vomits. I want a healer there, one who answers to us."
Addam didn't try to hide his relief. It was the command he had wanted to hear. "And if the Kingsguard interfere?" he asked.
"The Kingsguard are only a memory now. If anyone does try to interfere... you have twenty sword with you. Take care of whatever gets between you and... my boy."
Marbrand held Jaime's gaze for a long moment and then nodded. He had served House Lannister long enough to understand what was required without being told.
"And where will you be?"
"Maegor's Holdfast."
"Jaime," Addam said, shaking his head at the madness of it.
"Tommen is the priority, Addam. If I don't come back, you get the boy out of this city. You find somewhere safe and you keep him alive." Jaime's voice brokered no argument. "That is the order."
"...Understood." Addam turned on his heel and called for his sergeant.
Jaime turned toward Maegor's Holdfast. The Red Keep was a hollowed thing around him. Servants had fled to the cellars and Kingsguard posts stood empty or held by sellswords who didn't bother to salute. These silent corridors felt more dangerous than any army formed for battle.
He was halfway to the inner ward when Qyburn found him.
Qyburn did not hide or flee. He simply stepped from a side corridor to match Jaime's stride, falling into step with the easy grace of a steward greeting his lord. He was carrying a silver tray that held a single glass vial of dark liquid beside a folded cloth.
Qyburn's greeting was as warm and polite as a courtier's welcome. "Ser Jaime. We held out hope you might return before the end."
Jaime kept his stride, though his eyes never left the dark liquid in the glass. "What have you there?"
"Essence of nightshade," Qyburn said as easily as a man offering wine or water. "It is a painless preparation, distilled perfectly. The child will merely drift into sleep and remain forever beyond the reach of the enemy."
They turned a corner and the corridor stretched ahead toward the inner ward and the dry moat beyond.
"Her Grace has made the necessary arrangements," Qyburn continued. "Given what comes next, surely you see the wisdom. The alternative is Connington dragging the boy from the Red Keep and parading his head on a spike. We are sparing him the terror of the mob. It is a true mercy, Ser--"
He did not live to finish the word because Jaime's steel was already through Qyburn's neck.
Qyburn's eyes bulged as the silver tray slipped from his fingers and clattered against the stone. The vial shattered beside him to mix dark poison with the red of his life on the floor. The man had been walking toward Jaime's son with a death sentence in his hand. Now he was only a corpse.
Jaime kicked the mess aside and wiped his blade clean on the dead man's robes. Bronn watched him with the wary look sellswords get when a contract begins to smell like a suicide pact..
"We keep moving," Jaime said.
Whatever Jaime's face told Bronn made the sellsword stand taller. "Right," he said. "The Holdfast, then."
The drawbridge over the dry moat was lowered, meaning she wanted him to come. Torchlight threw long shadows across the iron spikes below. A single figure stood in the archway before the heavy oaken doors.
Before him stood Robert Strong, eight feet of enameled white armor, a greatsword planted point-down on the stone. He loomed, a massive presence, like siege equipment waiting for the signal to unleash its fury.
Jaime halted at the bridge's edge, the Riverlands men spreading out like a dark fan behind him. Bronn stepped up, his gaze locked on the giant as if sizing up a fortress wall, hunting for the breach that would let them through.
"That's not a man," Bronn said quietly.
"No," Jaime agreed. He recognized Gregor Clegane's bulk anywhere, though he didn't know what Robert Strong was. The specifics didn't matter. What mattered was the greatsword, the eight feet of plate armor, and the narrow bridge with iron spikes below.
His left hand tightened on the leather grip of his sword. Against that giant, one hand was nothing. A lunge at the knee joint might buy three seconds when the heavy oak doors groaned open.
The giant took a massive armored step to his left, its movement rattling the bridge as it heeded some unheard command. She expected him. In whatever shattered version of reality Cersei still inhabited, he always came back to her.
Bronn clamped down on Jaime's arm. "I'll go first."
