Chapter Text
For Alayne Stone, the beginning of the end came at the feast after the first day of the Tourney of Winged Knights.
The tables were heavy laden with roasted capon and hog, turnips and carrots cooked in honey, fresh bread, yellow cheese and white. The wine and ale flowed freely, and the scions of the Vale drank and spoke politics. As they drank their voices grew louder, so that she did not even need to strain to hear them. They spoke of the last harvest, of famine, wolves and outlawry in the Riverlands, the Faith Militant in the Crownlands, ironmen in the Reach, storms on autumn seas and strange ships seen in the Stepstones.
Alayne listened with half her attention, sorting information from rumour, and rumour from boast, until Ser Roland Waynwood, made expansive with drink and emotion, slammed down his cup and exclaimed, “The Starks of Winterfell were ever friends to the Vale! Yet here we sit, in service to the men who designed the Red Wedding—while the Boltons hold Winterfell, and Ned Stark’s daughter’s been wed to the Bastard of the Dreadfort.”
Alayne sat up straight, as if struck. No, she thought, no, that’s not right, Sansa Stark is to wed Harry Hardyng, and Arya is dead. But Ben Coldwater was nodding. “Bad business,” he said. “The men from White Harbour and Ramsgate who come through Coldwater Burn tell tales of the bastard that paint him half a monster. What happened to his first wife…”
“What happened to his first wife?”
So Ben Coldwater told the story, as he had heard it from the Ramsgate fishers in the harbour of Coldwater; and behind him, Alayne listened in silence, her mouth gone dry with horror.
“I heard a strange story today, Father,” she said later, as she went over the final plans for the second day of the tourney in Lord Petyr’s study. “I heard that Lord Stark’s daughter has been wed to Lord Bolton’s bastard at Winterfell.”
“Lord Stark’s daughter?” Petyr’s smile was strange. “Why should you care for such tales, Alayne?”
“Mere curiosity.” She said the words calmly, though her belly was in knots. “The elder daughter is missing and wanted for treason, and the younger daughter is dead, so whom did Lord Bolton’s son marry?”
“My clever daughter,” Petyr said. “The Boltons needed a Stark girl to unite the North, so Tywin Lannister gave them one. The Lannisters always pay their debts… but sometimes they pay false coin. The girl is not Lord Stark’s daughter, you have that right.”
Alayne’s head was spinning. If not Arya, then who? Not some southern girl, surely. The lords of the North would have to be fools to be taken in by such a deception. It must needs be northern girl, one who knew Winterfell, who knew the Starks, a girl on whom the Lannisters could lay their hands… a girl who would not be missed.
If not Arya then who—frail memory dropped on her from as if from a great height.
She had returned to her room and Jeyne had been gone.
In the fractured, terrified days after Lord Stark’s arrest and the massacre of his guards and household, she had been locked in a room in Maegor’s Holdfast with Jeyne Poole, the steward’s daughter. The girl had been distraught, weeping as she whispered of soldiers come, northmen slaughtered, until she longed for quiet and peace. Ser Boros Blount had taken her to Queen Cersei, to write letters condemning her father and begging her family to surrender. Cersei Lannister had been seated in the council chambers, in a mourning dress covered in jewels like scarlet tears, attended by the king’s councillors: Grand Maester Pycelle, Lord Varys, and Petyr Baelish. She had asked… she had asked…
She had asked if Jeyne could see her father.
Cersei hadn’t wanted Jeyne upsetting her, she’d said so. Her voice had been so sweet. It was only in memory that she heard the poison. What shall we do with this little friend of hers, my lords?
Littlefinger had said, I’ll find a place for her. She had returned to her room and Jeyne was gone, and Littlefinger had never mentioned her again.
False coin. Lord Petyr was watching her, smiling, inviting her to share his humour, so she laughed, though she felt sick, and shared the other gossip she had learned, and listened to his plans for Lord Royce and Lady Waynwood and Harry the Heir with a smile on her face.
All the while her head was a tumult. Petyr helped her escape King’s Landing. He kept her safe from Cersei Lannister. Perhaps he did not know what had happened to Ramsay Bolton’s first wife, she thought, but the excuse sounded weak even to her. Petyr took such care to know everything. And Littlefinger…
…Littlefinger would sell Jeyne Poole to a monster without blinking. He would do it in cold calculation, with a smile on his face, and laugh about it later. When she kissed him goodnight, the mint on his breath tasted like poison. I would leave in a heartbeat, she thought miserably, but I have nowhere to go.
Yet hidden inside her was a secret, a promise: there was one person left to her still. He was half a world away, as distant as the moon and as impossible to reach, but his name gave her the courage to turn back in the doorway, an absent-minded frown painted on her brow. “Father,” she said, “Whatever happened to Jeyne Poole?”
The good humour faded from Littlefinger’s smile. “To whom, sweetling?”
She remembered the Vale lordlings and their morbid curiosity. Whatever happened to his first wife?
He locked her in a tower and starved her to death. They found her with her mouth bloody and her fingers chewed to the bone.
“No-one,” she said. “Never mind.”
After the rest of it, the poison, the fire, and the clans from the Mountains of the Moon, Alayne fled the tourney on a stolen horse, with a steel dagger, a fat pouch of coin, two winter cloaks, and a rapidly darkening bruise on her face, courtesy of Ser Shadrich the Mad Mouse. Sansa Stark, he’d called her, and, a sack of golden dragons, before Ser Lothor Brune took his sword, his sword hand and his head.
The spray of blood had painted her face and dress in carmine. The field had been in chaos, men and horses screaming, thick, choking smoke in the air. She had taken Ser Shadrich’s horse and fled from it all, slipping away through the tattered stands and saplings, the low marshy ground in the valley, then up, up, into the hill passes to the north. The air there was cold and still, the scent of smoke lingering only in her hair and the thick wool of her dress, and as night fell she had been faced with a choice: go back—to safety, to poison, to Littlefinger, to her gilded cage—or go on into uncertainty, and an impossible journey.
With the night came the snowfall, soft and cool and smelling of home. She slept deeply that night, sheltered in a narrow crevice on the hard stones of the mountainside, and dreamed of the fells and open skies of the north, wind in crimson leaves and the rush of sulphurous water through stone. In the morning, she scrubbed Ser Shadrich’s blood from her face with the fresh-fallen snow, until her hands were pale and bloodless and her face numb, and she knew she had made her decision. Then she mounted the horse once more and continued north, through the hill passes to Heart’s Home.
She avoided the castle, where banners showed the ravens and hearts of Lord Corbray, and made for the river-docks. The traders there were rough men and women, but Alayne was nearly a woman and bastard brave. She sold Ser Shadrich’s horse for a handful of coin and bought passage to Coldwater Burn, in the Fingers; Coldwater, where sailors from Ramsgate and White Harbour shared gossip with the men of the Vale.
Autumn storms kept the harbour at Coldwater empty, she learned, and only two ships were from the North. The captain of the first eyed Alayne with undisguised hunger that made her skin itch, and the second ship looked liable to fall apart from the first big wave. She bought a bread roll and information from an urchin on the waterfront. “No,” he said to her question, “No other ships from the North in harbour. But if you’re meaning to head that way, you might try the sistermen.” He jerked his chin towards a narrow boat at the other end of the docks.
The boat was Fast Meg, out of Sweetsister, and her captain was a woman with strong arms and a squinting, weatherbeaten face. She was carrying a crate from the warehouses when Alayne found her, and she eyed Alayne suspiciously and said, “We don’t take passengers.”
“I can pay.” The woman’s eyebrows rose in blatant disbelief and Alayne felt the heat rising in her cheeks. She had washed her face and hands as best she could in the frigid water of the Burn, but her dress was stained and her hair ragged, and she knew she looked a fright. The captain turned away, making her way down the docks. Alayne followed after her. “If it please you, what’s your name?”
The woman sighed. “You’re a stubborn one, aren’t you?” she said. “My mother named me Thrift, like the flower.”
“It’s a pretty name.”
“What’s yours?”
People sought Sansa Stark still, though they looked for a highborn maid of three-and-ten with auburn hair, not a bastard girl with a murky mess of brown, salt-stained and tangled. She had hacked it off to the shoulder in the mountains above the Gates of the Moon, weeping as she did so. And people would be seeking Alayne Stone, as well, but not as hard, nor as far, for who would care about Littlefinger’s bastard but Littlefinger? Still she could not be Alayne, not where any would remember her.
Thrift was watching her, mouth wry, and she knew she had hesitated too long. “I’m… Catelyn,” she said. “Some call me Cat.” Inwardly she winced. If Littlefinger heard the name, he would know instantly, but surely no-one else would connect the name with her.
“And you mean to go to White Harbour?”
“I have family there,” she lied.
Thrift stopped, then, turning to face her. “What are you running from, Cat?”
Unbidden, her fingers rose to her cheek, where the marks of Ser Shadrich’s fist still lingered. “My, my… uncle,” she said. “He… he wanted me to be wed.”
“Was it your man that gave you those marks?” Thrift said. “Or your uncle?”
She snatched her hand away. “He was not my man.”
Thrift gave her an odd smile at that. “Good,” she said. “There’s enough harm we girls face in this world without facing it in our own homes.” She resettled the crate on her hip. “I don’t travel to White Harbour, Cat. I travel to Sisterton. But if you tell me true and you can pay, I will take you that far… aye, and mayhaps find you a boat to take you onward to White Harbour and your kin.”
Thrift’s ship was a fisher, a narrow creature with two masts and a lean-to shelter on the deck that made scant protection from the weather. She sailed with two nephews and a cousin for hands, sturdy young men who eyed Alayne with curiosity but made no effort at conversation. Alayne stayed out of their way insofar as it was possible on so small a ship, wrapping her second cloak around her against the chill and damp as the boat tossed nauseatingly on the waves.
They had passed the Paps and the island called Pebble when the autumn storms caught them. For a night and a day and another night waves tossed the ship about like a giant playing with a ball. Thrift and her nephews managed rope and sail and Alayne huddled in the shelter of the lean-to, terror clenching her guts like a fist. The morning dawned clear and calm, though the winter sun was cold. Wet to the bone, nauseous, she sat on deck with Thrift while the men slept.
“It’s as well the wind was in the east,” Thrift said. She was showing Alayne how to coil the ropes that lay tangled in the bottom of the boat. “Storm like that could have driven halfway across th’ Narrow Sea, else.”
Alayne’s hands were clumsy with the rope, her movements slow. “Are we lost, then?”
Thrift smiled. “No, lass. I know these coasts. Sailed them all my life. See—” she pointed to the distant shape of the land behind them, grey against the blue sky. “Winds blew us past the Sisters to the south, deep into the Bite. It’s a barren coast, but safer in a storm than most, for the water goes deep, without rocks to claw us open. We fare north now, and then we’ll turn northeast for Sweetsister.”
Alayne shuddered. “I’ve heard of the rocks around the Sisters,” she said. “Aren’t they terribly dangerous?”
“Aye, there’s danger in it.” Thrift’s smile was fae. “And glory, too, in threading the needle by starlight or foiling the wrecker’s lights. You’ve made an extra twist in the coil, there. Best start over.”
Wreckers, storms and rocks, Alayne thought. She had been ill since Coldwater Burn, barely able to hold down a little water; and she could not even coil a rope correctly. “This was madness,” she said. “I was safe in the Vale. I never should have left.”
Thrift shrugged. “Why did you?”
“I wanted to go home.” She said it without thinking, and when she did stop to think on it she nearly cried. Home, yes; she wanted to be home, to run between the hot springs in the dark shadows of the godswood, to laugh and gossip with Jeyne Poole, to hear her mother singing and her father’s gruff voice as he spoke with Rodrik Cassel and Maester Luwin. She wanted her brothers Robb and Bran and Rickon, and her sister Arya as well, but they were dead, and Winterfell burned and held by strangers.
She ducked her head, dashing away her tears. Alayne, I must be Alayne. Alayne had no brothers, no sister. Alayne held no grief for the dead of Winterfell. Alayne did not know Jeyne Poole.
Thrift hummed, a slight frown on her face as she adjusted sail and rope. “Before he died, my father was a fisher, like me,” she said. “He would say, a boat ashore is safe, but it’s not what boats are built for. He took a boat into the Bite every day I knew him, and the fish he caught kept us fed and in our home.”
“What happened to him?”
“One day a storm took him and broke him to pieces on the rocks off Sweetsister.” The woman sniffed. “The Lady of Waves and the Lord of the Skies took their tribute of him, as they always do. In the Three Sisters we live at the mercy of the gods and the storms. We are home… but we are never safe.” She smiled. “That’s a good-looking coil. You’re getting better at this, Cat.”
Sweetsister did not smell sweet. It smelled of seaweed, fish, and the dangling entrails of the hanged men on Gallows Gate. “Smugglers,” Thrift explained. “Smugglers stupid enough to get caught.” And in the town Alayne found her luck was in: Thrift’s kinsman was sailing for White Harbour. “He’s a sullen one,” Thrift told her. “Don’t mind his silences, though. He’s a kind heart beneath. He’ll get to your kin if anyone can.”
Though Alayne would never be a good sailor, the weather was kind from Sisterton to White Harbour and she managed to hold down a little water and bread. Thrift’s kinsman was taciturn, and his silences left her long hours to contemplate her next steps in the salt and sea air. Lord Manderly had been her father’s bannerman, and loyal to House Stark. She had considered begging audience before him in the Merman’s Court, proclaiming her name for all to hear.
But what proof could she furnish? What lord or lady would want an unwashed girl turning up at their door with claims that could not be proven? And as Thrift’s kinsman’s boat slipped into the outer harbour, she knew it for a false dream. New Castle wore its banners proudly: the merman with his trident, the flayed man of the Dreadfort, and above them all the lion and stag of the boy king. She would find no help there.
Alone, then. It was rank folly, she knew, to set out on such a journey. She had never been meant for such a life, not like Arya, not like her brothers. Madness, she thought. But if it was madness, it was a seductive madness, the madness of danger, of living life at the mercy of the old gods.
She bought a garron in the White Harbour markets. It was old and cantankerous, nothing like the fine steeds knights and ladies rode, but neither knights nor ladies had cause to travel such barren valleys, unless, like her, they fled from some hunter. She bought food that would keep, and oats for the horse, and a pungent sheepskin to guard against the cold, and on a clear, harsh day at the end of autumn she left White Harbour.
In her father’s solar at Winterfell had been a great map of the North, etched in black and red ink on the hide of an aurochs in the days before Torrhen Stark bent the knee. As a child she had delighted in the stark lines and ragged curls, the faded ink, the holes in the leather where the scraper’s knife had slipped, the ancient, rune-like text of the annotations.
Later, her interest had turned to the south, the land of her mother’s kin, of tourneys and songs, maps on linen and vellum and precious paper in which King’s Landing was the centre of the earth. But she had never forgotten the map, the mountains and rivers, the castles and the wolfswood, moor and fen, the swamps of the crannogmen, the barren Gift; and Winterfell at its heart, a crowned castle limned in gold.
North, she told herself, drawing the map in memory. North, and only north. She would follow the White Knife, staying off the kingsroad, staying off any travelled road. She would take goat paths through the mountains, paths no army knew.
The wind blew sharp as a flensing knife, she was alone, and she had all of the North to cross before she would be safe. But as she rode, a great bubble of joy rose up in her chest until she thought she might sing; it burst out of her in laughter, in long-denied delight.
The moon turned. Where the White Knife was fed by streams and rivulets she could cross them easily enough, but she did not trust the ice on the larger streams. More than once she had to climb up into the hills to find a place where the tributaries were safe to cross. It slowed her progress to a crawl, so when she dared she cut north across the hillsides and ridgelines, keeping the river ever on her left hand.
The days were cold and the nights colder, and she thanked the old gods and the new for her flint and tinder, for Ser Shadrich’s cloak and the sheepskins she had bought in White Harbour. Some nights, where the land was bare or the snow thick, she could not light a fire, and she caught scattered hours of sleep huddled against the side of her garron.
Where the White Knife met the Sheepshead Hills the land was low and peaty, heathers and moss dusted with snow. The valleys were frozen bog, all too easy to mistake for solid ground. Her garron put a hoof through the ice one day and cut itself on the shards. She cleaned the cuts as best she could and bound them with cloth, and then she prayed, a desperate, wordless plea to any god that might hear. If the garron died, so would she. The old gods of the north heard her prayer, and for once they were kind: the wound healed cleanly.
After that, Alayne kept to goat tracks on the hillsides, where soil scraped thin over lichen-eaten rock. The land had been farmed once: drystone walls marked out the edges of fields until the hills grew too steep even for goats. But the farmers were gone. And still the moon turned, and she travelled north. She had seen no living thing in days; the sheep and goats grazed on these hillsides in summer had moved down the valleys for winter.
In a rill in the hills she broke the ice on a stream with a stone, wincing as the noise echoed from the hills. The trickle of water beneath was stained amber from the soil. It was harsh and earthy, and cold as time, but she thought it the sweetest thing she had tasted. She drank deeply and broke the ice further so that the garron could drink as well.
When she looked up, a man stood on the other side of the stream.
She stumbled back, fumbling at her belt, her fingers clumsy in their gloves. She drew her knife from its sheath and held it before her with hands that trembled.
The man made no move to come closer, but spread his hands to show them empty. His fingers were bent and crippled with age. He was dressed in heavy wool, a sheepskin wrapped about his shoulders for warmth. “Night’s coming on,” he observed. He was a Hornwood man, for his cloak’s toggle was carved as a moose’s head with curling horns. His beard was wild and flecked with grey, and his dark eyes were wary as they watched her knife trace a trembling circle in the air. “Dangerous for a boy to be travelling alone in these times.” He studied her face, tilted his head. “More dangerous still for a girl.”
“Do you—” She hadn’t spoken aloud in days. Her voice scraped, and she had to clear her throat and start again. “Do you mean me harm?”
“I mean no harm,” the man said. “But night’s coming on, as I said, and snow comes with it. We’ve a roof up the way, my womenfolk and me, if ye’ll bide a time.”
Do I take this offer? Can I trust him? She looked around, but the ice and lichen and her poor exhausted garron had no answers for her. “Bread and salt.” The words spilled from her mouth. “If you’ll share bread and salt, I’ll come.”
The man’s eyes creased when he smiled. He rummaged in the pouch at his side and she drew back, wary, but when he finally moved forward, it was with a heel of brown bread in one hand and a finger-horn in the other. He stopped at the edge of the stream and held them out to her.
The salt tasted of leather, and the bread was three days old and hard as stone, but she chewed it until it was soft and swallowed it down, and could have eaten more. Then she sheathed her knife and took her garron in hand, and followed the Hornwood man up the valley.
There were three huts at the head of the valley, where the stream was dammed into a shallow pool, but smoke only rose from one roof. A flock of some twenty sheep were penned along the riverbank, guarded by a ramshackle shelter and windbreak. A woman was scraping a sheepskin on a frame, but she straightened as they approached. “What’s this?” she said.
“A traveller, given guest right.”
The woman’s eyes were cautious as she looked Alayne up and down. “Dangerous to be travelling in such times.”
“Less dangerous than it was,” the man said, “with the flayed men gone west.”
The woman turned her head and spat. “You can pen your horse here,” she told Alayne. “What’s your name?”
“Alayne.” She said it without thinking, and wondered if it was still true.
“A fine name. I’m Meg, and my man is Owen. We’ve little enough, but our hospitality is yours.”
“I thank you.” She stripped the garron of her bags and cared for it while the old man and woman talked in quiet voices of wind and weather. The horse was growing thinner. Beneath the snow the grass was thin and dead, and she had to ration the oats that she had bought in White Harbour. They would not last much longer, and she did not know what she would do when they ran out.
When she was done, Owen and Meg walked with her in the fading light to the crofter’s hut that was their home. At the door, Owen turned to her. “Be welcome beneath my roof,” he said, his tone oddly formal, “and at my table.”
The hut was a single stone room with a sod roof, home to Owen and Meg, their good-daughter Tansy, three grandchildren, Owen’s mother Nella, who had no teeth and reminded her of Old Nan, a scrawny dog and a nanny goat. The air was thick with peat smoke, manure, and unwashed people, but after days on the road Alayne could only be grateful for the warmth and the company. She had thought she might never be warm again.
They would not let her help with the food, and anyway she would not know what to do, so she sat and helped the children card the last of the autumn fleece while Nella spun thread and told meandering stories of giants and ice dragons.
“You’ve a touch with the little ones,” Tansy said. She was mother to two of the three children, and aunt to the third; their fathers had gone away when Lord Hornwood answered Robb Stark’s call to war, and no one had heard of them since.
“They remind me of my little brothers,” Alayne said. No, that wasn’t me. Alayne has no brothers. But it was harder to hold onto Alayne in a croft in the north than it had been in the Vale.
“How old are they?”
“They’re dead.”
Tansy’s eyes were sympathetic, and she asked nothing further. Children’s deaths were all too common a tragedy, and winter was coming.
I pray you old gods, she thought, let these children live through it. Let them live and have children of their own. That was not Alayne either; Alayne kept the Seven, not the old gods of the First Men. She rubbed her eyes. I am tired of being Alayne, she thought. I want to be Sansa again, to swear by the old gods and the new, to be a child, and have a family, and be safe. But Sansa Stark was hunted still, her family was dead, and she would never be safe again.
