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The men dragged Brienne back into the firelight, heaving and shaking like she was a boy unblooded. Locke was staring at Ser Jaime, something strange on his face. Anger, and greed, and something almost like pity.
"Wouldn't want to deprive my men," he said after a moment. "But you see, there's a problem with that. We're short on available cunts."
He turned away from Ser Jaime, offering her a thin smile. She stared back, eyes slitted and jaw tight.
"The Kingslayer doesn't have a maidenhead to preserve, as it happens. The way I heard it, his sister took it."
Behind him, Ser Jaime didn't move. Brienne swallowed her heart back down her throat.
Surely, surely Locke isn't going to allow this prisoner, a firstborn son of one of the greatest Houses in Westeros, to be raped by his men, and certainly not to make a point-
But he would. The Kingslayer, the Lannister heir, was paling, then flushing, the color fleeing his face and crawling back up his throat, his ears, his cheeks.
Brienne found her tongue. "Do you think you will survive returning him to his father after- after you violate him? Lord Lannister is not the sort of man to forgive an injury to his heir."
Locke laughed outright. "I think Tywin Lannister has enough to worry about. Go on, Lady of the Sapphires. Waste this man's hard work to make you valuable."
She gritted her teeth and silently swore to herself, to the spectre of Renly Baratheon, that Locke would die- if not by her hand, then by another's.
"You do remember what happened to the man who refused to pay my father the coin owed to him. Do you think my father will be kinder to you?"
Locke pushed himself to stand, ignoring Ser Jaime. "Consider, milady, how bad you want to make this for him. You do want him able to sit a saddle tomorrow, don't you?" He watched her for a moment, with satisfaction. "Any warm hole, eh?" He wandered away, toward his tent.
Brienne looked at Ser Jaime, who was watching the ground between his boots with slitted eyes. He had tilted his head, to shield his eyes from the nearest fire's light.
Saving his night vision, she thought to herself. The Kingslayer will fight. He will make them kill him. He'd said he would.
The skinny man who had first put his hand to her breast was the first to move. He stepped boldly up to Ser Jaime, and leaned down to grab at his captive's hips to turn him over. Ser Jaime had been chained to the tree he sat against by a long rope from his shackles. He used the slack to great effect, seizing the skinny man by the throat and pulling him down sharply. The skinny man's face met Ser Jaime's knee with a wet crunch, and when Ser Jaime shoved him away, the skinny man did not rise, but made a low, whimpering sort of noise.
The second and third men moved together, one grabbing Ser Jaime's ankles and dragging him far enough that the slack left his bonds. He skipped smartly back when Ser Jaime tore a leg free and kicked at him, but the other man took hold of Ser Jaime's lifted leg and heaved him onto his belly.
Ser Jaime was fighting, Brienne realized, but not well. He had fought her nearly to a draw, before- with a sword in his hand. Desperation made him clumsy, and he was not a man acquainted with fear, nor one with experience in pushing through it.
Thank the Seven I'm not a woman, he'd said. Brienne's tongue was thick in her mouth. She fruitlessly worked at her bonds, forcing her eyes away from the spectacle as one of the onlookers kicked Ser Jaime in the side. He grunted through his teeth, the first sound he had made, and tried to twist onto his back, but was forced to his belly and kicked again.
Brienne called out, "He's no good to you dead!" The men barely spared her a glance, but Ser Jaime wheezed a laugh into the dirt and found his tongue.
"On the contrary! Kill me now, and my father will have you scourged and beheaded, rather than skinned and staked out on the Rock's battlements. Or," he added, as the man who'd kicked him paused, "You could simply walk away, and collect your gold once I've been ransomed back." His voice was admirably steady, but they all could see the dampness of his shirt, the clench of his hands into the dirt. The man kicked him again and another knotted a truly disgusting rag across his mouth, not seeming to care Ser Jaime had kept his jaw clenched tight and the rag did not enter his mouth at all. More hands joined to tear away Ser Jaime's clothes and hold him still.
One man sneered and spat at his ass, caked with filth from two years of unforgiving captivity. "I'm not putting my cock in that, it'll rot off by tomorrow."
"How far's the river?" Asked another.
"Near a mile. I'm not hauling him that far. The lion likely expects us to bathe his lordship also!"
There was cruel laughter. Brienne could scarcely see Ser Jaime between the men's legs. He tried kicking again, but was held down so firmly she only knew he struggled by the flex of his ass.
"We're crossing tomorrow, let's let the river clean him enough to fuck." There was an irritated murmur, and a bit of argument; but eventually the men left Ser Jaime on the ground and went off to their own fires and suppers.
Brienne waited until Ser Jaime had awkwardly crawled closer to the tree he was bound to, to gain slack for his hands to fumble at his breeches. She waited until he was leaning against the tree, knees drawn closely to his chest, like a child pretending he wasn't curling into his mother for comfort. She waited until the fires burned down and most of the camp was asleep.
"Are you well?"
He didn't so much as twitch, but Brienne knew he'd heard. Ser Jaime had kept his head away from the nearest fires, but she had heard his breath hitch every so often, had seen the glint of damp on his sharp jaw.
"Thank you," She said stiltedly. "I- owe you. I'm sorry I couldn't do the same for you."
He said nothing, and they sat in silence until the dawn streaked the distant skies through the trees.
That night, it did not matter that they'd held him in the river until the moment he'd stopped thrashing, over and over until they grew bored and declared him clean, because Locke took Ser Jaime's sword hand and bound it around his neck.