"No, it didn't move for you."
Jaime stepped onto the bridge and walked with a apphrensive pace. His sword hand was ready as he watched the giant for any shift in posture, but Ser Robert Strong did not move. The blank visor tracked Jaime as he passed within arm's reach of the massive gauntlet while the creature stayed planted against the wall like a gargoyle.
Bronn kept close at Jaime's back but the giant did not stay still for him. He had only reached the middle of the bridge when Robert Strong shifted.
The gauntlet came down like a falling tree. Bronn threw himself backward and the steel fingers missed his chest by inches, close enough that the wind of it ruffled his jerkin. The Riverlands men dragged him back while the giant returned to his watch. Ser Robert settled against the wall with his greatsword lowered, as still as if the struggle had never happened. The Kingslayer would be allowed across the bridge but no one else.
Bronn found his feet, breathing hard. "So much for the both of us."
Jaime stood on the far side of the bridge, inside the archway, with the open doors of Maegor's Holdfast before him and his only reliable fighter behind a wall of plate steel. The bridge was four feet wide. Two men abreast at most. To force past Strong, Bronn and the soldiers would have to fight the creature on a narrow span over iron spikes. That was a butcher's bill Jaime could count without trying.
"Hold the bridge," Jaime said across the gap. "If that thing leaves its post, you come through and bring anyone you can gather from the garrison."
"And if it doesn't leave?"
"It will."
A short nod was all the answer Bronn gave and began drawing the Riverlands men toward the near end of the bridge.
Jaime stepped into a wall of heat. Cersei had lit enough tallow to burn the Red Keep to the ground, with wax dripping off the desk and tables until the carpets were slick with it. In the center of the room sat a heavy iron brazier and a mechanism of gears and pulleys. A wound chain vanished through a hole in the floorboards, the trigger Qyburn had built to drop a spark into the belly of the city.
Cersei paced near the hearth with her golden hair loose and in a tangled mess. She wore a gown of crimson silk with the laces fastened crookedly and a large wine stain running down the right sleeve. Three steps toward the window, an abrupt turn, and three steps back toward the desk as she muttered instructions to servants who had fled days ago. The alcohol had burned through her last thin layer of courtly pretense and left something not fully stable.
She stopped mid-step. The wild tension drained out of her face as she noticed him to leave a look of joy so terrible it made his skin crawl.
"I knew you'd come back." She breathed the words like a prayer and she meant them with every broken piece of herself. Cersei always did love a tidy ending to a story. We came into the world together clutching one another and she expected us to leave it the same way.
She hurried across the room and stopped a foot away, her green eyes searching his face. She reached for a half-full goblet on the table to hold it out to him.
Jaime ignored the goblet. His eyes were busy looking around the room for threats and weapons, a habit Arthur Dayne and Barristan the Bold had hammered into his bones. Help was through the open door behind him, but there was a monster guarding it that made a quick escape impossible.
"Why Tommen?" Jaime finally asked.
Cersei smiled with a maternal warmth that made Jaime's stomach turn. "I made sure he is safe," she said. "He is mine, Jaime. The Blackfyre and the Tyrells will never have him. He is mine, and no one gets to touch him."
She walked to the desk and leaned against it. "Qyburn gave him something sweet to drink so he will only sleep. There is no pain in it. It is better than what Connington would do and better than what the world does to gentle boys who wear crowns. I could not let them have him, Jaime. I could not."
She looked at him with an uncracked certainty that shone with a luminous with the kind of love that kills. The poisoner was a cooling corpse in some hallway and Marbrand had the boy in hand, yet the words still cut. Hearing the love in her voice as she explained that she was protecting their son by murdering him was the last thing Jaime could bear. It was the mercy of the mad, and it broke him.
Jaime gestured toward the mechanism and found shouted. "And that?"
She drew herself up and pride flared in her face, a sudden rush of color like life returning to a drowned woman.