The food was a pottage of pease and turnip. Once she would have turned up her nose at it, but it was hot and there was enough of it to fill Alayne’s shrunken belly. In the dim, warm croft she thought it the best thing she had ever tasted.
After the children were settled in the bed, the adults invited her to sit with them at the fire, and they spoke in soft voices long into the night. The winter would be hard, all agreed. Once, three families had lived in the little valley, but the men had answered Lord Hornwood’s call and followed Robb Stark south, and after, the others had taken their herds over the pass to the Hornwood proper, where there were more to help with the work.
“We’ll not be able to stay longer,” said Owen. “There’s little enough grazing left here, and winter is almost come. Twice already the snows have trapped us here.”
“Winter is coming,” said old Nella, “As the Starks promise. It shall be my last. But you, lass, you’re just a young bit of a thing. Do you even remember the last winter?”
“I was born in it,” Alayne said, “Though I lived my childhood in the long summer.”
“You’re a child still,” Owen said. “And a foolish one, to be travelling so late in the autumn.”
“I’ve had luck with the weather.”
“It’s been uncommon good these past days,” he agreed. “Might be the old gods smiling on you and your foolishness.”
Alayne folded her skirt hem into pleats and smoothed them out again. “When the snows come truly,” she said, and stopped.
“Go on, lass.”
“When the snows come, will you travel west? To the town beneath the walls of Winterfell?”
“No,” Nella said. “Not while the flayed men hold Winterfell.”
“No,” Tansy said. “No more would any Hornwood man or woman.”
“No,” Meg said. “Never, so long as the bastard of Bolton draws breath.”
Their vehemence took Alayne by surprise. “What grudge does the Hornwood hold against the Dreadfort?”
“I served m’lady Hornwood when she was a Manderly in White Harbour,” Meg said. “I went with her when she wedded our dead lord, before I found my husband at a harvest feast.”
“I had not heard Lord Hornwood was dead.” There was much and more Alayne had not learned, while a prisoner in the south.
“Lord Hornwood and his son both, fighting the Young Wolf’s battles in the south. Well, and all men must die; but what happened to Lady Hornwood, that was… monstrous.”
The sailors of Ramsgate call him monstrous. “It was Lady Hornwood?” Alayne whispered. “That the Bastard of Bolton married, that he killed.”
“I’d thought all the North had heard the tale,” Owen said.
I have not been in the North, she thought. And I must know. “If you can bear to speak of it,” she said, “I would hear it now.”
In hushed voices they told her of Donella Hornwood’s capture, her rape and death, starved and prisoned in a tower. Alayne was weeping when the story was finished, and so were they. They meant to wed this man to Arya, she thought. No, that was not Arya. Arya died when Winterfell burned. It was Jeyne who was wed to the monster; it was Jeyne she wept for. “One day,” she said, “If the gods are good, Lady Hornwood will have justice.”
“Justice,” Meg said. “The word has a strange flavour. When did the North last taste justice?”
“Before Winterfell burned,” Tansy said.
“Before the wolves went south,” Nella said.
“It was different,” said Owen. “It was different when there was a Stark in Winterfell.”
Meg scoffed. “Aye, when there was a Stark in Winterfell, the days were long and warm,” she said, her voice thick with scorn. “When there was a Stark in Winterfell, the sheep were fatter, the harvests were plentiful, and the rivers ran with milk and honey. But there was a Stark in Winterfell when wildlings raided in the wolfswood and the Bay of Seals. There was a Stark in Winterfell when the Bastard’s boys hunted on the Weeping Water. There was a Stark in Winterfell when Lady Hornwood died.”
“A child,” Owen said, uneasy.
“Aye, a child, and a cripple, but a Stark nonetheless. And now the wolves are gone. The lords died in the south, the pups were slaughtered when the ironmen took Winterfell, and the daughter is wed to the monster of the Dreadfort. She will die soon enough, and when she is dead there will be no more Starks.”
“There was another daughter.” Sansa hadn’t meant to speak, but the words spilled out anyway. She touched her lips, as if she might swallow them back again.
Her hosts exchanged looks. Tansy said, “There was?”
Owen nodded. “Lord Stark had two daughters, that’s so.”
“What happened to her?”
“She went south,” Sansa said. “With her father and her sister.” She married her enemies.
“Likely she’s dead as well,” Owen said. “It’s a curse, I tell you. Northmen should stay in the North, and the Starks of Winterfell more than most. The south spares none of ‘em.”
It’s true, she thought, and said nothing further that night. I survived, but I have not been spared.
North, and ever north.
The moon waned and waxed again. The White Knife climbed through Sheepshead Hills to Long Lake at the ragged edge of the mountains. The lake spread on her left as broad as the ocean. Each time the surface had frozen the wind-driven water shattered the ice and layered it in jagged sheets upon the shore before freezing again like a pile of broken glass.
Across the water, near the Kingsroad on the western shore, Sansa saw toy houses, thin columns of smoke rising from their roofs. Rushes stood out from the ice along the shores, and small figures fished on the lake. On the eastern shore the land was wilder, and there were no settlements, only steep hills rising out of the water. She picked her way along them. The oats had run out, and her garron tired quickly now. She spent as much time afoot as astride, leading him by hand along the narrow goat-tracks.
She rode the shore of the lake for three days, sleeping as best she could in sheltered nooks out of the wind. On the fourth day the lake widened until the far shore was out of sight, and the goat track she was following curled down over the shoulder of the hill into a sheltered valley where scrub and lichen gave way to thick moss forest. The summer trees were skeletons, but a handful of sentinel pines stood dark and green, and in the centre of the forest a weirwood’s crown of russet red stood proud against the grey sky.
Out of the wind, the valley was still and quiet. She let the garron picked his way in under the trees. Three roofless drystone houses still stood there, and a ruined fourth; an elder tree grew from its collapsed walls. She fixed the garron’s reins to the elder’s boughs, and continued on foot.
The heart tree was an ancient, sprawling weirwood, half-collapsed under its own weight. Its carved face was solemn and weeping, but there was a terrible joy in the curve of its mouth. I have seen fire, flood, and a thousand winters, it seemed to say, and I have laughed in the face of them.
Sansa slept that night under the weirwood’s branches, and dreamed.
In her first dream she walked the halls of Winterfell as they burned around her. In her father’s solar, a man with the long, stern face of the Starks stood at the map table. He made no sound as his armour melted and ran down his body, and his skin blackened and peeled away from the bone. His eyes were steel grey and staring; they never left her face. Cinders danced around him. They fell on the great map of the North, and everywhere they fell, new fires sprang up.
In her second dream she stood in the throne room of the Red Keep. The iron throne stood empty, the galleries filled with shadows that chittered and laughed. A net of strangling cord had been twisted between the pillars and the high rafters, tangled as a spider’s web. A man was caught within the net. Each time he struggled the cords cut tighter into his skin, slick with blood and dripping. And each time he struggled the shadows in the gallery roared with laughter like a sea in the storm.
In her third dream she saw a lavishly appointed room, scented with cinnamon and summer flowers. In the centre of the room was set a gaming table where a man played a game against himself. Every time he took a piece from the board he broke it and threw it to the floor, and replaced it with another. A thousand broken pieces lay about his feet, but he never ran out, and the game was never done.
In her fourth dream she sat at a feast, surrounded by shadows who drank and laughed and danced, and the air was loud with music and shouting and the tinkle of little bells. The fare was plentiful and the ale and wine flowed freely, but when morning came it came in silence, and the sun rose over a kingdom of flayed and mutilated corpses.
In her fifth dream a boy lay dead in a castle made of ice, his grey eyes open and staring, snow falling in his ear. His body was torn by a dozen stab wounds that smoked in the cold, and his blood had frozen hard on the frozen ground.
She gazed down at him and knew him, and woke weeping. The tears came hot and wretched and wracked her to the bone, shuddering through her until her face and hands were stained with salt and her entire body felt raw and tender. Too late, too late, a voice lamented within her. I am too late.
When she could weep no more, she struggled free of her blankets to kneel before the bole of the heart tree. In the darkness the weirwood’s face was fierce and fearsome, a gargoyle stretched by centuries of growth. She brushed her hand over the carved face. “You old gods,” she whispered, her voice raw with tears and disuse. “Why have you shown me this dream? Is my last brother lost to me?”
The thought came murmuring to her like memory, like certainty, like the peal of a bell in the shadow of her ribcage. It whispered to her out of the dark. Winterfell is the heart of the North, it said, and the godswood is the heart of Winterfell, and the heart tree stands at its soul and centre. Through the heart tree, all forests are one, and each one is holy.
She found her belt knife and, wincing, sliced a shallow cut across the base of her thumb. Three drops of blood fell smoking on the snow before she caught the flow of blood on her fingers. She pressed the blood to the carved mouth of the heart tree so that the old gods beyond count might taste it and know her for the blood of the North.
“Give him back to me,” she whispered. “I beg you, give him back.” By some instinct she raised her fingers to her lips. The weirwood sap tasted like iron, like earth, like honey. Something moved in the back of her mind, like a great dark beast turning in its sleep.
Behind her, just out of sight, stood a vast and silent host of figures. Their breath on her shoulders was the cold, dry winter, the barren earth, the ending of the old world. Their stone fingers settled dust in her hair like a sacrament. She knew with the queer certainty of dreams and waking visions that they were the dead, risen from the crypts of Winterfell to walk the earth; and she was the last one left in a line of kings.
She felt too large for her bones, a raw decay in her heart, the taste of honey in her mouth. The earth shook, or she fell. All the earth and stone and the dead of the north pressing down on her. She lay on the frozen ground, her cheek on the frozen earth, and gasped to breathe, her heart hammering inside her ribcage.
At length the press of them eased, and she could breathe again, and turn her face to the sky. The eye of the ice dragon shone blue to light true north until the rising sun drowned it in light.
That day she travelled no further, but kept vigil beneath the heart tree. Her body hummed with some hollow energy, and dark spots moved at the corners of her vision. Snow, she thought, though the sky was clear, or leaves, though the trees were bare. She knew she should move on, but some instinct held her in solemn vigil beneath the weirwood tree. She prayed, and waited, and drank a little water; she prayed and prayed again, a wordless plea to the old gods, to the barren land beneath her and the promise of spring beneath the soil.
When the sky dimmed to a deep indigo she fed her garron once more and stood at the head of the valley, looking out over the Long Lake and smoke from the houses on the far shore.
She did not sleep that night, but visions stalked her, swimming before her exhausted eyes. She saw knives in the darkness, and a white wolf with eyes like chips of garnet. She saw a burning star arcing through the sky, like the one that had ushered in the new century a lifetime before, when she was a child. She saw the hot pools steaming in the godswood at Winterfell, and a man and woman coupling beneath the heart tree, their movements slow and languid. Afterwards they kissed long and tenderly and lay together entwined through the purple summer night.
Shortly before dawn, the tension that had been building in her all day and night spilled over like a cloudburst, like a storm after calm. The cut on her hand opened and bled freely, and she pressed the blood to the heart tree and laughed, and wept for joy, though she did not know why. At last, exhausted, she slept, and as she drifted off she heard, or thought she heard, a voice deep in her bones, whispering. You are the last in the North, it said. But you are not the last.
She dreamed of her brother Rickon, who had died when Winterfell burned. She saw him as he had never been: no longer a baby but a child stout and upright, dressed in ragged furs and sheepskin. He was yelling and wrestling with a black monster, and she cried out; but the beast turned, and she saw it was a monstrous wolf with eyes that shone like wildfire and she laughed in delight.
She dreamed she moved through a city of bridges and canals and secrets whispered in the night, watched over by a giant taller than the sky. In the centre of the city stood a pair of carved wooden doors. One was weirwood and shone beneath the moon, but the other was dark ebony and drank all light. A girl walked in the corridors beneath the earth, dressed in white and black, and though she wore a stranger’s face Sansa knew it was her sister.
She dreamed of Bran, precious, restless Bran. Father had said once that Bran had run before he learned to walk, and climbed before he knew to run. In all the years she’d known him he had never been still. In her dream, he lay on his back, his hair long and tangled, the baby fat gone from his cheeks. His eyes were closed and his hands folded on his chest, but his lungs rose and fell in the darkness beneath the earth.
There’s been a mistake, she thought in a panic. Someone’s made a mistake, they’ve put the living underground and kept the dead up here.
Behind Bran was a shape like a great dark bird, its wings made of ragged smoke. The shadow curled around him and he breathed it in. When he opened his eyes they shone red as weirwood sap.
Had her brother always had three eyes?
He turned his head, and in the dizzying moment before she woke she thought he saw her.
Then the sky was lightening in the east. Above, the moon peered down at her through the boughs of the weirwood. “Sansa,” whispered the leaves in the wind. “Sansa,” and, “Sister.”
Snow and storms in the west, snow and storms in the south and east, and a thousand miles away, white ravens flew from the high tower of Oldtown to announce the end of autumn; but where Sansa travelled the snows eased and the winds calmed. She moved between the wreckage of summer and the promise of spring, as if the land itself was trying to ease her passage.
She had finished the food from White Harbour and the food from the Hornwoods in Sheepshead Hills. As she moved north from the weirwoods at Long Lake instinct guided her to the gardens of abandoned villages, where she found scrawny, self-sown vegetables: woody turnips and beets, a handful of beans dried on the vine, carrots gone sour and to seed. A fearless child on the Last River sold her a fish from the frozen waters, and she cooked it and ate it so hot that it burned her fingers and the roof of her mouth.
She re-joined the Kingsroad north of Last Hearth. Her horse staggered every other step now, and the occasional wayhouse was abandoned, gutted of all supplies. She slept and woke hungry, and though she did not starve, she wore very close to the bone.
The days were an endless grey of drifting winter fogs, the nights unbroken black, absent even of stars. Lady Hornwood walked through her dreams, her fingers bleeding, and her grandfather Lord Rickard, who had burned in the south.
Waking, the shades of the dead pressed close around her. She saw her uncle Brandon, a strangling cord wrapped around his neck, and Mikken the smith, his head and neck separated by a dozen brutal cuts. She saw a slender girl crowned in roses, her hands and dress stained with gore, who watched her with fierce, burning eyes. Once she thought she saw little Beth Cassel running at her side and laughing, as she had when they were children at Winterfell. When Sansa blinked and looked again it was not Beth but a stranger, a woman grown with dark hair and a hunting bow slung on her back.
She did not fear the ghosts. They were Starks and northerners, every one, and she knew their names and their stories. But they hounded her day and night, drove her north and ever north, and would not let her sleep. She was well into the New Gift, possibly as far north as Brandon’s Gift, but beyond that she did not know. She had lost count of the days, and moved in a haze of hunger and delirium.
She thought she saw the moon shining upon a wall of ice, and a burning shadow buried beneath it. As she watched the fire guttered and died, and all that was left was smoke. But it wasn’t smoke, it was snow, heavy as twilight, and dead things moved through it, with black hands and eyes like chips of ice.
She fled from them. The kingsroad dipped into a valley and crossed a frozen stream, then climbed again; and at the crest of the hill her garron put its head down and would move no more. She slid from the saddle and staggered a few steps. Behind her, the horse went to its knees, then lay down, and shuddered, and was still. She fell, and rose again, and staggered a few more steps and sat, heavily, on a granite boulder. She was so cold she had stopped shivering.
This is madness, she thought wearily. I will not make it to the Wall on foot. Her despair pressed down on her, a heavy weight. I could stop now, lie down and let the winter take me. I could sit here until I turn to stone. It seemed impossible, in the barren grey of winter, that she would ever return home; and even if she did, it would not be the same. Winterfell was broken and burnt, and made the habitation of traitors.
She looked up. The snow was falling faster, floating around her in great flakes that landed thick and white on the uneven earth.
It had been snowing on the day she left Winterfell.
So, so, she thought. It is impossible. But that does not mean I will give in to my despair. She stood. One step, she told herself, One step and then another. One foot and then the next. And when my strength is gone I’ll stop.
The first step was hard. The rest were easier. And she was walking, north and north through snow-covered hummocks and skeletal trees. After a time she realised someone was walking beside her: an ancient king of winter, his face grim and his beard white. He placed his hand over his heart and bowed to her. When she looked back he was gone.
She walked until the snowfall eased, and found that what she had taken for hillocks were piles of blackened beams and scorched stone. Before her a tree loomed, an ancient elm, and carved in its wood a scowling face. The cuts were fresh, the sap of their edges frozen in fury. The old gods of the north are watching me. She reached up to the face and placed her hands in the screaming mouth. “Please,” she whispered. “You old gods, gods of my father and his father before him, please.”
She did not know where the people came from. They surrounded her, solid shapes in the fog, wearing furs, carrying staves and cudgels. Woodsmoke came with them, and the smell of unwashed people. These are no ghosts. The strangers spoke to her, but the words were gruff and guttural and made no sense. I have come to the seven hells, and these are demons sent to torment me. “I’m sorry,” she said. She was whispering, her voice thin and broken in the cold. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand, please don’t hurt me, I’m sorry.”
They looked at one another and spoke some more in their strange tongue. Then one spoke. Her voice was clear and lightly accented. “Girl,” she said, “Who are you?”
It was a woman, her face lined and stern. When Sansa said nothing, she asked again. “Where do you come from? What do you seek?”
“I come from the south,” Sansa whispered. Her voice was scraped raw. “I seek Castle Black. I seek Jon Snow.”
One spoke in that same guttural language and another laughed, a raucous crack of sound. She flinched from it.
The woman snapped some words that silenced the others. She said, “Why do you seek out Snow?”
He’s my brother. She couldn’t say it. Sansa Stark is hunted still. It is not safe. Neither could she think of any other reason, so she remained silent.
“No answer? So be it. The grey girl seeks out a dead man,” the woman said. “Let us send her to him.” She nodded her head, and two of the men came forward to take her.
Then Jon is dead, and they are going to kill me. She cringed back into the bole of the tree. She had no strength to fight them. Perhaps it will be quick. And afterwards I can rest.
But they didn’t kill her. They levered her to her feet and tried to make her walk, but when she took a step, her vision swam and she fell. After that they carried her. The sky was clouded and dark, and she could not see the sun or stars, but she knew they were heading north still.
Chapter Text
The dead man stood atop the Wall and watched the haunted forest. A hard wind blew ice crystals into the air, glittering like broken glass. Thick cloud roofed the world in iron-grey and coal-black. In the distance, the weirwood copse was a bloody stain amid skeletal trees and sentinel pines.
The shades of his brothers manned the Wall. If he did not turn his head, they were only shapes glimpsed at the edge of vision, like ice crystals blown off the walls, but when he looked he recognised them. Here was Ser Jaremy Rykker, his lights spilled from his stomach by a dead man’s dagger, here deaf Dick Follard, an arrow in his eye, here one-armed Donal Noye, quiet and watchful as ever; though he watched with one eye only. The other was meat within his broken skull. Others wore older armour, steel and bronze, fur and leather. Their bodies had burned, but the shades of the dead kept their watch still, through the long years. Their black had turned grey and silver, their strong bodies turned to air. Eight thousand years of dead men pressed close around him
Dead men, they were, yet unresting. Just like him.
He breathed deep. The chill stung at him, the smell of smoke and charred flesh more a memory than a truth, and below and away his other self shifted on wolf feet and breathed deep as well: blood, fear, prey, the ever-present pang of hunger. Soon the lands around Castle Black would be hunted dry, and he would have to roam farther afield…
At the top of the winch-cage, living men huddled in shelter, keeping watch. They had offered to share the fire, but their cheerful talk died when he stood with them. His living brothers were always cautious, now, and wary, and how else, when the dead came walking? Besides, he no longer felt the cold.
He had dreamed last night of the crypts beneath Winterfell. The Shipwright, the Burner, the Bitter and the Sweet, the Bridegroom, the Moon King and the King Who Knelt sat their thrones and watched him with granite eyes, and he had walked their number, a dead man passing among the dead. When he woke from the dream the wound over his heart had opened again, blood stains crimson in the threads of his shirt. It was the colour of the Red Woman, of molten metal, the hard crimson of the sky in the west where it gleamed below the wall of clouds. He had almost forgotten what other colours looked like. Here at the edge of the world, there was only black, white, grey, and red, red, red.
He watched the northern sky until the sun set, and watched as the world beyond the wall turned to darkness. Below, the ground was pale with snow, and the trees of the haunted forest lay brittle and cold along the cold ground. The stone kings had been angry in his dream, their tongues granite and their words the roll of thunder in distant storms. This is not your place, they had said, You do not belong here. He had never belonged in Winterfell, but the flayed men were a canker in the heart of the North, and he must undertake their excision. One more task, and then I can rest, he thought.
A black brother approached, young and lean, with black hair and cheeks gone red with cold. The name came harder than the names of the dead; calling them up was like hauling water in a leaking bucket. “My lord,” the youth said, cautious. “I beg you, my lord, come away from the edge.”
“Be content,” said the dead man. “I do not seek to fall.” He stepped away from the edge all the same. “What is it?”
“The scouts have returned, my lord. The Bolton army still marches north.”
“How long?”
“A week at most. This thaw has eased their passage.”
He nodded. The man did not leave. “What else?”
“The last of the wildlings came in from Mole’s Town,” he said. “…They brought a girl with them.”
