The Red Mountain needed no more proper name that its current one that everyone in the region agreed upon.
Though the old woman who kept the inn called it the Frowning Peak, which Brienne thought was a name born from too much wine she had. The stable boy called it simply the High Hill, which was not a name at all but just a description of the size. The fishmonger who came twice a sennight from the valley road had never once looked up at it in Brienne's hearing, and she had been here long enough to watch him come and go twice over. Seven days in this place, a sennight of dry-smelling rooms and sour ale and the looks that villagers gave her when they thought she wasn't watching. Half pity, half unease, and beneath both of these something else, the particular discomfort that men wore when they could not decide what she was.
She could have told them who she was but she wasn't not sure it would have helped. She rose before the sun, as she have been doing for the days since coming here. The innkeep's wife left a loaf of bread on the table without being asked, which was a small kindness to her for she didn't like to talk to strangers more than wanted least until urgency, and Brienne ate it standing at the door watching the mist move off the lower slopes. The mountains here in the Grandison lands were worn and gentle compared to the peaks further east particularly by the Reach and Dorne, covered in scrub oak and pale grass that turned red during the sunrise and sunset.
She had told herself that was why she had come here, after Bitterbridge, that she had wanted to walk where he had served last, to think about duty and honor in the place where a truer knight than she would ever be had once served a King.
Her ancestor before he was Ser Duncan was all but a street urchin in the Flea Bottom slums of King's Landing. Duncan when he was still only a boy who wanted to be something. She had wanted the same thing, once. She still did, she was not sure wanting it made her any less a fool.
Her sword was at her hip as it always was. She had left her armor at the inn, it was heavy, and the mountain path was steep, though she had taken her mail this time and the familiar weight of it across her shoulders was something close to comfort. She was large enough that men sometimes mistook her for one at a distance, especially when she kept her helm. Up close there was never any confusion, her face saw to that. The jaw too broad, the nose turned wrong by an old break she could no longer remember receiving, her teeth crowding her mouth like tenants in an overcrowded hall. Her eyes, she had been told, were her one mercy, a blue clear enough to look at without flinching, though she had long since stopped keeping count of the men who had looked into her eyes and flinched anyway.
The path climbed through the oak scrub and opened onto a long bare ridge, and Brienne walked it as she had walked it every morning, and thought, as she always thought, about Renly. For there is no creature on earth as unfortunate as an ugly woman, she had heard his voice. A man whom she believed cared not of her appearance and materialistic gain behind her but the values she carried. She had loved him for years since his courtesy to her. She knew what her heart meant then and what it did not, and she was past the age of lying to herself about it either.
He had been kind to her, he had not laughed at her and in all the world she could count on one hand the men who had looked at her face and not laughed, and Renly Baratheon had been among them, and now he had broken her trust, show his true colors. The true want of his had always been her strength and yet the selfish and cruel reasons behind his kind act had left her betrayed.
They only say those things to win your lord father's favor, her septa's word kept ringing in her head as she hiked upwards to the tragic site. She told herself she had come to these mountains to think and pay respect to Ser Duncan, and it was almost true.
She heard the chirpings before she the source, the ducks paddling their way on the still water. The path curved around a shoulder of rock and from then it was below, a dark image reflecting on the water of the lake, the ruins of the once most beautiful castle now burnt black rising on the far shore of the water body against the grey morning sky.
And at the water's shore, a man. He sat on a flat ground, his back to her, a cloak of red-black pulled over him so that only the shape of his shoulders was visible beneath it. His hood was up. She could not tell his size from here, only that he had gone very still, not the stillness of sleep, for the man didn't even showed sign of shoulders heaving with breath but the stillness of something fixed in place by some magic she could not feel.
It was as if the man was deep in prayer, listening to something too far away for others to hear. She stopped on his path, it is nothing, she told herself. A traveler resting maybe a shepherd. A man with no business being your concern.
She had been telling herself such things since she left the Bitterbridge. She had been believing things less with every telling.
She withdrew herself into the treeline along the path's edge and watched. The man did not move as minutes passed by, heron crossed by his his side and still the man did not move. She could say why she waited, something in the quality of his stillness made her uneasy in a way she could not put into words, not threat, exactly, but absence. As though whoever sat on that stone was not entirely present in the world she shared.
