POV Brienne
She had still not grown comfortable with height though she had come to accept it, which was different. She had accepted height the same way she had accepted most things in her life, by deciding that the alternative was worse. The alternative here was to not fly, and she could not afford to let her King leave without her.
Below her, Dorne moved in shades of colors that she had no names for yet. The red-rock hills she had come to know around Starfall thinned and broke as Meleys carried them towards other side of the Westeros, into the dry reaches of the Prince's Pass where the mountains folded together in long ridges in color lighter than red. No trees here either, the sun had burned the ground down to its raw form leaving only stone and sand.
In her front, the king sat without speaking. He had not spoken since they left Starfall, when he had settled himself between pikes of the dragon and had looked back at the pale towers one last time, and then forward, and had not looked back again. She had not needed him to speak. She had been in enough silences with him now to know which kind this one was, not the silence before a decision to be announced or the silence of him planning quietly, but something that pointed emotional dilemma and so she sat silent.
They had won the this part of war, that was the part she reminded herself of, because the winning had not felt like, what it felt in songs. Songs are made for the last blow, for the victory. They had not won the war now but a mere part of it. Thought the war gave her memories, the march on Morne's gap, the sounds that wounded men made, the smell of the camp after their victory, the action of Meleys on the Torentine river, and burning of Euron which was a smell Brienne thought she would carry for the rest of her life whether she wanted to or not.
She smiled unconsciously as she remembered Edric Dayne's face when she and the king had passed him in the corridor at Starfall this morning, riding out for Starfall's gate, and the boy had looked at the King with the same longing that she had when her father had refused to take her with him on patrol of their territory against slavers.
Gerold Dayne was dead and Euron Greyjoy was ash. All that was left of Ironborn fleet was ash and debris drifting south on the Torentine. The prisoners were counted and secured, the High Hermitage men among them, taken alive as ordered. She had killed fifteen men at the battle by her count and the King had been proud of her.
Meleys tilted beneath them. Brienne's stomach lurched and caught the shoulders of the King at the right time as she looked down.
They were descending.
She had not expected that, the Stormlands were still a long flight to the north-east, and she had thought they would cover the whole of it today in one stretch. She looked ahead, past the dragon's neck, and saw what the king had seen, a small hill in the plains, a shelf of land which had cut from Red-Mountain ranges long ago and left something almost level. And on it, eight small mounds of stone.
The heat on the ground was more scorching than the heat above. Above, it moved with the wind, the dragon's speed was also a relief there, even in the Dornish sun it was almost bearable there. On the ground however, the heat was harsh, the red rocks giving back everything the sun had put into them over the course of the day, and it made her clothes unwearable.
She jumped down from the dragon first and then it was King who soon started to speak to the dragon. She did not hear the words, she never heard them clearly, he always turned his face away, but she heard the answer, which was a low sound from the dragon's chest that she had heard before, Meleys's purring.
She walked to the king's left side and put her hand on the pommel of her sword, which was what she did when she did not know what else to do with her hands, and she looked at what was ahead of them.
Eight mounds set in a roughly straight line along the pile of stone at the edge, looking out over the valley below. Each cairn was a mound of red-desert rock piled to knee height, time and weather worn, the stones had cracked over the years, some had fallen by small degrees on the earth. The valley below was empty, there was nothing below.
The king moved and stopped near one of the cairns at the corner. He was still for a long time just like when she had first met him.
"They were great men," he said. His voice was quiet, not low for secrecy, but in respect of the dead in those grave cairns.
Brienne looked at the cairns of stone and looked at him and asked, "Who were they, Your Grace."
He was quiet for a moment more. Not collecting words she knew he always had the right words to say. Collecting the will to say them, maybe.
"Three of them wore white cloaks," he said. "The Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, Ser Gerold Hightower, and two of his brothers, Ser Arthur Dayne and Ser Oswell Whent." He paused. "They had ridden here to serve their prince. My father." He said while he looked at the two cairns at the left of the last cairn, in front of which he was standing. "Ser Gerold Hightower, he was called the White Bull. He had commanded the Kingsguard for longer than my father had been alive. He was sent to call Prince Rhaegar back after Battle of Bells but only my father returned, he did not nor did Ser Oswell Whent or Ser Arthur Dayne."
She straightened hearing last name. She had seen the painting of Ser Arthur, it was on the wall of the solar in Starfall, younger than the stories made him, the white cloak sitting on him like it belonged there.
"They were here when Lord Eddard Stark came with his men to take his sister back," the king said. "And they fought him and then they died." He turned to the five cairns in the line ahead. "These five were Lord Stark's men, they came south with him and did not go home. Only Howland Reed survived along with Lord Stark. None of them you will find in any history, they were the kind of men who had gone where their liege lord told them to go and they died here and no one would write songs about them."
