Ramsay Snow was on his knees before them all, and yet he had a faint smile on his face, as though it didn't matter at all that he was moments away from losing his head.

The bile rose up in Jaime’s throat, looking down into those pale, utterly mad blue eyes. For a moment, he was back in the throne room of the Red Keep, looking at Aerys Targaryen—but it was years later, he was in the forests of the North, and this time, thank the Gods, he was not alone.

They’d had an absurdly good run of luck leading up to this—easy weather all the way to the Dreadfort, smallfolk in their holdfasts all too eager to speak, once they were assured they were speaking to the Lord of Winterfell, to the Jaime Lannister. The local baker had even put together a small party to guide them, the men pathetically eager to do something now that the risk was off their shoulders. Not that Jaime could blame them.

And they’d found the bastard, him and his vicious hounds and his pathetic minions, but they’d found him too late for the girl he was already in the process of carving up. It had been a short, brutal fight—Jory Cassel’s arm had been mauled by one of the hounds, but they’d had too much manpower not to win, particularly with the archers they’d brought, and before long, the hounds were all dead, Ramsay Snow and his beastly little followers were on their knees with their hands bound behind their backs, and the poor dead girl had been decently covered with Jon Snow’s cloak.

“Have you anything to say before I pass judgment?” Ned asked. You would have called his face expressionless, unless you caught a good look at his eyes, and saw the anguished fury there.

Ramsay Snow shook his head. “Only that I have followed in the steps of every Bolton man before me.”

Jaime ground his teeth together, and behind him one of the men let out an oath.

Ned’s expression didn’t shift. “Then in the name of King Robert Baratheon, First of His Name, I, Eddard Stark, sentence you to death.”

And for all his grand proclamations and demonic ways, Ramsay Snow’s head came off his shoulders as easily as any other condemned man’s.

His little acolytes didn’t fare so well; two blubbered and wept, one pissed his breeches. His fury rising after hearing the second man futilely plead for mercy he didn’t deserve, Jaime muttered in an aside to Ned, “Let me help you rid the world of this craven scum.”

Ned paused, but shook his head. “I’ve passed the sentence, so I must be the one to swing the sword. There will be time yet before you’re called on to do the same.”

So it was Ned who swung his greatsword for every execution, not bothering to clean it in between swings. By the time it was over, the great Valyrian sword was dripping with blood.

Jon had held it together throughout the entire grim affair, not flinching or looking away once, even if the horror of it all was written clear across his face, but his voice cracked as he asked, gesturing at the body of the dead girl, “What do we do with—”

One of their guides from the village grimaced. “Alyssa, her name was. We’ll carry her body back to her family, milords. Least we can do.”

“We’ll give an escort before we head on to the Dreadfort,” Ned declared, and no one argued.

There was very little speech during the slow trek back to the village, no crowing or bragging from any of the men. Jaime understood; this wasn’t the sort of victory you could glory in.

Glancing behind him, Jaime noticed that Jon still looked utterly wretched, his face practically gone grey and his dark eyes lost and unseeing.

After a moment, Jaime slowed his mount, maneuvering so that he’d fallen back far enough that he and Jon were now riding side by side, the rest of the party moving ahead of them.

“I’m all right,” Jon muttered before Jaime could speak, still not looking at him.

“Of course you aren’t all right,” Jaime said. “How could you be, after what we’ve seen today?”

Jon’s face crumbled, and when he finally looked at Jaime, he looked like a lost child. “How could—how—”

“I don’t know,” Jaime said to him. “All men carry beasts within them, but most never let theirs out, or even know the beast is there. Others…they’re nothing but beasts, you understand? They can’t be checked, they can’t be reformed or reasoned with—the only thing you can do is put them down.”

Jon swallowed, thinking it over. “So you don’t think…it wasn’t because he was a bastard that he—”

“Of course not,” Jaime said heatedly, understanding in a flash where this questioning of Jon’s was headed. “Gregor Clegane’s as trueborn as I am, and he’s an abomination, his name loathed and feared throughout the Seven Kingdoms. And furthermore, if I ever hear you so much as hint that you have anything in common with the filth your father just exterminated, I’ll wring your damned neck.”

It was an stupid threat, Jaime had to admit—how would the threat of being strangled make Jon feel better? But somehow it worked, as Jon huffed out something close to the ghost of a laugh, before nodding, resolve forming on his face as he looked at Jaime. “Thank you.”

“You can thank me by keeping your guard up when we get to the Dreadfort,” Jaime replied. “Because I fear that all this was the easy part of our travels.”

*

Jaime kept his hand on the hilt of his sword from the moment they rode in through the gates of the Dreadfort.

He had very reluctantly agreed to Ned Stark’s insistence that Roose Bolton face a trial, but from the moment Jaime caught sight of the cold-eyed bastard, holding out the platter of bread and the bowl of salt, Jaime immediately had a wild fantasy of leaping down from his saddle to swing his sword and take Roose Bolton’s head off his shoulders in one great blow.

“Lord Stark,” Bolton said, his voice and face utterly blank. If he knew what they were there for, he gave no sign of it. “Please, partake of my bread and salt.”

Ned looked at him, and then dismounted. Jaime immediately came down from his mount as well, standing at Ned’s shoulder as he ate the bread and salt.

“Lord Bolton,” Ned said quietly once he was finished, “it is my duty to inform you that your son, Ramsay Snow, is dead.”

Bolton’s face didn’t shift, not by an inch. They could have been talking about the harvest, rather than the death of his son. “News has already reached me of his death.”

Ned nodded at this, watching him closely. “Then you know he was executed for his crimes against the smallfolk on your lands.”

That finally got a reaction, a muscle in Bolton’s jaw leaping as he said, “I was astonished to hear of his brutal acts, Lord Stark. Believe me, had I known what the wretched boy was doing, I would have taken his head myself.”

“So kinslaying would have been another crime committed in these lands,” Jaime said, not bothering to keep his voice down. “Astonishing, what’s tolerated here.”

Roose Bolton turned a flinty gaze towards him. “Ser Jaime, I hope you are not accusing me of complicity in Ramsey’s crimes—”

“No, it’s not your bastard’s crimes you’re being charged with,” Jaime retorted, and Bolton’s expression flickered, as though he knew exactly what Jaime’s wordplay was referring to.

Ned gave him a sharp, quelling look, and Jaime subsided for the moment.

“Your son’s crimes are beyond question, we caught him…in the act of dismembering one of his victims, a young girl he’d just killed. However,” Ned paused, then said, “A trial will be called, to address what has been discovered.”

“The boy’s dead. What’s left to discuss?” Bolton demanded, and there it was—the flicker of fear in his eyes.

“The crimes you have been accused of, Lord Bolton,” Ned said, and Jaime felt it as his words rippled throughout the courtyard.

“The crimes I have been accused of?” Bolton’s face was starting to go red. Even his iron control had a breaking point, it seemed, and it was bitterly satisfying to watch.

“You stand accused of rape and murder, Lord Bolton,” Ned said evenly. “In connection with having restarted the barbarous practice of First Night.”

“Though I’m sure we’ll find even more atrocities, as we keep looking,” Jaime mused out loud. “Plenty of time for that.”

Jaime didn’t bother watching Bolton’s face as Ned laid out the details of the trial, how it would be held at Winterfell, the lords that would stand alongside Ned in judgment, instead he watched the men-at-arms behind Bolton, their alert gazes, how they were clearly ready to spring into motion at just one sign from their lord.

“And if I refuse to cooperate with this absurdity?” Bolton demanded through clenched teeth.

“You made oaths, Lord Bolton,” Ned said in warning, his voice hard. “Including the oath to recognize my authority over you as Warden of the North.”

“Just what do you think you’re going to do but submit, Bolton?” Jaime asked. “You think you’ll be able to hold out here forever? Against the combined forces of the North and the Westerlands? Never mind the assistance that King Robert will no doubt offer, as news of your house’s crimes travels down south. King Robert won his throne by defeating madmen, and you and your son are nothing if not mad.”

“Tell your goodson to watch his damned tongue,” Bolton said, his face growing even darker, eyes glittering.

Oh yes. Jaime knew a madman when he saw one. He’d given Bolton credit, he hid it better than his son, and certainly wasn’t as far gone as Areys, but the madness was there all the same.

Ned’s gaze flickered between them for a moment, then he said, evenly, “Whatever madness has happened here, Lord Bolton, Ser Jaime is correct—it will end here. One way or another, it will end.” His voice hardened, and Ned Stark continued, “Even if I personally have to take this fortress apart with my bare hands, brick by brick, and raze it to the ground to make it so. I will never condone the atrocities that have happened here under your watch and in your name.” A muscle leapt in his jaw, and Ned’s voice was thick with disgust as he finished. “The day of the Red Kings has long passed, Bolton. They won’t be coming back.”

Later, Jaime would turn over Ned’s words in his mind, trying to understand why they moved him so, why his heart had leapt as he’d listened to Ned speak—it took him far too long to admit that it was because it was a speech that he knew his father would have never made, never even have thought to have made.

But now, in the moment, there was no time for that, as Jaime saw, even as the seconds slowed to a crawl, he saw the exact moment in which Roose Bolton decided he had absolutely nothing left to lose—and that if he was already a dead man, at least he could take a Stark with him to the grave.

Jaime let out a yell of warning, even as he reached out to shove Ned down, pushing him to the ground as Bolton whipped out the dagger from his belt and moved to plunge it into Ned Stark’s chest. Jaime gritted his teeth as a band of fire was driven through his shoulder, but it was his left shoulder and not his right, he could manage this. He had to manage this, otherwise he was a dead man.

Gritting his teeth, he bought himself a few precious seconds by kicking Bolton squarely between the legs, enough time to pull the dagger free from his shoulder—there was a dizzying spurt of blood, but now Jaime had an extra weapon in his hand, and enough time to pull out his own sword.

Dimly, Jaime was aware of the chaos around him, men shouting, the clash of steel. But Jaime didn’t have time for any of that, not when his prey was lying there before him.

Bolton had no weapon left; Jaime bared his teeth and said, “Lost your blade? Stupid of you.” And before Bolton could say or do anything else, Jaime slid the blade of his sword right through the treacherous bastard’s gut.

A cry erupted from behind him, and Jaime whirled around in time to see one of Bolton’s men rushing him, sword raised, but Ned was already there, cutting the man down with his greatsword.

The fighting was already dying down, as the Dreadfort’s men realized their lord was already bleeding to death on the ground. Jon was all right, Jaime realized after a frantic scan of the crowd, his sword unsheathed and dripping blood, but there were three men down and unmoving. Jaime didn’t recognize two of them, but the third—

“Fuck,” Jaime spat out, staring at Jory Cassel’s body. “Fuck the Seven.”

He turned away from the dead man, from Jon’s devastated face, from their now-prisoners kneeling in the dirt, and looked back at the dying Roose Bolton, futilely trying to keep his guts from spilling free.

The fever of the battle, short as it was, was already starting to wane, and Jaime knew he’d be in a world of pain once the injury to his shoulder really started to register—fuck, there had better be a maester in this accursed place. But for now, rage was keeping him on his feet, pushing him forward as he lifted his sword and pointed it at Bolton’s throat.

“Your house is going to die with you,” he said, through clenched teeth. “Your head and your bastard’s head will go on the ramparts of your own keep as a warning, I’ll see your heir sent to the Wall or the Citadel, and your name will go into the fucking dirt, I’ll make sure of it. My word as a Lannister.”

Bolton’s pain-glazed eyes went wide, his mouth opened in a gurgle, blood already dripping from his lips—and Jaime stuck his sword through Bolton’s throat, blood gushing everywhere.

He swayed a little on his feet as he stepped back from the corpse, and Jon was there with a steadying hand on his arm. “Jaime! Oh gods, your shoulder—”

“It’s fine, I’ve had worse,” Jaime said impatiently, even as he felt an unwelcome wave of dizziness. He looked to where Ned was kneeling over Jory’s body, swallowed and said, “Go and get this hellpit of a fortress secured, and then get a maester who can see to my arm.”

He ended up sitting in the dirt himself, hand clutching his wounded shoulder, the dizziness going only worse as he felt a wave of terror and anger that wasn’t his own. Jaime closed his eyes, and tried to reach back to his husband in Winterfell, trying to send some type of signal to indicate that he was fine, but he couldn’t know if he’d succeeded.