"A masterstroke," she said. "Let the Griffin and the Tyrells think they have won. I will let them breach the gates and crowd the streets before I take them all." She gestured toward the floor. "The caches are still there, Jaime. Aerys lacked the will to see it through because he trusted pyromancers while I trust only myself. When I pull that chain the Red Keep will bloom like the sun. The fire will run through the tunnels to the Sept and the Guildhalls and the gates. If I cannot rule this city then no one will. We will leave them nothing but ashes."
Cersei was Aerys's successor, but she would light the flames with her own hands. Jaime stepped past her and grabbed the heavy iron poker from the hearth to drive it through the gears of the trigger mechanism. Metal shrieked against metal as he wrenched the iron sideways and tore the chain free from the lever. He kicked the assembly until it shattered against the stone.
His sister watched him break her grand design with a wet, brittle laugh that echoed off the walls until the sound turned ugly.
Cersei drank deep from her goblet and shrugged. "It doesn't matter. The fire is coming whether I light it or another does. The dragons are almost here, Jaime."
He offered no answer while he watched her drink and waited for the truth to surface. His sister had always mistaken his silence for an invitation to continue.
"Robert used to come to my bed drunk," she said in a conversational tone, as if they were discussing the weather. "He would put his hands on me and whisper another woman's name. Lyanna. Always Lyanna. I was just a vessel for his grief, a thing and nothing more. Do you know what that does to a person? To be used that way? To be nothing but a reflection of someone else's longing?"
Yes, Cersei I do understand.
"When I was a girl, a woods witch told me a prophecy," Cersei said as she paced back and forth with her wine goblet. "She said I would be queen until a younger and more beautiful queen cast me down. She said my children would die. Gold their crowns and gold their shrouds. And she said the valonqar would wrap his hands around my throat and choke the life from me."
She stopped and turned toward him. "I spent my life waiting for the imp. I thought Tyrion was the monster from the woods, but the prophecy meant you all along. You were the other half of me and the one person I ever loved."
"And I loved you," Jaime said, his voice coming out hoarse.
"I know." Cersei smiled then and she was the girl from Casterly Rock again, a sad and lovely thing who understood she was about to get exactly what she wanted. "That is why you are here. That is why you will do it."
She drank again. "I loved my children as well. Joffrey was a monster, but he was my monster, just as Myrcella was sweet and Tommen is gentle. I wanted to keep them safe, but the world steals whatever you love. You have to take it first to make it yours for all time."
Tears cut tracks through the powder on her face while she spoke. She was explaining herself now, and Jaime found he understood her too well. He saw the progression of his sister from the girl Robert ruined to the woman the woodswitch haunted. He saw the mother whose possessive love had soured into a madness beyond naming. Every road she had ever walked led to this room. It led to the poison and the wildfire and the terrible belief that she had to destroy what she loved to keep it hers.
Jaime gave her the dignity of being heard in her final hour because it was a mercy no one else would ever offer. She had not earned it but he had loved her once and this was the price of that love.
Cersei finished her wine and set the goblet on the table with a careful click. She walked toward him and placed her hand flat against his chest armor.
"You see it now," Cersei whispered. "We are the only two who matter, Jaime. Everyone else is an obstacle. I gave Tommen the greatest gift a mother can give when I gave him peace. Now it is our turn to die together, exactly as we were meant to."
She placed her hand on his chest as if it belonged to her. It was the way she had always touched him, as though the gold hand and the sword hand and Tommen's last breath were all her property. Even his honor had been hers to spend.
"I see it, Cersei. But Tommen's last breath will come when he is eighty and surrounded by grandchildren, not because of his mother's madness."
Jaime's left arm moved and his hand clamped around her throat. He drove her backward until her spine slammed against the heavy wooden pillar supporting the roof with his full strength. Cersei let the goblet slip and it bounced across the carpet in a spray of dark red wine. He saw the surprise on her face turn to recognition.