Arya, he thought, and his sluggish heart turned over. But no; Arya was dead, lost in the south. “A girl.”
“The wildling witch-woman said they came upon her kneeling at the heart tree, half gone with cold and hunger. She rode into Mole’s Town on a dying horse, they said, and none of the scouts saw her in the fog. The witch-woman said the old gods guarded her, or she played some weirding spell to hide her passage.”
“Who is she?”
“The witch-woman?”
“The girl.”
“I don’t know, my lord. She gave no name. She came from the south.” He hesitated. “She asked for you.”
The Maester’s chambers were furnace warm after the cold of the Wall. A fresh fire burned in the hearth, the logs cracking and spitting. As he entered, the ravens fell suddenly silent. The light of the fire made ghostly haloes swim before his eyes, blinding him, so that at first he could not see the girl who sat by the hearth, wrapped in blankets. He had to blink the shadows away before he could see her, and when he did he stopped hard. The youth that followed ran into him and shied back like a spooked horse.
The girl was tall, gaunt and starveling, her hair a matted mess of dark copper and dirty brown, her expression wary, her skin chapped with cold. She was nothing like the pretty child with copper-red hair she had once been, but he knew her instantly, and the shock of it was like swallowing meltwater, like a knee to the chest.
The last he had heard of her, she had been half a world away, a captive child-bride in the court of the dead boy king. He had not been able to help her, so he had not allowed himself to think of her. Had not thought to see her again. Not even when the red woman told him of her visions. Your sister, fleeing from this marriage they have made for her. Coming here, to you.
She had turned at the door’s opening; now she came to her feet, her eyes wide and dark and disbelieving. She took a step towards him, hesitant, almost fearful. She gasped a name—the name that had once been his—and threw her arms around his neck.
His head was a whirl, his breath coming short and choppy. If this is a dream, he thought, I do not want to wake. She was solid and shaking in his grip, her bones like knives, her skin corpse-cold, her breath burning on his neck. No dream, he thought, and, here, here in my arms, is a reason to be alive. He was dimly aware of the black brothers who lingered in the doorway, and at the hearth, watching, wondering. Let them wonder, he thought. He held her tighter, closed his eyes.
At last Sansa drew back, though she did not let him go. “Jon,” she whispered again. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. She started to say something, but hesitated. Her eyes slid past him to men, her expression pinched, wary.
“Leave us,” he said.
“M’lord, what…”
“Leave.” One hesitated, then bowed, pulling the other along by the elbow.
When they opened the door, Ghost shouldered his way in, nearly bowling them over. He was nearly as tall as Sansa, more than three times her weight, but he pushed his head into her stomach as if he were a puppy trying to climb into her lap. “He’s grown so big,” Sansa gasped. Her tears finally spilled over, but she dashed them away with her hand and laughed with delight, burying her hands in the thick fur of the direwolf’s neck.
When she looked up, her eyes were clear and her lips no longer trembled. She stood, brushing her hands on her skirts, and stood before him. They were almost of a height. “Jon,” she said. “Jon.” Her eyes were troubled, searching his. “You were dead. I dreamed it. You were dead, and now you’re not.” Carefully, she lifted her hand, touched his face.
He covered her hand with his own. She turned her hand in his and grasped it tightly. They sat before the fire, and for a long time neither spoke; when they did, both spoke at once.
“How did you come here?”
“Who were the men and women who brought me here?”
A moment of hesitation on the edge of laughter. He said, “They were free folk, wildlings from beyond the Wall.”
“Oh,” she said. “I see. I thought… They are like the mountain clans of the Vale. How did they come to be south of the Wall?”
“I made treaties,” he said. “What do you know of the mountain men of the Vale?”
“I was living there. Since King Joffrey died. Though I saw the mountain men first in King’s Landing.”
“You’ve been in the Vale? But where did you come from?”
“The Vale,” she said again, as if it were obvious, as if the Vale weren’t half a continent away and passage blocked by three different armies. “By way of White Harbour.”
“You travelled the length of the North? Alone?” His delicate, proper sister, who hated dirt and riding and inconvenience? Then realisation—sick horror—struck like a hammer. “Old gods and new, Sansa, there’s an army behind you. Had you been even a day slower on the road their scouts would have caught you, not mine.”
She frowned. “An army?”
“The Bastard of Bolton marches north.”
Her hand clamped down on his arm, an iron clasp around his padded sleeve. “Jon, it’s not Arya. It wasn’t Arya he was wed to, it was Jeyne, my friend Jeyne Poole, do you remember her?”
“I know.”
“—The Lannisters sent her north—you know? How?”
“She’s here.”
“She’s here?”
“She escaped Winterfell. Stannis sent her to me.”
“Thank the gods,” she whispered. “Old gods and new. I thought she would follow Lady Hornwood.” Her face crumpled then, and he thought she would weep again, but no tears fell.
“How did you know it was her?”
Her mouth twisted. She looked away and for a long moment she was silent. “I guessed it,” she said at last, and he knew she would tell him nothing further, not yet. The ravens watched them both with dark and knowing eyes. “You have to tell the North, Jon. Send out ravens, tell them all, tell them the truth. They won’t follow Ramsay Bolton if he doesn’t have a Stark, and he won’t have a Stark unless…”
Unless he has you.
The thought hit them both at the same time. Sansa’s eyes shuttered and she looked down, burying her hands in Ghost’s fur.
“You aren’t safe here.” His thoughts moved like rusty gears. He could not send her to Eastwatch as he had planned to send Arya, not with flayed men in the Gift… but he might send her through the Wall, to make the journey through the Haunted Forest. With one of the free folk to guide her and a half dozen rangers they might make the journey to Eastwatch and arrive still among the living. And from Eastwatch? Braavos? Lys? A sea voyage on winter seas, to an uncertain welcome in a distant land?
“I’m not leaving.”
“Sansa—”
“No.” Ghost lifted his head in a silent snarl as her hands clenched in his fur. She loosened them, stroking the thick white fur back in place. Her lips trembled as she lifted her chin. “I’m not leaving. Not now that I’ve found you. So you will have to win whatever battle you have planned against the Boltons.”
“Even if I win,” he said, “You won’t be safe here. The king would have married Arya to one of his bannermen in a heartbeat, had it been her and not Jeyne who came to me for shelter. He will try the same with you.”
Sansa stared at him. Then, astonishingly, she laughed. He had never heard her make such a bitter sound. “I’m sorry, Jon,” she said. “Haven’t you heard? I am a married woman. So long as Tyrion Lannister lives, there is nothing Stannis Baratheon can do to me.”
The dead man found Sansa Stark a place in Hardin’s tower, and for four days he saw little of her as she slept and recovered her strength, and he prepared for battle. They did not speak in those days, the familiar distance of their childhood settling between them.
One more task, he thought, and then I can rest; one more battle, and then I will be done. But the thought was no longer a comfort. When I am done, what of Sansa Stark? Who will carry her banner in battle? Who will guard her, waking and sleeping?
The morning his scouts found the flayed men massing in Brandon’s Gift, a black brother brought word that his sister wanted to see him.
She was still thin and frail, her bones standing out under her skin, but she no longer looked near collapse. The copper of her hair had grown in above the dark stain of the dye, to odd effect, and though it was cut too short for a proper lady’s style, she had bound it in ribbon braids and laid them neatly across the collar of her dress. Someone had found her clothes from the stores, and she wore the colours of the north, grey wool over white linen. Her expression was solemn, her back straight, the set of her mouth unyielding.
It was almost stranger than seeing the feral changeling that had arrived at the wall. She had been a child when she went south, as he had been a child when he came to the Wall. The north had made him into a man, the red priestess into something else again. Somewhere in the south—alone, unprotected, a hostage in the court of her enemies—she had made herself a woman, forged herself around a core of steel.
And perhaps there were places like that everywhere in the world. Places you entered as a child, from which no child could return.
“I have something for you,” his sister said, and beckoned him closer.
The banner she had made was half her height and nearly twice her length, the field of creamy lamb’s wool, the sigil the Stark’s steel-grey direwolf running on snow. He brushed his fingers against it. “I have no right to bear these arms.”
“I know.” Sansa’s voice was soft and precise. “But you fight for the Starks, so it is meet you carry our banner. That is for your army.” She hesitated, then took his elbow and drew him forward to see the other banner. “I made this for you.”
It was as large as the first, and as finely made, but different: the Stark arms with the colours reversed. A ghostly white direwolf running through the smoke of burning fields. “Bastard’s arms,” he said.
She tilted her head as she watched him, a bird’s watchfulness. “Yes.”
“The Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch can carry none.” Sansa would know that. Once, she would have protested at the breach of propriety. The Night’s Watch takes no part. She had always laid such stock in things, and again he felt dizzy with strangeness; for Sansa was the author of this treason.
Candlelight gleamed. He leaned closer and choked on a laugh. She had figured the white wolf’s eyes in red silk. “You gave it eyes like Ghost’s,” he said, but he was thinking, crimson silk, like the cloak for which Mance Rayder broke his oaths.
The day Jon Snow led his army against the Bolton forces, Selyse Baratheon summoned Sansa Stark to attend upon her.
Sansa was not surprised by the summons. The only surprises were that it had not come sooner; and that Alysane Mormont insisted on accompanying her to see the Baratheon queen. “You’re Ned Stark’s daughter,” Lady Alysane said, as if that explained everything. And certainly it was with that same loyalty that Lady Alysane had brought Jeyne Poole to the Wall through the worst snowstorm in living memory.
The brother of the Night’s Watch who had brought the summons was an old man with straggling hair and a wooden leg. He shrugged at Lady Alysane’s determination and led them both from Hardin’s Tower across the frozen ground of the yard.
Jon’s army had departed in the pre-dawn, with banners bound and hooves muffled by snow. The trampled earth of the yard was frozen solid, speckled here and there with horse dung, a broken strap, a pair of rats fighting over a handful of scattered oats. The yards and buildings were empty, eerie; all the fighting men had gone with Jon, save the handful that remained to guard the queen.
A raven landed on the fencepost in a flutter of wings that made her start. It tilted its head to look at her from one eye, then the other. “Corn?” it muttered and hopped along the fence, keeping pace with them.
The knight who met her at the foot of the queen’s tower wore the fox of the Florents of Brightwater Keep; this was Ser Axell, then, who styled himself the Queen’s hand. He was a short man with a bush of a beard. By his clothing, he had been stouter not so long ago, but the winter was telling on them all.
Ser Axell examined Sansa too closely, and he did not introduce himself. He dismissed the black brother with a wave of a hand. “I’ll escort her from here,” he said.
The old man hesitated. Sansa said, “Thank you for guiding me, ser.” The old man looked back and her, and she nodded, trying to appear certain. “Lady Alysane will accompany me.”
“Corn,” the raven said again. “King. King!” Ser Axell swiped at it and it fluttered away.
“Come on, then,” Ser Axell said. “I’m sure you’d prefer it out of the cold.” He turned to lead them into the queen’s tower and yelped, slipping and nearly falling on the ice of the yard as he scrabbled to draw his sword. Ghost had snuck up behind him. The direwolf was nearly as tall as the knight, and pale as moonlight against the snow.
“Peace, my lord,” Sansa said. “My brother’s wolf will do no harm.”
“No harm?” Ser Axell’s voice broke. “This wolf is a wild beast. It slew Ser Dorden the Dour and half a dozen men-at-arms—it should not be permitted to live amongst men.”
For all his angry words, Ser Axell’s sword trembled in his hand. Sansa stepped around him to bury a hand in Ghost’s thick ruff. “Jon rides to war,” she murmured in the wolf’s ear. “Shouldn’t you be at his side?”
Ghost’s mouth fell open in a panting grin. He sniffed at Sansa’s hair and leaned against her. His weight knocked her off balance and she had to grab onto his fur to stay upright. Sansa laughed, her courage rising. “Come, Ser Axell,” she said. “Queen Selyse is waiting.”
Axell Florent took a wide berth around Sansa and Ghost, and Lady Alysane a barely smaller one. At the door of the tower, Ghost raised his head, perhaps scenting something on the breeze, and trotted away.
The stairway was narrow, the stone risers worn by centuries of black brothers. The queen’s room was warm, almost too hot, the air heavy with the smell of rushes, sweat and charred herbs. Despite the fire and the many candles, the queen’s room was dim after the snow-glare outside. Ser Axell took his place among a dozen knights: Sansa recognised the arms of Florents, a Buckler, a Massey and a Follard. A squire wore a sigil she did not know, a ship with a pale circle on its full sails.
The wildling prince’s wet-nurses had told Sansa of the queen in hushed voices, and the lady Val had much and more to say besides. The Boltons claimed her husband was dead, but Selyse Baratheon still called herself queen, and her scar-faced daughter princess. My husband is chosen by the Lord of Light and he will prevail, the queen had said. I will not rise to such empty threats and provocations. And so she was queen still, in name and over what little dominion was left to her. She had set her chair like a throne upon a raised dais, but the heavy wood and leather of the chair swallowed her. Her robe was of black velvet and cloth of gold. The colours made her seem pallid, as if she had been carved from sandstone.
Brittle, Sansa thought. She lowered her eyes and knelt, Lady Alysane at her side. “Your Grace.”
“Lady Lannister,” the queen said. “Your lord husband is not with you?”
Sansa’s knees ached. The stone’s chill ate through the rushes, the rugs, and the layers of her clothing. “It was a marriage made against my will, Your Grace,” she said.
The queen looked Sansa over critically. “The dwarf killed his father near a year ago, and you were missing before that, were you not? So I do not believe you are with child.”
“I am not, Your Grace.”
The queen sniffed. “You were married before the Seven. A marriage made before false gods can be set aside. Only marriage made in the fires of the Lord of Light may be holy and fruitful.”
Marriage, Sansa thought, and Winterfell. If she were unwed, the queen might find a husband for her and claim the North; it was so familiar she almost wanted to laugh. She had no love for the god of fire. The wetnurses who cared for the wildling prince had told her of the pyre of the wildling king; of the burning weirwood trees, the flames so hot that the Wall wept frozen tears. She remembered the fire that burned on the Blackwater, the touch of steel at her throat. She lifted her chin. “I swear to the Seven, Your Grace, and the old gods of the North.”
The queen pursed her lips. “You are as stubborn as your bastard brother, Lady Lannister.”
“In the dark the trees have eyes,” said a voice from the corner of the room. The round, mottled face seemed bloated, a corpse staring up from under the water. The fool’s cowbells jangled as he rocked. “I know, I know, oh, oh, oh.”
Her brother’s forces returned to Castle Black with banners high. She almost did not recognise her brother. He looked as if he had bathed in blood and gore, and she was horrified… but Joffrey had always been clean, and sweet-smelling, and Petyr as well; and blood, she had found, was cleaner than poison. She could see the look in the men’s eyes as they watched him. Awe, she thought, and fear mingled with it. He dismounted in the courtyard and handed his reins to a wildling boy. His eyes cut across the buildings, marking details: the men who had come out to watch, the Baratheon queen at her balcony. Sansa, standing in the upper walkway of Hardin’s tower, bracketed by Lady Alysane and Val; Jeyne stood in her shadow, half hidden behind the taller women.
There were more men in her brother’s army than had ridden out; a large part of their number were afoot and stumbling, corralled within the riders, without weapons.
“Bring him.” Jon’s voice was cold, and cut through the yard like a knife. All fell silent when he spoke.
Four of Jon’s men came forward, a fifth man at their centre: a lordling, richly dressed and fighting still against the bindings on his hands. The men—Night’s Watch and wildlings among them—forced their captive to his knees. His livery was ragged; a strip of pink, a strip of bloody red. Sansa touched Jeyne’s hand. The girl was trembling, her eyes wide and staring. Her hand found Sansa’s and tightened.
The captive stared up at his audience. A human maggot, feasting on corpses, the Hornwood grandmother Nella had said of the Bastard of Bolton. His face was bruised, one arm clearly broken, but there was little to separate him from the stumbling armsmen, the black brothers of the Night’s Watch. He did not carry his evil on his face. His eyes darted, searching for escape; when he raised them to Hardin’s Tower and Jeyne flinched, hiding her face in Sansa’s shoulder.
Before the free folk, the Night’s Watch, the Northmen, the queen’s knights, her bloodied, muddy brother made a rough justice for Lady Hornwood, for Jeyne, for Winterfell and the North, and the women the bastard’s boys had hunted by the Weeping Water. “In the name of Sansa of House Stark, Lady of Winterfell,” he said, and his sword swung clean and beautiful in the frozen air.
Gently, Sansa took her hand from Jeyne’s. She descended the stairs to stand before her brother. He met her eyes; then, deliberately, he lowered them, bowing deep. “My lady,” he said. “It is done. The Boltons are ended, and Winterfell is yours.”
Queen Selyse watched from above. A bubble of laughter rose in Sansa’s chest, dizzying; she swallowed it down. Jon had not mentioned the Baratheon king in his judgement. He has shown her that his loyalty is to the North. He has named himself my ally, my right hand. It was audacious. Dangerous, her cautious self insisted.
I know, I know, she replied. I know it is dangerous. But how good it was to have an ally once again.
Lord Flint of the mountains had claimed himself too frail to go campaigning with King Stannis, yet he braved winter roads to ride at Sansa’s side on the road south. He was a crusty old man, uncompromising, and distant kin to her; Sansa’s great-grandmother had been a Flint of the Mountains, a cousin to old Lord Flint’s father.
Sansa did not fear the old lord; Lady Alysane still shadowed her, and her brother’s direwolf was never far. But she did not understand his manner. Lord Flint did not treat her as a child, or a girl; nor even as a woman. He spoke to her as he had once spoken to her father, as an equal, and that was the strangest of all. It was he who told her of the battle, how Ramsay Bolton’s forces had been taken by surprise on the kingsroad. Many and more of his men had laid down their arms at the sight of the Stark banners, or turned on the flayed men in their midst, old Lord Flint told her.
They spoke of the complex webs of relation and rivalry that governed the clans of the highlands, of the old gods, of the men of the North who had followed her brother south. “King Robb, aye,” Lord Flint said. “Though King Stannis would not hear him called so. And King Stannis came to my steading as King Robb never did, and asked me to fight his wars. What are kings for, but fighting wars? What use wars, when winter comes for us all?”
Sansa pressed her lips together, troubled. Stores were running low throughout the North. Her brother had spoken of it at the Wall, the pressures of the king’s army and the wildlings. The Hornwoods had spoken of it in Sheepshead hills. She had seen it herself on her flight north, on the kingsroad south. Empty fields, empty corrals, empty villages. Those who had not been killed hid from armed parties like her own.
On the thirteenth day an axle broke. While it was repaired, Sansa took a drink of heated cider and looked around her. The road cut through ragged hills. The soil was bare, uncultivated, a thin skin atop granite bones. She had known this land in summer.
A quiet sound made her turn. Ghost was a silent shadow against the snow-scattered hills, his breath a cloud in the cold air. She laughed. “You are as good a guard as any,” she said. “Come, then.”
Sansa climbed to the crest of the hill and stood into the wind. It came slanting hard from the north, sharp as a sword’s kiss; the sort of wind that could slice and shred through flesh and muscle and blood and leave her bare and exposed beneath the grey sky, the cold sun.
She breathed deep. She thought she could feel the great potential of spring’s growth, waiting under the open skies and moors of the north. All these things she had never loved until she left them behind.
She turned east and opened her eyes, and there on the horizon was Winterfell. From such distance, the damage of the sack and burning could hardly be seen, and it looked much as it always had: grey granite and dark oak, the ravens flying around the towers. The heart tree of the godswood was a lone splash of colour against the grey sky.
Ghost pricked up his ears. She followed his turning head. Halfway up the hill, watching her, stood Jon, a slender shape dressed in black and grey. They were never far from her now, her brother and his wolf; not since the battle on the kingsroad, that some were already calling the Battle of the Bastards. Not since he had taken Ramsay Snow’s head in her name.
Now, with Winterfell in sight, she held out a hand in invitation and he came to her side, picking his way up the hill with habitual grace. He stood beside her, and she tucked her hand into his elbow. Ghost gave a silent huff and settled at their feet. They stood in silence for a time. Even when they were children, Sansa had liked that about him, that he knew how to be quiet.
“There are no fires burning within the walls,” she said eventually. “Nor fires in the winter town.”
“The castle is a shell,” he said. “Not Winterfell, but the ghost of Winterfell. You can rebuild it.”
I, she thought. My castle of ghosts. Winterfell is yours, he had said; and she had remembered Lady Hornwood, the blood on her fingers and the silver tears on her haggard, grief-worn face, and wondered if it would be enough. Winterfell may be mine, she thought, but I cannot hold it alone.
They came to Winterfell early the next day, climbing up through the foundations of the winter town. The outer gate had broken from its hinges; the guards on the inner gate gave a mumbled answer and opened the scarred and ancient wood with bowed heads.
It was worse than she had thought. Charred and fallen stone, ragged fresh wood and charcoal. The old stables were missing; a pile of broken timber in the yard had been a replacement, but it had collapsed under the weight of snow. Scraps of dead horses could be seen between the broken timbers, picked clean by scavengers both human and animal.
