Chapter Text
The rain in the Riverlands did not feel like rain; it felt like a slow, grey rot, softening the earth until the world dissolved into grease and forgotten men.
Inside the command tent, the air hung heavy—thick with the reek of damp wool, stale sweat, and the acrid smoke of a hearth that spit wet sparks into the dark. Outside, the night was a chorus of quiet ruin: the rattling coughs of soldiers with lung-rot, the muffled weeping of boys who had learned too late that war was not a ballad, and the relentless, maddening thrum of water against canvas.
Ser Criston Cole sat on a salt-cured crate, his hands resting heavily on his knees. The steel of his greaves bit into his shins, caked in a dark crust of river-clay and old blood. He stared into the dying embers, his face carved from shadow and exhaustion, looking less like a knight and more like a statue waiting to be buried.
A shadow broke the weak orange glow at the threshold.
Ser Gwayne Hightower stepped inside. The highborn swagger that had carried him out of King’s Landing was entirely gone, scrubbed away by leagues of mud and iron. His golden-filigreed armor was dull, streaked with rust and black oil; a thin, jagged scab traversed his cheekbone. Yet his eyes—dark, sharp, and perpetually heavy with that haughty, aristocratic fatigue—remained unmistakably his own.
Gwayne pulled off his soaked leather gloves, wringing them out over the dirt. "Two more draft horses bled out in the picket line," he said. His voice was a dry rasp, carrying that familiar, silver-edged cadence that made even tragedy sound like an inconvenience. "The men are boiling harness leather for broth. If we reach Harrenhal by fortnight, Criston, we’ll be leading a procession of ghosts."
Criston did not blink. "Then we command ghosts. It is a fitting rank. The dragons will make ash of us all in the end anyway."
Gwayne let out a soft, sharp exhale—a quiet scoff that died before it could become a laugh. He sank onto a folding stool across the hearth, unbuckling his longsword with a heavy, metallic clatter.
"Always so relentlessly grim, Lord Commander," Gwayne murmured, rubbing his face with his bare palms. His voice lost its bite, softening into something fragile and worn. "I offered you a life after all this, you know. Before we ever crossed the Blackwater. A quiet place in Oldtown when the fires finally burn out. Good wine, dry boots, and a sunlit garden at the edge of the city where no one would ever ask you to draw steel again. My family would have granted it with a stroke of a quill once the throne was secured. You could have lived out your years in peace."
Criston’s mouth twitched, a hollow, phantom smile touching his lips.
"Oldtown," Criston whispered. The word sounded small in the vast, weeping dark of the Riverlands. "A gilded sanctuary, Gwayne. A softer retirement, perhaps, but under a Hightower banner all the same. You offered me a quiet place to grow old in your family’s shadow. But I never wanted a master's reward when the slaughter ended. I only ever wanted freedom."
Gwayne stilled, his dark eyes fixing on Criston through the haze of smoke. "Freedom," he repeated quietly, the word tasting strange and impossible on his tongue. "There is no freedom for men born to hold a sword."
"There is," Criston murmured. He leaned slightly forward, his voice dropping into the quiet cadence of a secret, or a prayer. "Across the sea. Pentos. Tyrosh. Lys. Where the sun actually hits a man's face, and the air smells of salt and the crush of olives, not blood and damp pine. A man could buy a modest house with a whitewashed courtyard. He could spend his mornings selling oranges and cinnamon in the square."
He paused. A sudden, bitter shadow passed behind his eyes—a ghost summoned from a life he had buried a dozen deaths ago.
"I offered that to a princess once," Criston confessed, the words falling between them like glass breaking on stone. "Years ago, on the deck of a ship bound for the capital. I offered her cinnamon and oranges. I told her a man of my steel could earn his bread as a sellsword. Guard a merchant’s ledger. Escort a spice caravan across the coast. Earn silver that hadn't been washed in noble rot." His jaw tightened, the muscle working beneath his stubble. "She laughed. She called it a peasant’s dream, and chose the throne."
He looked up then, meeting Gwayne’s gaze directly, waiting for the polite cruelty to follow. He waited for the Hightower pride to flare, for Gwayne to mock the lowborn romanticism of a steward's son, or to remind him of the solemn oaths that bound them to this brutal campaign until the very end.
The rain beat against the canvas. The fire hissed.
Gwayne looked into the fire for a long moment. The rain filled the silence, heavy and relentless.
"Do you know," he said at last, his voice dropping into a quiet distance, "when I was twelve, my tutor made me calculate the customs dues on three cargoes sailing from Pentos."
Criston frowned slightly, caught off guard by the drift.
"I remember every figure," Gwayne gave a tired, dry laugh. "I cannot remember the face of the first man I killed."
He looked down at his bare hands—the nails lined with black dirt, the knuckles raw and swollen. He looked at the dented, golden sun of House Hightower painted across his breastplate.
Slowly, deliberately, Gwayne reached down. His fingers worked the soaked leather straps of his left vambrace. The metal groaned as he unbuckled it, letting it fall into the mud with a soft, heavy thud—a quiet execution of his duty to House Hightower.