She heard them before she saw them. She always heard things before she saw them, her master-at-arms had taught her long ago to trust ears over eyes when there was cover to muddle the sightlines. Boots on loose stone path. The clink of something, a buckle, the ring of a scabbard against mail and then voices, low and already carrying the particular lazy confidence of men who have not faced truer swords than their own.
They came around travelling the curved slope of the lake where the path descended behind the castle. Five of them, she counted automatically, the way she had been taught. All of them with swords at their hips and mismatched armor that told the truth of their findings, a pauldron here, a brigandine there, colors and blazons that did not matched, everything that had been taken from someone who no longer needed it. The tallest wore a yellowed surcoat with no sigil, just a stain where one had been removed. Their horses were tied up somewhere out of sight, she guessed. They had come this last stretch afoot, which meant they were not entirely without sense.
She had heard of them in the hamlet. Men left masterless by the coming of war, the village people said, though they said it quietly and never to strangers. Robbers who had been working the mountain passes since the Baratheon brothers began calling for arms of their bannermen and made every lord too busy with their own survival to patrol their roads. The fishmonger had lost a cart to them and a trader had lost his life.
The tall man in the yellow surcoat walked toward the seated figure with unhurried confidence, as if accustomed to having things go his way. "Come on, lad," he called. "Lay down your belongings, let's have a look at you."
The hooded man did not move.
"He's deaf, maybe," said one of the others, and they laughed.
"Or daft." The tall man drew his sword. It was a longsword, nicked along the edge from use. He used it to prod the seated figure's shoulder, and still the man did not stir, and the tall man's face shifted from amusement into something uglier, the ugliness of tyrants whose authority has not been acknowledged. "Up with you, now."
Hearing enough, Brienne stepped out of the trees. "Get out of here," she said.
Five pairs of eyes swung to her. They took her in the way men always did, the height first, the breadth of her, the mail coat and the sword and then the face, and then the small recalibration as they reassigned her from threat to jest. She was used to it and she had learned to dismiss the mock behind the eyes of those.
"A woman," said the one with a chipped front tooth, and laughed.
"Get out of here," she said again. "Ride back the way you came."
"Or what?" The tall man in the yellow surcoat had turned away from the hooded figure, giving her his attention, an irritant. "You'll fight us, will you, big girl? Six of us?"
"If I must." She said without fear
He squinted at her as if trying to decide if she was mad or drunk, she could see it on his face. He was not a stupid man, she thought, he had the eyes of someone who had learned things the hard way and remembered the lessons but he had six swords and she had one, and his arithmetic was telling him those numbers served much better against her.
"Seize her too," he said. "It's been a long time since we had someone, we'll work out with her as much."
They split as they rushed towards her, having done this before, two going wide to either side to cut off her retreat. That told her something useful and she gave more ground to them deliberately, drawing the two on the flanks forward and watching the tall man's eyes to see if he would signal another move, and when the nearest one, the chip-toothed one, was close enough that his sword arm would be compromised by an angle, she moved first.
She had never been elegant but she had strength. The master-at-arms of Evenfall Hall in service to House Tarth, Ser Goodwin had told her that, Men will always underestimate her and their pride will make them want to vanquish her quickly, so she had learnt to let them spend their strength in furious attacks, whilst conserving her own. She was strong and she was fast, faster than they ever expected of something as large as her. And she had been trained by men who did not love her and had therefore not gone easy.
The chip-toothed man caught her blade on his and nearly held it, he was stronger than he looked but when its strength against strength she would always win, and she bore his sword down and drove her elbow into his jaw and he plopped down on the grass with his legs suddenly gone from under him. She plunged her sword down to his neck with no hesitance then and there.
The one on her left came in from the side, slashing low. She took it on her mail and felt the impact along her hip and turned with it, letting the force of the blow carry her around, and as she came around she cut-opened his cheek with a move he had not anticipated. He screamed, not dead, but will be minutes of blood drain.
"Kill her," said the tall man.
They came at her together then, three of them, the tall man and two others, and this was the part she had been trained for and the part that she hated, because in a melee there was no elegance and no thought, only the body knowing things that the mind was too slow to process. She broke one man's wrist, her body working on its own. She took a cut along her shoulder that would leave a bruise but did not pierce the mail. The tall man was good. She had known it from the way he moved with the sword, and he was proving it now, keeping his distance, not rushing the way the others had, reading her footwork.