Jon held her stirrup while she dismounted. It was properly the job of a stablehand, not the Lord Commander, but she did not object. He steadied her as she stood in the drifted snow. She did not want to see the home of her childhood like this: torn, burned and despoiled. But at least she need not see it so alone. Her brother’s men spread out through the fortress. They would find the living and bring them to the Great Keep. Though they would not know the secrets and hidden places of a fortress the size of a small city.
Guards shadowed them as they walked through the wreckage.
The glass gardens were a tangled web of broken glass and warped iron. The strength of the fire had shattered or melted the pipes that carried water from the hot springs to heat the Great Keep. Water ruined what fire had not, flooding cellars, digging runnels and ruts in the courtyards. Where it froze, it had forced even the stones apart. Most buildings were no more than stone shells, filled with blacked timbers and shattered roof tiles, their upper stories the habitation of bats and ravens.
The Boltons had rebuilt sections of the castle. In the great hall, the blackened rafters had been replaced with pale, raw wood. The floor was ankle-deep in scum and ashes, chewed bones, horse dung, rags and rushes. Jon’s face was cold and unhappy. She wondered if he had done as she had, put the memories of home away in careful layers of paper and cloth so that they might stay pure and untarnished by the passage of years.
It burned her to see the home of her childhood as a carcase of granite. A castle full of corpses. The thaw had melted much of the snow from the castle, and uncovered what the ice had hidden: bodies pressed to the ground, bone, skin and hair preserved in dirty ice, blackened timbers and ash, dung and entrails frozen hard, dogtorn scraps, the patterning of human teeth along a broken fibula.
“They’ve not been buried,” she said.
“The ground has been frozen solid for months,” Jon said. There was a frown on his face as he looked around the yard. “We need to spread word throughout the north,” he said abruptly. “Burn the dead.” Living dead men, he’d told her, with blue eyes and black hands. “These bodies are old,” he added after a moment, his eyes cutting across to hers. “From the sack and burning, I should think. The newer ones will be—”
“—in the lichhouse.”
They stared at each other for a moment. Then Jon beckoned one of their shadows. “Fetch a torch,” he said.
The lichyard was bounded by a drystone wall. From the outside, the wall stood above her head, but within it barely reached her knees. The ancient gateway had been bricked up long centuries before, and now the yard was reached by a flight of flagged steps. The difference in soil height was made up by eight thousand years of buried dead. Robb had told them that, she remembered suddenly. That, he’d said, and pointed to the roof at the edge of the lichyard, is where they keep the bodies in winter, when the ground is frozen solid. They keep them there until the spring and bury them all at once. Bran and Arya had asked him question after question, and she had shrieked and shuddered and blocked her ears.
“Do you remember when Robb dared us all to go down into the lichhouse?”
“I remember,” Jon said. “You wouldn’t go in.”
She had lingered in the doorway and peered inside and seen only steps leading down to a long room beneath the earth, her brothers and sister small shapes in the darkness. “I remembered that time in the crypts when you pretended to be a ghost,” she said.
The door was stuck, rust or ice holding it in place, and wouldn’t yield when she tugged at it. Jon handed her the torch and kicked at it until the hinges gave with a graunching squeal. The door opened a foot and stuck again. “You needn’t go down there,” Jon said carefully. “You don’t have to prove anything to me.”
“Oh, Jon,” she said with a sigh. “This isn’t about that.”
He eyed her dubiously, then took the torch back from her and slipped into the gap. Sansa followed, careful to keep her skirts from catching on the timbers. At the bottom of the stairs she paused, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dimness. The lichhouse was dug deep into the ground, lined with brick and straw to hold the temperature steady. Deep trenches in the floor were packed with ice. Cold bled from the ice, steaming her breath in the dim air. She could taste mud, blood and the incense-reek of decay.
“We will have to set men to felling trees in the Wolfswood,” she said faintly.
The dead were stacked like cordwood. No bones these, but frozen flesh stripped to smallclothes, pale and livid in turn with clotted blood, marching back into the darkness. Frost had formed on the bodies. She tried to count, but in the shifting shadows the numbers would not tally. I cannot look at their faces, she thought. But these were her people too, and she owed it to them not to look away. She pressed her fingers to her lips and walked deeper. Jon was a silent presence at her side, his face grim as he surveyed the dead.
Most were men, dead from violence. They wore only bloodstained undershirts and smallclothes, or nothing at all; armour and good cloth had been salvaged or scavenged. She saw gaping wounds, blows from sword and axe, fractured bones showing through ruined flesh.
Jon paused by one, bending a little to inspect the body of a boy, barely out of childhood. He was wasted, mere skin over bones. “This one died of starvation and the cold, not battle,” he said.
“Winter’s harvest.” Cold and hunger always took the weak first. “Lady Alysane has been speaking with some of your prisoners. Winterfell’s stores burned when the castle did, and the north has been two years with its men in the south, not working the fields.”
“Other keeps will have stores,” Jon said. “And they have fewer mouths to feed than once they might have, with so many of the men lost in the south.”
“Lord Stannis brought no stores north, nor the wildlings south,” Sansa said. She hesitated, the said reluctantly, “The Vale still has food. Littlefinger intends to drive the prices up before he sells, but Lord Royce of Runestone will be more generous, for as long as his stores can support it.”
“You could purchase food, then.”
“With what coin? I cannot imagine the Boltons left Winterfell’s wealth intact.”
“I made a deal with the Iron Bank,” Jon said, “For money to support the Watch. You could do the same.”
I, Sansa thought. I have nothing except my name and my claim. No gold and no army, and I cannot marry for them either, because I am already married. For the first time, the thought made her angry instead of relieved. We have only just come home, and already I stand to lose it again. The northern lords and ladies might back her claim against Stannis in her father’s name, but they would insist on a regency, and whom could she trust? Any regent would hold her until they had word of Tyrion Lannister’s death, then marry her to their advantage. Yet she must marry eventually, and marry wisely. Winterfell would need an heir.
Petyr would know what to do. The thought came unbidden, and revulsion followed. Petyr would play one side off the other, taking his profit where he could without a thought to the souls in his charge. She would not do that to the North. I will have no poison here.
She was staring at her brother, and he watched her in return, his long face solemn. They said Jon had fought like a demon in the Battle of the Bastards. Like a man possessed. They said that he and his wolf had killed a hundred men and taken no wounds. Blood is cleaner than poison. She had had neither waking visions nor dreams since she arrived at the wall, but sometimes she thought she saw a shadow around him, a darkness on the edge of vision.
She pressed her lips together and moved on down the line. There were more dead here through winter’s harvest, their skin thin over their bones, women, children, old men and youths alike. And others whom winter had not taken. A man with strips of skin carved from his chest. A woman with bruising on her throat spelled the grasp of fingers, a man’s large hands wrapped tight and choking. Two fingers on her right hand were missing, and a third was raw to the second knuckle. The skin had all been peeled away, revealing the sinews and bone beneath.
Flayed men. Flaying had been forbidden for generations under the Stark rule, but she remembered the rough voice of the Hornwood woman in the Sheepshead Hills, There was a Stark in Winterfell when the bastard’s boys hunted on the Weeping Water…
Her gorge rose. She turned and fled from the lichhouse into the light. The winter air scraped at her throat like swallowing gravel, but it was clean, and free of the taint of death.
Jon found her in the lichyard, standing by the grave where Lady’s bones had been laid to rest.
“You were wrong,” she said. “You were so wrong, Jon. This is not the ghost of Winterfell. This is her corpse.”
The Baratheon King arrived with the dregs of his army but two days after Sansa and the party from the Wall. She was glad for the timing. Better to be poor hosts than poor petitioners, faced with such an opponent; Littlefinger had taught her that much. She met the Baratheon king in the courtyard with Jon at her side, wildlings and men of the Night’s Watch arrayed around them.
She had arranged for bread and salt, the fragile protection of much-abrogated custom and frail proclamation of her own rights as the last Stark in Winterfell. Stannis took them perfunctorily, and his men followed suit.
They fell like beasts upon the meagre feast laid out in the great hall. Winter and starvation had aged Stannis Baratheon. He was a spare, stern man, without Lord Renly’s easy smile nor King Robert’s ruddy expansiveness. His army was broken, his people dying, and still he spoke of war in the the south, of the Iron Throne. After the barest courtesies, Stannis ignored her, attending instead to his lords and her brother. They spoke of military matters, supply lines, logistics and tactics, and she watched their faces. The men respected Stannis, she thought, and they would follow him; but how many followed for loyalty, how many for love? Who for ambition, and who simply because their treasons had left them no other options?
The lords of the Stormlands eyed her with the same hunger they had for the meat. She kept her face still and watched them in return. She did not know the men and women who followed the Baratheon king, although Alysane Mormont had told her a little of those she knew. They were lords of the Stormlands, younger sons hungry for glory, followers of the Red God; and Northmen, hillmen, men loyal to the Starks of Winterfell… but what could she offer in return for their loyalty? Loyalty was well and good, but it could not make a man wealthy. It could not keep a man warm and fed.
“Lady Lannister.” Sansa turned; Stannis was watching the hall, his plate clear and his flagon empty. “I would speak with the traitor Lord Manderly of White Harbour."
Sansa remembered Wyman Manderly as a cheerful man with shrewd eyes and a laugh that shook his many chins. His throat had been slit by the Freys during the siege of Winterfell. Now his voice was a rasping whisper and his flesh hung limp and grey about his face. He looked old, frail and ill, but his eyes glittered like shards of pale ice.
He essayed a respectful gesture in their direction. “Your Grace,” he said. His eyes slid across to Jon Snow. “You, I take it, are the Bastard of Winterfell, and Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch… Some claim King Stannis here means to legitimise you and make you Lord of Winterfell.”
Jon said, “Winterfell belongs to my sister Sansa.”
Lord Wyman’s eyes cut across to Sansa’s. “Does it, now,” he breathed. “Well, and I would take your word over that of Theon Turncloak, Lord Snow. Lady Sansa, a pleasure.”
“And you, Lord Manderly.” Sansa made her courtesies.
“Enough pleasantries,” said King Stannis. “My Lord Manderly, I name you traitor. Do you deny it?”
“I do.”
“You butchered my Lord Hand and set his head to watch the seas at White Harbour with an onion in his mouth.”
“But I did not.” Wyman Manderly’s rasping voice was perfectly level.
In the silence, a log popped in the grate, sending a shower of sparks across the hearth. “Explain,” King Stannis said.
“The head upon my walls belonged to a common criminal. Lord Seaworth lives; I asked his assistance in a certain matter, in exchange for my support for you, Your Grace, though I own I cannot prove it, except by the witness of certain men in White Harbour.”
Sansa fancied she could hear King Stannis’ teeth grinding. “What favour did you demand?” he ground out.
“Why, the return of my liege lord,” said Lord Manderly. “Rickon Stark.”
Sansa gasped, and heard the hiss of Jon’s indrawn breath. His eyes were wide and shocked as they met hers.
“Rickon Stark is dead,” King Stannis said. “Theon Turncloak murdered him and his brother.”
“He did not.” Lord Wyman’s voice was soft and even. And he explained how he had come to learn of Rickon’s survival, and the quest upon which he had set Lord Seaworth.
In the doorway of the sickroom, Sansa breathed deep of the pungent air, a lightness in her bones. Her family was no longer as small and barren as she had thought. Bran was missing, but he had been alive not so long ago. And Rickon… Rickon had only been three when she left Winterfell, a barrel of a child on still-clumsy legs. She doubted he would remember her, but she longed to see him, to hold him, to show him the love her mother had given her.
Yet she was afraid. Winterfell was the key to the North; Stannis Baratheon would not leave it in the hands of a child—no, nor a Lannister bride—without a regent. Warden and Lord Protector of the North. As Petyr Baelish had been to Robert Arryn.
I will have no poison in my house.
In the shadows of the doorway she watched the men. King Stannis was brittle iron and hard mercy; he would care more for the strength of the North than the life of a child. Lord Manderly was loyal to the North, he claimed, but he had danced with the flayed men. He had stood by while Jeyne was tortured. Her bastard brother was watching her, the scars around his eyes drawn tight by a pin-scratch frown. They were the only ones left; a motherless bastard born in the south, and a child-woman wed to her enemies. Between us, she thought, we almost make a whole Stark.
She knew whom she would sooner trust, though surely it was impossible, unless…
Unless.
One foot and then the other, she thought. One step after another, I can walk across the North.
Ravens carried word to every holdfast and keep in the North, inviting them to Winterfell that they might swear allegiance to the Starks and to Stannis Baratheon, First of his Name; and that they might have conference of succession, of regency, of the dead beyond the wall, and the future of the North.
Lady Jonelle Cerwyn brought linen, leather and grain to swell Winterfell’s stores. Lord Cerwyn had died in the south and his son in the first battle for Winterfell. “I swore to Lord Bolton under duress,” Lady Jonelle told Sansa. Her eyes were pinched tight at the corners. “My brother was dead at their hands, and my father dead in the south. But House Cerwyn remembers, my lady. The North remembers.”
Sansa thought her earnest, but words were wind, and altered as the wind blew. Still she smiled and made Lady Cerwyn welcome. They spoke of winter stores and the maintenance of household linens, and the importance of family for highborn women. With her father's death, and her brothers, Lady Jonelle was vulnerable; vulnerable, she would be an unreliable ally.
“Lady Cerwyn should marry,” she told her lady companions that evening. “A husband would make her more secure.” King Stannis had a great many knights who sought to marry a highborn heiress, but that would place Castle Cerwyn in the hold of a man whose loyalty was to the Crown above Winterfell.
“No free woman would need a husband,” said Val scornfully.
“Your ways are not our ways,” Sansa said. She still did not know what to think of the women the king’s men called the wildling princess; she was a prisoner, as Sansa had once been, but she bore it lightly. As if at any moment she might slip away and never be seen again, and only curiosity held her there. They said men had died for love of her. Yet Jon seemed to trust her; he had entrusted Sansa to her, or she to Sansa.
“The she-bear has no husband.”
At the hearth, Alysane smiled. “Aye, but we Mormonts are considered wild and strange by the greater houses of the North. Lady Cerwyn is no she-bear.”
At the hearth, Jeyne sat and said little, but that night as she and Sansa lay curled together in the bed she said, “Will you find Lady Cerwyn a husband?”
“If I can,” Sansa said. “It might help.”
Jeyne was silent for a long time, her breathing ragged. “Jeyne?” Sansa said.
Jeyne shook her head in the dark and curled up tightly, burying her face in her hands, and Sansa held her as she wept.
Lady Barbrey Dustin came, bringing lumber and workmen. Lady Dustin had had ties to the Boltons by marriage, along with the Ryswells; though she, like Lady Cerwyn claimed duress in her support for Lord Roose and had bent the knee to King Stannis. Lady Dustin was a harsh woman. She did not like Sansa, but neither did she like King Stannis; and there were undercurrents to her conversation Sansa did not understand.
“A harsh woman, that,” Val said that evening.
“Aye,” said Alysane Mormont, “Lady Dustin is a strange one, and hard; my mother did not like her well. They say she carried a grudge against your father for the death of her husband in Robert’s Rebellion.”
Jeyne was silent, and only that night, as they lay in the dark of the bedchamber did she whisper her story in Sansa’s ear: how Lady Dustin had taken care of her once; how, in the end, Lady Dustin had given her to the Bastard of Bolton, and had not raised a finger to help her. The room seemed colder, afterwards. Jeyne slept but Sansa lay awake, and Sansa remembered again the sight—the dream?—of Lady Hornwood’s ghost, her fingers and mouth dripping with blood.
Lady Dustin’s father Old Lord Ryswell followed her, with sons and nephews and cousins. So many men, Sansa thought, and wondered if any Ryswell men had followed her brother south; how many had fought for or against the Boltons. She sat silent at dinner, her place of honour between the King and the new-arrived Lord Ryswell, and listened to their manoeuvrings above her head.
“Lord Ryswell wants wives for his nephews,” Alysane Mormont said, “And for his sons to squire for the king.”
“He wants much and more,” Sansa said.
“Squires for kings,” Val said. “And what would the king do with such boys? Would they carry his greatcloak for him, and sharpen his sword? A man should sharpen his own sword.”
“Aye, unless a woman chance to sharpen it for him?” Alysane gave a crack of laughter
Val wore a sly smile. “And what woman would sharpen the king’s sword? The red woman who dreams of fire? I'll wager she keeps him warm at night.”
“Enough,” Sansa said. “You should be wary how you speak of the king.” Val shrugged, but Alysane nodded, rueful.
Wives and squires. Lord Ryswell wanted much and more, had said so at great length at dinner, yet Sansa knew there was more to it than that. “Lord Ryswell wants assurances,” she said. “He wants immunity from the king for his betrayals. He wants wealth and he wants power.” He wanted much and more, and most she could not give him.
As the moon turned, the greater and lesser houses of the North arrived at Winterfell. They were a dismal and depleted assembly. The great lords of the North had marched south with Robb, and few had returned; there were more ladies than lords, and those few lords that came were green boys or old men. But they came all the same, and they brought with them stores of food, grains, linens and furs; they brought loggers, builders, stonemasons and carpenters, weavers, cooks, maids and serving men.
Winterfell filled with voices once again. The fires had gutted the halls; labourers removed the burned timbers to the yards and brought in raw new wood from the Wolfswood. They fashioned it for beams and planks, built scaffolding so that stonemasons could repair the masonry and the roofs. They found the blockages and leaks in the pipes that lined the walls of the Great Keep, and warmth began to return with the trickle of water from the hot springs.
Sansa might not have heard the whispers if it were not for Jeyne Poole. One evening as they sat by the hearth, Jeyne said, “The workmen say that Winterfell is haunted.”
“Haunted?”
Jeyne nodded. “I hear them sometimes. They don’t notice me. They speak of strange noises, and falling stones, and the smell of burning flesh.”
But the smell of burning flesh was everywhere. The men of the Night’s Watch had dug a great fire-pit on the edge of the Wolfwood, and every few days they stoked it to life, fed it charred and ruined beams from Winterfell’s buildings and burned the dead. They removed the dead from courtyard and castle; winter’s harvest, carried one by one from the lich-house; and the men and women who died with the passage of days. For winter had come, and in the winter men died. From drink and from exposure, from accident, argument and illness. Smoke rose thick and acrid to linger in the still air above the castle grounds.
Robett Glover came from White Harbour with a wagon train and a heavy escort of knights. The wagons carried grain, salt, dried fish, potted meats, preserves, ale and wine, and smaller casks of substances rarer and more precious, which (Sansa heard later) set the cook in raptures: pepper and cinnamon from the Summer Islands, and saffron from across the Narrow Sea.
Robett Glover was brother to Lord Galbart, wife to Lady Sybelle, and father to the children still held hostage in the Iron Islands. More, he was among Lord Manderly’s witnesses to the survival of Lord Seaworth; and King Stannis at last, reluctantly, accepted Lord Manderly’s word and eased his guard on the convalescent Lord of White Harbour.
Among the members of Glover’s party was a glassmith, whom Jon abducted within minutes of their introduction, and Lady Wynafryd Manderly, Lord Wyman’s granddaughter. Lady Wynafryd joined Jeyne Poole, Val and Alysane Mormont as Sansa’s companions.
Lady Wynafryd spoke freely of family trees, the intricacies of marriages and alliances among the eastern nobility. Sansa listened, and remembered the Lannister flag flying over New Castle, the warships she had glimpsed in sheltered hollows along the White Knife. She remembered the Hornwood lands without lord or lady to rule over them.
New arrivals began to spill over from the Great Keep, and work continued, a constant fight against the threat of winter storms.
The Lady of Karhold arrived with an escort of scarred men in furs and strange bronze armour that reminded her of Lord Yohn Royce. They spoke to each other in the soft lilting Old Tongue, and with Lady Alys in a mix of tongues leavened by laughter and goodwill. The Thenns loved their new lady, it seemed. Sansa was glad for her, and envious; she had no such loyal men.
That night at supper, Lady Alys came to speak with Sansa. The Lady of Karhold was a woman grown at six-and-ten, with dark hair and a lively curiosity in her eyes.
“Lady Thenn,” Sansa said, and made her courtesies. She was startled to find they were of a height. “I have heard stories of your great ride across the North.”
Lady Alys gave her a bright and curious look. “And I have heard stories of yours, my lady,” she said “From White Harbour to Castle Black, I am told, and alone. It must have taken great courage.”
“Courage?” Sansa said. “No. Say rather, great necessity.”
“As was mine own.” Abruptly, Lady Alys said, “They say King Stannis means to set one of his own men to rule over the North.”
“It has been suggested,” Sansa said.
“I also hear that your bastard brother’s name has been put forward.”
“And what do you think of the suggestion?”
“I will not deny that it troubles me,” Lady Alys said. “Your brother is a good man, but he is Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, and the Night’s Watch is sworn to take no part in the quarrels of the Seven Kingdoms.”
Sansa said, “How is your lord husband, my lady?”
Lady Alys smiled a secret smile. “Sigorn is well, my lady. He holds Karhold for me, against the grasp of my uncles.”
“I am pleased for you,” Sansa said. “But you must know that the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch has no authority to arrange marriages for Stark bannermen.”
Alys stopped, and perforce Sansa stopped as well. “What mean you?”
“Only that Jon Snow has acted as the Lord in Winterfell before now—and you did not quarrel then, for it was to your benefit.”