Brienne said nothing, what was there to say.
"Lord Stark took the bones of his sister north. He left the eight buried here including those who he had fought against, which was more than most men would have done for their enemies." The king looked at the cairns. "Then he tore down the tower, in which his sister had died."
She had not known there was a tower, she had not known any of this. Except for the vague rumor of it, that Rhaegar Targaryen had taken Lyanna Stark, that there had been a war, that three Kingsguard had been found somewhere in the mountains and killed. She had heard it the way she heard most history, in snatches, in pieces, each piece fitting against the others imperfectly, gaps in between what the real thing had been.
"You were born here," she said. She was not entirely sure she meant to say it.
"I was." He looked at the stoned region where the tower's foundation had been. "My mother died here. Lord Stark held her while she died, asking for a promise to protect me."
Brienne looked at his face. The quiet of it, the way grief lived in some faces on the surface and in others much further in, where it took longer to see.
He keeps it very far in, she thought.
"The men in those cairns," she started softly. "The three who wore the white, they defied their king for their prince."
"They did," he said.
"You don't think them wrong for it."
He was quiet for a moment. Long enough that she thought he might not answer, but then he started. "I think they were loyal to the thing they had chosen to be loyal to, and when the choice between the thing they love and the oath became real, they chose love." He paused. "I think they probably knew what it would cost. I think they went to the tower knowing the end."
"And if they had left him?" she said. "Ridden for King's Landing, stood at King Aerys's side."
"Then perhaps the war ends differently. Perhaps my father had lived or at least my grandfather." His voice was level, no accusation or anger in his words. "But men who break faith when faith becomes costly are not men I want standing at anyone's side."
She thought about that. Let it sit with everything else the day had given her.
"Ser Arthur Dayne," she said. "The way Edric spoke of him and that painting." She paused. "He was everything a knight is supposed to be, and he died in front of a tower in the mountains that half the realm still doesn't know."
"Yes." He said in confusion.
"Does that bother you?" She asked, she knew Starfall had unsettled her king in someway.
He took a moment. She was starting to understand that his moments meant something. He did not pause from uncertainty but from precision, he wanted the words to be right when they arrived. "It bothers me that misunderstanding happened here," he said. "It bothers me that both my mothers paid the cost of it, that my siblings died because of it. But the men themselves-" He paused again. "no, a man who pledge his life for a cause and dies for it, is something one should be proud of." He looked out over the mountains, "It is the only kind of man worth having."
She said nothing. The wind was loud enough at this height that silence did not feel like a gap to fill.
"The five Northmen," she said eventually. "Do you know their names?"
"Martyn Cassel, Theo Wull, Ethan Glover, Mark Ryswell, William Dustin. We will stay a few hours," he said and then asked after a pause. "You don't mind."
She shook her head before the answer came into words.
He walked to the cairns. Sat down on the rock with his back to the valley and his face to the mounds, close enough to reach out and lay a hand on the nearest stone. She walked back to stand at his guard, far enough to not disturb his peace and close enough to protect. Meleys lay not far away eyeing the king.
The sun moved and the shadows of the cairns stretched out long across the red rock and then shortened and then stretched the other way. She watched the road below, which was empty, and the valley below that, which was empty, and the ridgelines beyond, which were empty too. This was not a place that men came to. It had been remote when the tower stood and it was more remote now.
Her thoughts again turned to the three kingsguard. She had read about those knights, the way she had thought about becoming a knight all her life, which was about men full of honor, truth and chivalry. The Kingsguard were sworn to the king. That was the first principle, the bedrock of their foundations and not the prince. Not the man they admired, not the cause they privately thought was right, the king, whoever sat the throne, whatever he happened to be. Ser Gerold Hightower had served under three kings. He had taken the oath knowing he might serve a bad one someday, knowing the oath did not come with an exception for that. Ser Arthur Dayne, whose sword still hung at Starfall, white as the moon on pale stone, had been by all accounts the finest knight anyone living had ever seen. And Ser Oswell Whent, who she knew the least about, whose name turned up in histories only as a second son, a minor name among small houses.
All three had died here.
Not with Aerys, not defending the Iron Throne. Here, in the mountains, for a prince who had put them here and ridden south without them.
Would you have done that? Her mind wandered as the question arose in her heart andshe did not know how to answer. It was the question, she never thought she would have difficulty in answering. And it not the kind of question she could dismiss by thinking harder at it. It had a real bottom and she had not found the bottom yet.