She was breathing hard as few minutes passed by. Her hip ached where one of the blow had landed. And there were still three of them on their feet, the tall man, and two others, circling wide to either side, and she understood with the cold clarity that came to her only moments later. She had committed too hard to the center. She had let the flanks drift. Stupid, she thought. Stupid, stupid girl.
The man on her left lunged and she twisted to take it on her mail and the impact knocked her half a step sideways, and in that half-step the man on her right found the gap she'd opened and drove his shoulder into her chest and she went down on one knee in the wet grass, sword still in hand, arm shaking with the effort of keeping it up. The tall man stepped in close with his blade angled at her throat, and she thought, quite clearly, the way she always thought most clearly when there was no more room for fight, that she should make run from here carrying the still man on her shoulder, there was a lake behind her, and that drowning was a better death than being captured by their han-
A sound broke her thoughts. It was barely a sound at all, a single sharp exhalation, as though someone had been holding their breath for a very long time and had finally, let it go. She heard boots rushing, and then there was a blur of red-black cloak in the edge of her vision and the tall man in the yellow surcoat was stepping back instead of forward, his sword coming up in a desperate guard, and steel rang against steel so sharply that the echo off it came back to her like a second blow.
She scrambled upright. He had been sitting by that lake for the better part of all the time she kept an eye on her. Now he was moving, and he moved the way like something she had never seen, nothing wasted, nothing performed. The hood had fallen back in the first stride and his silver-white hair was loose around his jaw and his sword was in his hand, and it was the sword she noticed first because she was a swordsman and they always noticed swords.
It was not a color she had a name for something she had read of in history books. A ripple ran through the blade when he turned it, dark and deep as the pattern in still water when the leaf falls on it. Almost black of color, and unlike anything she had seen in the hands of anyone she had ever faced or watched, and she had watched many.
The tall man was not slow. He recovered his guard in half a heartbeat and came back with a diagonal slash that most men would have had to retreat from, but the silver-haired young man did not retreat. He slipped passed it and stepped inside his guard, barely, the blade passing close enough to his ribs that she could hear the hiss of it against his cloak and then in fury of motion, his sword went right through the man's chest.
The second man came from the left. He was the most experienced of them, she thought, she had marked him early, the one who had not laughed, who had kept his distance and watched. He came in low and fast with a thrust aimed below the ribs, the stroke of a man who knew where most would not be able to cover quick, and it was a good stroke, the kind that ought to have troubled anyone it was aimed at. The silver-haired young man moved his body three inches to one side. Three inches, no more than that, and the blade found nothing but air, and then his own came around in a clean arc that ended at the juncture of the man's neck and shoulder, and the man dropped without his head.
The last one ran away putting all his strength. The young man stood among the fallen with his sword vertical to the ground, not breathing hard. The blade caught the morning light when he turned it, that strange rippling darkness running its length and she watched him look at it for a moment, something private moving in his face, before he cleaned it on the tall man's yellow surcoat and sheathed it with a sound like a whisper.
She realized her own sword was still raised and she lowered it. She had seen knights, had trained with knights, fought knights, beaten knights in the melee at home and tourney while they laughed at the sight of her and stopped laughing after. She had watched Ser Loras Tyrell in the lists and heard the women behind her sighing at the prettiness of his horsemanship, and she had thought, watching, that pretty was not the same as deadly and that she could have beaten him if she'd had the chance. She had seen many at practice and had measured each of them privately and known where they could be reached and where they could not.
She did not know where this man could be reached. His fight was not pretty. That was the wrong word for it and she had always hated that word anyway. It was clean, everything he had done right now with the blade was clean. No waste, no flourish and no gap between what was intended and what was done. She had seen the stroke that killed the second man and she had known, even as it happened, that it was exactly as deep as it needed to be and not one hair deeper, that he had not closed his eyes or gritted his teeth to summon extra strength.
It made her throat feel strange. She could not decide if it was envy or something else. He turned to her then, his hair was silver-white, shining as fresh snow in the morning sky, and his eyes when he raised them to her were the color of blood. Valyrian both sword and man, she thought, and the hair along her arms rose beneath the mail. Every story she had ever heard about Targaryen beauty was true, she decided.
"You fought well," he finally said, his voice was as soft that she had not expected and it suited him well as the corner of his mouth gave a small smile. There was nothing arrogant in the man who had just killed two men and watched the third run for his life. "Better than most men I have seen with a sword. Certainly better than I expected." The smile had not entirely gone. "You finished two and held three of them at once and were still thinking. That is a rare talent."
