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The fragile alliance had barely been sealed when heavy footsteps sounded behind them.
Not fast. But weighted with something that couldn't be ignored.
Lynn and Jaime turned at the same time.
Ned Stark.
The Warden of the North had somehow made his way onto the wall. He was alone, no sword at his hip, wearing nothing but a plain gray coat. That hard, familiar face was carved with exhaustion.
Jaime's hand released Lynn's almost without thought. His body went taut.
He looked at Ned Stark. And just like that, the mask slipped back into place, that familiar arch of mockery, that practiced ease.
"Lord Stark."
Jaime's tone was light. Deliberately so.
"This late, and you're not at the feast keeping your drunken king company? Out here catching a cold wind instead?"
He let a beat pass.
"Or have you come to deliver a bedtime moral lecture? About honor, perhaps? About oaths?"
The corner of his mouth curled sharper.
"If so, save your breath. Those speeches of yours — my ears have practically grown calluses."
Ned didn't take the bait.
His gaze swept across Jaime's carefully composed face, then shifted briefly to Lynn, who stood quietly to the side. Then it settled back on Jaime.
Those gray eyes. Like a northern winter sky, sunless and heavy.
Deep. Oppressive.
But the contempt that usually lived there was gone.
"I heard you're going to the North with Lynn."
Not a question.
The smile on Jaime's face stiffened.
He hadn't expected that. He'd come armed with a full arsenal of retorts, ready for whatever Ned would throw at him. But Ned hadn't thrown anything. It was like winding up for a punch and hitting nothing but air.
"So what if I am?"
Jaime lifted an eyebrow.
"A Lannister always pays his debts. I'm going to collect the favor Myrcella owes me. Can't have her widowed right after the wedding, what would that do to the family name?"
He kept the same careless drawl, trying to take back the rhythm of the conversation.
But Ned just looked at him.
Quietly. For a long time.
Long enough that Jaime started to feel it.
"I never asked you."
Ned's voice, when it finally came, carried no emotion at all.
"Back then. Why did you kill him?"
Jaime went completely still.
He had played out this confrontation in his head a thousand times. He'd expected curses. Contempt. The word honor wielded like a blade to pin him to a wall.
He had never imagined this.
Nearly 20 years later, on this ridiculous night, Ned Stark asking him why, calmly, plainly, like it was a real question.
Jaime almost laughed.
He had told him. He had tried to tell him, more times than he could count. Ned had never once listened. Had never once let him finish.
He looked at Ned's face now, that earnest, weathered face, those gray eyes stripped of all their old judgment.
Something cracked open.
20 years of swallowed absurdity. 20 years of grievance with nowhere to go. It came up all at once, and it took every pretense he had with it.
"You want to know?"
Jaime's voice had a tremor in it. He didn't notice.
"You. Ned Stark. The Embodiment of Honor himself." His jaw tightened. "Now you want to know why the Kingslayer broke his oath?"
He stepped forward. Closing the distance.
In the darkness, those green eyes were burning.
"When you found me, I was sitting on that ugly iron chair. My robe. My sword. The floor of the throne room." He bit each word off clean. "All of it covered in Aerys's blood."
"What did you see, Lord Stark?"
"You saw a traitor. A man who'd fouled the honor of the Kingsguard. A scoundrel."
"You didn't even," his voice cracked, "—bother to ask me why!"
"You judged me with that righteous stare of yours. Then you turned around and walked off to chase your greater glories."
Ned said nothing.
That weathered face didn't move.
Jaime's chest heaved. Like a lion that had been caged too long, all the years of rage and resentment tearing their way out at once.
"You want to know? Fine. I'll tell you."
"Do you know how the Mad King spent his last days?"
"He was afraid of his own shadow. Afraid of his son's shadow." Jaime's voice twisted. "He cut off his own hair and nails because he was convinced Jon Arryn had sent assassins to kill him."
"He became obsessed with wildfire."
"He loved hearing people burn. The screaming, he said it was the most beautiful music in the world. That it was the only thing that could silence the voice in his head."
His tone shifted. Something colder and more frightened underneath.
"When Robert's army and yours were at the gates, he called for his chief pyromancer. He told me he was going to bury wildfire beneath all of King's Landing. Every street. Every house. Even beneath the Great Sept of Baelor."
"He was going to make Robert Baratheon a king of ashes."
"And then he laughed." Jaime's lip pulled back. "'Jaime,' he said. 'Go bring me that old dog Tywin's head.'"