At least with the unexplained pain in his shoulder, Robb now had an excuse for why he was so hollow-eyed and pale. His mother didn’t seem to entirely believe it, and Tyrion definitely didn’t, but they had much bigger issues to deal with.

Something had happened at the Dreadfort, they all knew that much, thanks to Robb howling in pain while holding court in his father’s name. He’d been handling a dispute over sheep, abruptly interrupted when he’d screamed and clutched at his shoulder, a blaze of pain running through it as though he’d been stabbed.

Or as though his soulmate had.

The pain had reduced to a dull throb by evening, and Robb knew that Jaime was alive—he’d been able to feel Jaime’s anger and hatred, the fierce energy that came when he was in a fight.

Something had happened at the Dreadfort, but Jaime was alive, and Robb had to trust that his father and Jon were all right.

Which just left the other disaster to deal with.

For a week now, Robb had been cursed with the foul, obscene visions of his husband, his soulmate, fucking the Queen of Westeros, who was also his twin sister, committing the crimes of incest and treason in one profane act.

Well. Not one act. They’d been at it for years, as best as Robb could work out, the locations of their…trysts changing from what Robb knew to be rooms within the Red Keep to a place Robb could only assume was Casterly Rock, to an inn that was in King’s Landing, to the damned Kingswood, to—

And he’d heard them. It hadn’t been enough to see it, to feel Jaime’s desperate and all-consuming lust for his own sister, but he’d had to hear it all—the day that Cersei Lannister convinced her brother to reject his birthright and join the Kingsguard, all by trading up her virginity and promising to continue the to be his mistress once she’d married Rhaegar Targaryen. Well, that marriage had never come to pass, but Robb had to give the woman credit—she’d certainly kept her word. Jaime had had her for years, all throughout her marriage to the king, right up until, presumably, Robb’s mark appeared on his wrist to stop their foul union in its tracks.

But Robb feared that wasn’t the end of it. Because amidst the treason and the incest and the lies, he’d seen the same image over and over again, three golden crowns, shrouded in black.

Three crowns. Three royal children, all said to be as blond as their mother…and their uncle.

Please, gods no. But Robb knew that while the gods were almost certainly listening they would not relent. They would make him see it all, bear witness to the worst thing that Jaime had done, force him to face it so that he could…what?

Robb had no idea. And now that he had this ache in his shoulder, a reminder of the wound Jaime had received while in the service of House Stark, defending the laws of the North, serving under his father’s command—

He wanted to scream. He wanted to rage. He wanted all of this to not be happening.

Robb wasn’t a child, he knew that soulbonds didn’t come with a guarantee of happiness or even a contented life. Sometimes (though rarely) the bonds broke, or the couple wasn’t compatible. If one of the two died before the bond was stabilized, the other partner’s life would be in grave danger, and the maesters all agreed they were unlikely to be the same afterwards, even if they did survive the loss of their soulmate.

But nothing compared to trying to ignore or disregard your Mark. The pain of it aside, ignoring your Mark, your bondmate, it never led to anything good. You had to look no further than the awful fates of Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower for proof of what happened when god-given Marks were ignored in favor of politics and Targaryen marriage practices. After the Dance, everyone from Last Hearth to Sunspear, from White Harbour to Oldtown could agree—disregarding one’s Mark entirely would lead to utter catastrophe, for the Marked pair and their Houses.

Robb hadn’t done that. He’d followed his Mark, he’d married his bondmate, he’d worked to tie their lives and their families together without hesitation or fear…and this was the result? How could this possibly be fair? How could this be the destiny the gods had in mind for him, for House Stark?

But here they were, and here he was. The Mark was still on his arm, his husband was still guilty of unspeakable crimes, and the gods had deemed it necessary somehow for him to be hopelessly and fully aware of it all, while not being able to do a damned thing about it.

*

The raven came to Winterfell just two days after Robb felt the burning pain in his shoulder. Ramsey Snow was dead, and so was Lord Bolton, killed by Jaime after Bolton had broken guest right and tried to kill Robb’s father just inside the gates of the Dreadfort. His father was fine and so was Jon, but Jory Cassel was dead, slain while defending Jon from one of Bolton’s soldiers.

“Gods above,” Catelyn had whispered as Maester Luwin gave them the news. “I’ll have to tell Ser Rodrik, and the children need to know that Ned won’t be returning home as soon as we thought…”

There was a letter from Jon as well, short and pained, his brother’s sadness and bewilderment clear in every word. Gods. He should have been there at Jon’s side, guarding his brother’s back with a sword in his hand.

And of course, there was a letter for Robb from Jaime. Robb could hear Jaime’s voice in every line, Jaime’s handwriting even more untidy than usual as he recounted what had happened.

I know you’ll be furious when you hear the news, Jaime wrote, and angrier still that you weren’t here to fight at our sides, but I’ll confess I’m glad you’re safe at Winterfell. What’s happened in these lands is too foul for words, and you’ve had enough trouble borrowing my nightmares, I don’t want to see you gain new ones of your own.

Robb had to close his eyes for a long moment after reading that.

Jon’s taken Jory’s death and the horrors we’ve seen hard, but I’ve kept him busy with our new project. While your father is busy commanding Lord Karstark and Lord Hornwood to the Dreadfort to help uncover the full scale of the Boltons’ crimes, I’ve set Jon and a few others to the task of disposing of the flayed skins Roose Bolton kept in a tower as trophies. I won’t lie, my first thought was to burn them so that in whatever hell Bolton now resides, he’d know his disgusting trophies are truly gone. But your brother got very upset at the suggestion, saying that in the North you bury your dead, and that whatever else these skins were, they were once people, and should be afforded that respect. It was the first proper sign of life I’d seen from the lad in days, so I told him to have at it. He and the other men have been digging graves just outside the gates. I’d thought of helping, but the maester here (a wretched creature, I’ll enjoy sending him to the Wall for his dereliction to the laws of the realm) insists I need to rest my shoulder, and digging graves is two-handed work.

I’d like nothing more than to head back to Winterfell and leave this cursed place behind, but your father will be here for a while yet sorting through the wreckage of what the Boltons have done, and Jon certainly won’t leave before your father does, and so here I stay with them. It’s not all bad—the Hornwoods will be arriving shortly, along with Lord Karstark, and I look forward to seeing them try to explain just how it’s possible that they missed what was happening in their neighbor’s lands. Your father won’t leave it at that, of course, he’s already talking of calling all the lords of the North to Winterfell and reminding them of their oaths. There’s some hideous rumor that the Umbers also practice First Night, which nearly gave your father a stroke when he understood what the locals were saying. Others say it’s just a rumor that Roose Bolton put about to discourage the smallfolk from fleeing to Umber lands for help, but the truth has yet to be determined.

There was a blot of ink on the page, as though Jaime had paused for a moment, his quill hovering above the parchment, then the letter finished with—

I can’t say I wish that you were here, but I do miss you. This will be a wretched business to sort through, and I’ll be glad to return home when it’s over.

Yours, Jaime

Robb had been reading the letter for what must have been the seventh or eighth time when there was a knock on the door to his solar.

The last thing that Robb wanted at the moment was company, but he still lifted up his head and called out, “Come in.”

The door opened, and it was Tyrion, looking at him with too-sharp eyes, even as he asked mildly, “All right if I join you this evening?”

“Certainly,” Robb said after a brief pause, and he knew that Tyrion was noticing the strain in his smile as he said it.

He didn’t comment on it, though, not right away, just levered himself up into the seat opposite the desk, carefully setting a bottle of wine in front of Robb. “Arbor Gold,” he said with relish. “I think your palate has been sufficiently trained by now to appreciate this.”

Robb looked from Tyrion’s face to the wine bottle, then said, “If you wanted to talk to me, Tyrion, you could have just said. You didn’t need to bribe me with the most expensive wine in Westeros.”

Tyrion raised an eyebrow. “With how you’ve been avoiding everyone these past few days, I did think I might need a tool at my disposal.”

“I haven’t been avoiding anyone,” Robb said, his gaze flickering away before he caught himself.

When he looked back at Tyrion, Tyrion’s eyebrow was still up, if anything, it had gone even higher. “You have, and it’s been noticed. Your mother’s starting to worry—she says she hasn’t seen you so upset since the days your Mark came in, and you were being plagued by visions from the gods.” Robb flinched at that, and Tyrion saw it, curse him. His forehead creasing with concern, Tyrion leaned in and said, “Robb—”

“It’s nothing, I’ve just been thinking too much over this awful business with the Boltons,” Robb said quickly, too quickly.

“If you’re going to lie, be better at it,” Tyrion said, dryly. The light from the fire caught on his hair—Lannister gold, like Jaime’s. Like Queen Cersei’s.

Robb looked at him, his clever goodbrother, a man who had perhaps the finest mind in all the Seven Kingdoms, who’d only taken a week to get the measure of Jon, Robb’s mother, and the entire bloody North, and he felt a cold certainty wash over him.

Of course Tyrion would know about his siblings. The cleverest man in Westeros, so adept at seeing through people, at getting the measure of a situation—of course he knew. How could he not know?

“You’re right,” Robb said after a moment, looking straight into Tyrion’s face. “I was lying before.”

Tyrion exhaled as he leaned back in his chair, saying, “Finally we get the truth out of him. Well, whatever it is, I’m sure we can solve—”

“I received another vision from the gods,” Robb interrupted him, his voice hard, even as that cold calm stayed with him, as though he were blanketed in snow.

Tyrion looked startled at this. “Oh?”

“It was of Jaime,” Robb said. “And the queen. They were…together.”

Tyrion froze in his seat, his face going utterly blank from shock. Were the situation any less dire, Robb could have almost laughed at the sight of Tyrion Lannister being lost for words.

Instead he just felt his heart breaking, as he saw the confirmation of Jaime’s sins in Tyrion’s stricken face and rigidly still body.

"You knew," Robb said.

Tyrion inhaled, holding out a shaking hand. “Robb.”

“You knew,” Robb continued, relentless. “You knew of their—”

“I didn’t know,” Tyrion burst out. “At least not…” He scrubbed at his face, then admitted softly, “I didn’t know for a long time. I wondered, I suspected, but it wasn't until the last few years that—" He stopped, then said, "Cersei would have been his destruction. I hoped that somehow he could be saved from this madness, and when the Mark appeared on his wrist…it was enough to make me a believer in the gods’ mercy, as ill-deserved as it was."

“And the children,” Robb ground out, his stomach twisting at the mention of the gods’ supposed mercy. “The princes and the princess—they’re his too, aren’t they?”

Tyrion closed his eyes, pained. “Robb, don’t—”

“Tell me,” Robb insisted.

Tyrion opened his eyes, looking suddenly weary, “Will it help anything, for me to confirm it now?”

“To know if my husband’s committed treason along with incest and adultery?” Robb snapped out, refusing to feel guilty at the full-body flinch Tyrion gave at that. “Yes, Tyrion, I think it would help to know the full scale of Jaime’s crimes.”

“Fucking hells,” Tyrion muttered, burying his face in his hands again. He didn’t speak for a moment, and as Robb felt his fury rising, he opened his mouth, but Tyrion said softly, “Yes. To the best of my knowledge…yes.”

It shouldn’t have felt like a blow. Robb already knew what those three golden crowns meant, and yet the bile rose up in his throat anyway.

“This is why you didn’t want Sansa to marry Joffrey, isn’t it,” Robb said, bitterness coating every word. “Because you knew he wasn’t really Robert’s son?”

Tyrion winced. “It…was one of my reasons, yes.” He paused, then said, “I wasn’t lying about his personality. Joffrey really is a spoiled, vicious little shit who I wouldn’t trust with a dog, let alone with your sister. And…” Tyrion trails off, a pained look on his face, before he took a breath and said, “And I know this is true because I know exactly where he got his vicious ways from: my sister.”

He looked directly at Robb as he said it, and Robb felt a chill. “You think she’s dangerous.”

“I think she’s dangerous to you, your family, and everyone and everything you love,” Tyrion says, emphatic. “Why do you think I was so desperate to see Jaime settled in Winterfell? It’s because you’re safe here in the North, both of you. In Casterly Rock, all it would take is one servant loyal to Cersei and you’d be drinking poisoned wine, or having a convenient fall from the stairs. The danger’s even worse in King’s Landing, she’s had years to gather minions to do her every bidding. You wouldn’t make it past a month.”