Her hands flew up and clawed at his wrist, nails digging into his skin and drawing thin lines of blood. She thrashed against the pillar and kicked his shin, her hand causing candle guttered on the nearby table. But Jaime leaned his weight forward and pressed his palm deeper into her windpipe.
The fight went out of her in slow ebbs. As her lips took on a bruised purple shade, her fingers lost their grip on his arm and caught in his hair, the panic in her eyes fading into a dull glaze. In a room built to burn them both, Jaime held his sister and squeezed the breath from her lungs.
She found one last scrap of air and forced it up through her crushed throat to find a way to hurt him. In her dying moment she reached for a weapon to destroy the man she loved.
"ROBERT!"
Her hands fell from his arm as the scream died. The green faded out of her eyes the way the sky loses its color at dusk, and when they went still they looked nothing like his own. Jaime took her weight as she sagged. He kept his fingers locked around her throat and leaned his forehead against the stone pillar, taking his breath in shallow, ragged pulls.
Somewhere beyond the walls of Maegor's Holdfast, Robert Strong heard his queen.
The oak doors flew back as if they weighed nothing, shoved by a gauntlet the size of a ham. Ser Robert Strong came through the frame with his greatsword held ready.
Jaime stood frozen as his hand refused to open. The kill had broken the connection between his mind and his muscles, leaving him standing over Cersei's body while the world reduced to a ringing in his skull.
Robert Strong crossed the room in four strides. No urgency showed in the movement and no rage, for the thing did not hurry. It did not need to. It simply raised the greatsword.
The sound of running boots announced that the bridge was empty. Bronn had been waiting for the moment the monster moved and he came through the doors now at a full sprint, sword drawn and shouting Jaime's name.
"She's dead, Jaime. Let go of the corpse and move!"
Jaime heard the sellsword's shout but the command died somewhere between his ears and the fingers that would not let go.
Bronn did not wait for a response. He hit the floor and slid beneath the sweeping arc of the greatsword to drive his blade into the unarmored gap behind the giant's knee. The creature staggered. Bronn was already rolling clear and shouting for the Riverlands men to get in.
The three soldiers charged through the doors and threw themselves at Strong's arms. They used their weight to drag the creature sideways and hacked at the armor joints where Bronn pointed. It half-worked. The sheer mass of bodies slowed the giant as it turned in a grinding circle with men hanging off its limbs.
A jerk of the giant's shoulder sent one soldier flying across the room to hit the stone wall and stay there. Strong ripped free of the next man and broke his jaw with a swing of it's steel gauntlet. Through all of that, he kept coming for Jaime. The fighters hanging off him were nothing more than flies for an ox to shake.
Bronn scrambled back to his feet with blood leaking from a cut over his eye. "Jaime! Let go of her and move or we are all dead!"
The garrison heard the shouting from across the bridge. A half-dozen red cloaks came pouring into the Holdfast with steel drawn, abandoning their posts at the dry moat to answer the noise of combat. One look at the giant and their commander standing over the queen's corpse was enough to send them into the fray without a word spoken. Their blades found no purchase against the white plate and their spears skittered off the giant's limbs, yet the weight of the men held the monster back for a few heartbeats.
A flash of white from the far corridor.
Ser Meryn Trant appeared in the corridor with the reek of wine clinging to his white cloak. He stood there for a frozen for a moment, blinking at the sight of the red cloaks hacking at a fellow knight. When the realization of his duty finally pierced the daze, he drew his blade and charged into the fray. He went for the man closest to Robert Strong. Unfortunately for Ser Meryn, that man was Bronn.
Bronn parried the thrust and stepped inside the knight's guard to drive an elbow into his faceplate. The two of them locked blades near the hearth and began circling through a wreckage of overturned furniture and pooled candle wax.
Then the Mountain's shadow fell over him and that massive slab of steel came whistling for his head.
Small hands grabbed Jaime's sword belt and yanked with a strength that defied their size. The sudden violence of the pull broke his grip on Cersei's throat and sent him stumbling. He lost his footing entirely and went sprawling across the carpet as the momentum threw him aside.