"I went too hard on the center," she said. "I made an error on the flanks, you saw it."
"I did," he said. "And you recovered from it. That is also rarer than people suppose." A paused for a moment. "You were going to find your way out of it. I think we both know that."
He then turned to her gauntlet and she became aware of the blood on it. "It's not mine," She murmured and then started awkwardly. "You were sitting there," she said. "The whole time, they could have kill-" and then stopped, aware that she should not finish her sentences, which was a habit she had fell into when she did not know quite what she wanted to say. They were going to kill you was what she meant, but it had not been quite that simple, because when she had gone down, with the blade almost at her throat it had been she who was the near death. "Are you unhurt?"
"I am." he said.
"I am called Brienne," she started. "Of Tarth."
Something moved behind those strange red eyes. Recognition, perhaps, though she could not think how. "The daughter of Lord of Evenfall Hall," he said, not in a question. "You are member of Lord Renly Baratheon's Guard."
She stiffened at his words though her hand did not move toward her sword, for she would not dishonor herself with that but her chin came up and her jaw set and she met his eyes without looking away. "I was, I am not anymore."
"I see," he said simply and then turned back to ruins.
The silence that followed was a different kind of silence from the one that had come before. The lake lay still behind him. Somewhere in the trees a birds chirped.
"You have the advantage of me," she said at last. "You know my name."
He had been looking at the ruins across the water. He looked back at her, and she saw something in his face that had not been there before or rather, something that had been unmasked now, a grief so old and so clear that it had long since finished being sharp and become simply part of the shape of the face that contained it.
"Aemon," he said. "of House Targaryen."
Brienne found that she had taken half a step backward, as though the name had a physical weight to it and it had struck her somewhere between the ribs. Targaryen.
She had not expected that, she had earlier believed him to be more of a Velayron not the member of long lost House. The name sat in the air between them, she looked at his silver hair, his red eyes, the sword at his hip with its strange rippling blade, and thought that she should perhaps have expected it after all.
But the Targaryens were dead. Everyone knew it, King Aerys killed in his throne room. Prince Rhaegar fell on the Trident with rubies scattered across the water, the children, she did not like to think about the children, what Tywin Lannister's men had done to the children and their mother, but they were gone, all of them, every one, the line had been extinguished. And yet, Aemon, of House Targaryen.
It took all but a moment to her and it did not stop to weigh the matter or consider what the proper form was or what her septa would have said, her septa who was long in the ground and had always had more opinions about the proper form. She went to one knee on the wet slope. The grass soaked through at once as she lowered her head. "Your Grace," she said.
It was all silent for a moment and then, "Get up." It did not come as command, precisely. It was the voice of someone who had found gesture uncomfortable rather than gratifying, and who was honest enough not to pretend otherwise.
"I did not know earlier" she said. "I thought-all of them were-" She stopped. It was a clumsy thing to say. I thought your family dead was not a greeting, not in any sense. "Forgive me. I had no knowledge that any... that there remained-"
"You did not know," he said not in reproach but in his gentle voice. "Few do, it was kept so." He paused, and when he looked at her again there was something almost wry in it, a warmth that had not been in his face before the fight, nor all during the talk until now. "Though I confess, Lady Brienne, that it is somewhat disarming to be knelt to by a woman who was brave to start fight against five men and cut through two of them not three minutes past. It makes the gesture rather more significant than most."
She blinked, she could tell if he was impressed by her fight. She was aware that she was flushing because of his words, which she hated, because on her face a flush was never the faint rose-pink she had seen on prettier women but always a blotchy, mortifying scarlet that began at her jaw and went everywhere it was not wanted.
"I did not think," she said honestly. "I simply.... it seemed the right thing."
"It was the right thing," he said. "I only meant that you need not perform it on my account, for you walked in danger to save my life." It was such a plainly human thing to say that she did not know quite what to say after it.
She looked at him then, really looked, and found that she could not entirely stop the thought that came to her unbidden, found it rising through her, something she had carried for a long time without knowing it truly. Aegonthe Fifth, she thought. And Ser Duncan the Tall.
She had read the stories in her father's library at Evenfall Hall, the leather-bound accounts and the more ragged parchments. Duncan the tall, a hedge knight, with no name worth speaking, Duncan with nothing to his name but a horse and a sword and the stubborn persistent conviction that a knight was meant to protect those who could not protect themselves. He had met a boy at a small inn on route to Ashford Meadow and not known him for a prince, and the boy had not corrected him, and from that meeting something had grown, a friendship, a companionship that lasted decades, that was still spoken of in the same breath by people who had loved the stories of both men.
