GOT: I Plunder Skills — Chapter 401 - Brienne with a Strong Desire to Explore

The torches in the cellar swayed, their flames guttering in the dark.

Lynn had left.

That left Jaime, Brienne, the Hound, and their twenty new "colleagues" , draped in snow-white cloaks, blue flames smoldering in hollow eye sockets.

Silence.

Brienne's face had gone the color of old bone. Her fist was white around her sword hilt.

She was a warrior. She'd made her peace with death long ago. But the things standing before her now were something else entirely , something that lived outside the edges of life and death as she understood them.

The Shadow Assassin had shaken her. This was worse.

This was a desecration of everything alive.

The Hound wore a different expression altogether.

Sandor Clegane studied the motionless creatures with something close to amusement.

"Interesting," he rasped.

"No eating. No whining. You cut off their heads and they still come at you." He tilted his head. "Best guards you could ask for."

Jaime said nothing.

He stared at the undead standing before him, chest heaving, breath coming faster than it should. The shock was still moving through him , but beneath it, something else was taking root. An idea. Wild. Almost insane. Growing at a speed he couldn't stop and didn't want to.

Then, all at once, he laughed.

It started low. Then it broke open, loud and completely unrestrained.

"Haha — hahahaha!"

The laughter bounced off the cellar walls, wrong and strange in the silence.

Brienne and the Hound both looked at him the way you look at a man who's lost his mind.

"What are you laughing at?" the Hound asked, frowning.

Jaime stopped.

He turned. Those green eyes were burning with something that was almost mania.

"I'm laughing because I finally found it."

"Found what?"

"What I need to reach my peak."

CLANG. He drew his longsword and leveled the tip at the nearest White Walker.

"You."

"Come here. Attack me."

Brienne's pupils snapped tight.

"You mad Lannister!!" The words tore out of her before she could stop them.

The Hound pressed his lips together. The golden-haired fool had definitely broken something in his head.

Lynn had told them plainly , these White Walkers were not to be taken lightly. Every one of them was at least a match for Jaime, possibly stronger. Neither of them could understand why he was walking straight into it.

The singled-out White Walker's blue flames flickered.

Its head turned with a rigid, grinding slowness. Then it moved, each step heavy and deliberate, closing the distance.

"You're right."

Jaime kept his eyes on the thing as it came, not turning his head.

"Tireless. Fearless. Unkillable." A beat. "What better opponent is there?"

His voice carried something he couldn't quite contain.

He barely finished the sentence before the White Walker was on him.

No stance. No technique. It didn't even call a blade of ice. It simply swung one stiff arm in a savage arc, fingers raking for Jaime's head.

Jaime stepped back. His left-hand sword came up at an ugly angle , awkward, almost wrong , and caught the strike clean.

Metal rang against bone.

The White Walker didn't flinch. The deflected arm was already pulling back, and the other hand was already coming in.

Again and again Jaime barely got clear, his movements ragged, barely controlled.

But his eyes kept getting brighter.

This.

This feeling , the feeling of fighting someone who could actually kill him.

He hadn't felt it in far too long.

The cellar filled with the whisper of steel through air and the relentless, rhythmic sound of the creature attacking.

The Hound leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, watching like a man at a pit fight.

Jaime's instincts were good , that much was obvious. Every parry landed exactly where it needed to. Every evasion was a hair's breadth, nothing wasted. The golden-haired fool was a born fighter. No question about that.

Brienne couldn't look away.

She watched him weave and twist beneath those undead claws, driving himself to the edge over and over, and something inside her turned upside down.

She couldn't make the image fit. This man , this relentless, almost ferocious fighter , and the Kingslayer she'd despised her whole life. The arrogant one. The treacherous one. The oathbreaker.

They didn't fit together.

Lynn's words came back to her.

You did the right thing, but you've carried the infamy your whole life.

Was it true?

What if Jaime Lannister had killed Aerys Targaryen to save half a million people?

Then everything she'd believed about him , every drop of contempt she'd held for years , was a joke she'd been telling herself.

The thought pressed the air out of her lungs.

She valued honor and her oaths more than her own life. The idea that she had spent years despising a hero for his greatest act of heroism ,

DING , a different sound cut through her thoughts.

Jaime's sword finally found an opening. He drove it into the White Walker's chest.

The creature swung its claws at him anyway.

Jaime put a boot into its body and shoved, buying himself a few feet. He leaned on his sword, sucking in breath after breath, shirt soaked through with sweat, looking like something dredged up from the harbor.

But he was grinning. Deeply, completely satisfied.

And now they all had a clear sense of what these things were actually capable of.

---

Deep in the night, Brienne lay awake, turning from one side to the other.

The cellar. Lynn's words. They kept churning, wouldn't settle.