Robb’s mouth was dry, and he had to fight back the shudders of horror. “She would…even to her brother’s own—“

Tyrion was shaking his head. “There is nothing Cersei loves more than herself. Oh, she’s called Jaime her other half, but that’s not real. It doesn’t mean anything. She had him sacrifice his honor and his future all for her advantage, while it cost her nothing—she has the crown, and the neglectful husband who leaves her to her own devices, and the three children she can claim openly as her own. He was left with nothing but dishonor and a white cloak. And she’s furious that he’s out of her reach now, she’d do anything to lash out at the person she blames most for it.”

“As if I had a choice!” Robb lashed out, furious. “As if I have had a single choice about any of this—”

But it was no good, Robb could see it now. Even as he wanted nothing more than to shout and rail, hurl his anger at Tyrion like a hammer, Robb knew it would do no good.

He dropped his head into his hands, wanting to scream or to weep, he didn’t know which.

Tyrion did him the courtesy of not speaking until Robb managed to pull himself together, wiping at his face as he raised his head.

“Will you renounce him?” Tyrion asked, his voice tense and his body rigid, waiting for the final blow.

Robb looked at Tyrion, at his pale face, and his stomach churned, as he finally had to give the answer he’d spent this entire time trying to avoid.

“I can’t,” Robb admitted, his voice choked, shamed and furious in equal measure. “Even if it’s treason, even though I cannot fathom the sheer selfishness and stupidity—I can’t. I just can’t.”

Tyiron stared at him, face pale with shock. “Gods save us, you actually mean that, don’t you?”

Robb was too heartsick to bristle at the naked relief and hope in Tyrion’s voice. “Aye.” He was quiet for a moment, then said slowly, “I can’t…I can’t see a way to telling anyone that doesn’t result in the realm going to war.”

“That’s very true,” Tyrion said quickly, and as Robb looked at him, he said defensively, “I admit I’m interested in preventing the total destruction of my house, but it’s also the plain truth. My father would never believe it, and he’d go to war to stop the king from disinheriting his grandchildren. He’s spent too much in gold and lives by now to do anything else.”

From everything Robb knew of Tywin Lannister, that was the plain truth. “I don’t like the thought of treason, but I don’t like the thought of you and I being on opposite sides of a war, either.”

Tyrion looked disconcerted at this. “You—”

“Is it a shock to hear that I’ve grown fond of you?” Robb asked, defensively glaring at him. It was true, of course, every time this past week that Robb had even considered turning to his mother and revealing what he’d seen, he’d balked. For a thousand different reasons, some he was more willing to admit to than others, but just this past evening, he’d watched Tyrion easily distract his siblings from their worries and sadness over Jory Cassel. He’d kept the conversation moving, smiling as he’d encouraged Arya to display her newfound talent at elaborately insulting people in High Valyrian, setting everyone, even their mother, to laughter.

Tyrion had become part of the fabric here at Winterfell, and Robb couldn’t bear the thought of tearing him out now, all over sins not of his own making.

(And it was easier to think of what he owed Tyrion, of wanting to keep his goodbrother safe in the North, rather than to think of what it meant to side with Jaime in this, what it meant to keep Jaime close, rather than renouncing him.)

Tyrion’s expression wavered, and he cleared his throat. “No. I, ah, I am glad to hear it.” He paused, then said with more certainty, “For whatever it is worth, Robb…you have my loyalty. House Stark has my loyalty. I know this decision pains you, but I am more grateful for your mercy than words can express.”

The sincerity of it had Robb’s eyes stinging. Tyrion, because he was capable of tact, didn’t comment, or press further, just slipped down from his chair and turned towards the door, ready to leave Robb be for the night.

But there was still one last thing. “Tyrion,” Robb said. As Tyrion looked back to him, Robb said. “Don’t write to him. When he comes—” home, was what Robb couldn’t say, and so he changed it to, “When he returns to Winterfell, I’ll discuss this with him myself. I don’t want you interfering before then.”

Tyrion opened his mouth, checked himself, and said after a very long pause, “All right.” He watched Robb’s face closely, then said, as if he couldn’t help himself, “But you won’t—”

“I won’t ever speak of it to anyone but yourself and Jaime,” Robb said. He licked his dry mouth and added, the words heavy on his tongue, “My word as a Stark.”

There was something painful in seeing the total relief come over Tyrion’s body and face at that. He didn’t say anything else, just nodded and quietly left the room.

Robb was still for a moment, then he abruptly reached out to grab the wine bottle Tyrion had left behind, uncorking it and drinking straight from the bottle. He choked a little at first, but the more he drank, the easier it went down.

By the time that the gates of Winterfell were finally in sight, Jaime’s agitation had him nearly at the breaking point.

He didn’t need the bond to know that something was wrong, that was clear from the lack of letters from Robb, and the odd constraint in Tyrion’s brief notes sent to them at the Dreadfort. But he could feel it, the odd emptiness where Robb’s steady presence usually was, occasionally broken up by waves of pain and anger, despair and disgust.

Jaime had no idea what could have possibly caused it, but he wanted to be free of the Dreadfort and back with his soulmate as soon as possible.

Now, after weeks of delay and upheaval, Jaime was finally returning, and even Lord Karstark’s sour company and Lord Hornwood’s constant excuses were a small price to pay when they finally rode in through the gates; Jaime didn’t have eyes for anyone else, not even Tyrion, when he caught sight of Robb standing in the courtyard, pale and stone-faced.

Despite the punishing pace Jaime had set to get here as soon as possible, he hesitated for a moment before dismounting from his horse. The look on Robb’s face…

But Robb was moving forward, looking at him now with a shadowed gaze. Jaime reached out to touch his face, his thumb just barely brushing one of the dark circles under his eyes. “What’s this?”

He felt the shutter that went through Robb. “Nothing,” he murmured. His eyes searched Jaime’s face for a moment, then he nodded at Jaime’s shoulder. “How are you healing?”

“My shoulder’s fine, Robb.” Jaime stroked Robb’s hair, and Robb shut his eyes, his expression crumbling. “Robb, what—”

“Not now,” Robb said, opening his eyes and pinning him with a gaze that was full of determination, that momentary despair disappearing. “We have guests—”

“Guests who will be busy washing the dirt off and settling into their chambers,” Jaime protested. “Robb, you’ve been in turmoil for weeks now, you didn’t write to me once, I already know it’s bad. Tell me.”

He couldn’t think what it could be, and the uncertainty was unbearable.

And yet, when Robb gave him another long searching look before abruptly nodding, conceding, “Not here. In our rooms,” Jaime almost wished he hadn’t pushed so hard. Whatever was happening with Robb, he could already tell that solving it would not be an easy task.

Of course, slipping away to their own quarters was more easily said than done—he had to greet Catelyn, and Robb’s siblings, and embrace Tyrion, who looked just as stressed as Robb, giving Jaime a pained grimace of a smile, and just what in the hells was going on?

The dread of whatever was coming felt like a physical weight on his back as Jaime followed in Robb’s wake through the halls of Winterfell. The moment that they were in their chambers, the door shut behind them and the guards safely out of earshot at the end of the corridor, Jaime turned to Robb and said, “All right, out with it.”

Robb wasn’t looking at him; he was by the window, staring out through the glass. “I had another vision.”

Jaime exhaled, relief mingling with his concern. “I’m sorry to hear it. Was it about Aerys?”

“No, it was about you. You were lying with a woman.” As Jaime turned to ice, Robb’s voice went on, relentless, stripped of all emotion. “She had blond hair, like yours. She had your eyes. And until her marriage to the king, she had your name.”

He was still breathing. It seemed incredible that he could still be breathing after this blow. “Robb,” Jaime choked out through numb lips, and had no idea how to continue.

The face Robb turned to him was the face of a stranger. “Are you going to try and deny it?”

His entire body felt numb. “Would it do any good if I did?”

“No,” Robb admitted. He looked at Jaime for a moment, then asked, almost casually, “Are the children yours?”

Jaime couldn’t speak at all now.

Robb was watching him closely, and Jaime thought he could finally see a spark in his eyes—the anger that had to be there coming to the surface at last. “Tyrion said they were, but I might as well confirm it with you. The visions were a little less clear on that point.”

If he’d been capable of moving at all, Jaime would have staggered. “Tyrion—”

“He noticed something was wrong and came to the solar one night to check on me.” Robb went quiet and then said, heatedly, “He’s a far better brother to you than you deserve, I hope you know that. One word to Jon Arryn or the king, and he’d have been able to inherit Casterly Rock years ago with you and your father out of the way.”

Jaime stared at him. “That’s what you have to say to me?”

Robb raised his eyebrow. “I’ve had weeks now to contemplate your treasonous acts, I daresay I’ve considered them from each and every angle by now.” He gritted his teeth and added, eyes glittering, “Though no matter how often I think on it, I cannot fathom how fucking selfish—”

“It wasn’t selfishness,” Jaime murmured in a low voice. “Hate me for it if you must, but it wasn’t selfish, I gave up everything for her—”

“You risked the entire realm!” Robb shouted, then shot a furious glance at the door. Glaring at Jaime, he hissed, stepping closer, “You cuckolded the king of Westeros, you’ve destroyed the royal succession! Should this be discovered, it would be a civil war between the Crown and House Lannister, with all the other kingdoms caught in the middle—you’ve endangered all of Westeros, how can that be anything but monstrously selfish!”

It felt like ice was running through his veins now, instead of blood. “No one could find out—”

“You fucked your sister dozens of times in the Red Keep, planted three blond cuckoos in House Baratheon, and you tell me that no one could figure it out? That no one will think to wonder, or start to suspect?” Disgust dripped from Robb’s voice. “All that wanton destruction, and for what? So you and your sister could imitate the madness of the Targaryens?” Robb stared at him for a moment, then turned away. “Gods be good, I don’t even know how to look at you right now.”

The silence that followed that…it felt like a physical blow.

At last Robb spoke again, still staring at the window, keeping his face turned away from Jaime. “When did it start?”

“Does it matter?” Jaime asked dully.

“Yes,” Robb said, with absolutely no room for disagreement.

“We were young.”

“I gathered that much, given that you were fucking your sister in an inn at the age of fifteen,” Robb said, brutal. “How young? Sansa’s age?”

“Younger.” Jaime sat down on the edge of the bed, suddenly feeling too weary to stay on his feet.

“As young as Bran?” Robb asked, disbelieving. Horrified. It had been years, the memory growing dim from how long Jaime had avoided remembering it, but the horror was, after all, familiar—Jaime had seen it on his mother’s face, ages ago.

“I don’t…I don’t know. As long as I can remember, Cersei was…she said…”

He looked up, sensing a spike of emotion from Robb at that, and when he did look up, Robb was watching him again, head tilted to one side, like a hunting dog who’d caught the scent. “What did she say to you?”

“We were two halves of the same soul,” Jaime said slowly. “The same person, but in two bodies. She said it couldn’t…it wasn’t a sin, if we were the same person, if I was the other half of her. And I believed her. I always believed her.” Bile rose in his throat. “I believed her, right up to the day that the gods put the Mark on my wrist, and then…”

His throat was too tight to go on, but Robb, displaying a ruthlessness that Jaime honestly hadn’t known he had in him, pressed, his voice hard, “And then what?”

Jaime lifted his head and said, “And then I knew she was wrong. That we were wrong.”

Robb was quiet for a moment, then a twisted, bitter smile appeared on his face, and gods, how Jaime loathed seeing it on him, on his bright-eyed, idealistic husband. “No wonder you looked at me like you hated me, that first day in the courtyard,” he said softly. “Gods, I couldn’t understand it then…”

“It wasn’t,” Jaime began, nearly choking on the words. “It wasn’t like—it wasn’t even about you, I didn’t even know you then. I’d just been uprooted from Cersei, from everything I knew—” Robb was watching him, those blue eyes cold, and Jaime burst out, the truth spilling free, “You were there to prove that my entire life was built on a lie, and yes, when I came to Winterfell, I hated you for it. Do you want to know how long that lasted? A day. I couldn’t resist you any longer than that. By the end of that week, I was yours, even if I couldn’t admit it to myself yet.”

For just a moment, the ice cracked, emotion rippling across Robb’s face—and then he was turning away again, staring fixedly at the desk where just a few weeks before, they’d been arguing yet again about the need for a proper navy for the North and how to properly assess the suitors for Sansa’s hand when the time came. “You should have told me,” he gritted out.