She held her breath. Lady Alys studied her intently… and then she laughed, her head thrown back, her hair falling as a black river down her back. “You are shrewd, Lady Sansa, and you have a sharp wit. Are you certain I cannot name you as your brother’s regent?”
“You flatter me, my lady, but I am only a woman.”
“I am no flatterer,” Lady Alys said. “But I understand you. What would you have me do?”
“I would have you remember that when your claim was threatened, you did not turn to your neighbours, to Manderly or Umber. You did not seek the aid of Stannis Baratheon. You turned to the son of Eddard Stark, and he did not let you down.”
Sansa spoke with Flint and Holt, Mollen and Ashwood, Tallhart, Umber and Liddle; and she spoke with their wives, their daughters, their sworn men and servants. Some she thought she could rely upon; others were cyphers, or outright hostile. King Stannis had his eye on the south; he made his battle plans, grinding his teeth with impatience; his knights strutted, breeding ill-will among the northmen.
Even with supplies brought from throughout the North, Sansa and her stewards struggled to feed the many mouths who flocked to Winterfell for council on the future of the North. The moon turned, and Jon chafed to return to the Wall and his true work, and she fretted, for if she succeeded in her aim, his true work would change and change again.
And as Sansa paced the broken hallways of her childhood home, she sometimes heard voices drifting from rooms that were empty when she entered into them. And sometimes the angle of light through a cracked shutter echoed the long summer of her childhood.
Her last interview was with Lord Wyman Manderly of White Harbour. He had recovered sufficiently to sit upright in his sickbed; soon, perhaps, he might be able to take a turn around the room.
Sansa sat on a chair, her hands folded in her lap. “My Lord of Manderly,” she said.
“My lady.” Lord Manderly gave a gracious bow from his seat. “I thank you for your visit.”
Lady Wynafryd had told her of her father Lord Wylis and his long imprisonment; the wreck of a man who had returned from the Trident and Harrenhal. Lord Manderly’s health was improving, his jovial twinkle almost as it once had been… yet she though she understood something of the fury it concealed. It gave her the courage to say, “You played a dangerous game, these past moons’ turns, my lord. Deceiving kings, and dancing with flayed men and Freys.”
“We all must play our part,” Lord Manderly said placidly.
“Yet still you keep your secrets from King Stannis,” Sansa said. “Still you hold your pieces close to your chest.”
“I? I conceal nothing.”
“I have been at White Harbour, my lord,” Sansa told him. “I saw the ships in your harbour … and I rode north along the White Knife. I have seen the warships you hide in the curves and secret bowers of that river, and I know you have not told the King of them.”
“You have a keen eye, my lady.”
“And you a keen mind, my lord. You know why I am here.”
“Indeed.” He breathed deeply and sighed. “I have sent men to seek your youngest brother, but I have not yet found him. Moreover, the lad is six. He must needs have a regent.”
“Whom would you have in that role? Yourself?”
Lord Manderly smiled an odd, twinkling smile. “Whom would you have, my lady? Lord Glover? Crowfood Umber? Lady Dustin of Barrowton? A man appointed by Stannis Baratheon and his red god?”
Sansa said, “I would have a son of Eddard Stark.”
“The Snow of Winterfell.” Lord Manderly’s breath wheezed in. “The Black Bastard of the Wall, I have heard him called. I hear strange stories.”
Sansa folded her hands together and sat back. Careful, she thought, I must be so careful. “What stories have you heard of my brother, my lord?”
“Mutiny and dead men, and the Stark banner flown in battle. Some say he broke his vows, allowed wildlings through the Wall, and others say he has turned his hand to the politics of the North, beyond the remit of the Night’s Watch. A deserter, an oathbreaker and a traitor. Ned Stark executed men for such crimes.
“I have heard he was named Lord Commander while still half a boy,” the fat lord said. “I have heard that he allowed a horde of wildlings to pass the Wall. I have heard he is half a wildling himself, a warg and skinchanger, with a monstrous white direwolf. The wolf I have seen for myself. I have heard he made common cause with the rebel king; well, so have we all, in our time. I have heard he consorts with witches and giants. I have heard,” he paused and raised his eyebrows, “I have heard that he cannot be killed.”
He was curious, she saw it in his eyes. Curious, and willing to be persuaded. “Any man can be killed, my lord,” she said. “Few rise again afterwards to walk in the world.” Yet such are the enemy we face in the north.
“You claim he died, my lady?”
“I have heard the sworn word of those who did: men of the Night’s Watch, wildlings, an honest septon… sworn knights of Queen Selyse’s household, King Stannis’s red priestess, and Queen Selyse herself. Each swears that he lay as the dead for a night and a day before rising again.”
“The Night’s Watch oaths are sworn unto death,” Lord Manderly observed.
“As you say, my lord.”
“It creates an interesting ambiguity.”
She opened her hands. “My brother is a man of the north, and the blood of Winterfell.”
“So are you, my lady.”
“I?” Sansa laughed. “You jest, my lord. I am but a young girl.”
“You might marry.”
“I am married.”
“To a lordling of Lannister, a kinslayer and a traitor. Your husband is likely dead by now, my lady, and were he not, the marriage might be set aside… especially as I hear it was never consummated.”
Sansa took a deep breath. “My lord, if I recall me rightly, you were kin to Lady Donella Hornwood.”
A shadow passed across his face. “You speak the truth, my lady. Lady Donella was a Manderly of White Harbour before she wed.”
“And you are aware of the fate of my dear friend and companion Jeyne Poole.”
“The poor child; yes, I am aware.”
“Alys Karstark faced a similar threat, were you aware? Her uncles sought to usurp her claim while her brother Harrion was prisoner in the south. Women in our positions are peculiarly vulnerable to such fates. I, too, was forcibly wed for my claim. My lord husband was, at least, a kinder man than Ramsay Bolton.”
“That is faint praise, my lady.”
“It is the truth. Lord Wyman, I am my brother’s heir. Any husband of mine might, were he regent, might feel the urge to… shall we say… promote himself. I value my brother’s life more highly than that. Tyrion Lannister is not here. His name is immaterial, save for the scant protection it affords me from others who might seek to exploit my claim.”
“It is a paper shield.”
“But a shield nonetheless.”
“And your brother the bastard? Do you claim he is without ambition?”
She did not know what her half-brother wanted. Or perhaps she had always known. He wants what I want. He wants Winterfell.
The day that King Stannis had set for his council to decide the future of the North, Sansa rose in silence, in the darkness. She dressed herself: under-robes, stockings, a gown of creamy wool trimmed in burgundy red, a cloak of grey and white. Ghost slept in front of the fire. When she opened the door he rose and followed her down the dark stair.
Sansa had dreamed that night of a forest of corpses; they hung from trees like ripening fruit, and others moved through the mist like living men, but their throats were cut to the bone and they could not speak. In the centre of the forest was a ruined sept where a woman in the grey robes of a silent sister stood held a shining crown of bronze and iron. It shone like the sun as she turned it in her hands.
The silent sister had taken Sansa’s shoulder in a grip like iron and forced her to her knees on the hard stone. She raised the crown high and lowered to Sansa’s head; the spikes bit like thorns. It is not mine, she wanted to say, this crown does not belong to me; but no words came. She looked up from her knees then, trying to see the woman who stood above her, but her face was in shadow.
Now, in the grey pre-dawn light, in silence and freshly fallen snow, she picked her way through the courtyards of the castle. Her mother’s sept was still in ruins; few northmen worshipped the Seven, and King Stannis’s red priestess would not have it rebuilt. She passed the gap-toothed mouth of its broken doorway and into the tree-shade of the godswood.
She had not yet ventured within. She had been afraid to, at first; her father's memory rested among these trees. How many times had she seen him seated, solemn man, beneath the dappled shade of the heart tree? But the dead had been strewn even here, the outer trees scorched and barren. The dead had been removed, their bodies among the first burned. The pool below the heart tree had a thin rim of ice at its edges, but the water was warmed by the same heat that kept Winterfell alive. The pale bark of the weirwood shone ghostly in the early morning light
There was something wrong with the heart tree. A sweetness in the air that tasted sickly and thin. Ghost was uneasy at her side, his tail and ears flat.
The crimson leaves brushed her shoulders like limp hands. The eyes of the heart tree were filmed with a pale rot. The earth was hollow, and in the depth of it was a hunger, rising up like a tide. The heart tree is rotten, and Winterfell is a corpse of itself, and so the North decays.
“I am trying,” she whispered. “I am trying to mend it, but I do not know how.”
Notes:
Some characters are absent because they do not interest me. Others are absent because they do not fit easily into the story I am telling. This is not perfect or perfectly canonical, but if it were I don't think I ever would have managed to publish chapter 2. May chapter 3 follow in time.
Chapter Text
The tables of the great hall were ill-matched; some charred and ancient, others of green wood rough-hewn, splintered and splitting. Sansa had claimed the place at King Stannis’s left hand, and he had allowed it for her father’s name, if not her own. Lady Lannister, he called her still; but there were many and more who did not follow his example.
The king’s jaw was set as he surveyed the hall. The tables were scantly laid with harsh brown bread, watered mead and stew with more beans than mutton. Lords, ladies and knights sat on benches and crowded the walls of the hall. They spoke, as so often they did, of storms and snow; of the last harvest, war in the stormlands, the grey plague, the smallfolk’s growing hunger, the hunt for the remnants of the Bolton’s army.
“What of the crannogmen?” asked Lady Cerwyn. “Someone must still guard the Neck, or we would be overrun.”
“I am less certain of that, my lady,” Robbett Glover said. “No armies have tried the neck in months. The boy king has enough trouble in the south, with his regent’s murder and ironmen raiding in the Reach.”
Sansa swallowed and pitched her voice to carry. “Certain word had reached the Vale these four months past that the armies of the Westerlands were mobilised against ironmen.” King Stannis gave her a flat look.
Glover was nodding. “The same tales have reached White Harbour. Traders from the south say that there is fighting in the Stormlands as well, although I cannot say who fights whom. The wilder rumours claim the Golden Company has crossed the Narrow Sea to fight for a Blackfyre pretender, and the Faith Militant have besieged Storm’s End. I hear that a monstrous wolf pack that prowls the kingsroad, and every tree in the Riverlands is hung with dead men, courtesy of the outlaw called Mother Merciless.”
Corpses like ripening in the trees like fruit, Sansa remembered. A ruined sept, a crown of bronze and iron.
Ser Justin Massey snorted “By the name I take this outlaw also to be one of the Faith Militant?”
“I do not know. But she is rumoured to have a fondness for the noose.”
“Rumours,” said Lady Dustin. “Some dozens of men have come north afoot since the fighting in the Riverlands, and no crannogmen hindered their passage through the Neck. No word has been heard from Lord Reed in years.”
Her voice echoed harsh from the stone walls. Tapestries, Sansa thought, would soften the sound; Jeyne would know by now if any had survived the burning. The air was close with woodsmoke, damp wool and badly cured furs.
Her eye caught on the unrelieved black of Jon’s cloak. He had taken a seat near the head of one of the lower tables. His face was remote as he listened to the talk; the wars of the south, she thought, meant little and less to him. It was the enemy to the north that concerned her brother.
“Broken men from the wars in the south, aye,” said Lord Ryswell. “They have grown lawless and brutal. Three such men already I have sentenced to death: two for murder, one for rape.”
“I would ask that you do not execute your criminals, my lord,” Sansa said. “Send them north to the wall; the Night’s Watch has need of men, even such brutal and lawless men as these.”
Her brother inclined his head to her. Lady Dustin’s glance was sharp, but old Lord Ryswell pursed his lips judiciously and said, “Perhaps, perhaps.”
The king raised his fist for the councils to begin; the chatter eased. First came the granting of honours, knighthoods, oaths of loyalty to Stannis, the true king, in the name of the Lord of Light; heirs confirmed to their fathers, lords confirmed to their titles and holdings. Many and more of the decisions made had been made days or weeks before, in private conclave. And then the honours were completed, and there was a waiting hush in the hall.
“Lord Manderly has sent men to seek your liege lord, the child Rickon Stark.” King Stannis’s voice was harsh in the sudden silence. No-one was shocked; certainly Sansa thought Lord Manderly had taken care that every northerner knew of his errand. Intent, perhaps, for all knew that Rickon Stark, if he lived, could be no more than six years of age. “If the child can be found, he will inherit Winterfell and the North when he comes of age; but that will not be for many years.” King Stannis spoke grudgingly, like the grind of a millstone; but he had learned from his dealings with old Flint of the Mountain. He did not decree. “My lords of the North, whom among you would you have set over you as regent to your young lord?”
Lord Manderly has been watching Sansa. “Your Grace,” he said, and his voice had almost its old strength once again. “We would have a son of Eddard Stark.”
Voices rose in a murmur. She heard one voice, in southern accents, say “Surely not,” and be cut off abruptly.
“The North will accept no other,” said Old Flint of the Mountains.
Stannis met the old man’s unflinching gaze, his brows drawn tight. “The Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch cannot be Warden of the North.”
“It is not without precedent,” Lord Manderly said. “Your brother King Robert named a sworn member of the Kingsguard as Warden of the East.”
“I counselled my brother against that decision,” King Stannis said. “I do not take it as my model.”
Sansa’s mouth was dry and she had to swallow twice before she could speak. “Forgive me, Your Grace,” she said. “Indeed, even after the wardenship was returned to House Arryn, the lords of the Vale were loud with their indignation at the slight of having their own passed over. But Your Grace knows of the threat that approaches from the north. In such times, who could better manage the defence of the North than the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch?”
“And what of you, Lady Lannister? You do not desire the regency for your husband? Or for yourself?”
She did not allow herself to flinch. “I am not ambitious, my lord. I will be my brother’s chatelaine, Your Grace, and keep his castle in order, until he comes of age and takes a bride.”
The king held her gaze for a long moment, and she could not read his expression. Then he turned, abruptly. “Lord Snow,” he said.
“Your Grace,” said Jon. His face, she saw, was still and pale. His hand tightened and relaxed on the table.
“I would have this service of you, until such a time that I revoke it, or your liege lord comes of age.”
“Your Grace,” said Jon, “I am yours to command.”
“Then kneel, my Lord Commander… and rise as Regent in Winterfell, and Warden of the North.”
Voices rose in the silence; a chorus of assent, though neither acclamation nor disapproval. Sansa breathed out.
The door slammed back and a gust of air made the rushlights gutter and spit. Eyes turned to the door, where a guardsman had entered. He seemed taken aback at the eyes that turned to him, and made his way hesitantly behind the long tables, skirting around the serving men and women to come forward to the high table. “My lord, my lady,” he said, “Your Grace. A party has arrived from the south.”
“From the south.” Stannis’s voice was sharp. “Do they come from Castle Cerwyn? King’s Landing? Dorne?”
“They come from the Neck,” he said, “By way of Barrowton.”
Again he hesitated. Sansa said, “Who are they?”
“Lord Galbart Glover, my lady, and Lady Mormont. Lady Maege, that is, not Lady Alysane. And Lord and Lady Reed, and crannogmen of the Neck. And a handful of men in the Stark colours, escorting silent sisters. They claim…” he swallowed. “They claim to carry your brother’s will, my lady, and the bones of your father.”
After the rest of it, the torchlight red on twisted faces, the shouting and recriminations; after his father’s bones had been entombed in the dark crypts, after Lord Reed had caught his elbow and spoke to him in quiet words beneath the gaze of the stone kings on their thrones, their granite fingers tight around the hilts of their rusted swords, the dead man went to the godswood and knelt before the heart tree.
The hot pools filled the woods with mist, and his sister, when she came to him—not his sister, memory whispered—looked like a spirit. Ghost trotted at her shoulder, silent and watchful.
He had been trying to pray, to calm the turmoil in his head, but he could not remember the words. Ghost came to his side “Why did you do it?” he asked.
She did not pretend to misunderstand. “There is no-one else.”
“You are Lord Stark’s child.”
“I was taught to manage a castle,” Sansa said. “Not a kingdom. I know nothing of military strategy and war, and we are facing war – in the south as well as the north, by these tidings from the Neck.”
“You would have advisors.”
“Whom? These southern men, who by their loyalty to King Stannis have lost their titles and ancestral homes in the south? These lords of the North who swore oath to Lord Bolton and lent themselves to the ruin of Winterfell? I don’t trust them. I trust you.”
Your mother never trusted me, he thought. “I swore an oath.” His voice scraped in his throat. “I will hold no lands, father no children. I will wear no crowns and win no glory. Would you have me forswear myself?”
“I will live and die at my post,” she returned, her voice sharp. “You cannot claim to have forsworn that oath. King Stannis said that he offered you Winterfell once before and you refused. Why?”
“He would have had me burn the godswood,” he said. “He would have had me deny my gods.”
“I would never ask that of you.”
“You plotted and schemed to have me named my—our—your brother’s regent, Lord Protector, Warden of the North—would you have me usurp his seat as well? Would you have me abide by your brother’s will, name myself King in the North and take up arms against Stannis?”
She was silent for a long moment. “What do you mean, my brother?” she said.
He could see no-one; hear no-one; Ghost could smell no-one. Still he lowered his voice to merely a breath as he spoke the words, and afterwards in the silence she said, “Who knows of this?”
He shook his head. “Fath—Lord Stark. Lord Reed, and I think his wife Lady Jyana. Perhaps others among the Greywater men. You and I.”
“Too many,” she said. “Word will spread.”
“Surely you see how impossible this is. Lord Manderly said, we would have a son of Eddard Stark.”
“So, and so. It still cannot be me.” Her voice was tight, and it ached in him like a broken bone. “My husband’s name disqualifies me. My brother’s will disinherits me.”
Lady Lannister. Stannis used the name assiduously, and his men followed their king’s lead; Ser Justin Massey and Ser Richard Horpe, who had aspired to lordship in Winterfell, were particularly vicious in their use of the name.
Sansa had learned to use the name as both sword and shield . He had never seen her flinch from it. Not until Robb’s will had been read. Her face had gone still and hard as stone, her lips pressed so tight the blood fled from them. Only he had been close enough to see the tears in her eyes.
How could he? Her own brother—he shied away from the word. Her brother; no longer his.
“Robb did not know that Rickon lived when he wrote his will. He thought all his brothers dead.”
“No,” she corrected him, voice sharp. “He thought his brother lived still. No, listen to me, Jon Snow. Bastard you may be, and your father not whom you thought, but you and he were raised as brothers, and your blood is the blood of Winterfell.”
“So is yours!”
They both drew back at his shout. He was breathing heavily. He felt exposed, scraped raw; as if she pointed to a wound in his side. It was bleeding. It had been bleeding for a long time, possibly since he was born. All his life he had been Ned Stark’s bastard, and now all he heard was Lord Reed’s soft voice. The child of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark.
Warden of the North, he thought. Lord Regent of Winterfell. It was all he had ever wanted. Why did he fight so hard against it?
“A Snow is not a Stark,” he said at last, heavy, and turned from her. The girl she had been might have allowed him his retreat, but the woman grasped his elbow, her hand hard and uncompromising, and pulled him back.
“Winter is come, Lord Snow, and war comes with it. Tell me truly, Jon, which were a better lord as the nights grow longer? A man of the north with the trust of wildlings and the southern king, a skilled fighter and experienced commander… or a frightened child?”
He stared at her, at the hand that still gripped his arm. In the west the sun had dropped below the clouds, bathing the courtyard in stormy light. The golden light stretched long, like the summer days of his childhood, and for a moment he thought he heard the clash of steel, voices raised in song, and the breathless, shrieking laughter of children. They were sounds of life, and love, and happiness.
Sansa’s grip on his elbow had tightened. Her eyes were wide, staring into his, and he knew she heard it too. For once her expression was open and unguarded, and she looked impossibly young.
The sun sank below the hills. The light faded, leaving the courtyard grey and wan. It left him hollow and ringing like a bell, breathless with loss and sorrow.
There was no sound but their harsh breathing and the whisper of wind in the godswood.
Smallfolk trickled into the winter town, first singly, then in groups, bringing with them hay and corn, livestock, artisans and traders. They were beginning to thin the flocks, freezing the carcases in ice-houses that bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the lich house. The household ate well; for every part of every beast must be eaten, no part spared or wasted; blood for soups and sausage, the marrow sucked dry, even the bones smashed and ground and boiled into stock.
The queen and her men had come south for the comfort of Winterfell; and Stannis, unhappy king, had taken his host west to scourge the countryside of Bolton men.
He knew that soon he must take his own host north to reinforce the wall, and yet he lingered, uneasy; and he found, as Sansa predicted, that whispers were spreading through the men; of Robert’s Rebellion, of the presumption of bastards, and of dragons.
The dead man awoke all at once, every nerve ablaze. For a moment he did not know where he was. The fire had burned itself out and the room was dark, but it was not cold. Nothing was cold as the Wall. In Winterfell he often woke sweating with the weight of blankets and furs.
He had dreamt a woman stood over him, flowers on her brow. He had seen that face before, in the sliding hours between waking and sleep, the accusing eyes that stared into his, the long, solemn face. He would know her in an instant if he ever saw her. In his dream she wept silver tears, and when she reached out to touch his face, her hand was dripping with blood.
He could taste blood in his mouth.
A dream, it was just a dream.