She had been six the first time she understood what a knight was supposed to be. Not the word, she had known the word since she could talk, but the meaning behind the word, the idea of it, the weight of the promise under all the ceremony. Her father had taken her to see a melee, one of the small ones that the local knights organized, more to keep their men sharp than for any prize worth speaking of. She had watched a big man in dented armor step between a savage knight attacking a fallen rider and take the impact himself, at no advantage to himself, at considerable cost, because the fallen rider had no weapon so he had sided with the weak. He had not made a speech about it, he had simply put himself there.
She had decided then. She had gone home and found a stick long enough to practice with and started, to protect. Almost ten years of everyone she met telling her in different ways that it was not possible had not moved that decision. It had bent her, now and again. Pressed her to corner in the worst moments. But the decision had never changed.
She thought about Renly. She had not stopped thinking about him, about words he had spoken. She had loved him and he had damaged her bringing one thing, she thought he never cared for. She was past being ashamed of it.
What she had come to understand, slowly, in the time since, was that what she had felt for Renly was her childish fantasy. Something she had believed to overcome her uncertainty about her own worth. He had liked her in different way, had found her useful, he had welcomed her strength, the men her house can bring into his fold, had been kind to her, had even been proud of her in the way men were proud of a good horse.
When she had heard his words, she had run. She had been made to run ashamed, insulted, fooled and the running had been the rest of it, the breaking down of everything she had thought was real. She had come out of it still herself but more stripped down and then she had met him at an unexpected place.
She looked at the king sitting among the dead.
Almost fifteen years old, she kept having to remind herself. He sat with his back to her and his face to the cairns and had not moved in hours. She could see the slow rhythm of his breathing and that was the only thing that gave away the boy, the breath.
He was two name days younger than her.
She thought about the night before the battle. The way he had marched the pass in the dark with Dornish men, and she had gone with him, and he had spoken to her about Gerold Dayne and she had listened, and what she had thought, listening, was not about the tactical question. What she had thought was: he has thought about this as if these are his people to protect. Not to rule but to protect. There was a difference, and it was not a small one.
She had believed in Renly quickly, wholly, without thinking of his faults. She now believed in Aemon Targaryen not finding a single fault, aside from his stubbornness to fight the battle holding vanguard.
Would I have stayed? she asked herself again. If he one day asked me to hold a tower and die there, would I have stayed?
Yes. She had the answer now. The King's word of faith resonated with her. Yes, without deliberation, the same way she would have stepped between a savage rider and a fallen rider, not because it was right, not because it served her, but because some things were simply what you did, and she had known since she was six years old what kind of person she was going to be.
The shadow of a hawk crossed the rock shelf and was gone before she could follow it.
A distant sound came up from the valley, wind in the gullies below, nothing else. The cairns did not move. Meleys breathed behind her, in and out, a sound like a large and heated bellows, but did not open her eyes.
He came to her in the late afternoon.
She heard him before she saw him, not footsteps, his footsteps were always quiet but because of Meleys unfolding her wings, thinking he was coming to her. He wasn't. She turned and he was walking toward her from the cairns, and his face had the look it sometimes had after a long silence, not lighter, but more settled and peaceful. The grief lost somewhere behind a door now.
He stopped a few feet from her.
"You have done much, these past days," he said. "Saved me from men on the road before we flew to Dorne. Marched through a mountain pass in darkness with men you had never met." He paused. "Went first down a cliff face on a horse."
She smiled hearing his words.
"Before the battle," he continued, "I told you something." He looked at her directly. "I said not yet, about the knighthood." He paused. "I have been waiting to find the right place."
She froze then. Before he said anything else she understood, and the understanding came through her like something physical, like warmth rushing towards her on a cold night.
He looked at the graves and then turned to her. "This is the right place," he said.
She almost asked why. She stopped herself, because she already knew why. This lane of rock, these eight cairns, the three Kingsguard who had died for a prince who asked something of them and they had laid there lives for it. The five northmen who had marched with their liege lord to rescue his sister, without asking nothing in return had fought against the best knights of the realm. This was a place that knew what it cost to do a thing because you believed it was right, regardless of what the world thought of it. She could not have asked for a better place, she could not have thought of one.
"Kneel Brienne," he said.
She knelt.
The rock burned through the knee of her breeches. The sun was slightly behind him and she had to narrow her eyes to look up. He had already drawn Blackfyre. She had not even seen him draw it. The Valyrian steel caught the desert light and turned it into something else, a deep moving colour in the blade, black and grey and the dark red of embers seen through smoke.