Oak and stone exploded into a shower of splinters as the greatsword slammed into the pillar. It had struck exactly where his head had been. Jaime slammed into the carpet as a girl's voice flared above him. She sounded breathless and livid, as if she had only stepped in because he had left her no other choice.
"MOVE, you stupid man!"
Jaime blinked until the candlelight stopped swimming and a face took shape above him. She was a serving girl he did not recognize, a stranger with a drooping left eyelid and a round chin framed by brown hair.
The girl's mouth moved as she said something urgent.
But Jaime could not hear a single word.
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From her crouch in the reeds along the Blackwater shore Arya watched the smoke of a hundred fires rise over the city. King's Landing was dying a slow death but she felt no pity for a place she hated. She had commanded Nymeria and the pack to wait in the Kingswood to avoid being seen. A direwolf was too easy to spot while a girl with a plain face stayed invisible.
An hour after the sun went down, she had found the drainage outlet where the city wall met the river. A rusted iron grate sat half-drowned in the brackish water. It was a narrow gap meant for runoff, but Arya forced her way through sideways. Barnacles scraped her shoulders as she squeezed past the stone and fell into the knee-deep filth waiting on the other side.
A hundred years of the city's filth had washed into the tunnel and just... stayed there. It was a thick soup of salt and shit causing Arya to tie a strip of cloth over her face to dull the stench. Braavos had smelled just as bad, and she had waded through those canals for a long time.
The tunnel opened into a wide chamber where Arya knew the way even before the light reached her, a place of old secrets where a eunuch and a fat man had once talked in the dark. A sweet and biting scent led her now, a smell that did not belong to the usual stench of filth and pulled at her curiosity until she followed.
The pots sat in orderly ranks with wax sealing their lids, each big enough to hold a man's torso and waiting for a spark. One was open, and what lay inside horrified even her.
"Enough to cook the whole city," she whispered.
More chambers branched off the main run and she marked them in her head. Left at the cracked lintel, right where the ceiling dipped, and three steps past the damp patch. The Kindly Man had rapped her fingers when she forgot a count, but she would forget nothing here.
Arya surfaced inside the castle wearing a face from her collection. It was a Braavosi serving girl with a round chin and a drooping left eyelid. The skin itched at the seams where it met her own, but it made her forgetful, and forgettable was all she needed.
She mapped the halls as she walked, marking the exits and the weapons on the walls and the men who carried them. The castle felt hollow. No pot-boys bustled through the corridors and no scullions rushed past. Half the guard posts stood empty and the few men she saw moved in pairs with eyes that jumped at every shadow. It was a castle dying from the inside even while an army held the walls.
Ser Ilyn Payne sat on a stool halfway down the corridor near the old cells. He was hunched over his work with his pox-scarred face low as he drew a length of steel across a whetstone. Seeing the man shapen the same sword that had swung to take her father's head only made her hate for the man burn hotter.
Arya looked around again to ensure the corridor stayed empty, devoid of guards or anyone to bring him orders in a castle that had forgotten its headsman when the servants fled.
She approached with soft steps, carrying a clay flagon and wooden tray toward the man who never looked up. To free her right side, she shifted the tray to her left, her fingers closing on the kitchen knife scavenged from a forgotten pantry. The knife itself was dull, but the edge was sharp enough for someone who knew where to strike.
Arya drove the blade behind his ear and felt it grate against bone before it found the soft meat inside. Ilyn's shoulders gave a single twitch. His fingers went slack and let the greatsword slide from his lap to the stone floor. As the heavy blade clattered down, the whetstone spun off toward the wall with a final click.
"Ser Ilyn." She had said that name to the dark of a hundred different rooms, but saying it once in the light was enough to let it go.
The greatsword was too heavy for her to lift, so she leaned it against the wall. She waited for the heat to rise in her chest or for some satisfaction to take hold. She stood over him, looking for a feeling that wasn't there. One more name gone, but the list didn't feel any lighter. It just felt empty.
