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Brienne shifted her weight uncomfortably, her hand steady on Oathkeeper’s hilt. She had never seen a crowd such as this, so colorful and rowdy and loud, ebbing and flowing as if it were a living thing; not in King’s Landing and certainly not in Renly’s camp. Not even the hordes of Others and wights which attacked them nightly were as strange as this. Most impressive was the giant structure housing the multitude: tall glass ceilings showed the clear blue sky and warm sunlight bathed her face, reminding her of summer. It certainly smelled better than a city or a war camp, but the quality of the air hardly made up for how unfamiliar everything was.
“Are we in Essos?” Jaime whispered next to her. His shoulders were tightly tensed inside his white and gold armor and the useless twitch of his right arm betrayed how nervous he was under his steady voice.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “It doesn’t look like Essos.”
“You’ve never been to Essos, wench,” he sighed, and she rolled her eyes.
Before she could retort, a man with a shocking mop of green curls and a mess of white paint on his face planted himself in front of them and grinned maniacally. The circles of black grease and the dribble of red around his mouth, grotesquely reminiscent of blood, reminded Brienne of the Bloody Mummers. Her first instinct was to draw Oathkeeper; her hand was at the hilt before she could think to move it and she vaguely registered Jaime doing the same with his blade when the man spoke and made them freeze, swords half-drawn.
“Oh, my god! You look just like them! Kelly, Paul, check it out!” His voice was high and she realized he was barely a man grown despite his intimidating appearance. A couple appeared at his side and they clapped with glee when they saw her and Jaime. The girl had dark skin like a Summer Islander’s and shoulder-length red hair—almost the color of Lady Sansa’s—and she was wearing a strange sort of outfit, black and shiny and tight like a second skin. It covered her arms and legs but left very little to the imagination. Brienne blushed and forced herself to look away. The second boy wore a set of trousers and jacket, brown with lighter lengthwise stripes. He held a slender metal object with a glowing blue tip in his hand and carried it like it was important.
The girl pulled out a silver box from the pack slung over her shoulder. “Can we take a photo? My followers are going to freak!”
Jaime took a step forward. “Freak? She’s a highborn lady. Call her—”
A bright flash of light blinded her and Brienne threw her arms up over her face. By the time she could see clearly, the trio had moved on and were now assaulting a strange brown and black creature, as tall as Brienne and hairier than a bear with a face like a dog.
Jaime gaped at them, shaking his head slightly. “Which of the seven hells did she send us to?”
Brienne eased her sword back into its scabbard and forced herself to relax. “You are at fault here,” she grumbled. “I warned you against seeking counsel with the witch, but you would not listen.”
“The Red Woman said the witch might have the key to defeating the Others. It was a chance we could not refuse to take.”
They moved down the long room, pushing through the crowd, and some people stared and pointed but no one stopped them. Brienne wondered if it was the grime and blood on their faces that kept them away or the sight of two tall knights in armor, one of them carrying Valyrian steel. By the look of the people surrounding them, she suspected it was just that they weren’t interesting enough. Jaime scanned the room from left to right as they walked, as if looking for something.
“Did the Frog give any clue as to what we’re meant to do here?”
“She said there is a sorcerer, fat and white-bearded, who can give us any answer we seek,” Jaime replied.
“Is that all she said? There must be a million people here!”
“She said we would find him when we found ourselves.”
“What does that mean?” she asked, wrinkling her nose.
“I don’t know,” he said, with a shrug. “I suppose we could ask people if they’ve seen us.”
“That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” she scoffed.
He glared at her over his shoulder. “And what do you suggest, wench?”
Brienne mustered all the annoyance she could find and glared back. “I suggest we go back the way we came and keep fighting, Ser. Seeking a sorcerer who may or may not be real is a distraction we can’t afford. Our men need us.”
Jaime rounded on her, his grimy white cloak flying out behind him like a whirl of dirty snow, and lay his hand on her armored shoulder. His face was very close to hers, close enough to feel his warm breath, and she forced herself to look in his green eyes instead of staring at his wind-chapped lips. “Our men need to know how to defeat this evil. Winter is already here, Brienne. Fighting won’t do us any good if we can’t win.” He gave her a soft shake and the determined glint in his eyes almost stole her breath. “I intend to win.”
Brienne nodded slowly. As foolish as this quest was, she knew she would follow him anywhere. She already had, several times over. “Let’s find this sorcerer, then.”
Jaime didn’t like the way they were looking at the wench. There was no derision or disgust in their eyes—rather awe and admiration, and for that he raised a silent prayer to the Father—but they would not stop staring. If her flushed face was any indication, Brienne had also noticed and was having just as much difficulty with it as he was. Having to stop and talk to every third person they came upon was certainly not helping matters.