Jaime had to laugh at that, the sound wild to his own ears. “How? Was I supposed to turn to you one evening and confess my greatest crime, the thing you’ve so eloquently pointed out could put my house to ruin and send the Seven Kingdoms into civil war? What could I have told you, Robb?”

“Anything!” Robb shouted back, whirling around to face him, eyes wet and his expression wretched, haunted. “Anything would have been better than, than having to see it for myself, night after night! And then I had to stay silent about it, I couldn’t speak of it to anyone, not until Tyrion got it out of me—”

Jaime’s stomach roiled. “And now? Will you speak of it now?”

Robb watched him, expression gone opaque once more—except for those glittering eyes. “Are you asking me to help conceal your treason?”

A bitter taste flooded into Jaime’s mouth. Somehow, he managed to get out, “I’m asking if you’ll condemn the…the children.” He wasn’t such a fool as to ask for mercy for himself, or for Cersei.

Robb looked at him for a long, long moment. “No,” he said finally. “I won’t.”

If he hadn’t already been sitting down on the bed, Jaime would have had to collapse onto it. “You…”

“I can’t reveal what I know without risking a war. Even if war could be averted somehow, it would still lead to the total destruction of your house,” Robb said—gods be good, he really had been thinking this all through. “You and your sister may deserve it, and your father certainly does, but Tyrion doesn’t. The—” he seemed to choke on his words for a moment, but forced out, “The children don’t deserve it. And the shame would only rebound on House Stark, never mind that the crimes aren’t our own, we’d still have to carry the weight of them. So no, I won’t speak.”

Jaime was the one who couldn’t speak. It was a mercy he didn’t deserve, Robb was right on that score, and the granting of it left him weak, burdened—he never knew before now how heavy the weight of mercy could be.

Or maybe that was just grief, knowing what he’d just lost, what he was going to lose.

Willing his voice to stay even, Jaime began by saying carefully, “I won’t insult you by offering my thanks, but—”

“Is there any insult you could offer that would be worse than this?” Robb asked, bitterness coating every word.

Jaime faltered, but pushed on. “But you won’t be burdened with this much longer. I’ll go to King’s Landing, convince Cersei that we need to flee and take the children—”

Robb was staring at him as though he’d grown a second head. It shouldn’t have been a relief, his husband staring at him like he’d gone mad, but anything was an improvement on that look of disgusted betrayal. “You mean to break your marriage vows to me, so you can run off with your sister and your bastard children?” Robb asked, very softly, but the outrage in it was ringing like a bell from the Great Sept—along with something that almost sounded like jealousy, but that wouldn’t be true, not when he was so obviously tainted in Robb’s eyes now.

“I mean to take this burden off your shoulders, ”Jaime said, emphatic. “I’d leave a confession behind—between that and your word of what you saw, even my father won’t have a leg to stand on, and war can be averted. We’ll go across the Narrow Sea, hide in Essos—not even Varys will find us.”

It was a fate Jaime would have welcomed years before—incredible that it would taste like ash to him now.

Truly, the gods were crueler than he could have ever believed. To give him this now, when he’d stopped even wanting it, and right after the bond had stabilized enough to make it even possible—the irony was awful enough to choke on.

But Robb was still staring at him with disbelief. “All right,” he said, abruptly. “Say I go along with this. Say you go to King’s Landing and talk to your sister. Why in the world do you think she’ll agree to go into exile now?”

Jaime stopped. Taken aback, he said slowly, “She’ll have to. Now that you know—”

“If Cersei was willing to run off with you and abandon her crown, she would have done it by now,” Robb said, brutally. “No, she’ll just arrange to have me murdered instead.”

Jaime jerked at that, shaking his head. “No. No, she wouldn’t—”

“Tyrion is quite convinced that she would, and I find myself trusting his judgment more than yours,” Robb said, still in that casually brutal way, as though they weren’t discussing the possibility of his murder. “No. You’re not going to King’s Landing, and you’re not fleeing to Essos.”

Jaime was so stunned by this proclamation that it took him ages before he could speak. “So then what am I going to do?”

“You’re going to stay in the North,” Robb said, face expressionless again. “You won’t run back to King’s Landing, you will never be alone with your sister again—” this last part was nearly spat out, “And you will at least pretend to value your brother’s life above your lust for your sister.”

Now that was a deep cut. “Of course I value Tyrion!” Jaime snapped out, rising to his feet. “How can you say otherwise?”

“How can I not?” Robb countered. “You know the king better than I do; do you think he’d believe that Tyrion knew nothing of what was going on? That it wouldn’t be his head on the executioner’s block, after yours and Cersei’s?”

Jaime was numb from horror at the vision Robb laid out. “He’d have never—”

“No? Well, maybe Tyrion would have been on the battlefield instead,” Robb said. “He’s a clever man, he’d make a brilliant tactician—if he could manage to stay out of the fighting.”

“Stop it,” Jaime whispered. “You’ve made your point.”

A muscle in Robb’s jaw twitched, and just then, Jaime could hear all the angry words that Robb was holding back, all the vitriol he had yet to fling at Jaime’s head. In this room, he was a lifetime away from the husband who’d woken Jaime from his nightmares with a gentle voice and gentler hands.

But Jaime didn’t have the right to mourn that man. His sins had finally caught up with him, after years of avoiding the gods’ punishment. It made a horrible, vicious sense that there would be interest due on the debt.

And his punishment would be this, to live in the wreckage of the miracle he’d never deserved, but once had thought he could keep.

Jaime lifted his chin. “Do you want me to move to other quarters?”

Robb was quiet for a while, obviously tempted, before jerkily shaking his head. “We’re meant to be—it’ll cause questions. Questions we can’t afford to have people asking, not now.”

It made a hideous logic, never mind that it would make them both miserable, continuing to share a marriage bed. Jaime nodded, once, and gritted out, “I should…I need to talk to Tyrion.”

Robb nodded in turn, looking exhausted all of a sudden. “Go.”

Feeling like a man twice his age, Jaime headed for the door, only turning back once his hand was on the handle. “Robb—”

“I won’t tell,” Robb said dully, not looking at him. “I already promised your brother. Gave him my word as a Stark.”

Jaime set his teeth against saying anything—no thanks, no apologies. They would be worthless, set against the weight of everything that had happened, the crimes that Jaime was making Robb carry.

Gods. What a ruin he’d made of everything.

Jaime turned and left, before he could go on and make it worse still.

*

Of course, Tyrion was waiting for him, wine at the ready and with sympathy Jaime didn’t deserve.

“Drink at least two full glasses of that before you start talking,” he’d ordered, and Jaime went ahead and did as ordered. Gods knew he wasn’t to be trusted making decisions anymore.

Once the wine was moving through his veins, Jaime offered up quietly, “I can see you on a boat to Essos before the month’s out. If you don’t want to risk being in the North, just in case…”

Tyrion’s forehead was furrowed. “In case of what?”

Jaime shrugged. “Should we be discovered, if…” It took an effort to go on, but he managed, “If Robb can’t keep this secret, you don’t deserve to be punished for—”

Tyrion shook his head. “I don’t worry that Robb will tell. Don’t get me wrong, he’s absolutely furious at having to hide this, but he—” Tyrion stopped, and then said, “He said he was too fond of me to relish the thought of facing me opposite a battlefield.”

“Of course he did,” Jaime said, a faint smile coming to his lips. If anyone deserved Robb’s mercy and continued regard in all this, it was Tyrion. “And he…he said he gave you his word.”

“The word of a Stark,” Tyrion confirmed, a faint smile appearing, if only momentarily. “No, I think we can rely on that, if nothing else. And even if I didn’t feel confident in the notion of a Stark keeping their word, I wouldn’t leave you here on your own, even if I…”

“Even if?” Jaime prodded once Tyrion trailed off.

Tyrion sighed. “After I heard about the visions that Robb was granted, I went to the godswood, and I pledged myself to House Stark before the old gods, if only they would show mercy on you and the children.”

Jaime sat back in his seat, stunned. “Since when have you been a follower of the old gods of the North?”

“Since it became increasingly clear that not only do they still have their eyes on us, but they are continuing to directly intervene in our affairs!” Tyrion hissed, looking wild-eyed. “Jaime, think! Do you honestly believe this is happening out of nowhere? For Robb to have one vision granted directly from the gods was strange enough, but now two of them? And both of them are about the very things you would have never admitted to on your own?”

It felt as though the wind was knocked out of Jaime. “You can’t know…” he trailed off weakly.

Tyrion’s gaze was hard. “Jaime. We can’t afford to pretend this isn’t happening. And any advantage we can get, we need. So yes, I will go down on my knees and pledge my loyalty to whoever the fuck I need to in order to make sure you and the children get out of this alive.”

They were quiet for a moment.

“He’s never going to forgive this,” Jaime said finally.

“He won’t tell,” Tyrion quickly began, and Jaime shook his head.

“Of course Robb won’t tell; he gave you his word, and he wants to keep you safe,” Jaime said. “But he won’t forgive this. Not my sins, not the children, not the burden of this secret. Robb won’t forgive me for any of it.”

Tyrion’s gaze slid away, and after a moment, he pushed the wine skin closer to Jaime, a tacit agreement that Tyrion was too kind to confirm with words.

And so for the first time in gods only knew how long, Jaime outdrank Tyrion in the space of one evening. The wine helped, but only so far, because while it dulled the immediate pain, Jaime’s mind kept wandering to other memories, other times when he could have said no to Cersei and didn’t, not when they were children and she kept terrorizing Tyrion, not when they were fifteen and she was convincing him to join the Kingsguard, not when she had finally become Queen and took him into her bed once more.

He’d never said no, because nothing had ever been more important than Cersei. Not Jaime’s vows as a knight, not the laws of man or the laws of the gods, not even—to his growing shame—his brother Tyrion, who he’d never managed to fully shield from Cersei’s malice.

“I should’ve been a better brother to you,” he slurred at one point, looking blearily at Tyrion from where he was resting his head on the desk.

“You’re an excellent brother to me,” Tyrion said kindly.

Jaime tried to shake his head, but the desk was in the way. “Robb said. Said I wasn’t.”

“He was angry,” Tyrion said, after a moment. “He didn’t mean—”

“Mm. No, he did. I know he did. I know exactly how he feels, that’s the whole point of the bond.” Jaime tried to laugh, as he said next. “I can tell exactly how much disgust he feels for me now, I promise you.”

Tyrion didn’t reply to that (how could he) but after a moment, Jaime felt him pat his hand, the gesture awkward in its painful sincerity.

“What an absolute cockup I’ve made of my life,” Jaime muttered.

“It could be worse,” Tyrion offered up.

Jaime actually lifted his head up at that. “How.”

“You could be bald,” Tyrion said solemnly. It was a terrible, weak joke, but Jaime found himself helplessly snickering anyway.

Tyrion once again proved he was a better brother than Jaime deserved, as he let Jaime sleep at the foot of his bed for the evening. He fell into a heavy sleep, and in another act of mercy he didn’t deserve, the old gods made sure Jaime didn’t dream of anything at all.

His husband looked like utter shit.

A small, nasty part of Robb was pleased to see Jaime looking so low, with his eyes bleary and red-rimmed and his hair unwashed, and with the general air of a man who had tried to drown himself in wine the night before, and who had found no relief in it.

The rest of him, the cold methodical part that ruled now, that side of him noted that they’d have to make a better show of it going forward, if they were going to conceal everything from his family. He’d already heard from Jon this morning about Jaime drinking the night away in Tyrion’s chambers (according to the servants) and how Jaime had missed his usual morning spar with Jon as a result.

But Jaime was present and sober now as they joined Robb’s father in his solar, along with a small crowd consisting of Maester Luwin, Vayon Poole, Robb’s mother, and Tyrion. Robb held himself apart from Jaime, letting Jon and Tyrion stand between them, shielding his mind away from the gray, sour taste of Jaime’s misery and self-loathing, holding on instead to the cleansing fire of his own fury until it burned every other emotion away, and left nothing but a cool clarity in the ashes.

His father didn’t wait on ceremony once they were all gathered—he just began immediately, detailing the crimes they’d uncovered at the Dreadfort, how many of Lord Bolton’s men were being held in Winterfell’s dungeons awaiting trial (the number was depressingly high), and the reparations being made out of the Bolton treasury to the victims (the precious few that were still alive) and to their families.