His heartbeat echoed in his head and he knew he would not sleep again. He pushed his blankets aside, went to his window and eased open the shutters, letting the night air into the chambers. It tasted of tin. Snow today, he thought, and prayed it would be a light fall. There was much and more to be done before Winterfell could withstand another heavy snowstorm. He breathed deeply of the cold air and let it carry away the scent of flowers that lingered like a memory, turned bitter with rot and iron.
Still his senses strained. He smelled musty linens, soap, the smoke that still lingered throughout the halls of Winterfell no matter how many times the stones were scrubbed. He heard wind in the broken shutter, the distant call of an owl… a soft clink of metal in the hall outside…
His heartbeat, which had almost eased, began to pound again. The guard, he thought, we set guards to walk the corridors. Any moment now I will hear his footfalls on the stone. But the sounds he heard were furtive, on the edge of hearing, so that he almost thought he imagined them. Was that the brush of cloth on stone, or only the wind? A footfall, or the tap of cooling metal in the grate?
The door slammed back with a creak of strained hinges. Crossbows thrummed and three iron bolts buried themselves in the mattress of the bed. The three men pushed in through the doorway, furtive and quiet. “Where’s the wolf?” one murmured.
“Doesn’t matter, so long as we got…” the man trailed off as he reached the bed. Then, urgently, he said, “Where’s the bastard?”
Longclaw took him in the side of the neck, an overhand blow that cut through muscle and deep into the collarbone. He left the man to bleed out on the floor, already turning to face the other two.
They moved forward in concert, one to his left, one to his right. One wore boiled leather and ringmail, but the other was in armour, the metal gleaming in the shadows. The dead man was dressed in shirtsleeves and breeches and had neither armour nor shield… but he had Valyrian steel in his hand, and fury singing in his heart.
He went after the man in boiled leather. The man blocked the first and second blows, but his countercut was clumsy. In the third blow Longclaw made it past his guard to bite deep into his attacker's thigh. The leather-clad man dropped with a grunt, struggling to rise again.
The armoured man was a more skilled opponent, his blows powerful—but slow. Longclaw set his helmet to ringing and caught the leather-clad man in the gut on the backblow. He went down screaming, his entrails spilling into the rushes.
Only one attacker remained. The circled each other in the dark room, exchanged testing blows, twice, thrice; on the fourth, he slid away instead of meeting his opponent’s blade, and the armoured man over-reached. Longclaw took the blade and two of his fingers. A second blow shattered the man’s kneecap, a third an elbow, and a kick threw him to the floor with a crash of metal.
The man scrabbled for his sword with bleeding fingers, but he kicked the blade aside and fell to his knees on the man’s chest. He seized the man’s own dagger, levered up the visor of his helmet and held it against the exposed eyeball. Only then did the man stop struggling.
It was too dark to make out his features. “Who are you?” he demanded.
The man spat. The knife scored a line in the soft skin under his eye. The dead man shifted his weight to lean on the man’s injured elbow. He screamed and went still, panting. “Who are you? Why are you doing this?”
The man’s voice was strained. “To save… the North.”
“From what?”
“From you.”
His first instinct was to laugh. Dead men beyond the wall, ironmen in the Reach, dragons dancing in the south, rumours of the grey plague in the Stormlands, winter arrived and starvation at their doorstep, and he was the one that threatened the north? But on the heels of laughter came a fury that burned like ice. “Save the north?” he said. “You couldn’t even kill a bastard boy in his sleep.”
“You will never be our king. Bastard. Traitor, oathbreaker, deserter. Targaryen. You and your Lannister whore are not fit to rule in Winterfell—”
His first, bewildered thought was, Cersei Lannister? The Queen Dowager was a thousand miles away, and he had never exchanged a word with her in his life. Then he realised. No. Not Cersei.
Sansa.
He ran. There were people in the corridor, and torches, and shouting. They clamoured questions he could not hear through the roaring in his ears. One did not move fast enough and was sent flying. After that no-one got in his way. The corridor stretched for a mile. The stairs were higher than the Wall, and as he climbed he was falling backwards, caught in the sick lurch between the snap of broken bone and the pain.
The landing, and another corridor. Halfway along it, Sansa’s door. It stood open, faint firelight spilling out into the hall. He surged through it, blade at the ready, and halted, rocking. Ghost stood in the middle of the room, jaws bloody, lips pulled back in a silent snarl. For a dizzying moment he saw himself through Ghost’s eyes, now a man, now a wolf, now a man again.
At Ghost’s feet, blood was a black pool around a corpse.
He could already feel the shattering within, teeth biting into tongue, body unmaking itself, the promise of a scream forcing its way up through the charred wreckage of his throat. Only behind it came a voice—his own?—saying no, no, look again.
A body, yes, throat torn, entrails spilling across the rushes, but the hair was black, not copper red, the body dressed in leather, not linen. Frantic, he looked up, around, and saw her at last, a pale shape in the darkness of the window embrasure, a frantic maidservant at her side. Her eyes huge and staring. Unhurt.
He staggered against the doorframe. He had not drawn breath all the way up the stairs, and now his body shook with strain, gasping air and salvation in racking sobs. Alive, alive.
They moved at the same time, stumbling forward, reaching for each other. He faltered when he saw the blood on his hand, but Sansa didn’t hesitate. She touched his hand, his arm, his face. Blood stained her fingers, and they trembled as they brushed against his cheek. She was shaking, or he was. He could no longer tell the difference. He wanted to hold her until the bloodstains on their clothes matched. He wanted to bury his face in her shoulder and cry.
Behind him, the door thumped against the wall. Sansa flinched back, clutching his arm. He angled his body to guard her, Longclaw loose and ready in his hand, and Ghost snarled, bristling, at her side.
People and noise spilled into the room. Guards and stewards, men and women in nightgowns and hastily-donned robes, their voices like the chatter of ravens in the rookery. They whispered and skirted around the corpse, the direwolf, the bloody sword of Valyrian steel.
Slowly, Sansa’s grip on his arm eased. Her hand slipped down his arm and she twined her fingers in his.
The man who had been Jon Snow dragged himself together. “Hal,” he said, finding the half-dressed captain of the guard in the throng. “There were three in my room.” Sansa’s hand clenched convulsively around his. “One is still alive. Keep him that way, then scour the castle. Make sure there are no others.”
“Alive?” said Hallis Mollen, surprised. Then, “Others?”
“Check,” he said tersely, “whether my cousin and I were the only ones attacked, and whether any other conspirators are still within the walls of Winterfell. And yes, alive. I need to question him.”
Sansa had pushed her braids back over her shoulders and was turned half away, speaking with the steward. “Be certain the servants are all safe, please, then remove the bodies to the lichhouse until the morning’s burning. And replace the soiled rushes.”
“Do you know who they were?” Hal said.
“No.” He longed to rub his face, but Sansa had not let go of his hand and he was not ready to set aside his steel. “Someone’s bannermen, I assume. Find out whose.”
“As you say, my lord.” Mollen bowed and left the room. Servants were already lifting the corpse to carry it away. They cast wary glances at Ghost, circling wide around the direwolf.
“Have the fires lit in Father’s solar,” Sansa said. “We’ll remove there to attend to business while our rooms are cleaned.”
“Yes, m’lady.”
Sansa let out a shuddering breath as the steward left. The room was emptying, only a stubborn maidservant remaining. Ghost prowled, fur slowly settling as he paced its corners and dipped his head behind the tapestries that hung on the walls. His feet stirred the rushes. Carpets, he thought, Sansa should have carpets, as they have in fine palaces. But blood and entrails would never wash clean from carpets. How often would attacks come, that they would need to cart out bloodied rushes and lay down fresh? How long would they have fresh rushes? If the winter lasted for years the rushes would be gone long before spring. And why was he thinking about rushes? But somewhere underneath the trivialities was a chasm of anger as deep as the Wall was high. They tried to kill her.
“Jon.” Sansa was watching him. “I need to dress.” She looked meaningfully at their clasped hands. Somehow he was the one gripping tighter now. He opened his fingers, flexing them at the sudden chill as she let him go.
Sansa stepped away. To the maidservant’s murmured question, she said. “No, there’s no time for that.” Sansa stepped behind a screen. Cloth rustled, and her voice drifted out, soft and precise and only a little shaky. “Do you mean to question the prisoner yourself?”
“Yes.” His fingers flexed around Longclaw’s hilt. To save the North, the man had said. “I need to know why he did it. I need to know if there will be others.”
“I want to be there.”
“No.”
“They tried to kill me as well.”
There was nothing he could say to that. Ghost padded over and pressed against him. He leaned gratefully into the direwolf's warmth. Sweat and blood had dried on his skin and he was chilled to bone.
Sansa stepped out from behind the screen. She wore boots, a woollen gown, a heavy, fur-lined overrobe that clasped at the stomach. Her face was pale but composed, stubborn, and she was clearly ready to argue the point until he gave in. But as she looked down at him her brow furrowed and she leaned forward. “Jon, you’re injured.”
“No, I’m not.” But she pressed her fingers to his chest, just above his heart, and pulled them back to show him the blood dark as wine on her fingers.
The fire had warmed the solar from bone-aching to merely chilly, and Jeyne Poole was waiting by the desk, her hands fidgeting and her eyes red with tears. She ducked her head when she saw them. “I brought clothes for Lord Snow,” she told Sansa, her voice barely audible. “And warm water.”
“Would you send someone to the Maester’s chambers for wound salve as well?” Sansa said.
“I have some,” Jeyne said. “And bandages. They said you were unhurt, but I wasn’t sure…” her voice trailed off as she indicated the basket beside the clothes.
“Thank you, Jeyne,” Sansa said.
“…Thank you,” he echoed.
Jeyne bobbed a curtsey at him. Her eyes never rose above his shoulder. He did not know how to speak to her, and she had not forgiven him for his coldness when she came to the Wall after his death and the torture of her brief marriage. She had seemed a broken thing, then. He had been surprised when Sansa invited her to return to Winterfell with them, and more surprised that she accepted. She wants to be helpful, Sansa had told him. She wants to feel useful. Let her. And though there were rooms in the castle that she would not enter, and days when she would not leave her room, she had proven useful in a quiet, self-effacing way, acting as housekeeper and lady’s companion to Sansa.
“The search has found two dead so far,” Jeyne reported as he set Longclaw down and began to wash the blood from his hands. “A guard in the lower keep, and a stable-boy. Your master of horse thinks he encountered the attackers and tried to sound the alarm.”
The blood on his hands was black in the candlelight, leeching yellow and red in the water as he scrubbed. “Was anyone else attacked?”
Jeyne’s eyes flickered up and away. “None that I know of,” she whispered.
Sansa said, “Jon, sit down and take your shirt off.”
Jeyne squeaked faintly and retreated to the hearth, though she did not leave the room. He followed Sansa’s instructions, his skin pebbling in the chilly air. Sansa’s breath hissed between her teeth.
It was not a new injury. He had known that without looking, and not just for the lack of tears in his clothing. The other wounds from the mutiny at Castle Black had closed neatly and faded to ropy white scar tissue, but the last, the knife that killed him, had left a key-shaped scar just above his heart that had never truly healed.
“This has happened before,” Sansa said. It wasn’t a question.
“Many times.”
Sansa’s hand lifted, hovered over the wound. Her expression was closed-off, the polite distance she had learned to hide behind somewhere in the south. He touched her wrist, and when she didn’t move away he curled his fingers around her arm, rubbing a thumb over the knob of her wrist bone.
She raised her eyes to his, searching. He wondered what she saw: no longer a brother, not quite a cousin, living dead man with a wound over his heart that would not heal, but opened and bled again each day.
She took a deep breath, nodded and turned away, busied herself with salve and cloth.
By the time Hallis Mollen returned, he was bandaged and dressed, sitting in the great winged chair he still thought of as Father’s, cleaning Longclaw. Jeyne and Sansa spoke quietly by the hearth. “Your prisoner is being held under guard in the lower keep, my lord,” Hal Mollen reported. “Maester Rhodry is tending to him. The bodies are in the lichhouse, and we’re preparing the firepit to burn them.”
“Do you know who they were?”
“Yes, my lord.” Mollen looked troubled. “The dead were Umber men, from Mors Crowfood’s troops. Your prisoner is named Willem Snow.”
“Snow,” he said.
“A bastard brother of Ethan Glover.”
“Ethan Glover?” He could not place the name.
“Ethan Glover was Lord Galbart’s cousin,” Sansa supplied. “He was Uncle Brandon’s squire. He died during Robert’s Rebellion.”
He remembered Lord Reed’s soft voice, Martyn Cassel died there, and Lord Dustin; Theo Wull, Ser Mark Ryswell and young Ethan Glover, who survived the murder of your uncle and Lord Rickard only to die at the Tower of Joy—his stomach dropped. “Invite Mors and Hother Umber to join us here,” he said. “And Lord Glover, as well. Take a dozen of the household guard to ensure that they accept. And tell the castellan to send out messengers to the other lords and ladies in our host. Have them gather in the great hall.”
“Many of them are already there, my lord,” Mollen said. “They want to know what’s happened. Word of the attack has spread,” he added unnecessarily.
“I will attend them shortly,” he said. “But first, I must speak with the prisoner.”
“You will need witnesses,” Sansa said.
“Maege Mormont and Old Flint.”
“Lady Dustin, as well.” Sansa’s brows were drawn down in a pin-scratch frown.
“Lady Dustin?” Mollen’s face twisted in confusion. “Forgive me, Lady Sansa, but can she be trusted?”
It was a just question. Mollen had led the party escorting Lord Stark’s bones north to Winterfell. Barrowton men had tried to detain them as they passed, a confusion only resolved by the arrival of Lady Mormont and Lords Reed and Glover out of the Neck. Lady Dustin’s explanations had been far too glib. And Lord Dustin died in the Red Mountains of Dorne as well. But he would not challenge Sansa’s judgement in front of Hal Mollen, who still sometimes acted as though she were still a child. “Lady Dustin will attend us,” he said.
Sansa said, “Jeyne, would you…?”
“I’ll take word to the lords,” Jeyne Poole said. She skirted around Hallis Mollen on her way to the door.
Ghost entered as she and Hal left. He sniffed at the bandages and thrust a bloody muzzle into his face. “Easy, boy.” He took up the cloth and wiped some of the blood away. Over Ghost’s head, he said, “He was in your room tonight.”
“Yes.”
If he were not—he could not think it. “He stays with you from now on,” he said, “And you will have guards, as well.” His strokes were too vigorous and Ghost drew back, teeth bared. He gripped the direwolf's muzzle, reaching out with his mind to gentle him. After a moment he looked up. “Why Lady Dustin?”
“Because I don’t trust her,” Sansa said. He raised his eyebrows, ironic, and Sansa forgot her poise enough to make a face at him. Her hands fidgeted as she sought for words. “If she is a witness,” she said at last, “Lady Dustin will be publicly and visibly party to your judgement.”
It would only be the outward appearance of support. He saw her point, but… “If I use her so, it will not make her love me better.”
“No, but it might make her less attractive to other troublemakers. And…” she looked down, frowning, and back up. “If you give her a place in your councils it may ease her pride.”
The castellan found them at the entrance to the lower keep with news of two more prisoners. Another of Winterfell’s household was dead, an old woman had been bound and gagged in a small room off the scullery. Her heart had given out from the strain.
Dead also, in the winter town below the wall, was Gerrick Kingsblood, whom Queen Selyse had named King of the Wildlings. Kingsblood had been pompous and boastful, and he had never liked him. The wildling had killed one of his attackers and wounded the other two. He wondered if Queen Selyse would try to name Gerrick’s son-by marriage Ser Axell Florent the new wildling king. He almost wished she would try.
One of Kingsblood’s attackers was belly cut. Blood soaked his ragged shirt and trews, and from the faint tang of sewer his organs were pierced. He would be dead in days, crime or no, and he knew it; he had only whispered oaths in answer to their questions.
The second lad taken in Kingsblood’s tent was a scrawny thing with spots, perhaps sixteen. Barely younger than Jon Snow had been when he died, but a green boy for all that, a crofter’s son from the lands around the Last River. It was unlikely he had ever held a blade until Mors Umber marched him against the Boltons. He did not speak above a whisper, and he never raised his eyes from the floor. “Wildlings stole my sisters,” he said. “They slew my father and left my mother and me to starve. You brought wildlings through the wall and now they are in Winterfell, which is the heart of the North. The soul and centre.”
“Gerrick Kingsblood was a guest in my cousin’s home. He was under my protection.”
“He was the wildling king,” the boy said. “We meant to kill him, and I thank the old gods that we succeeded.”
“You meant to kill more than the wildling king, I think.” The boy glanced up at Sansa and away. “You know what fate the law reserves for murder and those who break guest right,” he said. “You have a choice. You might take the black and serve the North again. But to do so you would need to fight alongside wildlings against a greater enemy. Could you do so?”
For the first time, the boy met his eyes. “Never,” he hissed.
“So be it.”
The boy held to his composure and his pride as theys filed out of the narrow room, but as the door closed behind them he began to weep.
Ethan Glover’s bastard brother was a man of middle years, with the gaunt look of winter rations. His expression mingled pain, strain and gut-churning defiance. Maester Rhodry had bound his broken knee straight and his injured elbow to his chest. His armour had been cut away and lay in the corner of the room, tarnished steel and dull leather. Lady Mormont nudged the pile with a booted foot. “Your armour has a southern look,” she said conversationally. “You fought in Robb Stark’s host?”
“I fought at Oxcross and Duskendale,” Snow said. “I was with the Young Wolf’s army at the wedding.”
Broken men from the Robb’s army had been trickling north since the ironmen left Moat Cailin. Tens of thousands had ridden or marched south, but only hundreds returned. Battle and treachery had eaten at their numbers before the massacre at the Twins; afterwards famine and chaos had taken the Riverlands. Those who survived the Riverlands and the causeways of the Neck were starving, desperate men with little to lose. The broken men would be a problem.
This broken man is already a problem. Maege Mormont took up station to Willem Snow’s right, and Flint to his left, so that he could not see them both at once. It did not seem to bother him, until Ghost shouldered into the room and sat behind him, breathing hot breath on his shoulder. That made Willem twitch, then wince as the movement jarred his wounds.
“Eight men and women are dead this night," he said. "Four of your men. Three of my household and a guest under my roof. You tried to kill my cousin. You tried to kill me.”
“I would I had succeeded.”
Old Flint’s voice rasped in his chest. “You would slaughter your host as he slept, and call yourself a Northman? The laws of hospitality are sacred to the old gods.”
Willem Snow did not turn his head. “I never took your bread and salt,” he said. “I am no guest of yours. Kill me and be done.”
“I would hear your reasons first.”
Willem glared at him, chin raised in defiance. “You don’t care for our reasons,” he said.
“I would hear them all the same.”
For a long moment, Willem Snow glared at him, and he thought the man would not speak; but at last, abruptly, he said, “I fought in the south. I fought for the Young Wolf, aye, and killed for him, and near died for him, for the Starks, for the North. But the Young Wolf is dead, and the Starks are dead, and only the North remains.”
“Lady Sansa lives,” Maege Mormont said. “Lord Rickon lives. Jon Snow lives.”
“A Lannister, a lost boy, and a bastard. The Starks are dead, I say… and the bastard would rule over us, usurp his brothers’ claim, set wildlings to live among us, and bring a false king and a red demon to burn our weirwoods. The North remembers.” he said. “We remember Lord Rickard, who burned in the south. We remember the Rebellion.”
Lord Rickard was my grandfather, not yours. And Lord Rickard’s murderer was Jon Snow’s grandfather as well. On the wall a torch spat and flared, and shadows shuddered across the room. Had his mother known her father was dead, and at whose order, when she lay with the Targaryen prince? His head hurt to think on it.
“My brother died in Dorne,” Willem Snow said. “So did Lady Dustin’s husband. Wull, Ryswell, and Cassel lost good men that day, and only Stark and the crannogman escaped alive… with you. Did Stark kill them to keep the secret of your birth?”
Lady Dustin’s indrawn breath hissed behind him. He wondered if she had had this thought before. It will not make her love me any better.
“You’ve got them thinking you’re some kind of god, but we know better.” Willem spat. “You are a traitor, and an oathbreaker, a warg, and half a wildling. A Targaryen. You have no right to rule the North.”
It was nothing he had not told himself, in the small hours of the night. Yet who else was there? He could admit it now, absent his anger at Robb’s will, Lord Reed’s words. He could see it laid out before him like a map. If not for him, Stannis would appoint one of his own as Lord in Winterfell, a man who knew nothing of the North and its people. Unrest would follow, and discord, and when the dead came marching, they would find no-one to stand against them. The thought left him chilled. “You would throw the North into chaos.”
“Chaos?” Willem Snow said. “I sow no chaos. It was your father who set the blaze, and the North has been burning ever since.”
My father, he thought, and wondered whom Willem Snow meant. Rhaegar Targaryen, whose desire had overthrown a dynasty, or Eddard Stark, whose death had begun a war? The room felt suddenly stuffy.
“Did Mors Umber know what you planned tonight?”
For the first time, Willem Snow’s eyes lowered. “He did not,” he said.
“Did Hother Umber know what you planned tonight?”
“He did not.”
“Were any others party to your conspiracy?”
“No.”
“Before the sun rises this day,” he promised, “You will die by my hand. My lords, my lady, excuse me.” He stood. At the door he turned back. “I am no Targaryen,” he said. “I am not a Stark. I am a Snow, as you are. A bastard of the north.”