He caught sight of a small child with standing in a corner by himself and wearing a black mask with pointed ears like a cat’s. “You, boy,” Jaime barked. The boy stared up at him and scowled. “Have you seen us? Or people who look like us?” He gestured between himself and Brienne, who was staring at the floor with a fresh blush on her cheeks and pretending not to listen.
“I see you, old man,” the boy spat and looked him over. “Who the fuck are you supposed to be?”
Appalling manners. He sounds like Joff. Jaime straightened up and spoke, using his most commanding, most Tywin voice. “I am Jaime Lannister, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard and commander of the Lannister army at Winterfell. Who are you?”
The boy picked up the ends of the black cape behind him and spread it out like wings. “I’m Batman,” he growled.
A bark of laughter escaped Jaime. “You are neither a bat nor a man. You’re barely out of the cradle.”
The bat-man-child hissed at him like some wild beast and swung his foot against Jaime’s unprotected shin. Pain lanced up his leg and he had to hold on to Brienne’s arm to keep his balance.“Seven hells! You little animal!” The boy squealed and disappeared into the crowd.
“Don’t antagonize these people, Jaime. We need their help.”
“He kicked me, wench!”
“I saw that.” She tugged at his arm. “Let’s move on. Surely someone around here must have seen us.”
They spent hours going in circles, looking for themselves. Some rooms were full of people facing high daises with long tables. Behind the tables, a larger image moved, a duplicate of the people sitting in the front. “Sorcery,” Brienne hissed in his ear, and he wondered if the men and women above them were warlocks, like the ones from Qarth the Dragon Queen had told them about. Other rooms had rows upon rows of small tables, which reminded him of the marketplace at Lannisport. Paintings were being sold, and some of them were shocking in their detail, as if living men were stuck inside pieces of paper. None of them were of themselves.
Jaime was beginning to despair when he spotted the red-haired girl who had greeted them hours ago. She flashed them a smile and jogged over to them. “I’ve gotten almost five hundred likes. People are flipping out about your costumes.”
The words coming out of her mouth made no sense to Jaime but he smiled and nodded anyway. “You seemed to recognize us before,” he said, slowly, and hoped she would say something he could make sense of when she answered. “Where do you know us from?”
The girl’s face twisted up in confusion. “From the show, of course. Are you guys going to the panel? I was going to go but I got into the Orphan Black one instead and I’m giving away my passes.” She held out two shiny squares with black strings attached to it and Jaime almost fell over when he recognized the faces painted on them. It’s me, he thought. And Tyrion and Cersei and... is that Ned Stark?
They looked different in a strange way, as if he were looking through a piece of warped glass, but the faces were unquestionably familiar, undeniably them. The wench leaned over his shoulder and gasped. “This man,” she said, tapping Jaime’s own face on the pass, “will he be there? At this... panel?”
“I think so,” the girl said. She gave them both long, hard looks and laughed, shaking her head. “The resemblance is totally insane. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were really the Kingslayer and the Maid of Tarth.” She glanced down at Jaime’s right arm. “All you’re missing is the golden hand.”
“It’s too cold back home for the golden hand,” he said. “Better to wrap the stump in linen and keep it warm.”
The redhead met his gaze for a second and whatever she saw made the smile fall away from her lips. Without a word, she slipped one of the passes over his head and then did the same to Brienne. “Come on, I’ll take you to the panel.”
They had only to show the passes at the door to be let in and the girl wished them luck and left them to their fates. The giant room was packed with hundreds of people, but it was as quiet as the crypts below Winterfell. Everyone was listening to the man speaking on the dais. He was so far away he looked like an ant, but the magical projection behind him showed every detail, from his blonde hair down to his green shirt.
“Gods, it’s you,” Brienne murmured, stunned. Or someone who looks like me. Jaime hadn’t worn his hair so short since he’d shaved it in the Riverlands, and his beard back then had been much fuller than this man’s stubble. There was a break in the man’s nose which Jaime didn’t have and the voice was different too. A lilting accent crept under every other word and Jaime wondered if that was what he would sound like, had he been born across the Narrow Sea.
Beside the man was a tall woman, pale and very blonde and pretty, and his heart skipped with the jolt of recognition. “And that’s you,” he whispered back. Brienne and this woman had the same general features, but they were smoothed out, less pronounced and more feminine, though maybe it was just in the way she carried herself. The smile and the laugh were the exactly same. “She’s better looking than you,” he said, “but your eyes are more beautiful.”
Even in the dim light, he saw Brienne’s face grow red and she shifted her eyes away from him and to the front of the room. “That man.” She pointed a slender finger to the beginning of the row. A fat man with a bushy white beard and a brown cap sat there, listening intently to his and Brienne’s eerie doubles. “Could that be our sorcerer?”
“Perhaps,” he said. “We should move closer.”