All the Northern lords would be coming to Winterfell and bearing witness, and his father had already written to the Vale to summon Roose Bolton’s heir, Domeric, who was off fostering with House Redfort.

“Will the boy stand trial as well?” Tyrion asked.

His father grimaced. “So far there is no sign that Domeric Bolton either participated in or even knew of his father and brother’s actions. There is not a single complaint against him.”

Jaime stirred for the first time since entering the room. “You can’t seriously mean to let the boy inherit his father’s seat.”

“If it’s proven he’s innocent—”

“He’ll go to the Dreadfort and continue the reign of terror his family’s held over those lands for fuck knows how many generations,” Jaime retorted, a flush rising on his pale cheeks. He hadn’t shaved this morning, and the beard he’d grown in his time away made his face look leaner, more gaunt—almost wolf-like. “Gods above, am I the only one who remembers how fresh some of the human skins were at that accursed place?”

Ned’s nostrils flared. “And you heard from the maester—”

“A wretched creature who was ready to swear to anything to save his own skin—”

“—that Domeric Bolton was kept far away from his father’s brutality. He was sent away to the Vale at the age of seven, and only came home infrequently; it’s not impossible that he was truly ignorant of his father’s crimes.”

Jaime was staring at his father as though he’d grown a second head. “Do you honestly mean to tell me, after everything we saw, after we witnessed Ramsey Bolton carving open an innocent girl, and Roose Bolton trying to stick his dagger in your throat, that there is a single member of that wretched family worth saving? Good gods, Ned, I know you Northmen like to cling to your honor, but this is—”

To Robb’s shock—to everyone’s shock—his father abruptly slapped the desk with his palm, the loud bang of it stunning the room into silence. Color high on his cheeks, Ned snapped out, incensed, “I will not punish a son for his father’s crimes. I know what the Seven say about the sins of the father, but that is not the Northern way, and it is not my way. Not so long as I draw breath.” He seemed to come back to himself, looking down as he said in a tight voice, “That is the reasoning that led to the murders of Aegon and Rhaenys Targaryen in the Red Keep at the end of the rebellion, and not even you, Ser Jaime, would defend that act.”

Despite himself, Robb’s gaze flicked back to Jaime’s face, just in time to see it leeched of all color.

“Ned,” Robb’s mother murmured, and his father glanced towards her, shifting his shoulders as if to shake his anger away. “I think we’ve rather drifted from the point.”

“Aye,” his father muttered, taking a breath. “When Domeric Bolton is here, I want him guarded at all times. His aunt is Barbery Dustin, his mother was Lord Ryswell’s sister, and none of them bear any love for me or our house. The last thing we need is even the appearance of a conspiracy between them, it’ll only infuriate the other lords even more. I’ll have enough to do as it is keeping the Greatjon calm.”

“He denies practicing First Night, then?” Robb asked.

“As loudly and vociferously as he can,” Maester Luwin said. “The letter was written in his own hand, if I’m not mistaken, and the number of inkblots show…well, a certain agitation.”

“Forgive me,” Tyrion said, clearing his throat. “But, under the circumstances, I feel it must be asked. Can his word be trusted on this? Can any lord’s words be trusted on this matter?”

His father leaned back in his chair. “I would trust Lord Umber’s word on this,” he said, then grimaced. “But if you’d asked me six months ago if the Boltons would be capable of the depravity we’ve just witnessed…” He trailed off, looking exhausted, and his mother laid a hand on his shoulder. He reached up to squeeze it wordlessly, then focused on Tyrion once more. “But you’re not saying this just to raise suspicions of every one of my bannermen,” Ned said, raising an eyebrow. “What scheme do you have in mind now, Tyrion?”

There was a faint thread of amusement in his voice, but more than that, there was trust—because Tyrion had proven himself loyal, and his father was returning that same loyalty back, it was the Stark way. Robb’s stomach clenched, because Tyrion deserved it, he’d been responsible for uncovering the Boltons’ evil acts as much as anyone, Robb couldn’t risk seeing Jaime’s crimes heaped upon his head, he couldn’t.

“It’ll take time,” Tyrion cautioned. “But I think…perhaps a northern progress. A tour of sorts, where you visit each and every one of your lords and their keeps over the next year. Ostensibly it will be about strengthening ties, granting them the honor of having the Warden and his family visit, but in reality—”

“In reality we will be spying on them,” Ned finished dryly.

“We will be ensuring that they are keeping to the laws of gods and men,” Tyrion corrected. “It’ll give us a chance to speak to the smallfolk on their lands, make sure everything truly is as they should be. And if any lord demures, or tries to delay…well, that will simply mean they warrant a closer look.”

His father was quiet for a moment, then nodded. “It’s a good plan.”

“And you should take Jaime with you,” Tyrion added casually. “Under the circumstances, it’s possible the smallfolk might feel more comfortable speaking to someone who isn’t a northerner. Robb can stay behind and hold Winterfell in your name, it’ll be good for people to see that the future of House Stark is secure.”

Robb held his face carefully still throughout all of this, and beneath the churning sea of emotions he did not want to examine at all, there was a flicker of admiration at how neatly Tyrion had handled that. Trust a Lannister to be the perfect partner for subterfuge.

The fact that the subterfuge was necessary, that he needed his own goodbrother to find a way to keep him and Jaime apart, likely for months at a time—well. Robb wasn’t going to think of it.

Steeling himself, he followed Jaime out of the solar as the meeting ended, asking curtly in a low voice, “Are you planning to spend the night in Tyrion’s quarters again?”

Jaime stiffened, but kept his face utterly blank, even as his eyes darted over Robb’s shoulder, ensuring they were out of earshot. “Would you prefer I didn’t?”

He said it as though the answer didn’t matter either way, which sent Robb’s temper soaring. “I would prefer that quite a lot of things be different,” he snapped back, working to keep his voice low. “But what I need is for people not to notice that anything is—” He checked himself, and said, even more quietly, “Jon was looking for you this morning, people noticed you weren’t in our quarters last night.”

“All right,” Jaime said, still in that toneless voice. “Anything else?”

Despite the beard and the unwashed hair and hollow cheeks, his husband still looked beautiful somehow. Like one of the illustrated pilgrims in his mother’s copy of The Seven-Pointed Star. It was infuriating. Robb wanted to knock him down to the ground, he wanted to shout in Jaime’s face, he wanted to shake him. Anything to make this horrible gnawing misery go away.

He wasn’t going to get it. Because this man, as beautiful and as horrible as he was, was the burden the gods had sent to him to keep.

“No,” Robb said, and walked away.

*

As the Northern lords arrived in a slow trickle, the days moved just as slowly.

Robb did his best to keep a good face on it, keeping a smile on his face for his younger siblings, helping where he could as his mother frantically prepared for the guests that were arriving, watching and learning as his father carefully crafted the strategy he would take, once all his bannermen had arrived at Winterfell.

And he did his best to look out for Jon, who had been quiet and hollow-eyed since his return from the Dreadfort. It wasn’t his usual brooding (the brooding that had lessened once Jaime had taken him on as a squire) this was heavier, darker.

“Are you sleeping any better?” Robb asked his brother at breakfast one morning. Jaime had been an unmoving lump beneath the furs as Robb had risen that morning, still as the grave, but Robb knew he had been awake, of course.

Jon lifted one shoulder, neither confirming or denying, but the dark circles under his eyes told the story for him.

“You should go to Maester Luwin for some dreamwine,” Robb urged, but Jon made a face.

“I tried that, it only made the dreams worse,” he said, poking at his morning porridge. “With the dreamwine, it’s like I know I’m dreaming, but I can’t make myself wake up. I can’t even move. I’d rather stay up all night instead than go through that again. Besides, Jaime says the dreams’ll go away on their own.”

“Does he?”

Jon stopped poking his food, and looked him right in the face. “What’s going on between you two?”

“Nothing,” Robb denied, reflexively. Jon gave him a flat look for this, and Robb amended it to, “Nothing you have to worry about.”

Jon pursed his lips a little. “He doesn’t look like he’s been sleeping well. And he’s not having fun with the swordplay like he usually does.” He paused, then asked more quietly, “Have you two quarreled?”

“Why would you think we’ve quarreled?” Robb tried to parry.

“Because he flinches whenever your name comes up,” Jon said. He was watching Robb carefully, the same patient look on his face that their father had, that look that Robb knew like his own hand, because this was his brother, who he loved and trusted.

Robb opened his mouth, and in that half-second, all the reasons why he couldn’t speak rushed back to him. Tyrion. The faceless blond children in King’s Landing that Robb raged over, but didn’t want to see destroyed. The thousands that could die to salvage Tywin Lannister’s pride.

(Jaime, Jaime watching him without any hope, Jaime in his sister’s arms, Jaime’s head taken off his shoulders by the swing of a sword.)

Robb swallowed. “It’s fine. Nothing for you to worry over.” Jon’s mouth turned downwards, and abruptly, Robb leaned in to throw an arm around his brother’s shoulders, shaking him a little, the solid weight of Jon’s body against his a relief. “It’ll be all right. Trust me?”

Jon looked at him sidelong, but finally smiled. “Of course.”

Robb breathed out in relief, shaking Jon’s shoulder again before letting him go, holding on to his own promise like a lifeline. It’ll be all right. I will make it be all right. Whatever it takes.

So Robb held his tongue. Each day, each night, he held his tongue.

In public, at least.

“Do you miss them?” Robb asked one night in the dark. He could hear Jaime breathing next to him, and he knew that Jaime wasn’t asleep either.

It took a moment for Jaime to respond. “Miss who?”

Jaime had taken to sleeping beneath the furs, while Robb slept on top of them—it had been their custom since that morning where Robb had woken up to find himself wrapped around Jaime like a vine and had immediately recoiled, unable to hide his fury and disgust, and Jaime unable to hide his flinching misery.

(Robb wasn’t sorry for it, how could he be sorry for it? And yet, the bitter hurt that Jaime had felt had found its echo in him, somehow. So they wordlessly fell into this habit instead, and Robb told himself it was better.)

“The children,” Robb found himself saying, staring up at the canopy over their beds, meant to keep out the cold. “Your…blond cuckoos. I wondered if you missed them.”

The pause was shorter this time, and when Jaime spoke, he sounded incredulous. “Are you serious?”

“I’m just wondering,” Robb said, marveling at the coolness of his own voice. “After all, you risked so much to bring them into the world. Surely you must miss them now that you’re clear across the continent.”

His mental shield was as unyielding as granite, so he couldn’t actually feel whatever it was that Jaime was feeling, but he somehow knew it anyway. “No,” Jaime said finally. “I don’t miss them. I was never—” He stopped speaking.

Robb’s nostrils flared, and he said, very evenly, “Go on.”

“I was never allowed to be very close to them,” Jaime gritted out. “It wasn’t…it wouldn’t have been prudent.”

“You are japing,” Robb said, in flat disbelief. “That’s what you call being prudent?” His voice was rising, and with an effort, he reeled it back in. “Was that your idea or the Queen’s?”

“Does it matter?” Jaime asked.

“So it was hers then,” Robb said, grimly. “Of course it was. Another degradation to add to the list.”

“Don’t,” Jaime said, his voice harder now, body tensing up next to his.

Robb should have stopped, but he couldn’t help himself, the words kept spilling out anyway, like a river flooding its banks during a spring flood. “Just because you can’t admit the filthy pit that she’s dragged you into, all your lives, doesn’t mean that I have to play along. I saw it, in case you’ve forgotten, every lure she cast out, every manipulation, every time you cast aside your honor and your duty and your sanity—”

Quick as a whip, Jaime’s hand leapt out to grab at Robb’s shoulder, his grip bruisingly tight. “Enough. Enough, Robb.” As Robb choked on his fury, Jaime said in a rasp, “Whatever…whatever Cersei is, whatever she did, I did follow her, I chose to follow her. The…the sin of it is mine, as much as it is hers.”

“I am well aware of that,” Robb spat out, hating the way that the warmth of Jaime’s hand seemed to be sinking right into his bones. “And now, thanks to the gods’ favor, your sins, and hers, are mine to carry as well.”

There was a long, painful silence. “I know,” Jaime said at last, sounding so utterly weary that for a moment, Robb’s throat threatened to close up on him, his eyes burning. “If I had known you were coming…”

“You’d have met me with a clean heart,” Robb finished for him, his throat aching with the grief he refused to let free. “I know.”