In winter the sun rose late. The courtyard was lit by torches and braziers and steam rose from the crowd in place there. They murmured when the dead man came forward with Sansa and the lords to stand upon the top of the steps; they murmured louder when the prisoners were brought forward, bound, pinned between two Stark men apiece. The belly-cut man had his innards bound tight inside him; he was barely upright, half-swooning in his captors hands.
He said, “These men and five others came in the night, seeking the deaths of Lady Sansa of House Stark and myself. These men caused the deaths of three of our household and a man under our protection by the laws of hospitality. Would any witnesses to these deeds speak?”
“So swear I, my lord.” Sansa’s voice was steady. “I, Sansa of House Stark, Lady Lannister by my marriage, swear by the old gods and the new. I have seen the dead, and I have heard the living speak of their guilt.”
“I swear,” said Lord Glover. “I, Lord of Deepwood Motte, do so swear by the old gods and the new that these men offered violence against his liege lord.”
“I swear,” said Old Flint. “Flint of the Mountains. By the old gods, I swear that this man plotted treachery against the blood of Winterfell. He is convicted by his own words and deeds.”
“I swear, my lord.” Barbrey Dustin’s mouth was pinched, as though she tasted something sour. “These men offered violence within the walls of Winterfell and sought to kill members of House Stark.”
“Do any here speak in support of these men?” The sky was lightening to the east; the torches spitting in the light breeze of the morning. He waited, his breath clouding in the air. None spoke.
One by one he condemned them and one by one he took their heads. The youth first, for his bravery, so he would not have to wait; he would not speak a final word, but went to his death silently. The belly-cut man next, for mercy; he too had no final words, and his captors had to lower him to the block. He looked up from the second spray of blood and caught a glint of torchlight from Sansa’s cheek. She’d managed to weep without him noticing, silent as Ghost.
“Willem Snow,” he said, “here in the sight of gods and men I judge you guilty of murder and treason. In the name of the king, and House Stark of Winterfell, and by my word and my hand, I sentence you to die. Would you speak a final word?”
“We came to kill you and we failed,” said Willem Snow. “Given the chance, I would do the same again, and pray the gods I succeeded.”
Longclaw descended in a spray of blood. The sun rose. Icicles and frost spread its light into thousands of blazing shards. In that moment there seemed to be twice, thrice, ten times as many people in the courtyard, grey shadows cast from no solid shape, packed close as a battlefield crush. They yearned like starving dogs towards the blood that dripped from the three corpses and his bared sword, the blood that oozed thick and cloying from the wound over his heart.
Chapter Text
Jon took each man’s head with a single sure stroke. They spasmed and were still as blood sprayed out across the snow, black as soot in the torchlight, spreading in pools. The heads fell and rolled across the courtyard.
Her father’s legs had spasmed just so, when Ser Ilyn took the greatsword Ice and cut off his head. Her father’s head had fallen just so, rolling from the High Septon’s pulpit down the steps of the Great Sept of Baelor to the cobbled square below. The crowd had roared, screamed, surged towards the steps. A man in a mustard yellow doublet had lunged for her father’s head, raising it by the hair, blood dripping; then dropped it, doubling over, when one of the goldcloaks put a mailed fist into his belly. And later Joffrey had taken her to the walls, where the smell of decay had mingled with hot tar and she had seen it again, staring blindly out over the city.
Sansa breathed and tried to still the trembling in her legs and belly, to allow her eyes to dry. This was not the sodden heat of summer in King’s Landing. The air was hard and tasted of smoke and ice, muting the smell of blood and shit as the dead voided their bowels.
“Lord Snow,” Captain Mollen said, “Do you wish the heads placed on spikes?”
A single drop of blood dripped from the sword in Jon’s hand. “No,” he said. “Burn the heads with the bodies.” His face very still. “Lord Glover, a word with you, if you please.”
Murmurs rose, then conversation, as Lord Glover followed job from the courtyard. Captain Mollen gestured forward the waiting cart and his men began to load the bodies upon it. Lady Maege and old Lord Flint left together, speaking quietly. As Lady Dustin made to the follow, Sansa raised her voice. “Lady Dustin. Will you walk with me?”
The lady paused, though her iron spine did not permit the suggestion that she hesitated. Her thin lips twisted, but she opened a hand in agreement.
Sansa and Lady Dustin walked side by side through the ruins of Winterfell towards the North Gate. Alysane Mormont and Wynafred Manderly followed behind, an honour guard of sorts, and Ghost paced silently, white against the dirty snow. Heavy clouds still roofed the sky, but below them to the east and south the sun rose blinding in the clear sky.
Over the towers flew the banners of the Northern lords: the battle-axe of Cerwyn, Tallhart’s pines, the merman of Manderly, Locke’s crossed keys, the Umber giant, the stony hand of Flint; chevrons russet and gold for the Stouts, Slate in grey and white; the horse heads of the Ryswells of the Rills in grey, russet, black and gold. And there Lady Dustin’s banner, the spiked crown over crossed longaxes of Dustin quartered with Ryswell’s horse.
The widow of Barrowton was of an age with Sansa’s father, not yet forty, though the grim set to her face made her seem older. She had been luckier than Lady Hornwood in her widowhood: in the long peace of King Robert’s reign, when Lord Eddard ruled in Winterfell, none had dared displace her, nor seize the lands she held in trust for her husband's heirs. I could learn from this woman, Sansa thought, were it not for the grudge she bears my family.
Sansa said, “Who is your heir, Lady Dustin?”
The lady answered readily enough. “Denys, he is named. A cousin in the second degree of my late husband. I left him to mind Barrow Hall. He is competent enough, though dull.”
Sansa knew the name, though she had never spoken to the man. Denys Dustin was of an older generation than Lady Barbrey, descended from the lady’s grandfather-in-law. In the summer of her youth Sansa had seen him at Winterfell on feast days. He had made no particular impression on her at the time, being neither young nor handsome. “He has a son, I think, who is married to a niece of Lord Slate.”
“Yes, and through them Denys has two granddaughters and a grandson—although the son is not yet weaned. Thus the succession of House Dustin is assured.”
They paced through the courtyards, and around them men and women worked: clearing rubble, building scaffolding, mortaring stone, digging out the old channels of the hot springs and laying new pipes of fired clay. Outdoors when the wind was calm, indoors when the snow fell, in shifts through the short days and at night by torchlight, the smallfolk were labouring to rebuild Winterfell.
The workers were paid in grain, in copper, in as much hot barley water as they could drink, and one meat meal a day. Jon had ordered the hunters to range afield and bring in meat for the workers and smallfolk as well as the lords and their retinues while the weather held. They must be able to work, he had said. They must be able to fight . She knew he was worried about how much food would be needed; how much grain, how much salt, how much meat, how much vinegar.
Already much of the livestock had been slaughtered and set to salt and the ice houses beneath the earth, so that the beasts would not need to be fed grain that could go to people. The Baratheon army had fished a lake dry on their ride south, Alysane Mormont had said; and all knew the false spring would end soon, and the hard frosts would come again, the snows deep enough to bury a man as he stood; and whatever work they had completed must last all the long winter. Yet the work of hundreds of men and women over many weeks had undone only a fraction of the damage done the day and the night when Winterfell had burned.
Sansa said, “Lord Snow means to take wards to foster at Winterfell.” It had been her idea, but Jon had thought it good. “Young men and women of high birth. Once my brother Rickon is returned—” if my brother Rickon is returned — “he will grow up alongside his future vassals, so he will know their measure and they his when he comes of age.”
Lady Dustin snorted. “As Robb Stark knew Theon Turncloak?”
Robb. Sudden tears stung in Sansa’s eyes. She is testing me. “There are many reason that lords take wards, Lady Dustin. Patronage, fealty, bonds of obligation or kinship—I believe the late Lord Bolton’s first son served in your household as a page in his youth. But since we are speaking bluntly—so that they might stand surety against the good-conduct of their noble parents. As Theon Greyjoy did until my brother released him.”
At the inner wall they turned, pacing its length to the newly built stables. Horses had been saddled, and guards waited to accompany them.
Lady Dustin said, “You mean to take hostages. Whom would you take from my cousin Denys? The babe in arms?”
“How old are his granddaughters?”
“The younger is four. The elder is ten or twelve, I forget exactly.”
Arya’s age, Sansa thought. She had once thought Arya returned safely to the north before their father’s death. Later she had thought her dead when Winterfell burned. Lord Manderly said Bran and Rickon had survived, but he had known nothing of Arya; she had never come to White Harbour in her own name. Perhaps she had never left the city and was buried in some potter’s field in King's Landing. I dreamed she was alive, though. In a foreign city built of stone, behind doors carved of ebony and weirwood. “Until the boy is of an age to come to Winterfell, I would invite the elder daughter to join the ladies of my household.”
“You honour us,” Lady Dustin said dryly.
At the foot of the First Keep they passed the entrance to the crypts below Winterfell. The First Keep had been empty for generations, and workers had not cleared the rubble strewn all about it: great chunks of shattered masonry, burned beams, broken gargoyles. The door to the crypt has been repaired and its door locked and guarded. Sansa and Jon held the only keys now, and she had given orders that no-one was to enter save them. She saw Lady Dustin’s head turn to the door and thought, Jeyne was right .
“If your brother is returned he will need a bride,” Lady Dustin said.
“A betrothal would be a matter for the Regent of Winterfell to decide,” Sansa murmured.
“Betrothals are women’s work. The Lord Regent will take your advice.”
“And your cousin Lord Denys’s younger daughter is of an age with Rickon.”
“As you say.”
“I will think on your words.”
They crossed the frozen moat to the outer wall. The day had darkened as the sun climbed above the clouds, and their breath clouded the still air. There were smallfolk in the winter town now, mainly those whose daily tasks took them beyond the walls to the fields or the Wolfwood, to hunt or gather firewood. Each time Sansa had passed through the winter town she had watched for the Hornwood crofters who had offered her hospitality on her lonely journey north, but she had not seen them.
Sansa and Lady Dustin rode in silence; behind them Alysane and Wynafred and the guards spoke softly as they rode, their voices a murmur in the still air. Dirty snow lingered in drifts and piles in each sheltered shadow. Past the barren winter fields was the defile at the edge of the Wolfwood where the bodies were burned. The taste of smoke and charred flesh hung heavy in the still air as they rode towards the defile, rich as roasting pig. It made Sansa’s belly turn over and she swallowed down bile.
The picket was outside the defile, for no horses would go near the fires. A boy wrapped in heavy furs took their horses to add to the line. Alysane stopped to consult with him about stone in her horse’s hoof while Wynafred followed Sansa and Lady Dustin as they passed beneath the cliff.
In the south this work might have been done by the silent sisters, sworn to the service of the Stranger and the dead. But there were no silent sisters in the winter town—few enough in the whole of the modern—so the men of Winterfell had built a rough stone fire-pit in which they burned the dead.
Charcoal was best for cremation, the red priestess had said, because it burned hot and clea. The forges had more urgent need for charcoal than the pyres, though, to make nails and hinges and iron brackets for the rebuilding of Winterfell. Instead, the dead of Winterfell lay upon a platform built of her ruins, the fires fed by the splintered, blackened timbers that could not be re-used.
The three heads Jon had cut off had been placed next to their bodies upon the platform built above the fire, gazing sightlessly across the defile.
The foreman came to her side. “Lady Sansa, m’ladies” he said, bobbing polite bows to her and her companions. His face was smeared with soot from a careless hand, his leathers greasy.
“Your name is Hobb, is it not?”
“Aye, m’lady, Hobb Halfaxe they call me.”
“How many are to be burned today?”
“Some dozens, m’lady.”
“What are they?”
“Four old women dead from cold or hunger, and three old man,” Hobb said. “There was a man who fell from the scaffolding on the bell tower and another who passed out drunk in the snow and froze to death. A still-born babe, a child of six months, a child of three.”
“The workers found a dozen older bodies buried beneath the snow and fallen stones by Guards Hall and brought them to us,” another man said.
“Those were near bones already,” Hobb confirmed, “But we burn them anyways, together with what all the carrion cart brings us. Then there are the dead from last night: maidservant, guard, stable-hand, the wildling called Kingsblood, and the broken men.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“If you would, m’lady—” he hesitated.
“Please go on,” Sansa said gently, when he did not seem able to continue.
“It’s about the ashes, m’lady.” He gestured to the mouth of the defile, where rough crates were stacked.
“Yes?”
“We were wanting your decision on what we were to do with them. Lady Stark. The ashes, and the charred bones, those that haven’t broken apart. Wood ash would go to make soap, or in winter we sometimes use it to make ice on the paths less slippery. But we’d not use these ashes so, for it seems disrespectful like. Bonemeal is a good honest fertilizer, but not in the winter. It'd be washed away in the thaw without ever feeding the crops. But the crates are piling up some and we was wondering where to put them.”
“Oh,” Sansa said faintly. She could not tell how many crates there were; she counted fifteen, but they seemed to be stacked deep as well as high. She had known manure was used as fertilizer, and the contents of chamber pots, but she had never heard of bonemeal. It seemed just as disrespectful as using the ashes on the paths to her, but she was not a farmer. “They can be stacked in the lich house, I suppose. We won't be storing any bodies there this winter.”
“M’lady.” He bowed, bashful, and moved away.
The men were skilled with fire. They had fireboxes filled with smouldering coals, which they briefly coaxed to a roaring blaze in the kindling beneath the pyres. Sansa watched, fascinated, as wood smoked and caught. The heat was immense, the bodies dark shapes on the makeshift bier. Despite the horror of it Sansa could feel the warmth ease the tightness in her neck and shoulders.
“Why did you bring me here?” Lady Dustin asked eventually.
At last, Sansa thought. She said, “Your late husband died fighting King Aerys’s Kingsguard in the mountains of Dorne, Lady Dustin.”
“Defending your bastard cousin, yes. Your father did not trouble to bring his bones back to me.”
“I am sorry for your losses. The Dustins and Ryswells have had their share of grief, in both Robert’s Rebellion and the War of Five Kings. I know you must have little love remaining for those causes, and I know your pain. My brother’s bones are lost in the south, and my mother’s as well.”
Lady Dustin’s expression was thoughtful as she looked at Sansa. “Your brother was born in the south, the one they called the Young Wolf.”
“That is true,” Sansa said. She was the first of her siblings to be born within the walls of Winterfell, for Robb had been born at Riverrun and Jon even further south in the red mountains of Dorne.
“Your brother went south to defend your father, and stayed in the south to avenge your father’s death. He was in the south when he became Lord of Winterfell. In the south he was named king, and in the south he died. He never set foot in the North he ruled.”
“I know it.” Two generations of northern men had gone to fight in the south; and the handful that returned were broken and brutal, carrying their wars with them. As Lady Dustin still carried the war that killed her husband. “We cannot afford further wars in the south.”
“I am glad you recognise it.”
“Lady Dustin, I will speak bluntly. Winter is here and we have need of every hand. Will yours be turned against me and mine?”
“Since we are speaking bluntly, I will not be imitating the men upon that pyre. I have little love for the Starks, but assassination is a fool’s game.”
“I do not think you are a fool,” Sansa said. She found she had the trick, still, of looking without truly seeing, as she had looked on the tar-dipped heads of her father and their King’s Landing household a lifetime ago in summer. But if she shifted her gaze and her focus she could see the twisted expressions on the three faces through the fire. Their hair was alight, skin beginning to pull back from bone, steam boiling from the sockets of their skulls.
I can choose what I see or do not see , Sansa thought. For Rickon’s sake, I must always choose to see. “So much for the living. What of the bones of the dead? How long must I keep able-bodied men idle in guard on the crypts of Winterfell, so that you cannot feed my father’s bones to your dogs?”
She heard a gasp behind her, a muffled oath. Alysane had rejoined them, and Wynafred would be listening as well. She saw Lady Dustin realise it, and realise the significance of the Mormont and Manderly women hearing this conversation. Her brows drew down. At last she smiled, though the expression was bitter. “Well, and perhaps I was a fool – to trust to the silence of Theon Turncloak.”
The fire had slumped into a bed of shimmering coals. In a shower of sparks, the bier of bodies collapsed. The workers had put aside their sheepskins and furs and laboured in their shirtsleeves in the furnace heat of the fires. They used long metal rakes, the handles wood wrapped in rags, to stir the coals and the dark lumps which had once been people, to make sure they burned down to ash and splintered bone. Snow was beginning to fall, dancing in the heat of the fires and melting before it reached the ground.
Feeling the words out, Sansa said, “There may be cures to treasonous thoughts, if not treasonous deeds. We spoke of betrothals earlier, Lady Dustin. I will say this: Rickon must choose his bride carefully. He would need a bride who can bind the North to him. If you can offer that when the time comes, Lord Snow and I will consider your suit.”
“And I cannot offer that with one hand and take my revenge with the other.” Lady Dustin’s words were breathed out on a sigh. “Your father’s bones are safe from me, Lady Sansa.”
It was the first time Sansa had had the courtesy of Lady from the widow of Barrowton. She knew better than to think it a victory.
-
In summer the Godswood had been dark, shadowed by the thick canopy of leaves, but now it was winter and the leaves had fallen. Thick black trunks of ironwood, oak and ash supported a canopy of skeleton branches higher and more intricately vaulted than any castle hall. The pale winter sun shone silver on the fresh snow and the frost-rimed needles of the sentinel pines. The stream had thawed in the false spring. Branches and ferns that dipped into it were hung with ice shaped like bells which chimed as they brushed against each other, small clear tones that fell into the silence like music.
The dead man had been busy all day with the wreckage of Willem Snow’s treason: it was only in the fading afternoon that he had a moment’s respite. He sat upon a stone beneath the heart tree, Longclaw laid across his lap.
The shades of the dead crowded close around him, shapes in the corners of his eyes, a shadow in the steam from the hot pools. They did not seem to see him, yet they pressed around him more closely than they had since the Wall. They were silver against the black wood, the white snow, and above him the arterial red of the weirwood leaves. As he drew the polishing cloth down the steel of his sword it occurred to him to wonder what they wanted.
He felt the crunch of snow under his other self’s paws. A breath of wind blew steam from the pool across the path; the russet of his cousin’s hair was bright against the white snow. The dead parted as she passed, stirring and murmuring silent courtesies. He thought she did not see them, no more than Ghost did when he slipped inside the wolf’s skin… but Ghost was uneasy. Beneath the smells of ice, leaf-mold, soap and wool, the lingering bitterness of charred trees at the Godswood’s edge, there was some stranger scent, something sweet and wrong. He breathed deep, trying to understand.
Sansa said, “Your blade is Valyrian steel. I hadn't realised.” She found another rock and sat, arranging her cloak and furs neatly around her.
His hands had stilled on the blade. He began to move again, rubbing oil into the dark steel, the ripples where the metal had been folded back on itself a hundred times in the forging. “Longclaw belonged to Lord Mormont, who was Lord Commander of the Night's Watch before me.”
“Lady Maege’s brother?”
“Yes. She recognised it today, and bade me tell her how it came to me, and what I knew of her brother’s death.” Betrayed by his men, just as the dead man has been in his turn.
“I wondered where you were, and I remembered Father used to come here after an execution… Ser Ilyn Payne, the king’s executioner, took Ice after father’s death,” she said. “But when I saw him later, at King Joffrey’s wedding, he was no longer carrying it. I don’t know what has happened to it.”
“I knew Ice had not been returned with father… with Lord Stark’s bones.” He closed his eyes against the shades of the dead, opened them to see her watching him, her eyes concerned. Blue, like her mother’s. He said, “I offered to return Longclaw to House Mormont, now or at my death. She told me that she would be pleased instead to see it come to the young Lord Stark of Winterfell once he was of age.”
Sansa sighed. “That was a challenge, I think. I am sorry.”
It had amused him at the time. No doubt Lady Maege would be pleased to ensure the sword – and rule of Winterfell – came to Rickon Stark by force, if Jon Snow were behindhand in relinquishing power on his liege lord’s majority. “She may test me all she likes.” He shook his head. “You were right. I can see that now. There was no-one else you could have chosen.” She had told him so, but it has taken Willem Snow’s treason to show him the truth of it. A dead man, yet he was the best option available to her.
“Jon?” She sounded worried. As she should be, he thought, if he could not hold Winterfell; if he could not hold the North.
The wind was rising, silken as a knife. The limp red leaves of the weirwood tree brushed together, whispering. Something in the sound made her stand, run her fingers across the carved face in the ancient tree. “The heart tree is rotting,” she said.
He frowned. “Weirwoods don't rot.”
“I don't understand it. They say a weirwood tree will live forever unless fire or axe destroy them.”
Ghost raised his head. Through his eyes the clearing was empty.
The dead man slid Longclaw back into its sheath. “It's starting to snow again,” he said. “ You should go in.”
“Go ahead without me,” Sansa said. “I, too, need to pray today.”
“Keep Ghost with you,” he said. “And don't stay out too long.”
The dead had parted to let her pass. Around him, they crowded so tightly he felt he could barely breathe. Here was Maester Luwin, his neck open from the neat curve of a mercy cut. Here was a wildling spearwife, arrows in her back, here an ironman, bleeding from a dozen slashes. Here was Ser Rodrik Cassel, who had taught him how to use a sword. His left arm was a stump, his face stained with silver blood. Others were strangers, dressed in wool or fur or leather. He looked for Lord Stark, who had been his father, but could not see him in the crowd.