They snuck around the edges of the room, trying not to bother the people watching. He was not paying attention to what was being said. Words he knew and words he didn’t mixed indiscriminately to form a message he felt he should understand but didn’t. Finally he heard one word he recognized and it made him pause. Oathkeeper. He felt Brienne stiffen beside him.
A woman’s voice surrounded them, but he could not see where she was. “Was it a conscious choice, to keep your hand on Oathkeeper’s hilt during all those scenes, or was it something that just happened?”
The woman who looked like Brienne leaned into the black box between her and the man who looked like Jaime. “It was, definitely. Jaime is always on Brienne’s mind and that’s just her way of reminding herself of this oath she swore to him.”
Jaime glanced down at Brienne’s hip and saw her hand dancing over Oathkeeper’s hilt before she realized what she was doing and dropped her hand like the metal had burned her. If it was at all possible for her to blush deeper than she had been before, she was doing it now. Jaime couldn’t help the smile growing on his face. “Is that true, wench?” She kept her eyes fixed on her strange copy, her whole body tensed, and refused to even acknowledge his presence.
Her double continued, “And it’s kind of a romantic gesture, isn’t it? He gave her this beautiful sword, the Brienne equivalent of a jeweled necklace, and she’s always touching it, reminding herself that it’s there, that he does care.”
Brienne’s face moved very slightly towards him, as if she were watching his reaction to the woman’s words. He tried to keep a disinterested look on his face and hoped it was convincing. How does she know that?
An hour later, the man at the head of the table announced the panel was over and everyone clapped euphorically. The couple who looked like them, the girls who looked like the Stark girls and the Tyrell girl, the boy who looked like Ned’s bastard, and the men who looked like the Viper and the Hound, they all filed out of the dais and disappeared behind a door. The sorcerer stayed back to speak with a lanky man with salt and pepper hair, and Jaime grabbed Brienne’s hand and dragged her to the front. “This is our chance, wench.”
Jaime’s shouts went unheard at first, probably because the man’s name was not “Sorcerer”, but eventually he saw them and his brow creased with confusion. “We must speak with you, sorcerer,” Jaime shouted.
“Please,” Brienne begged next to him. “It’s of the utmost importance.”
The sorcerer studied both their faces, turning from one to the other and back again, and finally he nodded and descended the steps to meet them. He stood half a head shorter than both of them, but the way he stared made him seem bigger. “Your scar looks better,” he told Brienne.
She raised her hand to touch her cheek and winced. Sometimes she forgot she had it; Jaime could see it in her face whenever one of the more indelicate soldiers stared. Sometimes he forgot she had it too, just how sometimes he forgot what he was missing himself.
“And how are you doing with your left hand?” the sorcerer asked Jaime.
Jaime held his hand out proudly. There were callouses on his fingers and on the pad of his hand and the muscles of his arm were stronger than before, maybe stronger than the ones in his right had ever been. “Much improved. The wench helps.”
The sorcerer smiled. “Good. Why are you here?”
Brienne had recovered from her shock and spoke up, stooping a little to look the man in the eye. “Maggy the Frog said you would tell us how to defeat the Others.”
“Did she?”
“Our army is dwindling in the North. The Wall has already fallen. Soon, the dead will rise all over the Seven Kingdoms and beyond.” She took a trembling breath, and Jaime knew if he looked at her, he would see tears shimmering in her blue eyes. “We need your help.”
He nodded and looked down at his hands for a long moment. Jaime wanted to grab him by the beard and shake him. The sorcerer clearly knew the answer but he didn’t seem to want to part with it. “There are women and children dying,” he said, and he hated the way his voice was shaking. “I’ve lost more friends than I can count and the dragons don’t seem to be enough.”
That seemed to be enough to sway him. He gestured for Brienne to lean down and whispered in her ear, a long stream of words Jaime couldn’t catch. Instead, he watched the emotions fly over Brienne’s face, fear and surprise and anger... and finally, hope. She flashed Jaime a brilliant smile as she straightened up and he thought it might have been the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. The sorcerer patted both their arms, gave them a wink and walked away.
Brienne grabbed Jaime’s hand and squeezed it and laughed. He had never seen her so happy. “We’re going to win,” she breathed, and then she leaned forward and pressed her broad lips against his. To his eternal shame, it took Jaime more than a second to realize what was happening. When she began to back away, he pulled her against him and kissed her back, relishing in the warmth of her mouth and the smoothness of her tongue. He wondered why they had needed to live so much and travel so far before their mouths could meet, and he realized he wouldn’t have had it any other way.
When they broke apart, they were sporting matching grins. “We’re going to win.” The words felt strange in his throat, now that they were fact and not an impossible dream. Brienne nodded gleefully. “Let’s go give them the news,” he said, and they went back the way they’d come.