He couldn’t even picture it, that was the worst part. That shining future that should have been his, the storybook golden knight…Robb had never had that, not from the first. There had only ever been this Jaime, with his secrets lurking in the shadows, even as he’d dazzled Robb from the first moment they’d met.

Abruptly sick of everything, including himself and his own rage, Robb turned away to face the wall, his back to Jaime, curling up into a ball and waiting for sleep to overtake him.

It took a long time.

*

The only place that Robb found himself able to relax, truly, was in Tyrion’s quarters, with the doors shut and bolted and a glass of wine before him.

It should have been more awkward than it was, Tyrion was Jaime’s brother, and Robb and Jaime were painfully at odds, but Tyrion was so frank about the entire situation that it perversely made things simple—they both knew where they stood, and that neither of them would speak of it to anyone else.

“You don’t resent him at all, do you?” Robb asked one evening, as the candles burned low. “He’s put you in a terrible position—“

Tyrion spread his hands open. “There have been times where I would have shaken him until his bones rattled, if I were capable of it and if I’d thought it would do any good. But he’s my brother. For a long time, he was the only one who cared for me at all. I can’t turn my back on him. Could you ever turn your back on Jon?”

“Jon would never give me cause to,” Robb retorted.

“If he did,” Tyrion pressed, patient. “If he had one weakness—a terrible one, a dangerous one—would it wipe out your childhoods? The lifetime he’s been at your side?”

Robb hesitated. “I would shake him until his bones rattled, and if that didn’t work I’d beat the sense into him,” he muttered.

“But you wouldn’t abandon him.”

“No,” Robb conceded at last, though it tasted sour on his tongue. He looked at Tyrion and said, after a moment, “You’ve never asked me to forgive him.”

Tyrion raised his eyebrows. “Would it do any good if I did?” As Robb shook his head, Tyrion shrugged. “There you go then. I’m not so much a fool as to bash my head against a brick wall.” He paused, then said, haltingly, “Besides…I can’t help but think you were given the truth of it for a reason. Though I’m damned if I can see why the gods would burden you with this, and wait a year to do it.”

Robb shivered. “I can’t think about that. If I do, I’ll go mad with wondering.” But even as he said it, Robb did wonder—he’d been wondering, and would go on wondering still. Why this vision, why now, when it was too late to denounce Jaime, too late to cut him and Tyrion loose? “You really think this is all part of some…larger plan, don’t you?”

Tyrion nodded firmly. “I do.” He laughed self-consciously, and said, “I keep going to the godswood, waiting for the old gods to give me a sign, but so far they’ve declined.”

Robb felt his mouth curving up. Tyrion’s conversion to the old gods from the Seven had been a great topic of conversation around Winterfell, with most people bemused but pleased. Old Nan in particular was very smug, convinced that it was her tales of the North that sent Tyrion on, as she put it, “the path of common sense, which always leads to a heart tree”.

“Father says he’s never seen someone talk quite so much in a godswood before,” Robb said, finally smiling. “Particularly someone who obviously expects to hear someone talk back.”

“Well, that’s the problem with a religion that has so few rules to it,” Tyrion said. “Nobody can tell me I’m worshiping wrong, now can they?”

Robb had to chuckle at this. “No, they cannot.”

“Not that I’ll have much time to get acquainted with the old gods,” Tyrion said. “We’ll be very busy over the coming weeks, of course.”

“No one will grudge you a few moments in the godswood,” Robb said, but frowned a little. “We’re going to be a long time untangling this mess, aren’t we? The Boltons, I mean.”

“Mmhm,” Tyrion agreed.

Robb squared his shoulders. “All right. How can I help?” Wallowing over the destruction of his marriage would do him no good, and here at least, he could be of some use.

Tyrion’s mouth quirked, and he said, “Have you spoken to Lord Karstark’s sons?”

“Not very much, not yet,” Robb said.

“You should start,” Tyrion said. “And Lord Umber’s son as well, when the Umbers arrive.”

Robb took that in. “All the heirs to the major Northern houses,” he said. “Anything I should keep in mind when speaking to them?”

Tyrion’s mouth curved up. “Do you know, Robb, I think you would have done very well in the south. With a little practice.”

“I’ll stick to Northern intrigues, thank you very much,” Robb said dryly, and Tyrion laughed.

But it was easier than Robb would’ve thought, falling into conversation with people like Harrion Karstark, Cley Cerwyn, Asher Forrester. They were eager to speak to him, of course, the heir to Winterfell, husband to the man who’d killed Roose Bolton. Jon stuck close, as did Theon, and it was perhaps not entirely surprising that Jon was more popular with the others than Theon was.

There was only one topic of conversation to be had, of course.

“The Boltons must have been mad,” Cley Cerwyn said, urgently. “What did they think was going to happen, that they would never be caught?”

“They weren’t caught, not for a long time,” Theon pointed out. “You get away with your crimes for that long, why would you think you’d get caught out? Or that anyone would care if you were?

“Yes, we all know how the ironborn behave, Greyjoy, but we do things differently in the North,” Asher Forrester retorted.

“Apparently you don’t do things that differently after all,” Theon replied, and both Asher and Cley bristled at that.

“He’s right,” Jon said quietly from where he was sitting. “Much as I hate to admit it.” He looked up to find everyone watching him, and said, halting, “It’s not…it’s not enough to say that the Boltons were mad, although they were. We need to ask why they got away with it for so long.”

Everyone was quiet at that, before Asher asked, hesitant, “Did…did any of the smallfolk say why they never came to Lord Stark? Or any of the neighboring lords?”

Jon said, heavily, “They had a lot of reasons. Mostly, they just feared the reprisal from the Boltons. Some of them, gods help us, thought it was like this everywhere in the North.” Cley Cerwyn cursed at that, and the faces around the table became grimmer.

“We will be working to put this right for a long time,” Harrion Karstark said quietly. “All of us.”

“Aye,” Jon agreed, his voice low. “We will.”

But the conversation that stuck out the most was the one that Robb had with Smalljon Umber, when he and his father arrived at Winterfell. Robb had been in the courtyard when they arrived, the Umber party thundering in on their horses, the Greatjon’s face grimmer than Robb had ever seen it on one of his visits to Winterfell.

He’d gone before Robb’s father on one knee, head bowed low. “My lord.”

Robb’s father had bade him rise, but there had been a crease between his eyebrows as he said it, and they immediately disappeared in the direction of what Robb knew was his father’s solar. That left Smalljon Umber, looking awkward with his size, easily the tallest man there now his father was gone.

“Here,” Robb said. “Let me show you to your guest quarters.”

Smalljon was quiet at first, following Robb through the corridors like a very large shadow. Robb kept the conversation light at first, asking about their journey down to Winterfell, talking about the large feast that would be held once all the lords had arrived.

Smalljon didn’t say much in response, not until they reached his guest quarters and he abruptly said, “It’s not true, you know. What they’ve been saying about First Night in our lands. We don’t—my father doesn’t do that. I don’t do that.”

“That’s good to hear,” Robb said. “Do you know why anyone would say otherwise?”

“My father’s grandfather was…an evil man,” Smalljon said, heavily. “He…believed in the old way. The wrong way.”

“But you and your father don’t.”

“No,” Smalljon said, with force to it. “We would never.”

Then you’ll have nothing to worry about, is what Robb didn’t say. “I am glad to hear that, Smalljon. Truly.”

Smalljon searched his face for a moment, then let out a sigh. “Will you tell me how you discovered it all, then?”

Robb looked at him a moment, then nodded, and began to tell it all. Following Tyrion’s instructions, he didn’t leave out the part where Tyrion had been evaluating all the candidates for Sansa’s hand—and he saw a spark of interest in Smalljon’s face at that—and how that, combined with the exodus of smallfolk from the Dreadfort to the lands around Moat Cailin had finally let them to the right path, to asking the right questions, and finally getting the answers.

“And it was Jaime Lannister who slew Roose Bolton,” Smalljon said.

“Aye, it was,” Robb said, after a moment.

“It’s funny,” Smalljon said, with a tiny laugh. “I’ve always believed in the gods, but I’d never thought to see them move in the world this way.”

“How do you mean?” Robb asked.

Smalljon looked surprised at the question. “I mean in what they did, bringing the Lannisters here.” He tilted his head at Robb, saying, “Surely you’ve thought of it too? It was your marriage to Jaime Lannister that started all of this.”

Robb opened his mouth to deny it, but couldn’t. “I…hadn’t thought of it like that,” he said at last.

“Really?” Smalljon asked, obviously surprised. “If it were me, I wouldn’t be able to think of anything else.”

Robb felt a chill go through him. “There’s a lot to consider.”

“Hah, I’ll bet!” Smalljon exclaimed. He grew more solemn, saying next. “I’m glad, though. Whatever purpose the gods have for you both, this was obviously part of it. If the Lannisters hadn’t come when they did…I don’t know when or how we could have stopped the Boltons.”

“We would have stopped them,” Robb said, but his voice was hollow.

Smalljon didn’t look like he believed it either. “Would we? I swear it to you, Robb, I swear it on my mother’s grave that we never heard of what the Boltons were doing. But our lands border theirs. If we didn’t hear of anything, and the Karstarks and Hornwoods didn’t hear of it, then—”

“Then how could anyone else,” Robb finished for him.

Smalljon nodded. After a moment, he chuckled and said, “You know, on the journey down here, my father said that after witnessing the sack of King’s Landing during the war, he’d have never thought he’d be grateful for a Lannister’s intervention, and yet here he was, having to praise Jaime Lannister. Guess the gods like to make fools of us all on occasion.”

“Yes,” Robb agreed. “Sometimes they do.”

It clung to him, all throughout the dinner in the great hall that night. Even as he talked to Smalljon on one side and Theon on the other, even as he looked past where Tyrion and Jaime were talking to each other at another table, it stayed with him.

Was it really that simple? A straightforward chain, from his marriage to the downfall of the Boltons—Lannister gold to build Moat Cailin, Tyrion’s cleverness to unwind years of the Boltons’ hidden crimes, Jaime’s sword to dispatch Roose Bolton, and all of it guided by the old gods.

And if it was…was that enough? Did saving King’s Landing make up for nearly twenty years of sin and treason? Was planting three bastard children in the royal succession balanced out by helping to save the North from Roose Bolton and Ramsey Snow?

Robb had no answer for that. And he wasn’t sure he wanted to have one.

As it turned out, it was possible to keep going, even after your life had been smashed to pieces.

Somehow, Jaime kept breathing, kept getting up each morning, and he didn’t run for Essos or the Wall. That was the biggest victory of all, every time that he went to his cold marriage bed and didn’t run from the wreckage he’d caused, or the beautiful young man whose life he’d ruined.

Here he was, staying in the wreckage, and slowly bleeding out as he did.

It helped (as much as anything could help) that Tyrion kept him busy, sent him to talk to one bannerman after another, sifting through to see which ones of them had known, which ones of them had suspected, and which ones truly had had no idea of what was happening on the Bolton lands.

“Lord Hornwood is lying through his fucking teeth when he says he didn’t know,” Jaime reported one afternoon in Ned Stark’s solar. “It’s worth following up.”

Ned grunted at that. “Aye,” he said grimly. He looked at his quill but didn’t pick it up. “Barbary Dustin’s arrived this morning.”

“Domeric Bolton’s aunt?” At Ned’s tight nod, Jaime raised his eyebrow and asked, “I know she’s the Lady of Barrowton, but you seem remarkably worried about a minor bannerman of yours.”

“Not worried,” Ned corrected him. “The history between our houses is…rather complicated.”

When he didn’t elaborate, Jaime asked, “Am I just supposed to start guessing what you mean by that?”

Ned’s mouth thinned, but he elaborated, “Barbary was a Ryswell before she married, and my brother was fostered with her family. They were…rather close, and she had hopes of marrying him and becoming Lady Stark, but my father’s ambitions ran higher.”

“He wanted the daughter of a Lord Paramount with a fat dowry,” Jaime translated.

“Yes,” Ned conceded. “Brandon seemed content enough with his engagement, but.” He stopped again.

Jaime sighed. “Ned. I can’t assist if I don’t know what’s going on.”

“It was rumored that he and Barbary…that he took Lady Barbary as a lover. Took her maidenhead. And then he didn’t marry her, and died in King’s Landing not long after.”