Next came his gorget, the collar resting cold against his throat; he unlatched it and dropped it beside the first piece, stripping away his oath.
Then, his sword belt—his knighthood—slid from his waist and coiled in the dirt like a dead snake.
Finally, he worked the side-latches of his gilded breastplate. He lifted the heavy steel over his head and set it upon the dirt, a corpse of the war he was leaving behind.
He looked across the embers, a hollow, self-deprecating humor touching his eyes. "I rode into this campaign of my own accord," Gwayne said softly, staring at the ruined pile of his identity. "I wanted the glory of it. I played the dutiful knight, eager to march... and for what? Endless blood. Betrayals at every turn. Kings who change their minds with the wind." He shook his head, a heavy sigh tearing from his chest. "I am so tired, Ser Criston. A man can only bleed for foolish pride for so long before he realizes he is spending his life only to carry his own family's ambition."
He rested his bare forearms on his knees. For the first time in months, the Riverlands no longer smelled like wet ash. In his mind he caught, impossibly, the sharp, dry sweetness of sun-warmed stone and crushed citrus.
"She was a fool to laugh at you," Gwayne murmured softly. The ghost of his aristocratic sarcasm flickered back into his eyes—darker now, shorn of its arrogance, but unmistakably Gwayne. "Imagine refusing citrus and sunshine for councils and dragonlords. I've met Pentoshi merchants happier than half the court."
He paused, his gaze locking onto Criston’s with a quiet, unyielding weight.
"Myr," Gwayne said flatly. "The Myrish magisters pay absurd sums for Westerosi plate. They consider it the ultimate display of wealth for their captains. An armorer in Myr would weep at the sight of it. We sell the armor."
Criston stared at him, the world shifting violently beneath his feet. "Ser Gwayne—"
"I know trade," Gwayne cut in, his voice ringing with a sharp, practical clarity. "Oldtown sits on the mouth of the Honeywine, Ser Criston—my tutors drilled foreign exchange and Essosi ledgers into my head while my brothers-in-arms and cousin played with hawks. You draw the steel if anyone threatens our peace. I will handle the bargaining and the merchants. And I happen to like cinnamon."
Criston watched him. Slowly, his calloused fingers reached up to his own neck. He caught the heavy silver clasp of his white cloak between his thumb and forefinger.
With a sharp, decisive snap, the latch gave way. Criston pulled the pristine, suffocating cloth from his shoulders and let it fall, mirroring Gwayne as the white wool sank into the black, unforgiving mud at his feet.
"Three horses," Gwayne whispered, his sharp mind already charting the dark. "We ride south-east toward Saltpans tonight. By the time the scouts realize we are missing, they will assume the Riverlords dragged us into the woods and cut our throats. We sell the beasts, buy passage on a Braavos-bound cog, and toss our titles into the sea."
Criston looked down at the white cloak ruined in the dirt, then up at Gwayne, his voice quiet, clear, and finally free.
"Get your sword, Ser Gwayne."
Gwayne reached down, picking up his bare longsword by the scabbard, leaving its ornate belt behind in the mud. "Where are we riding?"
Criston turned his eyes toward the dark canvas of the tent, listening to the rain pounding against the world outside.
"South," Criston said softly.
Gwayne paused at the threshold, pulling his dark cloak tight around his unarmored shoulders. "And beyond that?"
Criston looked back at him, the shadow of a true smile touching his face for the first time in a decade.
"We'll decide when we see the sea."
Criston had already turned toward the back of the tent to gather his travel pack when Gwayne stopped, his hand resting on the wet canvas flap.
The silence outside hadn't changed. The rain still rattled against the oilcloth, and somewhere down the line, a man coughed—a wet, rattling sound that ended in a low groan.
Gwayne’s jaw tightened. He looked down at his bare hands, then back at Criston.
"And the men?" Gwayne asked quietly. The silver edge in his voice was completely gone, replaced by an uncomfortable, unvarnished weight. "The two hundred left under our banners. The boys boiling harness leather."
Criston didn't freeze, but his movement slowed. He tied the leather strap of his pack with methodical, brutal precision.
"They will do what soldiers always do when their captains vanish," Criston said, his back still turned. "They will disperse. Or they will surrender to the Riverlords. Or they will march on Harrenhal under someone else's doomed command."
"We are leaving them to dragonflame, Ser Criston."
Criston turned then. His face was cold, stripped of the manic edge it had carried for years, leaving only a hard, grey truth.
"We were already leading them to dragonflame," Criston replied softly. "That was the order from King's Landing. We were only ever meant to be the kindling, Gwayne. You know that as well as I do." He picked up his plain arming sword, slinging it over his shoulder. "You can march them into the fire tomorrow if your conscience demands it. But the dragon won't care how honorable their captain was."
Gwayne stared at him for a long beat. He glanced back toward the hearth, where the golden sun of House Hightower lay half-buried in the Riverland mud, cold and hollow.
He swallowed hard, turned his back on the command tent, and stepped out into the dark.
"Three horses," Gwayne muttered into the rain. "I'll take the roan."