Jaime?

  He stared blankly at the words, the parchment damp in his hand, the ink slightly run. The sky had been weeping over them for the past two nights now.

  A frown turned his lips. What have you done now, Cersei?

  His uncle was not a man for jests. The only one of his uncles with any humor had been Gerion, and he had vanished on a mad quest to find Brightroar. The sword had been lost to them since before the Conqueror ever thought to cast a throne of swords, carried off by a King of the Rock who thought to plunder Valyria after the Doom had taken her.

  Perhaps we are as mad as the Targaryens. Only we learned to shit gold and not dragons.

  He found his feet. He would go to Casterly Rock to see for himself. It was not as if he was needed here.

  They had made the siege of Crakehall untenable, yet the three who had taken charge after Lord Mathis Rowan lost his head were a craven, miserly sort, and would not take the field against him. Ser Emmon Cuy led the Reach foot still, or Ser Pissflowers as Jaime had graciously dubbed him.

  Sunflowers and green apples, those were his foes. And a boy more coney than huntsman.

  Outside the world was grey and sodden. The rains swiftly soaked his golden hair, only his armor just as golden keeping the rest of him dry. The storms from the sunset sea were not as mortal as those that plagued the narrow sea, but they were relentless, and cold as an Other's arse.

  Now where was his poxy squire. "Podrick!"

  He had taken a squire as he was bid to, but not the preening sons of the high lords his lordly father would see foisted on him. The boy was some distant kin to Ser Ilyn Payne, fatherless for the Greyjoy Rebellion and motherless for the wandering singer she had run off with. Yet he had a good heart and some wits to him, which was more than could be said for most. If he was to make a knight, then he would make a knight, not a lickspittle with a sword and armor.

  Pod did not dally either, to his credit. Even if he had mud enough on him to seem a river lord. "Call our knights."

  He left the command to Addam Marbrand in his absence, and with him he took the Mountain. He would sooner keep a mad dog close if it needed putting down.

  The morn had turned to noon when they rode for Casterly Rock. And what a sight they made. Though standing twice as high as Pod's cream-and-lemon pony, the destrier still bowed under the weight of Clegane. That paragon of chivalry had been near enough a corpse a few moons past, yet now he rode as if it had been naught but a summer chill.

  The rains followed them to the Rock, and he had but set foot inside when Aunt Genna descended upon him.

  "Cersei… she's lost herself to madness, Jaime. Slaughtering septons and septas to the weirwood, as well as any prisoners the Kingsguard could find here or in Lannisport. She's confined your father to his rooms and the rest of us to the Rock."

  He did not know what to make of the words, as if the Stranger had whispered in his ear instead.

  If not for his armor, her nails might have cut him, so great was her urgency. "You needs leave, and quickly. Return with men enough to put this to rights. In your father's absence, you are Lord of Casterly Rock."

  Yet the sound of footsteps drew his eyes. Tyrion?

  "You took your time," his impish brother snarked as he stepped from the gloom. "Or perhaps our uncle in Deep Den's more laggard than I thought."

  "Tywin has ever been a proud, stubborn fool where you were concerned, Tyrion," their aunt spoke pleadingly. "The gods know I told him the same, and he spoke not to me for half a year. Yet you must see—"

  "Must I?" his brother rasped. "My beloved father saw to it that I watched as his garrison raped my wife for a silver apiece. Would you care to know how many times she cried my name 'fore her eyes went dead and dull?"

  The words saw the guilt coil into his stomach again as his aunt stared as though she had been struck.

  He had not dared stay himself. He fled near as soon as he had spoken his father's words, a knight running from a girl's screams…

  "He must have seen in her your grandfather's mistress," his aunt returned with haunted eyes. "What other madness could it have been, to treat a girl so?"

  "Aye, and my sweet sister's no more mad and no more cruel. Only Cersei wears hers on her sleeves for all the world to admire."

  "I…" he tried to interrupt, but he still could not find the words to speak.

  "You'll find her in her rooms," Tyrion said in his stead. "Though you might find a sorcerer wagging her tongue."

  "He's here?" How many moons had it been since they had spoken…

  "In a manner of speaking." His aunt only turned paler for his mention.

  Finally, he gave a sigh. When he looked back, he only saw Pod staring up in open-mouthed awe at the statue of Tybolt the Thunderbolt cast in gold. The Mountain That Rides had somehow vanished without a sound.

  "I heard you took a squire," he heard his brother say. "Though this one looks like a stiff breeze might snap him in two."

  "He reminded me of you." A ghost of a smile caught his lips with the words, some of his wits returned to him.

  As he met Tyrion's mismatched eyes again, the light from a wall sconce caught a glint of metal. A miniature hand in Lannister gold was pinned to his impish brother's finery, its fingers curled into a fist.

  "She made you Hand of the King…" Perhaps he would see the sun rise in the west and set in the east next. None of it made any sense. Cersei had always loathed Tyrion.

