A Vow Without Honor

The Consequences

Myra

The rains had set in again when Lord Karstark and his selected party set off after Jaime. He'd taken his other son and the best warriors of his household, and stormed off to the east at a reckless pace. The horses would never be able to maintain it, and one wrong step could devastate them, but none of the men cared. It was vengeance they wanted, and gods help the poor souls in their path.

Let him be far away, she thought. Let him be safe.

Nestled in the pit of her stomach, however, was the unsavory knowledge that Jaime's journey to freedom was far from over. But she had done all she could for him, given everything, and now was the time to focus on her own well being.

Her brother had yet to look at her again. When confronted with the fury in his eyes, she had turned away, utterly unable to hold his gaze. By the time she'd gathered the courage to meet them again, he'd gone, a series of shouted orders in his wake.

They were breaking down the camp. It was time to leave.

With practiced ease, she watched the men tear down the war camp. In a span of an hour, perhaps two, the tents and all their belongings had been packed away on carts, mules, or, in some cases, on their very person. There was little left to identify that they had ever been there, aside from the disturbed grass and burnt out campfires.

But the going was slow afterwards. Myra doubted there was a single roadway between them and the Narrow Sea that was solid and free of mud. Carts became stuck, soldiers lost boots – to the momentary entertainment of their companions – and one of the horses rolled an ankle on a hill. It screamed until someone took a dagger to its throat.

Her mother did not speak to her during the journey. Catelyn rode directly beside her, but felt a thousand leagues away, further than when she was trapped and thought to never see her again.

Robb rode in front, at the head of the column, flanked by Talisa and two guards. Though she could make out the occasional exchanged sentence, the two were mostly silent. She could tell how on edge her brother was simply by how he held his shoulders, rigid and tall – he had always been a terrible slouch otherwise. At least she could still understand that much about him, though little else it seemed. He felt impossibly further away than her mother, and Myra was not certain she could close that gap.

If loving someone means tearing half the world apart, perhaps you're better off without.

She'd meant the actual world, but clearly the gods thought it amusing to try for something of a smaller scale: her world, her family.

She'd done the one thing she had told Jaime she was against, but she didn't know.

How does one know when they are in love?

She had thought it was an emotion like any other. Sadness, joy, anger, people knew when they felt those things, but she had been utterly blindsided by her mother's words, and only in the light of that did she realize it herself.

It was not the sensation she had been expecting, but that might have been her circumstances. He was a Lannister and she was a Stark. These things didn't happen, and yet here she was, a foolish girl in the middle of a war contemplating her feelings.

For some reason, it made her think of Sansa's songs, and how totally unlike any of them her particular story was. The gallant knight was a kingslayer and the maiden a murderer, and rather than mourn his departure, Myra felt a sense of calm fall over her. He was safe, and if he did not see her again, that meant her family could not harm him.

In fact, the prospect of never meeting him again was not as daunting as she thought it ought to be.

She wasn't a complete fool. As misguided and one-sided as it seemed, Jaime's relationship with Cersei was what mattered to him. She was a traveling companion, a friend maybe – as if Jaime Lannister could claim he had friends – but she was not the sort of person he fell in love with. She was too young, too naïve, too...herself, she supposed, and the instant she realized her affections, she had resigned herself to that unrequited fate.