I don't need it to feel like something. she thought. I need the next one.
She moved on, climbing upward toward Cersei.
For the next few hours, Arya spent learning why Maegor the Cruel earned his name. Every tunnel near the Holdfast ended in solid stone and every drainage shaft was too narrow or sealed with old mortar. She found three promising cracks but all three led nowhere. The Holdfast had one way in across the dry moat and on the far side of that bridge stood eight feet of white armor that did not breathe or sleep or move. She circled the passage network twice while counting her steps and pressing her ear to the walls but she came up with nothing.
She was refining a bad plan involving a stolen red cloak and a tray of food when the garrison started shouting.
Jaime Lannister walked through the front gates as though he still owned every stone.
The Kingslayer. The Kingslayer was not on her list. She had thought about putting him there, but the names were long enough and he had never been hers to kill. It was stupid of him to come inside. He had no army with him, and the Golden Company was still sitting outside the walls.
Arya kept her distance, far enough to slip away but close enough to catch his words. With a tray in hand she moved through the halls like a serving girl, present and invisible all at once.
She was behind the wall when Marbrand briefed Jamie. The spy passage ran parallel to the corridor and she pressed her ear to the gap between stones to hear the wildfire confirmation. She heard Jaime send Marbrand for Tommen with twenty men and she heard the words "my boy", confirming the long debated rumor.
His son. Half the realm had whispered it and now he was openly confirming it.
From inside the passage she saw Qyburn find him. The man in grey robes fell into step beside Jaime with a silver tray and a vial held ready. Arya heard the soft warmth in Qyburn's voice as he spoke about nightshade and the painless mercy of the drink he'd made.
Jaime's sword went through the man's throat before the sentence ended.
The man was not a name on her list, but the speed of his death was still startling. There was no warning and no speech, just a man killing another without any prompt. She stored the observation away and did not know what to make of a the Kingslayer killing an ally.
While the Kingslayer steered his men toward the inner ward, Arya kept pace through the side passages. She found a vantage near the dry moat where the tunnel hugged the outer wall, letting her watch the giant guarding the Holdfast doors. The giant moved aside only for Jaime. When a sellsword tried to follow at the Kingslayer's heels, a massive arm swung out with blurring speed. The man nearly lost his head before his companions hauled him back by his cloak.
A new problem arose because the only way across was past the thing guarding the door and the men watching it. A serving girl loitered near stacked crates, waiting to be told what to carry, so Arya settled in to wait with her. The Kingslayer's men held their ground at the end of the bridge. Nobody spoke and nobody tried to cross. The sellsword kept his eyes on the giant and his hand on his sword, and Arya could almost read his thoughts.
The wind brought sounds from across the moat, though the distance swallowed the words before they could reach her. A woman was speaking in a high, drunken ramble, her voice uneven against the whispers of a man.
Come out here where I can reach you. But Cersei would not come out and Arya could not go in. The name she had wanted to cross off the most right now sat behind a door she could not open.
Then a sharp sound carried across the moat followed by a single word.
"ROBERT!"
At the sound of the name the giant turned and lumbered into the Holdfast, his shadow vanishing from the bridge as the heavy doors swung wide. Jaime's men didn't wait. They were running before the big man had even cleared the way, and the guards posted by the moat joined the rush with a heavy clatter of steel.
The crate Arya had been pretending to sort hit the floor as she fell in with the men. She stayed low and to the edge of the line, letting the push of their plate and mail pull her along like a scrap of wood in a stream. No one noticed her. Why would they?
Heat and the smell of wildfire hit her as she crossed the threshold. The air inside the room was thick with spilled wine and the scent of hundreds of tallow candles. Her stomach clenched at the stench from below because she had seen what they were keeping in the dark.
A shattered mechanism lay near the hearth with an iron poker driven through the gears. Someone had broken whatever it was meant to do.