She had pictured this moment, many times, in many shapes, in halls and fields and in the dark before sleep. She had never pictured a blade like this one. She had never pictured a king, knighting her.
He set it on her right shoulder and she felt the weight of it, which was not heavy but was specific, exactly the weight of something that meant what it said, his tone clearly sent those message.
"In the name of the Warrior, I charge you to be brave."
She had been brave, she had been brave at the Morne's Gap in the dark, going first down the cliff face with the rocks loose beneath her horse's hooves and nothing but darkness and the sounds of an army below. She had been brave when she rose against bandits to protect to the secret king.
Blackfyre moved to her left shoulder.
"In the name of the Father, I charge you to be just."
Justice was harder than bravery. She had learned that. Bravery was physical, it lived in the body, in the decision made before thought caught up. Justice was slower, it required you to weigh the person in front of you against the emotions inside you, and to put the principle first even when the person was someone you loved. She thought of the prisoners at Morne's Gap, the Dornishmen of High Hermitage, the ones who had followed Gerold because he was their lord and they had not been given the choice to refuse. She thought of the king's order take them alive if you can. Not because they had earned mercy, because they were owed the chance to answer for what they had done in a proper place.
Right shoulder again.
"In the name of the Mother, I charge you to defend the young and innocent."
Edric Dayne, ten years old, standing in the solar holding a parchment with both hands. She had fought to protect children against the cruelties of war.
Left shoulder.
"In the name of the Maid, I charge you to protect all women."
Her mother had died before Brienne knew her. She had a painting and a name and the faint memory of her father's grief, which had lasted years and gone quiet only slowly, the way all real grief went quiet. She had grown up surrounded by women who were expected to be weak and only care for household and birth the heir's and second sons and daughter for alliances. She had been asked to protect women from cruelties of men who take advantage of their weakness.
She blinked, hard.
"Arise, Ser Brienne of Tarth."
And then she stood as a knight. She was not sure exactly how but the movement felt different now, with her body handling it while her mind was elsewhere. She was standing and the sword was sheathed and the king was looking at her with his small, private smile.
"Thank you, Your Grace," she said.
He shook his head. "You earned it before Morne's Gap, the moment you rushed to save me against large number." His voice was quiet and entirely certain, the voice he used when he had finished deciding something and was stating the conclusion. "You have been earning it since before I met you. I had the sword and the right words, you had already done the work."
She looked down at her hands. The scarred knuckles, the calluses at the finger-joints, the old breaks that had healed slightly wrong and left her grip stronger on the right than the left. Not the hands someone would ask for marriage. Not the hands the singers would sing songs for.
Only the hands to protect.
"What do you wish for," he said. "For your service, name it and if it's within my power you'll have it."
She had known the answer for past few hours, if she was honest. Probably longer.
"I wish to wear the white, Your Grace." She met his eyes. "To serve in your Kingsguard." She did not look away. "I know I haven't done much. I know the things people will say." She paused. "But I request you of it anyway."
He was quiet for a moment then.
"You will have it," he said.
She stood with those words to let them be real.
"Ser Barristan Selmy is my Lord Commander," he said. "He is old, but he has given more of his life to that order than most men give to anything at all. The white cloak has to be given by his hand and before every man and woman." He held her eyes. "The ceremony is for the realm watching, not for you and me." He paused. "When we reach the main host, you will kneel again. He will say the words. It will be done properly."
She thought of Ser Barristan white-haired, blade-sharp, the last of a particular kind. She had never met him. She had spent years wanting to. She had heard the story of him riding in the war of Ninepenny Kings, the man who rescued the King from the Darklyns.
She wanted to stand in the same order as that man. She wanted to very badly.
"I will wait," she said.
"Good." He turned back toward the cairns, then stopped and turned back. "You may call me Aemon," he said. "When there's no one else to hear it." He offered it like a friend. "You've earned that too."
The warmth she felt at his words, friend, the king as a friend.
He walked back to the cairns and sat down among the dead, the way he settled again among the mounds as if the company of dead did not trouble him. She turned back to the valley and her hand found the pommel of her sword and the last of the afternoon burned on, and she stood watch, which was what she had always been best at, which was what she had always been.
Ser Brienne, she thought. Her father would be happy at Evenfall once he heard of her actions. She would ask the King for a visit or she would send a letter from whatever castle they made camp. She would write in her own words, not the ones she had rehearsed in her head a thousand times, the tumbling excited words, the ones that had always come out clumsy when she imagined saying them aloud. She would write the words she had now, serious and mature words.
He would read it at his desk. He would read it twice, because he may not believe then at once, and then he would fold it and put it in the place where he kept her mother's things, the valuables. And he would be very happy.
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