  "It came as much a shock to me. I warned her against it. I do not think the realm has ever seen so small a Hand."

  He found his aunt's eyes still choked with worry. "I'll speak to her and then I'll speak to Father," he promised.

  "I should also mention some matters of the realm," Tyrion continued. "Father would approve."

  "There is none I would like less," he muttered.

  Pod hurried along after them as Tyrion filled their ears with tall tales. Viserys Targaryen had returned and hatched a dragon. Renly Baratheon had grown horns, while his Tyrell queen wore a garden for a gown. The least he believed was that the ironborn now followed a queen.

  "Next you'll tell me that grumpkins and snarks have assailed the Wall."

  "Not grumpkins and snarks, mayhaps, but there's a King-Beyond-the-Wall that marches on it with some hundred thousand wildlings. Ned Stark's went to guard us from him."

  He nodded faintly. That much he could believe.

  "The sight of our sweet sister should open your eyes to this story we've found ourselves in." Tyrion had departed with those words, leaving him at Cersei's door.

  Ser Flement Brax stood still as a statue as he stalked inside. At first, it seemed an idyllic scene, Cersei brushing Myrcella's curls and humming a song he faintly remembered their mother singing to them. But the eyes that found his own were a cat's, and the crown upon her head was a thing of sorcery. And when she smiled…

  "Jaime." Those eyes went to his back. "And a squire. Speak your name before your queen and princess."

  The boy put on as brave a face as he could manage, stepping from his shadow. "P-Podrick Payne, Your Grace."

  "Cersei," he whispered, but it was his daughter who spoke in her stead.

  "Father," she greeted softly. Yet the one word near took the strength from him.

  "You told her," he dumbly returned.

  "The High Septon has already named them abominations, Jaime. I have only returned his scorn. Now there's no more septas to nag in my ears about the Mother and the Crone."

  The Lannister green of his daughter's eyes showed a thousand things. All things that he deserved. There was a thousand things he wanted to say also, yet he could not stir himself to even a one of them.

  "Myrcella…" he tried instead. "Would you show Podrick around the Rock?"

  A nod. Pod's cheeks went red as their banners when she took his hand in hers. Soon he was left with Cersei, her eyes at a level with his for the first time since they were children.

  "They will not know what to make of it, Cersei. It was ill done…"

  "The Valyrians wed brother to sister for a thousand years. The Targaryens did much the same. What had Maegor done when the Faith paid protest?"

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  "Maegor the Cruel," he reminded her, "who all the realm loathes still."

  She shrugged her shoulders as if it were a trifle. "They can whisper Cersei the Cruel in the same breath as Kingslayer."

  It was said Lann the Clever replaced his eyes with a cat's in the same breath as he stole some sunlight for his hair. The way she stared at him now unnerved him as much as the words.

  "Maegor had Balerion the Black Dread."

  Tyrion had spoken truly. The Beggar King hatching a dragon did not seem half as mad now. All the world had turned on its head after a sorcerer had found their shores.

  "And I will see the Rock walk," she whispered feverishly. "I've dreamt it, Jaime. The stars will fall. The seas will turn to stone…" He heard another in her words. The king he had put a sword through. "The Tyrells, the Baratheons, the Martells, they will all pay fealty to the lion crowned in sunlight."

  Had Solomon filled her head with madness or had it always been there and he only turned a blind eye?

  "Aerys dreamed of madness also," he whispered hoarsely. "He thought he would rise from the pyre he made of King's Landing a dragon."

  Her smile widened to reveal a maw of daggers. "And what do you see before you, Jaime?"

  A monster, he wanted to say. But was he any better?

  "Will you fight me, Jaime? Will you try and take the Rock from me? Father will send me to the silent sisters and Tyrion to freeze on the Wall."

  He shied from the thought as he had some moons ago. He had never cared for the Rock.

  Again he fled. It was not long before his steps had found his father's solar, Ser Mandon Moore's dead eyes meeting his own.

  "I would speak with my father, ser." As much as the knight loved duty, he still loved his head more.

  As he walked into the room thick with gold, his anger only grew. He caught the sight of him in the gloom, skin turned as pale as milkglass.

  "Have you brought your sister to heel? Or have you come to justify your weakness?"

  His eyes were sunken like a corpse's and cold as the gold that choked the room. "I am not the one who's been thrown into a room to rot, Father."

  "By a fool girl and a grasping dwarf."

  "You only make yourself sound more pitiful," he dared to mock.

  "I would have left you a legacy to last a thousand years if you but had the temerity to take it!"

  "A thousand years of shame," he threw back at him. "What will be your legacy but dead babes and a house ground into the dust?"

  His father's jaw tightened. "You would throw this war at my feet? You, who cuckolded the king with your own sister?"