Then she saw Cersei slumped against a wooden pillar with purple finger-bruises around her throat and eyes open and empty. Jaime stood over her with his hand still clamped on her neck though there was no pulse left to feel. His face was hollow and his stare was just as empty as hers.
She's dead. Arya stopped walking as the thought hit her. Cersei Lannister, the woman she dreamed of killing every night was dead by someone else's hand.
You stole it. She thought as her anger was now aimed at Jaime. You took the one that mattered. Then a quieter thought came from underneath. You don't have to do it now.*
Arya shoved the thought away before it could take root. She refused to admit she had been dreading the feel of Needle sliding through the drunk woman's throat. Instead she watched the greatsword as it began its swing toward Jaime's head. Finally making up her mind, Arya lunged.
She seized Jaime's sword belt with both hands and yanked with all the strength the wolf in her had. His fingers tore free of Cersei's neck as he toppled sideways onto the carpet. The greatsword cut through the pillar where his head had been and sent stone and wood flying.
"MOVE, you stupid man!"
Her voice was harsher than she intended. Jamie blinked up at her with pupils so wide she could tell he wasn't seeing her at all.
"Get up," she screamed. "Get up or the next one takes your head!"
He shook himself. His hand found the floor and he pushed up to one knee, which would have to do.
The room was already a brawl. The sellsword had soldiers hanging off Strong's arms while red cloaks hacked at his joints and he shouted over the noise of it all.
"Hit the joints! One at a time! Pull him down!"
The giant flung a man into a table and the wood shattered. A candle set the tablecloth afire, but the sellsword cursed and stamped it out before the carpet caught. The giant shook off the soldiers hanging from his arms and moved toward Jaime.
Jaime got his feet under him and drew steel with his left hand.
A flash of white at the door caught the corner of her eye. Ser Meryn Trant took in the room and the dead queen and the soldiers swarming his sworn brother, the wine haze burning off his face in a blink. He drew his sword with a flourish better suited to a tourney than a fight over a corpse and went for the sellsword because he was the nearest man with a blade.
"Finally remembered your oath, did you?" The sellsword met him with the corner of a grin. "Took you long enough."
They traded blows near the hearth where the sellsword gave ground on purpose, drawing Trant away from the giant. Sparks flew where steel bit steel. A candle toppled and hot wax spattered the knight's knuckles, making him curse as he kept swinging.
Sliding between red cloaks at a crouch, Arya kept her eyes on the seam under Trant's right arm where his plate met the mail. Years ago she had watched Syrio Forel dance around this knight. She remembered the flat wooden sword and her own scream and the way she thought the dance was over.
"For Syrio," she said under her breath.
Needle slid under Trant's arm and the flesh parted. She twisted the blade to angle up toward the lung and drove it higher between his shoulder blades. The waif had taught her that a girl does not stab once. She finishes the job.
Trant's knees gave way with a grunt. He could not even turn before the blood started bubbling behind his visor. That one she felt. A warmth that spread from her knuckles up through her wrist, the kind the Payne kill had refused to give her.
The sellsword looked at the dead man, then he looked at her.
"How old are you?"
"Old enough," she said, pulling Needle free to wipe it on Trant's cloak. She looked toward the big one. "How do we take down the giant?"
He blinked once and his mouth twisted. "The gorget is crooked on the left. That's our only--"
She was moving before the sellsword finished his word. He thrust his steel into the gap where the plate sat crooked and the blade went home under the gorget with a thunk. Strong's head jerked but he didn't bleed like a man. Only a dark sludge came out like smoking tar.
"Seven hells," the sellsword said. "That's not a man."
"Then stop fighting it like one. Take the head."
Red cloaks hacked at his legs until a sword found the back of the knee where the dagger had already broken the greave. The joint gave and the leg buckled. The giant dropped to one knee with a force that made the floor shake, yet his greatsword kept swinging and carving through the press. An arm fell here and a face split there as blood spattered the carpet and hissed across the dying candles.