"He told me to kill my own father."
Silence for a breath.
"So I'll ask you. If the Mad King ordered you to kill your brother — to kill your father — would you do it? Would you murder the man who raised you, the brother you honored most, because your oath demanded it?"
"Or would you kill the man giving those orders?"
"There was no third option."
"Kill your father: kinslayer. Kill the king: kingslayer." His eyes were bright and savage. "What do you know, Ned! You've always had the luxury of your honor. Did you ever once try to see it from where I was standing?"
His eyes had gone red.
"He gave his final command. 'Burn them. Burn them all.'"
"I watched that pyromancer run to carry it out. I listened to Aerys laughing. I could smell the rot on him."
"Tell me, you noble Stark!"
He was nearly roaring now.
"What the fuck was I supposed to do?!"
"Keep my oath and watch half a million people, men, women, children, burned alive by green fire?"
"Or draw my sword and put it through that madman's back and end it?!"
"You saw what I chose. Yes. I chose the latter."
"I killed the Mad King. Then I found the pyromancer and cut his throat. I hunted down every man who'd heard that command. Every last one."
"I saved the city. I saved your King Robert. I saved your life."
"And what did I get?"
The sound that came out of him wasn't quite a laugh.
"Kingslayer. A villain the whole world spits on."
"And you, Ned Stark, you walked into that blood-soaked hall with your honor and your army, and you couldn't even be bothered to look at me."
Silence swallowed the wall. Only the wind.
Lynn watched without a word, and felt it move through him anyway. He knew this story. He'd always known it. But hearing it torn out of Jaime Lannister's chest like that, raw and shaking, the weight of it was something else entirely.
Jaime Lannister. A hero the world had misread for 20 years. A tragic man who spent his own name like coin to buy half a million lives.
Ned didn't speak for a long time.
He turned, the same way Lynn had earlier, and looked out over the city, all those lights scattered through the dark below.
He could imagine it. Without that sword thrust, this wouldn't be a city anymore. It would be scorched earth. A ghost field of ash and bone.
He thought of Lyanna.
Of the Tower of Joy. Her voice at the end, barely more than breath, pulling him close to tell him the thing that would define the rest of his life. The secret he had carried alone ever since. The lie he had told his dearest friend.
Promise me, Ned.
You must protect him.
Some oaths were always going to break.
Some honor could only be kept through lies and blood.
He had broken oaths too.
Ned looked at Jaime Lannister, this man he had despised for the better part of his life.
And in this moment, it struck him how much they were alike.
"I judged what I saw."
His voice was low.
Jaime's whole body flinched.
"I was wrong."
Three words.
They hit like a thunderclap.
Jaime stared at the back of Ned Stark's head and couldn't move. He had waited for those words for 20 years. 20 years. He had stopped believing they would ever come.
And here they were. From the last person he would have expected. Spoken as simply as if they cost nothing.
His eyes burned. He turned away fast, jaw tight, before anyone could see.
---
"The Mad King is dead."
Lynn's voice cut through the silence, steady, measured, deliberate.
"But the madness still sits on the Iron Throne."
Ned and Jaime both looked at him.
In each other's eyes, they found the same thing. The same resolve.
Robert's paranoia. Robert's cruelty. That command of his, barely distinguishable from a murder order.
It was the last straw.
The loyalty Ned Stark had carried for Robert Baratheon for 20 years was gone. He had known it for a while now. He was a father before he was a Hand, and no king alive was going to use him as a blade against his own daughter's future.
It was the same choice Jaime had made. Exactly the same.
Honor meant nothing if it couldn't protect the people who mattered.
Ned had finally learned that.
"The King wants your head."
He turned and looked at Lynn directly, eyes steady and clear.
"I won't let him have it."
No hesitation. No qualification.
A declaration. An open defiance of the Iron Throne.
Jaime dragged a knuckle across the corner of his eye and pulled the arrogance back into place like a man putting on armor.
"My father's army can reach the Twins in 3 days." He glanced between Lynn and Ned. "So. Are we ready to discuss what kind of death Lysa Arryn gets to choose?"
"No."
Lynn shook his head.
Ned and Jaime both frowned.
"We're not just going to let her die."
Lynn's eyes were calm. His voice was quiet.
"I'm going to make her pay back everything she owes, with interest. The whole Vale included."
➤ Next: Lysa's War Rally
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