She pulled on her cloak and walked out.

Cold moonlight lay flat across the snow. Winterfell was utterly still.

She found herself moving toward Jaime's room without quite deciding to.

She had to know the truth.

There was still a light under his door.

He was shirtless inside, working a hot damp cloth over his body. The claw marks from the day's sparring ran in pale lines across his skin.

He looked up at the knock, impatient.

"Who is it?"

"Brienne of Tarth."

A moment's silence from inside. Then the sound of cloth, footsteps, and the door swung open.

Jaime had thrown on an outer robe. He leaned against the doorframe, looking her over.

She was in gray chainmail. The moonlight fell on her face , the face that was never going to be called beautiful , and her expression was as grave as someone walking into a trial by combat.

"Lannister."

No preamble.

"I heard what Lord Lynn said to you. About King's Landing. About Aerys Targaryen. About the wildfire."

The easy look on Jaime's face went still.

He crossed his arms, studying her.

"Is that right? Has the Maid of Tarth come to retry the Kingslayer's crimes on behalf of the Faith of the Seven?"

The sarcasm had an edge to it.

Brienne didn't rise to it. She just looked at him, and her eyes , those blue, too-serious eyes , held something he almost didn't recognize.

"I want to know the truth. Whether what Lord Lynn said is true."

He held her gaze.

No contempt there. No hatred. Just the plain, naked need to know.

This tall, homely woman was a genuine fool. There was no other word for her.

He'd long since stopped caring whether anyone learned these things. The secrets were old and the world had already decided what it believed.

Jaime let out a slow breath.

But something about the way she stood there , that open, unguarded expression , reached past the iron he'd built up from decades of scorn and misunderstanding, and pressed somewhere softer than he expected.

"Come in."

He stepped aside.

The hearth was going strong. Jaime poured himself a cup of wine and held it out toward her.

She didn't take it.

"What do you want to know?" he said, with a short laugh.

"Everything." Simple as that.

Jaime looked down at the wine turning in his cup. His thoughts slipped back, the way they sometimes did, to that afternoon that broke his life in two.

"That day, the army was outside King's Landing."

His voice was level. Detached. A man telling someone else's story.

"Aerys thought Tywin had come to save him. He ordered the gates opened."

"Then the slaughter started."

"He realized it all at once — everyone had turned on him. His son Rhaegar, dead at the Trident. His allies, defecting one after another. And now even his most trusted Hand had marched in with an army to kill him."

"He broke. Completely."

"He ordered the pyromancers to light every cache of wildfire buried beneath the city. All of it. He wanted the city to burn with him — all five hundred thousand people. He said he would give Robert a kingdom of ash and bone."

Jaime's breathing shifted. His grip on the cup tightened without him meaning it to.

"I knelt in front of him. I begged him to take it back."

"He laughed. Like a madman."

"He asked me if perhaps my father's army deserved to taste the fire too. Then he told the pyromancer to light it — right there, in front of me."

"He reminded me that the Kingsguard obeys the king without condition. And he used that to threaten me. Bring him my father's head, or I was the one breaking my oath."

"So I killed him. That's all there was to it."

He looked up. Those green eyes were perfectly still.

"I cut his throat. I watched the king I had sworn to protect twitch on the floor. Then I sat down on the Iron Throne and waited for Ned Stark to walk in."

Brienne stood without moving.

The story was crueler than she'd imagined. More airless.

The world she'd believed in , the clean, ordered world where knights were noble and oaths meant something and honor was its own reward , it had just come apart at the seams.

The man she had despised for half her life had saved an entire city.

And those armies marching under banners of justice, those lords with honor on their lips , they had nearly become the instruments of a madman's funeral pyre.

Something vast and nauseating swept through her all at once.

"You ," Her voice came out rougher than she intended. "Why didn't you tell Ned Stark? Why didn't you tell Robert?"

Jaime laughed , a quiet, hollow sound.

"Tell them?"

"I did."

He rose and crossed the room toward her. Up close, those green eyes were as deep and cold as still water in winter.

"People believe what they see. And sometimes what they see isn't the truth."

A pause.

"Would they have believed the word of an oathbreaker? A man who put a sword through his own king's throat?" His voice didn't rise. "Or would they rather believe I did it as a gift to my father? A token of loyalty to Tywin Lannister?"

He held her gaze.

"Brienne. Sometimes the truth doesn't matter at all. What matters is what people choose to believe."

He drained the cup. Then he turned away and didn't look at her again.

"Story's done. You can go."

She stood watching the line of his back, that quiet, solitary silhouette against the firelight.

She opened her mouth.

No words came.

She had thought she understood loneliness. Standing there, she realized she hadn't understood his at all.

➤ Next: Misery Loves Company