On the other side Jaime struck. He drove his steel up into the throat even as three men threw their weight against Strong's remaining arm to hold back the swing. The blade bit and the gap in the neck grew.
With the others drawing his focus, Arya slipped under the guard to find the eye slit. Needle went in deep, yet the steel met only an empty hollow where a man should have bled. She twisted the blade and ground the point inside the helm, searching for a brain to destory.
The giant's movements eventually stuttered.
The sellsword planted a boot on the giant's chest and hauled on the helm while a soldier hacked through the last of the spine with a dented sword. When the head came away the sound made three men retch. The body kept moving for a few beats and swung blind before momentum ran out and it toppled. Even then fingers twitched on the severed hand.
Then that stopped too.
Silence blew through the room. Only the spit of candle wicks and ragged breathing from men who had just survived something beyond explanation.
Arya stepped back, her face burning. She raised a hand to the borrowed skin and felt how much of it was gone. The whole right side had torn loose during the fight. It was peeled back from her jawline to her temple and hung by a strip of glue near her hairline. Her own cheek and her own jaw and her own grey eye stared out from underneath the woman's slack brown skin.
A red cloak near the door saw it first. He had been catching his breath with his hands on his knees, and when he looked up the color drained from his face. He stumbled backward and his sword came up.
"What the fuck is that?!"
Another soldier turned, then a third. They had just killed something that should not have existed and now a girl's face was falling away in wet pieces to show a different girl underneath. One of them made a sign against evil while another moved to block the door.
"Stand down," the sellsword barked. He started shoving his men toward the door and shouting orders about Tommen and the garrison, leaving the girl with the torn face for later. When he reached her, he paused, keeping his voice low so the others wouldn't hear.
"I don't know who you are," he said. "But whoever taught you to use that pig-sticker did good work."
"Nobody you'd know," Arya said.
HA single nod and he was away, shouting orders at the red cloaks. Most of the guards scrambled to follow him, but the one who had made the sign against evil took the long way around her to reach the door.
Jaime stayed still, his sword hanging loose in his left hand as he stared at her ruined mask. Part of the borrowed face trailed down the side of her head with one brown eye drooping in its dead skin, but the rest was gone. His gaze searched her jaw and cheekbones for the real girl beneath the disguise. He saw grey eyes and dark hair wet with sweat. He saw a long face that could only belong to a Stark.
"Don't," she said.
The Kingslayer halted. He shut his mouth and kept the name he'd been about to say behind his teeth.
She turned and crossed the blood-slick carpet, stepping over Trant's body and the white cloak matted in his own red. She glanced at Cersei's slack face. The name was gone from her tongue but her presence would never leave her mind. But now was not the time to decide how to feel about it.
"Your brother... he is looking for you," Jaime said behind her.
Her stride broke. For one step her feet forgot their purpose and the word brother cracked through every wall she had built since Braavos.
But she then as if she didn't hear Jaime, she kept walking.
"He's coming," Jaime said. His voice was stronger now, the fog burning off. "It won't be long before he arrives and I am sure you have heard the rumors by now as to why. When he gets here, if he learns you were here and vanished, he will tear this city apart stone by stone looking for you."
She stopped at the door.
"I don't need a Lannister's protection."
"No," Jaime said. "You just killed a knight of the Kingsguard and ended a horror that should have stayed buried. You have no need for a protector. But I need to make sure your brother sees you alive and well."
It made sense, and she hated him for it.
"Nymeria is in the Kingswood," she said, "and I'm going back to find her."
"Go, then. I won't be the one to cage you, but see that you're back by the time he gets here."
She turned looked at Jaime Lannister across the wreckage where his sister's body cooled. He was not asking her to stay for himself, but for the man who had sent him.
She studied him for a long moment, and nodded her head. Jaime gave a sigh of relief and nodded back.
Arya turned toward the bridge. For the first time since she left the House of Black and White she was not running toward anything or away from it. Now she had to wait and Arya Stark had never been good at waiting.
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