  The fingers of his sword hand twitched. "Would I have dared had you not made a monster of me first? As I put a sword to Aerys and his pyromancers, you saw Elia and her children butchered. Then the horror you made of a girl of three-and-ten…" He stepped closer, even his thoughts hot. "You made a mockery of every vow I'd ever taken."

  Still he saw not even a shadow of guilt in those eyes. "Look to Dorne to see the folly of having done otherwise. Your weakness would have seen the realm suffer a hundred rebellions. Would they not see dead babes?"

  "Forgive me, Father, but I seem to have misplaced the peace you would have brought the realm. And now we've near as many kings as kingdoms again."

  His heart beat madly, his brow wet with sweat.

  "You were always a fool. Aspiring to nothing but a sword as you chased honor like a whore chases coin. Your mother's weakness, much as it pains me to admit it."

  A smile took him as his sword left its sheath like a razor. "Perhaps you're right. When I saw what you had made of Elia, I wanted to put a sword through you as I did Aerys. Kingslayer, kinslayer, it was near enough."

  The shadow of uncertainty that crossed his father's features only emboldened him. "You would not dare."

  "Wouldn't I?" He put his golden sword to his father's heart. "All it would take is a push. Then I would go and take your mad dog's head and send both of you to Dorne with my regards."

  It was a sweet thing to see a butcher as his father so helpless. He drew a breath deep as winter, then let it out in a sigh, returning the sword to its sheath.

  "But then I rather like my mother's weakness as you named it."

  He turned his back. Let his father have the day he had sown.

  His rooms were a familiar sight, but sleep would not find him. He would find himself watching the night sky instead. The rains had died, the red ruin in the sky revealed again.

  "It would seem you stand at a crossroads, Ser Jaime."

  He had almost drawn his sword again when he paused at the sight. Solomon had discarded the finery of an Andal lord entirely, a thing of yellow draped over him now, and his black hair over it.

  If not for how his smile shifted like it were water, he would have thought the sorcerer stood before him in the flesh.

  "A crossroads," Jaime repeated softly. His anger had cooled, but into a biting wind. "And if I would put a stop to Cersei's madness?"

  He remembered how Littlefinger's man had screamed as if he had been gelded, clawing at his own skull.

  Solomon only touched a hand to his forearm instead. "If that is where your heart would lead you."

  The sorcerer stirred to stare at the same sky after, his back to him.

  "I see three roads. The first is as you said. You could be the Lord of Casterly Rock your father could never be. You might even take a crown yourself and be the first King of the Rock since the last knelt to the Conqueror." A quiet moment passed. "But I suspect you do not care for it. You had ever dreamed of knighthood, and you well know she would resent you until the end of her days for the birthright she would see you steal from her."

  He could only sigh at the words.

  "The second would see you in Dorne."

  A jest soon found his tongue, though it tasted like ash. "There is a certain ring to it, I'll grant you. To be the first man eaten by the dragon in a hundred years."

  Solomon's dark eyes touched his again. "That is not what you fear. You fear they might ask why you sat a throne as Elia and her children were butchered."

  The words cut through him like a sword. There was no lie he could tell that he could fool himself with, let alone a sorcerer.

  How many times had he seen Elia visit him when he dared close his eyes. He could never even look at her.

  "The third would take you north. It is not only Mance Rayder that marches on the Wall."

  "The black would serve me no more than the white," he denied.

  The room turned quiet as a lichyard. The day's events were an anchor on every thought.

  "Dorne," he finally whispered. A part of him already rushed to justify it another way. "It's Renly that seats the Iron Throne. If he brings the westerlands and the Vale to heel…"

  "A few words will not win you succor. Prince Doran might as easily argue that Dorne has weathered worse than a Baratheon king. But if you came not empty-handed…"

  For a breath he was elsewhere, down in the deepest places of the Rock. There he saw a statue cast in gold, with a face he knew. Gregor Clegane. And though it remained still as a night in the dead of winter, he heard it screaming.

  The next saw Solomon staring at the sky again. "It is almost time now."

  It was Tyrion's earlier words that wagged his tongue instead. "Cersei's not the only one to drain a cup of sorcery…"

  A quiet hung in the air until words soft as silk would break it. "I once told you that it is for you to choose to act as a true knight should. That I would have no oaths from you."

  The sorcerer reached for the cut throat in the sky.

  "A crown should be earned through deed, through daring. Lann the Clever. Durran Godsgrief. Garth Greenhand. Those were kings worth a crown. Kings that could stir the hearts of men to be something more than what they are. That is what I would give Westeros."

  When Solomon turned to face him again, he had three eyes where men had two. Jaime did not shy away.

  "And not only kings. Symeon Star-Eyes. Serwyn of the Mirror Shield. Galladon of Morne."

  The sorcerer's dulcet tones were a soft tide pulling him under. Or maybe he only remembered the boy he was.

  "Give the world cause to name you something more than Kingslayer."