“And she resented never being made Lady Stark,” Jaime said.

“That, and her husband was one of my companions in Dorne. He died,” Ned said, swallowing. “He died along with most of my men, I couldn’t bring back his bones. I couldn’t bring back any of their bones. Just my sister’s.”

There was a distance to Ned’s gaze, as though he wasn’t here in this room in Winterfell, but rather still trapped in the desert sands of Dorne, surrounded by dead men. His men, and the Kingsguard who Jaime once called brothers.

He swallowed, not asking the dozens of questions he’d never asked about that day, and said instead, ruthlessly keeping himself in the present, “So Barbary Dustin blames you then. For all of it, likely. Her husband’s death, her broken hopes of being the Lady of Winterfell. And now you’ve uncovered a scandal that could destroy her nephew.”

Ned’s face grew even grimmer. “Exactly.”

Jaime clicked his tongue. “You’re right. The woman is definitely going to be a problem.”

And sure enough, she was.

It started with Jaime’s conversation with the Greatjon, at one of the smaller tables in the Great Hall. Jaime had been ready to suspect Greatjon Umber of anything, after the stories they’d heard from the smallfolk, but the Greatjon had disarmed him from the first. He’d gone to one knee in Ned’s solar and sworn that he knew nothing of the Boltons’ crimes, that First Night was not practiced in his lands, and he was willing to take them straight to his lands and let them question his smallfolk, out of his hearing.

“What do you know of Domeric Bolton?” Jaime asked him quietly.

Greatjon grimaced. “Nothing much,” he’d admitted. “I know he’s lived half his life in the South, learning how to be some poncey knight.” Jaime raised an eyebrow, and Greatjon huffed. “You’ve at least bloodied your sword in real combat, and not just those ridiculous tourneys. Let those fancy summer children face a horde of roving wildings, or a ship full of those cursed ironborn, then I’ll take them seriously.”

Jaime had done both by this point in his life, and fared well each time, so he conceded the point. “So the boy…”

Greatjon shrugged. “As I said, I don’t know him. Thought it was ridiculous Roose sending his son out of the North at all, never mind at such a young age, but I assumed it was so his son could catch a highborn lass from the South with a great big inheritance. Nothing compared to yours, of course, but something sizeable. Having an heir with the word ‘ser’ in front of his name couldn’t hurt with that.”

“You don’t think it’s peculiar?” Jaime prodded. “Keep his son and only heir at a distance, away from any witnesses, anyone who could speak out against him the way they did against Roose…” As Greatjon’s eyes went wide, Jaime said urgently, “What if Roose was hedging his bets? Keeping his trueborn son looking pure as fresh snow. A nice polite boy, taught in all the southern graces, some poncey knight as you say…would you think to be wary of him?”

Greatjon looked grim. “No.”

“I’ve been studying the history of the North,” Jaime said. He hadn’t been able to convince Ned, not yet, but one look at the Greatjon and Jaime knew he’d be ready and willing to do anything to convince the Starks and the North of his loyalty, to set himself apart from Roose Bolton. “Time and time again the Boltons have betrayed the Starks, betrayed the North. They’re given chance after chance, but the treachery in them always rises back up to the surface.”

“And you’re wondering why they should be given another chance now,” Greatjon said. His face drew into a scowl as he said, “Breaking guest right, rape and murder, trying to kill Ned Stark…no. I can’t see a reason to give Domeric Bolton a chance either.”

“Do you think the other lords might feel the same?” Jaime asked, delicately.

The Greatjon snorted. “If they don’t, I’ll bang their heads together until they see sense.”

So that was satisfying, but nothing else was. A day later, Jaime had retreated to Tyrion’s small solar, a pathetic attempt at hiding away from the rooms he shared with the husband who rightfully despised him, with some vague idea of looking over the latest Moat Cailin reports.

He was on the verge of suggesting to Ned that he travel down to the Neck, to supervise the rebuilding and the work on the canal. He didn’t want to do it, but it seemed a better solution than living in Winterfell, bracing for the day when Robb’s silence would break.

Sunk in his own misery, it took a moment for Jaime to hear the knocking at the door. Irritated, he called out, “Come in already.”

One of the maids tentatively poked her head in, saying quietly, “M’lord, Lady Dustin is here to see you,” but then a crisp voice said, “Step aside, girl, I can announce myself.”

Jaime sat back in his chair as Barbary Dustin walked into the room. She didn’t look like very much, pale and dark-haired like so many women of the North, solidly built like most women in middle-age, but her mouth was thin and hard with displeasure.

“Lady Dustin,” Jaime said, and made no effort to get up from his chair.

“Ser Jaime,” she replied coolly, then set a withering glare upon the poor maid. “Leave us, girl.”

The maid scurried out. Sensing a fight, and grateful for the chance, Jaime gave her his most infuriating smile and said, “What can I do for the Lady of Barrowton?”

“You can stop trying to get my nephew executed,” Barbary Dustin said.

Jaime’s smile didn’t slip. “Why, Lady Dustin, why would you fear that? Has your nephew done anything that would warrant an execution?”

Lady Dustin glared at him. “He has done nothing, and you know it, Lannister. And yet you are working to turn all the Northern lords against him, Umber is already baying for his blood—”

“Yes, the Greatjon has taken the slander against his House very personally,” Jaime said. “Your goodbrother made a point of accusing Lord Umber of the same perversities he was committing himself. Did you think Lord Umber would receive that news with a shrug?”

“That was Roose, not Domeric,” Lady Dustin said, nostrils flaring.

“I’m sure we’ll hear tales of your nephew’s evil deeds before long,” Jaime said. “I find it highly unlikely that the apple’s fallen very far from this twisted family tree.”

“You won’t find anything,” she said, voice hard and sure. “Domeric is not his father, nor is he anything like that foul bastard Ramsey Snow.”

“Perhaps,” Jaime conceded. “But you are overestimating how much his supposed innocence will matter. His father and brother have tainted House Bolton for generations to come, and what use is a lord who can’t command the respect of his peers or the smallfolk?”

Lady Dustin looked at him for a long moment, and then a small, wintery smile appeared on her face. “So there it is,” she said. “You’re after the Dreadfort. Want to hand it off to one of Ned Stark’s sons, I suppose, perhaps that bastard squire of yours.”

“What an excellent suggestion,” Jaime said. “Though quite honestly, I’ll settle for keeping it out of the hand of a traitor.”

“Domeric is not a traitor,” Lady Dustin spat at him. “And how ironic it is, to hear the son of Tywin Lannister argue that the child should be punished for their fathers’ sins. Tell me, Ser Jaime, how many times have you feasted at Casterly Rock to the minstrels singing The Rains of Castamere?”

Jaime got up from his seat. Blood boiling, he shot back, “Tell me, Barbery Dustin, when your cunt of a nephew turns traitor like his father, shall I mount his decapitated head upon the walls of Barrowton?”

Quick as a snake, Lady Barbery lashed out with her hand, the sound of her slapping Jaime’s face ringing out through the room. Jaime’s head whipped to one side, and he snatched her wrist, using his grip to jerk her in closer.

“Your nephew,” he whispered to her, his cheek stinging all the while, “has the blood of traitors in him. Are we to wait until he’s a man grown, fermenting terror and rebellion in his lands, before we stop him? Are we to wait until he’s old enough to seek revenge for his father’s death, and he comes for the Starks with a sword in his hand and hatred in his heart?”

Lady Barbery bared her teeth. “He is not his father.”

“No,” Jaime agreed flatly, releasing her wrist. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Should I go to Ned Stark, then, and warn him against the day when you turn into your father?” she replied in a vicious hiss. “Should we prepare for the day when you send out your knights to murder and rape unarmed women, and dash their babies’ heads against the wall? All the world knows what kind of man Tywin Lannister is, and I dread the day when you rule at Winterfell with that half-Tully by your side. That will be a dark day for the North indeed.”

Jaime opened his mouth to say the gods only knew what at the wretched woman, only to be interrupted by Tyrion saying urgently, “Jaime.”

They both turned to see Tyrion standing in the open doorway, with Lady Carys behind him, both of them looking wary. Tyrion gave Jaime a deeply unimpressed look, then said politely, “Lady Dustin, allow me to escort you to your rooms.”

Lady Dustin took a moment to reply. “Thank you, Lord Tyrion, but I believe I can find my own way.”

“Oh no, I insist,” Tyrion said, keeping his voice pleasant, but his gaze was sharp. “You are a guest after all, and we take guest right very seriously here.”

That was a particularly well-placed arrow, and from the way Barbary Dustin twitched, it had hit the mark. But she swept out with her head held high, because her arrows had landed too, little though Jaime wanted to admit it.

He waited until the door was shut behind them all before sinking back into his seat, shoulders slumping.

Tyrion came back not five minutes later, fuming. “Well, I hope you’re pleased with yourself,” he snapped out, climbing into the other chair to better glare at him.

Jaime lifted a shoulder. “Barbary Dustin has outed herself as an unreasonable partisan of her nephew’s cause, she’ll find few allies here. Her resentment of Catelyn and Ned is too obvious.”

“If I thought that was why you picked a fight with the woman, I wouldn’t mind,” Tyrion retorted. “But you didn’t do it for our cause, you did it because you wanted someone to lash out at, and Barbary Dustin was the nearest to hand. She’s an unpleasant woman, it’s true, but she’s also desperately trying to save her sister’s son from paying for his father’s crimes.”

His father’s crimes. The phrase rang unpleasantly in Jaime’s ears, and he found himself saying, distantly, “When was the last time someone mentioned Princess Elia and her children to you?”

Tyrion blinked. “I can’t remember,” he said slowly. “There was a Dornish bookseller, in King’s Landing, he wouldn’t take Lannister coin, but nobody else dared. Only Aunt Gemma, sometimes, she’d complain about the stain on our family name…mind you, she never said it anywhere that Father could hear her.”

“Father wouldn’t have cared about the Boltons,” Jaime said.

“No,” Tyrion agreed.

It hurt to go on. “He could’ve…he could’ve disowned Clegane. Handed the brute over to Dorne.”

“Yes,” Tyrion said. “But our father has never been the sort to abandon a tool he could make use of in the future.” He waited for more, but as Jaime continued to stay silent, he asked gently, “Jaime, what are you thinking?”

He was thinking of Robb’s accusation, how he’d flung it in Jaime’s teeth that he’d risked war for the chance to keep Cersei, risked the realm and the lives of his entire family, Tyrion and Cersei, his father and the children that Jaime would never claim as his own. The accusation had cut deep, because it was true, and because it was something Jaime could never correct. He’d never touch Cersei again, but the harm was done, there were still three golden cuckoos in the Red Keep, and if they were ever discovered…

Jaime had been tempted, time and time again, to go to Robb and try to demand forgiveness, set his recent actions on the scale and try to argue that they made up for his sins. He’d only refrained because he’d known it would be pathetic and futile.

Now though, he knew that it would be futile for an entirely different reason. Because there was nothing he could do to make up for his sins, for the danger he’d placed on his brother, his children, his sister, the realm.

It was enough to make him choke on his despair, it was enough to make him weep. Except he’d done plenty of that, and it hadn’t helped. Nothing could make up for his sins, not even if he saved Ned Stark’s life a dozen times over.

But maybe…maybe he could start to make up for his father’s sins. At least one of them, anyway.

“I think…that I’m going to travel,” Jaime said slowly. “To the Westerlands.”

“Jaime,” Tyrion said, warning, “If you have some half-baked notion of going to the capital to run off with Cersei…”

“No,” Jaime said, and meant it. He couldn’t risk it, even if he wanted to…and wasn’t that a surprise, to realize he didn’t even want to go? His love for Cersei, the love that has consumed him, now felt like it belonged to another man entirely. “I’m just going to go to the Rock, I promise you.”

Tyrion’s forehead creased. “Why?”

“I miss the ocean,” Jaime said airily, and Tyrion gave him an exasperated look. “Robb and I need some distance,” Jaime said, more seriously. “He’s given his word, I know, but…he’s not a natural dissembler, and the longer this goes on, the more that people will notice. We’ll say I’m going to talk Father into settling the succession at last, bring back some miners with me so we can start looking for mineral deposits in the northern mountains.”

“Some breathing room for you two would help,” Tyrion agreed, but he was still looking at Jaime suspiciously. “Jaime, you won’t…you aren’t going to do anything stupid, are you?”