She had loved those stories since she was a girl on Tarth who was too large and too plain and too stubborn to be what her father's court expected of her, and who had needed, very badly, to believe that a person could be those things and still be worth something.
He met a Targaryen by accident, she thought, on a road he had not planned to walk. And I have met one by a lake.
She was nothing like Ser Duncan, she knew that. He had been kind in the easy way of naturally generous men, she was blunt where she meant to be gentle and gentle where she ought to have been firmer. He had been beloved, in the end. She was not sure she would ever be beloved, and had mostly stopped keeping count of the reasons. But Ser Duncan had found his purpose in an unexpected meeting on an unmapped road, and she had been walking unmapped roads for long enough now to know that she had not yet found hers, and there was a young man standing before her with silver hair and a Valyrian sword and a grief too large for the age of his face, and he was the last of a line she had thought extinguished, and he had just saved her life.
He had his face turned toward the ruins. In the growing light she could see them properly now, the skeleton of towers tumbled inward, the rootwork of old walls, everything fire-touched, stone that had not merely fallen but been broken. Old devastation, a place where something terrible had ended.
"Why are you here, your grace?" she asked.
"It was home to my kin, once." He was quiet for a long moment. "My great-grandfather died here, my great-grandmother, others." He let out a slow breath. "I have been dreaming of this place for sometime and I needed to see what was left of it."
She looked at the ruins, really looked at them, and tried to imagine what it was to carry a grief that had been handed to you before you were born. "What do you see?" she asked. "When you dream like that, what did you see?"
He was quiet long enough that she thought he would not answer. Then he began "Fire, mostly. And the faces of people I never knew." He glanced at her sideways, it was the first time he had looked at her sidelong rather than directly, and it made him seem, very young. "My father was born here, the night Summerhall burned. They say he came into the world and world rejoiced while his kin burned in the fire." His jaw tightened. "I saw all of it and I cannot stop seeing it, when I am near."
She did not understand it wholly, she had never dreamed of something like this, had never watched anything burn in her mind that was not also burning in the world but she understood the grief well enough. Some fires you could not look away from even when every sensible part of you insisted that the looking changed nothing and helped no one and only cost you more pain..
"I am sorry," she said, because there was nothing else to say.
He then pulled his hood back up against the wind. He was already moving down the slope, back toward the path, when she realized the bandits had marched up from. Brienne stood where she was, on the wet ground, she did not quite know what she was supposed to do next. She wanted to call-out and ask the King to let her follow him yet she didn't have courage to move her tongue. She was still standing there, feeling awkward and conspicuous and thoroughly without purpose, when he stopped.
He was perhaps twenty feet away, still facing down the slope, and he stopped walking the way a man stops when thoughts occurs to him, and for a moment she thought he was going to say something about the ruins, or about Summerhall.
He turned back. The red eyes found her, direct and unsentimental and, she found them not unkind. "There are men marching on Dorne," he said. "Invaders, men who would put innocent head to swords and spikes." There was a pause to his statement. "I mean to meet them."
Brienne of Tarth stood on a wet mountainside in the Summerhall lands with the morning wind in her short rough hair, and thought about a room that smelled dry and of sour ale and seven days of nowhere in particular. She thought about a road she had not yet found a reason to take, she thought about Ser Duncan, who had needed a reason, and found one in a boy who did not tell him his own name, and had spent the rest of his life glad of it.
She thought, very briefly and without much productive result, about what her father would say in the matter.
"Want to come and deal with invaders with me?" he asked.
It was not a summon, it was not a royal command, nothing kingly in it at all, just a question, offered the way you offer a road to someone who appears to be standing at a crossroads without a map. He might have been asking her to share a fire on a cold night. He might have been asking her anything at all.
"Yes," she said, before she knew she would.
She fell into step behind him. The lake lay still by their side. The ruined towers of Summerhall stood against the brightening sky. Neither of them spoke for a long time, and she found that the silence between them was not the awkward kind, not the kind she had spent most of her life filling badly with the wrong words at the wrong moment. It was simply the silence of two people walking in the same direction.
Ser Duncan, she thought, one last time and she gave a beautiful smile in gratitude and honor towards the Summerhall.