Jaime Lannister had to admit it: Robb Stark was a surprisingly good commander, for how young and inexperienced he was. His victory at the Whispering Wood hadn't been a fluke; as it stood, Robb Stark was well on his way to winning this war.

Robb Stark was also well on his way to being a much better king than Joffrey ever would, though Jaime would never have phrased it in quite those terms to Cersei. The boy would have been lost in a world of intrigue - Stark men always were - but a throne built by conquest was different.

If there was one thing that bannermen universally responded to, it was lords who got their hands dirty. Add that to the adoration Ned Stark had enjoyed for being so very honorable and the superstitious mythology surrounding those damn wolves, Robb Stark was extraordinarily popular among people who hadn't even met him.

If anything was going to bite Stark in the ass, it would be the sister. It wasn't uncommon for nobles to bring their bastard brothers or sons to war with them, often with the implicit promise of a lordship if they triumphed - that's how the Baratheon house had started, or so the story went. But a sister was more unusual, particularly when the sister didn't appear to be one of those northern warrior women and particularly when Stark's lady mother - who had infamously disliked her husband's bastards, for admittedly obvious reasons - was also wandering around the camp.

Relying too much on women was a sure way to seem weak to your men, and there had to be enough bad blood there to create… disagreements.

Stark seemed to be utilizing them fairly well, though. He'd been smart enough to not leave Jaime with one of his bannermen, and he'd also been smart enough to keep Jaime well away from Catelyn Stark - much to Jaime's chagrin. He knew the woman well enough to know that she could be goaded with comments about her daughters.

The Snow girl, on the other hand, had proved remarkably immovable. It was clear that he sometimes irritated her, but he hadn't been able to find any meaningful cracks in her relationship with her brother. Bribery and overt threats had fallen on deaf ears, and insults seemed to largely inspire eye rolls. It was clear that she didn't like him insulting her brother, but either she was a generally composed person or her brother was holding something very significant over her head to keep her in line.

He had no idea what kind of person she was in general - he'd barely given a thought to Ned Stark's bastards even when he was at Winterfell, other than to feel amused that the so very honorable Ned Stark had bastards in the first place - but if he had to guess, he'd have guessed the latter.

He'd found more cracks in Robb Stark during the admittedly fewer interactions he'd had with him, but those were largely in the form of being an overprotective brother when it came to the sister there was any point in being overprotective of - and if Jaime ever got back to King's Landing and all he had to offer was that Robb Stark didn't like his enemies calling his sister a whore, he thought that his sister and his brother would probably (for once) actually manage to agree with each other, though the "well, of course he doesn't," would probably carry different inflections.

Stannis was stiff and boring. Robb Stark was wholesome and boring. After extenive deliberation, since he had nothing better to do, Jaime had decided that he preferred being Robb Stark's prisoner to being Stannis's, but it had been a close thing. They were both tediously sanctimonious, but at least Stark hadn't joined a cult, and there was some minor intrigue in the form of his sister.

"Your brother is teaching you to use a sword," he commented one afternoon as she gave him water.

"King Robb is teaching me to use a sword, yes."

"Does he insist that you call him that? Good gods, maybe he is as stiff as Stannis. Even Joffrey doesn't insist on his kin calling him king behind his back."

Though he might if he knew they didn't.

"But you're not his kin," she said, putting the stopper back in the water and standing up. "You're a Lannister, and he's the King in the North and of the Riverlands."

"That sounds tedious to list out."

"Fighting your family is tedious for him. We all have problems."

She turned. He watched the red wolf, always hovering by the door to the pen when she was inside it, join her as they walked away.

The Starks were certainly wholesome, boring, and sanctimonious, but he doubted that any of Stannis's people understood sarcasm - much less were capable of using it. That was a plus, as far as being a prisoner to boring and sanctimonious people went.

"Why are you so loyal to him?" he asked the next day. The sun was starting to set, but the area was well-illuminated by torches, and that damn wolf was still hovering behind her. Even if he could have tried something, he wouldn't have been stupid enough to do it now - and with his hands chained behind his back again, he didn't have a chance at escaping, not right now.

Her expression didn't change. "He's my brother," she said flatly.

"No…" He drew out the word. "No, I know family loyalty. This isn't that. What did he do to deserve this level of…" He considered the word for a moment. "… adoration?" Her face went stony, and he rolled his eyes. "Purely wholesome adoration. Yes, I know. I would never impugn the honor of the Starks."

She glanced away from him and toward the heart of the camp. He wished that he was in a position to take advantage of her momentary loss of focus. He wasn't sure whether Stark would order him filled with arrows if he had a knife to his bastard sister's throat, but Jaime would have loved to test it. "If I need him, he's always there," she said after a moment. "And he's never left me."

"And yet you're still a Snow. He could legitimize you if he wanted, you know."

"He already has an heir in Winterfell, and I'm not going to make a marriage alliance," she shot back, returning her attention to him. "Why would he bother?"

It took him a moment to process that - it wasn't the answer he'd been expecting. "How thoughtful of him," he said eventually. "It's just that if it was me, I wouldn't want people calling my sister a bastard."

"Well, I suppose that's why you're his prisoner rather than the other way around." Her smile was sickly sweet, and even in this light, he could see that it didn't reach her eyes. "He can think about the big picture."

Of course she'd say that. He wasn't sure why he'd even bothered to challenge her on it - she clearly worshipped the ground Robb Stark walked on in an utterly predictable way.

And she didn't seem to realize that she'd just given him quite a lot of information. She'd been ready with a response to the jibe about legitimization, which meant that they'd either actively talked about it or she'd thought about it - so it was on the table, even if Robb Stark wasn't doing anything about it right now.

On one hand, Jaime supposed that it wasn't that strange, given that they'd grown up together. On the other hand, doing so would have irritated both Stark's lady mother and the Riverlands as a whole, the latter of whom Stark needed to fight this war. It shouldn't have been an option on the table.

He probably couldn't drive a wedge between the Snow girl and her brother - but he was starting to think that he could probably use her against him, anyway.

A/N: I hope that introducing another PoV isn't making this go too off the rails - I just kind of love Jaime and the chapter wrote itself? I was originally just looking at it as a brainstorming exercise, but I actually kind of like how it turned out? Idk? I'd love feedback on how it turned out and whether I was able to capture Jaime's voice.

I want to thank LadyBritish for all her help brainstorming this last year, and to everyone who's reviewed since then.

Reviews/favorites/follows are always appreciated. Thank you so much for reading!

- Branwen