Jaime smiled, and lied to his brother. “Of course not.”

*

Jaime had some notion of going off on his mad quest alone, like a hedge-knight from a storybook, but that notion came crashing against reality soon enough.

Specifically, the reality of his very stubborn squire.

“I’m going with you,” Jon said, mulish.

“Since when do Starks even want to go south of the Neck?” Jaime demanded.

Jon just gave him a very unimpressed look, lips pursed. “Something’s gone wrong between you and Robb,” he said. “I know it’s bad, because he won’t tell me about it and you’ve spent ages now looking like a condemned man, and meanwhile Tyrion is running about trying to distract us all from what’s going on with you two and how worried he is about it.”

Jaime should have denied it immediately, except that he couldn’t seem to find the air needed to speak.

Jon watched him, and then nodded a little, as if he’d just confirmed something. “I know why you’ve said you’re going to Casterly Rock, but you’re really going because you can’t stand to be here, and if things are that bad, then you need someone to look out for you.”

Jaime finally found his voice. “And you think that’s you?”

“Of course it is,” Jon said, as though it were obvious. “I’m your squire and your goodbrother. Even if I wasn’t worried about you, I’d still have a duty to look out for you.” He folded his arms over his chest, and said, with the air of someone laying down his winning hand, “And since you made me your squire, that means you have to take me along.”

“Are you that eager to polish my armor?” Jaime asked, but Jon just said, implacable, “If I have to.”

He’d looked so absurdly young as he’d said this, and Jaime should have cut him down to size immediately, except that he knew that Jon had thought this out through, in the same quietly methodical way he dedicated himself to learning the sword, and knowing he’d taken that much care in working out what had happened and how he could best help—

Well. Jaime found himself unable to do much else except bluster and then go to Ned Stark for permission to take his son on this ridiculous quest of his (that he hadn’t actually told anyone about).

He’d been sure that Ned would say no, except that when he’d gone to Ned, Ned had just looked at Jaime over his desk, arms folded over his chest (in a remarkable imitation of his bastard son) before asking, coolly, “What is going on between you and Robb?”

As Jaime stiffened in his seat, Ned continued, “I haven’t asked before now, but his unhappiness and yours has been obvious to everyone. We hadn’t wanted to interfere, but now with you suddenly requesting leave to travel back to the Westerlands, I feel I have to ask.”

Jaime set his teeth. Tilting his head, he asked, “I hear that Lord Manderly has been hinting that he’d like Jon as a bridegroom for one of his granddaughters, how is Lady Stark feeling about that?” As Ned glared at him, Jaime said, “You don’t ask about the state of my marriage, and I won’t ask about the state of yours. Now, do I have your leave to take Jon with me or not?”

Ned glared at him for a while longer, mouth grim, then he said abruptly. “Yes. Mostly because while I loathe the thought of any of my children within arms’ reach of your father, Jon is your squire, and he’s made it very clear that even if I refuse, he’ll just go anyway.”

Yes, that unfortunately did sound like Jon.

“Theon’s asked to go with you as well,” Ned added.

“Theon?” Jaime echoed, incredulous. “What in the hells am I supposed to do with him?”

“Take him to visit his family,” Ned said, with a shrug of his shoulders. “Unless there’s some other purpose to this trip that you haven’t told me about,” he added, eyebrows raised.

Jaime glared, but what could he do? “Fine, I’ll take the idiot squid with me.”

But the worst of it was telling Robb. He hadn’t met the news with dismay or confusion, just stared at Jaime for a long moment with a face like stone and his presence in Jaime’s mind like a block of ice, before saying, “If this is a trick, and you mean to visit your sister instead…”

“I won’t,” Jaime said, doing his best not to show how deeply Robb’s distrust of him cut. Not that it mattered what showed on his face, when Robb could sense it all anyway. “Tyrion’s here, I won’t risk him like that. Not…not again.”

Robb looked at him, then nodded curtly before turning away, ending the conversation.

He did come out to the courtyard on the day of their departure, likely because Tyrion had urged him into keeping up appearances to some extent, especially with all the Northern lords still about. He hung back, however, when the rest of his siblings came up to wish him well, Arya the most miserable of them by far.

“Are you sure I can’t come with you?” she asked Jon, face woebegone. “I could be useful, I know I could.”

Jon smiled and bent down to kiss her hair. “I know, but you have your own task to keep to,” he said, giving a not-at-all subtle nod to Robb, who was saying farewell to Theon.

Tyrion was there as well, and pulled him down for a hug, whispering fiercely in his ear, “Whatever you have planned, don’t be an idiot. And I expect you back home within three months, Jaime.”

“I’ll be fine,” Jaime promised, and Tyrion just huffed in response.

The last of his goodbyes was with Robb, who looked at him levelly, eyes cool. He was no great liar, it was true, but his mask was getting better, and his shielding against Jaime’s mind had improved by leaps and bounds. Jaime felt the absence of his presence like an open wound. “I expect you back soon,” he said, and leaned in to drop a brief, cool kiss against Jaime’s surprised mouth.

“I’ll do my best not to disappoint you,” Jaime said once he’d pulled away, his own lips buzzing, and with an ache in his chest.

Robb looked at him for a moment, then nodded. “See that you don’t,” he said, and stepped away.

Jaime rode out of the courtyard without letting himself look back once, followed by his squire and his unwanted squid of a companion, as well as the twenty guards that Ned Stark had insisted they take.

And as he rode away from Winterfell’s gates, the ache in his chest seemed to grow, until it finally settled into his bones, and Jaime knew he would carry it with him, no matter how far away he went.

He was fairly impressed by how long it took before Theon and Jon started pressing him in earnest about his plans, and why they weren’t taking the Kingsroad, but taking the river down all the way to the Saltspear, where they would eventually sail to Pyke, before going further on to the Westerlands.

“I agreed with Lord Stark that Theon could visit his family,” Jaime explained, taking note of the wave of emotion that washed over Theon’s face at the confirmation that yes, he’d be returning to the Iron Islands for the first time since the war. “Besides, I have a business proposition for your sister Yara. I understand she’s become quite the promising young sea captain.”

“What business,” Jon and Theon said in unison, then made faces at each other.

Jaime dismissed their questions with a wave of his hand. “Nothing for you to worry about.”

Theon looked disbelieving, but it was Jon who said, slowly, “Didn’t you kill a lot of ironborn soldiers at the Battle of Pyke? And now you want us to sail to the Iron Islands so you can ask Theon’s sister to go on some voyage that you won’t give us any details on?”

Jaime pretended to consider it. “Yes, that sounds about right. Of course, if you’d prefer to return back to Winterfell…”

Theon took the bait, just as Jaime knew he would. “No! No, that’s fine. We’ll keep going.” And he shoved at Jon’s shoulder, clearly demanding that Jon take the bait as well, or at least keep his mouth shut.

Jon didn’t let it go at that, of course. He followed Jaime to the bedchamber they’d be sharing at the innhouse for the night, shutting the door behind him and saying flatly, “I don’t think we should go to Pyke.”

“Of course we should,” Jaime said, casually loosening the ties to his jerkin, not looking at Jon.

“No, we really shouldn’t,” Jon said, urgently. “It’ll just take one ironborn with a grudge and a dagger, and then you’re bleeding out on the shores of Pyke, and I’ve got to explain to Robb and Tyrion how I let you get injured, or worse, and then your father is likely going to go to war—”

“Gods be good, Jon, breathe,” Jaime said, alarmed. “Just how long have you been coming up with this dire vision of the future?”

Jon looked at him balefully. “We’ve been on the road for a week, I have had plenty of time to consider all the ways in which this trip could go wrong.” He eyed Jaime up before adding, “Especially when you aren’t telling me everything.”

He had that mulish look on his face again, shoulders squared and his mouth thin with displeasure, and Jaime had a sinking feeling that he would not, in fact, be able to brush Jon off this time. Worse still, he was reminded suddenly of being fifteen and watching the rest of the Kingsguard, his sworn brothers, brush off his questions or concerns, assuming that Jaime was too young, too stupid, to properly understand anything of real importance.

He’d thought it would be a lark, taking Jon on as his squire. An easy way to keep his husband happy. He hadn’t realized, then, the ties he was forging.

But here they were, and if Jaime was going to take on one responsibility he’d ignored for too long…he might as well pick up another.

“I need to hire a ship and a crew to carry a parcel,” Jaime said at last. “If everything goes as I hope in the Westerlands, I’ll be able to hand the parcel off to Yara Greyjoy and her crew, and they can sail on to its destination while we return back to the North.”

Jon’s shoulders began to relax. “Is this parcel at Casterly Rock, then?” he asked curiously.

Jaime shook his head. “We won’t be going to the Rock. At least not right away.”

“So where will we be going then?”

Jaime sat down on the bed, feeling very weary. He hadn’t meant to tell Jon this, not until they were safely in Lannisport, too far away to turn back. “You and Theon will be staying in Lannisport with the guards. I will be going to Clegane’s Keep,” Jaime said.

It didn’t take very long for Jon to realize what that meant. “The keep where Gregor Clegane lives?” At Jaime’s tiny nod, Jon paled. “What business could you possibly have with the Mountain?”

“Business that is long overdue,” Jaime said.

Jon started to shake his head, awareness slowly dawning in his eyes. “Jaime—”

“It’s an interesting tradition you Northmen have, dispatching your monsters once they’ve been exposed,” Jaime said. “Think it’s a tradition I might want to bring over to the Westerlands.”

“You’re going to try and kill Gregor Clegane,” Jon whispered. “You…the voyage you want Yara Greyjoy to sail off to…gods, is it to Dorne? You’re going to—”

“I’m going to kill Clegane and send his head and hands to House Martell, yes,” Jaime confirmed, marveling a little even as he spoke—Seven help him, it truly did sound utterly insane when said aloud.

Jon spluttered helplessly for another moment or two, before bursting out, “But it’s the Mountain! What if he kills you?”

“Then my father will have Clegane killed,” Jaime said, with a shrug he didn’t really feel. “Either way, the bastard’s dead.” He eyed Jon before adding more lightly, “And for the record, I do not appreciate your easy dismissal of my abilities—”

“This isn’t a jape,” Jon snapped at him. “This—you could die! They say the Mountain has the strength of twenty men, that he’s over eight feet tall, that he—”

“They say a lot of things,” Jaime interrupted. “He’s just a man, Jon. He bleeds like any other man.” But Jon was white-faced with terror, and Jaime swallowed before saying, “There are a handful of people in the entire realm with even a prayer of surviving a fight against Clegane, Jon, and I’m one of them. Being the best swordsman in Westeros has to be good for something. Let it be this.”

And Jaime knew that Jon, who was Ned Stark’s son to the bone even if he didn’t carry the Stark name, would not be able to stand against that argument.

He was right, as Jon shook his head a little, before finally sinking down on the edge of the bed next to Jaime. “Seven hells, Jaime,” he said at last, “If you get yourself killed fighting the Mountain, I’ll never be able to look Robb in the face again.”

Jaime bit back the several maudlin, self-pitying remarks he could have said to that, and said instead, “If you’d prefer not to come, we aren’t that far out from Winterfell, you could still—”

Jon jerked his head up, scoffing. “As if I’d leave you to face down the Mountain with Theon as backup,” he snorted, before saying more softly. “I’m your squire and your goodbrother. I told you, I have a duty to stand with you. No matter how reckless you’re being.”

“Thank you,” Jaime said.

They sat quietly together, then Jon said slowly, “We can’t tell any of the others, can we? Theon would just write back home to everyone and they’d come chasing after us, and the guards…hells, they’d probably tie you up and drag you back home.”

“They probably would,” Jaime agreed.

Jon nodded, breathing in and out before saying, “You are the best swordsman in Westeros, so you can beat him.” Despite the strength of his words, his voice wavered a little at the end, almost but not quite making it a plea.

Jaime had lied to Tyrion, to Robb and to Ned Stark, to just about everyone in order to go on this trip, but he found himself unable to lie to Jon. “On my best day…yes. I can beat him.”

Jon’s face wobbled for a moment, looking heartbreakingly young, before his expression firmed. “So we’d better make sure it’s your best day then, shouldn’t we?”

A tension Jaime hadn’t wanted to admit was there finally lessened. Reckless and foolish as this plan was, Jon was with him now, and there was no turning back. “Yes. We will.”