-
Sansa watched Jon walk away across the frosted ground. There was something strange, stilted, about the way he moved; as there had been something strange in his eyes as he gazed at the shifting mists rising from the pool. His eyes – Sansa shuddered – had been as cloudy as the eyes of the heart tree.
She wanted to ask what he saw at these times when his eyes seemed to focus on nothing. She wanted to ask about the wound on his breast that would not heal, the last remnant of his death on the black ice of the Wall. She wanted to ask almost anything except that: there were so many things she still did not know of the years since they left Winterfell. How he came to carry House Mormont’s valyrian steel, to be Lord Commander, to have those scars around his eyes.
Clouds had gathered, obscuring the sun; snow was beginning to fall.
Something made her stand, run her fingers across the carved face in the ancient tree. The sap was crusted and rough beneath her fingers, the scent musky. The eyes were crusted and milky. “Blinded,” she murmured. “How can you be healed? How can he be healed?” What sacrifice must we make to you?
The First Men had killed their captives before the heart tree. Maybe Jon should have taken the traitor’s heads here in the godswood, and watered the heart tree with their blood . That did not seem right. She did not know what desperate prayers the dead traitors might have carried to the old gods, but surely they would not have been healing for their executioner.
No. That is no true sacrifice. For a sacrifice, you have to give up something that is truly your own.
Had she thought that? She wasn't sure.
On the shore of the Long Lake, half dead with cold and hunger, she had prayed to the heart tree of a ruined village, and thought it had answered.
The silence of the godswood was profound. Even the chime of ice in the streams was muted by the falling snow. She realized she was straining to listen–as if, if she listened hard enough, the heart tree might answer her.
Ghost was perfectly hidden against the thin dusting of snow on the ground. She did not see him until he brushed against her side. Her heart jolted and she stumbled, and caught herself against the heart tree, a scraping graze across her left palm and tore off part of her thumbnail. The blood was shockingly warm on her cold fingers. Splinters had lodged themselves in her skin. Fingers shaking, she tried to pinch them free. One piece was lodged deep in the heel of her palm, and she couldn’t get a grip.
What sacrifice must we make?
Something that is truly ours.
She pressed her hands to the weirwood’s mouth, an offering of blood. She scarcely knew what to pray for. “Show me what to do,” she said at last, and raised her fingers, sticky with blood and weirwood sap, to her mouth.
-
In her dream she was in the winch room of the Eyrie, amid the great wooden capstans, the wide circles worn in the stone floor by a thousand generations of oxen. Their frozen bodies hung from the beams, ice crystals crusted on their clouded eyes. Their throats had been cut before the last people descended from the Eyrie, and they had been gutted, the entrails tossed to the falcons.
She did not want to be here.
The Crescent Chamber was empty, the tapestries taken down from the walls, a little drift of snow in the hearth. She turned away from the steep marble stairs that climbed to the Lower Hall, slipping into the undercroft. The cellars held the wicker and wood baskets that carried men and supplies from the waycastle Sky, great storage chests sealed with wax against the weather, barrels of oil to store the winch-chains and metal fittings, proof against rust until spring came again.
In the kitchens more snow had stolen down chimneys to gather in the hearths. In the first few days it had melted, frozen, melted again; now a thick layer of ice lay in the grate and crust of icicles grew on the mantel. Frost crept beneath doors and down from shutters. It patterned the slate floor and the scoured, scarred tables.
Her feet carried her onward, through the dark halls to the Morning Hall above the kitchens, then the arcade. The solar was bare and empty, its Myrish carpet sealed away in cedar chests with the tapestries bedding and drapes, her aunt's wardrobe, all the cloth they had not brought down the mountain before the snows closed in.
From her aunt's balcony she could see the empty godswood. Once she had built a castle there from snow. Now the drifts were as tall as a man, burying the fallen statue and blocking the courtyard doors.
In the end, as she knew she must, she came to the High Hall. Its doors stood open. She passed among narrow fluted pillars, the marble walls veined in blue. The weirwood throne was empty upon the dais. The sconces were empty upon the pillars and the carpets had been taken up for winter storage.
The Moon Door was closed and barred. She lifted the first of the three bronze bars that held it shut. It ought to be bitingly cold in her hands but she felt nothing. She wondered why she was doing this, and why she could not stop. She lifted the second bar and set it beside the first, a deep dread curdling in her belly. No, not this way, please.
The third bar lifted free. She had barely touched the latch when the heavy wooden door flew inwards. Snow had built up around the frame and it blew skirling into the hall. Outside the world was white. The Eyrie was inside the cloud.
The shoulder of the mountain was six hundred feet below the Moon Door. The men of the Eyrie had not been able to recover Lysa’s body from those crags after she fell. Mya had told Alayne Stone that in the Age of Heroes all the Lords of the Vale had been given to the falcons when they died. She was a Tully before she wed, though. The Tullys give their dead to the river.
Wind tossed snow in the air, the flakes so fine that they spun and rose instead of falling… it was ash, she realised suddenly, for there were drifting sparks and embers within it.
She turned away from the door and for a moment, in the dimness and swirling snow and ashes, she thought she was standing in a winter godswood, the pillars transformed into skeleton trees and on the dais a great weirwood, the great tree the throne had once been… and a dark shape flew at her out of the shadows of the hall, pecking and clawing. She stumbled back, her hands raised to protect her eyes, shrieking “No, no –”
– and she was falling. In winter even the falcons fled the high peaks. My body will be frozen until the spring comes, she thought, dizzy, as she plunged through the sky, too frightened even to scream.
Ashes tumbled around her and the wind tore at her hair and her skirts. A crow was spiralling down above her, just out of reach.
Sansa, the crow said. Or was it a raven? She thought it was the one that had pushed her. Sansa!
“Falling,” she whispered. “Please, I don't want to fall. Aunt Lysa fell and they never found her body.”
The mists were swirling with glowing, shifting colours, now green, now orange, now flaring bright to cast an army of shadows across the sky.
Sansa, you need to listen.
The voice was so familiar… “Bran?” She whispered. “I dreamed you were dead.”
Embers and ash spun in the wind of her falling, and she could hear the bells, a great clamour and alarum, ringing, ringing, singing as they burned. Lights bloomed across the sky, orange and green. The sky had looked like this on the night the Blackwater Rush burned.
Sansa, listen, you did something the night Jon died, and now everything’s out of balance. You have to undo it.
“I didn’t do anything,” Sansa said. “I don’t understand.”
The blood of Winterfell, he said, as if he hadn’t heard her. Her hand was bleeding, the drops spinning out into the sky. Surely you’ve seen it. You know something’s wrong.
“But I don’t want Jon to die,” she said.
Look , said the crow, as if it had not heard her.
Her eyes were stinging, watering with the wind that tore at her hair and skirts. Far, far below her she could see mountains, silver threads of rivers between dark trees, the red blaze of weirwood in scattered godswoods, as if they were a painting on vellum, a map painted on the hide of an aurochs. Cinders swirled around her, and everywhere they touched new fires sprang up.
“The North is burning,” she told the crow.
Not exactly , the crow said.
“What do you mean?”
Look.
There below her was the snow castle she had made, that long ago morning in the Eyrie; white and shining with crystal snow, the lichyard bark, the godswood twigs; Winterfell rebuilt, the glass gardens standing once again, the roofs back on the old halls. But something was wrong. “The heart tree,”she said suddenly. It towered over the other trees in the godswood, brooding and patient and blind. “The heart tree is rotten.”
Not rotten, said the crow who was her brother. It's burning up, like a poisoned wound.
“How is it poisoned?”
It draws the poison up from its roots.
“Where are its roots?”
Look, he said.
She did not want to look.
Look! he said again. The heart tree raised its eyes from the water of the pool at its feet. The eyes were not filmy with rot but clear, and they saw through her. And she was still falling, faster than ever. I will wake when I hit the ground. I will wake—
But it wasn’t the ground she hit. It was the black mirror of the pool at the heart tree’s feet.
The water was warm, and cradled her. The crow had gone away. She could not breathe underwater, and at first that frightened her, but then it seemed she did not need to breathe after all.
And in the darkness, a point of light.
She saw a seed fall into dark earth beside a pool of black water. The weirwood grew from it, a slender line of ivory and a shock of russet leaves beneath the canopy of ancient trees that grew tall across the land. Creatures moved through them, fox and boar, silver-white deer, great mammoths. Wolves moved like shadows across the moon, and the sun circled the northern summer sky and never set.
Men were born and grew and drew stones from the fields and made drystone walls to guard their creatures and crops, and stone crofts to live in. They carved eyes in the face of the weirwood and bathed in the black water at its roots. They made swords for themselves, bronze sickles and bronze crowns, and when they died, worms and time turned their bodies to rich dark soil which fed the roots of the trees, and the trees grew tall and put out leaves and weathered summers and winters and were felled in turn.
Old stones went to new buildings, and the new buildings lived and died in turn. She saw houses rise and fall, crumble, be extended and destroyed. The forests were felled for their timbers, for beams and rafters, wainscoting and panels, and in time their timbers burned to ashes, and the ashes went to earth. And through it all the weirwood kept watch over the water, and its roots grew into the dark earth below. Into the catacombs where the kings of winter rested.
The heart tree grows from the dead . She knew it for a certainty; it rang in her like a bell. But the tombs were empty. On the shores of the Long Lake Sansa had tasted weirwood sap and the dead had risen from the crypts of Winterfell to walk the earth. And she had been so near death that ghosts crowded around her, waiting to welcome her into their number. Jon was dead, they said. For a day and a night he had been dead. What followed when the Red Woman brought him back? She had seen the shades of the dead on the road north, walking in the waking world. The heart tree grows from the dead, but the tombs are empty, so what is there left to nourish it?
She saw it whole, in that moment: the heart tree that grows from the dead, that watches over the living, who become dead in their turn, a perfect circle. And trapped in that circle, the man who had once been her brother, who had died but was no longer dead. Who had been brought back with fire and blood. The blood of Winterfell .
The light of an oil lamp gleamed in his eye as he descended, like a man sleepwalking, step by step into the dark earth.
She rose out of the black mirror of the water.
-
Night had fallen. Men were still laughing and drinking in the great hall as she crossed the courtyard and curving paths. She took a lantern from the stores and lit it, her hand aching still with the splinter she had been unable to get out. Her steps were quiet, only squeaking slightly on the fresh snow. At her side Ghost made no sound at all.
The door to the crypts was no longer guarded. It was black inside, even with a lantern, and she could barely see the steps spiralling down. She descended, one hand on the wall to steady herself. Ghost’s teeth were bared in a silent snarl. “I know,” she said. The way was narrow and steep, the steps uneven and dished from the feet of centuries of stone carvers and kings.
The crypts branched and spread beneath the earth like the roots of a great tree, long vaulted tunnels held up by pair upon pair of granite pillars. These are the roots of Winterfell . Here the Starks were buried, the Kings of Winter sitting their thrones.
She had rarely come down to the crypts as a child, fearing the dark and the dead, but she was a woman grown now and must be brave. To calm her fluttering heart she told off the kings as she passed them. Here was King Jon Stark, who drove raiders from the White Knife and built the fortress called the Wolf’s Den at its mouth; here his son Rickard, called the Laughing Wolf, who defeated the Marsh King and brought the Neck into the North through his marriage. Some were cleanly realistic, others stylised, snarling like the direwolves carved at their feet.
The kings were not the only ones buried in these dark halls. Behind the statues were galleries, sinuously carved, with slabs covering stone slots where the children of House Stark were buried, and the king’s wives, all gone down into the darkness of the grave.
Sansa had never expected her bones to lie in Winterfell with her ancestors, although she had been conceived and born within its walls. She had always known that she would leave, as her mother had left her childhood home, to marry some lord, be his wife, bear him children, run his castle and care for his lands, and be laid to rest at his side in some lesser tomb or sept.
Here was Theon Stark, who conquered the Three Sisters islands in the Bite, and Edrick Snowbeard, who lost them to House Arryn. Iron swords had been places in their laps to keep the vengeful dead from walking… but many of the swords had rusted away to red flakes. The lantern’s shadows seemed to waver around the edges, as if behind her, the kings were rising from their thrones to pace at her side, as they had in the nightmare of her long journey north.
Here was the statue of Torrhen Stark, the King Who Knelt. Now she was walking among the Lords of Winterfell who ruled beneath the Targaryen kings. Lord Bennard, who had ruled as regent for his young nephew Cregan, and been imprisoned when he would not give up the regency. Here was Jonnel Stark who married her namesake, Cregan’s granddaughter Sansa; here the tombs of that Lady Sansa and her sister Serena. There were no statues for the ladies, only inscriptions. Here was Lord Willam, who fell to the King-Beyond-the-Wall, and his brother Artos who avenged him. The dim and shifting light made their stern faces stir and shift as she passed.
Here was the statue of her grandfather Lord Rickard, who burned in the south. He no longer held a sword; neither did Uncle Brandon, who would have married her mother. Here her father: the carving had been begun before Winterfell was burned, but it had never been finished. Her father had broken with tradition to have a statue made for his sister: Lyanna Stark, who had died in her sixteenth year.
Here, at her feet, the body of her son, who had outlived his mother by less than a year. Ghost ran ahead to him, sniffing, searching, nudging at Jon’s arm.
He was very cold. The weirwood splinter in her hand burned like a brand when she touched his wrist. She could not feel his heartbeat. “Jon, come back to me,” she whispered. “Come back.”
-
The dead man was very cold. He had been looking for Lord Stark, who had been his father. He had looked and looked among the shades that pressed around him but even here in the crypts before Lord Stark’s half-finished statue and the wall niche where his bones rested, Lord Stark could not be found. And as he searched among the shades, they seemed more able to see him, to press against him, chilling him to the bone, until he had sunk to his knees on the floor, unable to hold himself up.
The dead man’s head was half turned on the stone, facing into the dark of the crypts. His cheek ground against the gritty floor. The only warmth he could feel was the slow trickle of his heart’s blood. It had soaked through the bandages and his shirt, a sluggish trickle across the stone floor. He thought he could hear words, the rumble of distant storms, the granite tongues of the stone kings who surrounded him. He couldn’t make out the words, but he thought he knew them from his nightmares. Thief, traitor, murderer, oathbreaker. This is not your place.
He could taste the hard grey smell of stone, lamp oil and rust. He could see himself collapsed on the stone floor of the passage, smell the musty scent of blood. Ghost’s tongue lapped at the trickle, the brassy taste of fresh blood. He had half expected the taste of carrion.
Through Ghost’s eyes he could see the shadows shift, a gleam of light on bright hair, the rustle of cloth and fur. Sansa’s fingers felt like a brand on his wrist, his cheek. He wanted to tell her to run, but he was too weak. Run, Sansa, he thought. They’ll kill you, as they’ve killed me, and I couldn’t bear that. Run. Live long and well. Leave Winterfell to me and the ghosts.
He had thought for a time that he might be able to live after all; but that was wrong. He had died those weeks ago at the wall; and the dead had no place at the feasts of the living.
Ghost was uneasy, his fur bristling, casting about. He sniffed at the statues, stuck his nose in the dead man’s ear, at Sansa’s fingers. Sansa pulled her fingers away, but Ghost followed, sniffing. “What is it?” she said. There was a strange smell there, one which did not belong here in the crypt with the dead.
Through Ghost’s eyes he saw her frown, lifting her hand away. Then her eyes widened. She found her belt knife and clumsily, left handed, knicked the palm of her hand. The blood was coppery, and beneath that was the rich brown smell of the living earth. Sansa’s breath hissed out as she scratched at her palm with her fingernails, drawing something pale from the heel of her hand. Then she stilled. Her eyes were wide, staring into the dark at morning Ghost could see.
With an effort of will, he turned his head. She was on her knees at his side, but her gaze had lifted, arrested to meet the eyes of the dead shade who stood over him. It was an ancient king, his beard long and his crown wrought of bronze. “I saw you,” she said. “On the road north, I saw you.”
The king inclined his head. She was looking around, and he knew, from the bright terror in her eyes, that she saw them all. But she swallowed and spoke again. “You’re killing him. Don’t you know him? He is your blood, your kin, the blood of Winterfell.”
This time they both heard the whisper of words. This is not his place . He does not belong here.
“No,” she said. “The living have no place at the feasts for the dead.”
He is not of the living.
“I know,” she whispered. “That's why…” her eyes fell to the dead man's. “That's why it isn't working,” she said. “It's why his blood is poisoning you. It's why the heart tree is rotting. You need the living blood of Winterfell, and he can't give it to you. But I can.”
She took up the knife again, hands trembling, and sliced deeper into her palm, until the blood oozed and dripped once, twice, on the stone of the floor. There were tears in her eyes. “If he is dead, stop killing him .”
The king saluted her, hand over heart, and bowed. His pale hands lifted her to her feet, turning her bloody hand palm up. He drank from the blood pooling in her palm.
Then he was gone.
The dead man heaved a breath. He felt as if a stone weight had been lifted from his chest and his lungs could move freely for the first time all day. For the first time in weeks . He lay gasping on the stone floor of the crypts and one by one the ghosts came. They wore ringmail and rags, fine cloth and boiled leather, pelts of bear and wolf, crowns of stone and bronze and iron. He saw greybeards, crones, and newborn babes, men and women in their prime, and children dancing between them all, scrambling and laughing. One by one they came to Sansa where she stood, tall and fierce, her hair shining like silver, blood on her hands, blood on her dress. One by one they drank from her palms and their ghost light faded.
There were many and more of them. A youth with an arrow in his throat kissed Sansa’s brow and knelt to take his libation. Next came a young woman, slender as a spear, who claimed a kiss from Sansa’s lips. Sansa laughed, surprised, and pressed her fingers to her mouth, the blood a black smear across her chin. She was shining, the ghostlight turning her hair to shadows and moonlight, her skin luminous. She knelt to hold out her hands to the children, dead of fever and cold and accident, and there were tears on her cheeks as she greeted each one with a whisper and a smile. He loved her for her kindness and he marvelled at her strength.
Sansa's fingers were trembling. He thought he should go to her, but he couldn't yet find his feet.
Ghostly fingers brushed over his forehead. Don’t be afraid, a man's voice murmured. Jon turned his head and saw a face that could have been Uncle Benjen’s, could have been his own in the mirror, though the voice was choked by the strangling cord that hung from his neck. She draws her strength from the heart of Winterfell.
“Father?” he asked, “Lord Eddard, I mean?”
Brandon was shaking his head. He was not yet in the North, he said.
Slowly the dead man was able to push himself off the ground, to his hands, then his knees. He saw the wildling spearwife from the godswood, the faces of this he had known in his childhood, others whom he recognized from status of the crypt. His grandfather Lord Rickard, blackened and burnt, brushed Sansa’s forehead in blessing and left a smear of ash behind.
At the last came a lady, a girl. She was his own age, he thought, or younger. She wore a crown of roses and her hands and gown were smeared with gore. He had seen that solemn face before, in dreams, on the statue his father had broken with tradition to have placed in the crypts beneath Winterfell.
Lyanna Stark’s fingers were cold on his cheek. My son, she whispered. Even now you can choose . You have to choose.
“Choose?” He whispered.
You cannot be both the shadow and the light that casts it. If you try to make yourself into a bridge between the living and the dead, it will tear you apart.
Her eyes were sad as she turned away.
She stood before Sansa like a mirror. In the ghost-light even their hair was the same colour. She took Sansa’s hand.
Then they were alone. His cousin was swaying, the light that shone through her diminishing like clouds cast over the face of the moon. The cuts on her hand bled sluggishly and her fingers trembled with pain. Her mouth shaped his name, but no sound came.
Jon barely caught Sansa as she collapsed to the floor. The light was diminishing, the ghosts fading into the darkness of the crypts.
The air was still and warm, and smelled of stone, dust, and dry dead things. Sansa was heavy in his arms, warm and alive and real, and after a moment her arms closed around his back, fingers curled to protect her injured hand. She pressed her face into his neck. Her cheeks were damp.
In the darkness he found her face. Her eyelashes fluttered under his fingers. Clumsily, he wiped her tears away.
“I thought I’d lost you,” she whispered.
“No,” Jon said. “I'm here.”
She gripped his hand and held it tight.
-
Lord Wyman had told Sansa of his wariness of maesters, so she was not surprised that the message, when it came, was not carried by raven, but by Robett Glover, flushed with cold and smelling of horse. Sansa went at once in search of Jon, moving so swiftly her guards had to lengthen their stride to keep up. Those she passed directed her to yards; thence to the stables; and finally she ran Jon to ground in the walled gardens where the glass-houses had once stood; where, now, one stood again.
The glass-house was the smallest of the old glass gardens, a lean-to built up against a south-facing wall, barely taller than she was. The glass was cloudy and a little bubbled, but it glistened in the cold light of winter. Jon stood at its entrance, speaking to the glassmith. He wasn’t smiling but there was a lightness in his expression she had not seen in years.
“Jon?” she said.
He looked around, and beckoned to her. “Sansa, come and see.” Inside, water from the hot springs ran in channels along the floor. The steam made it as warm as King’s Landing in the summer. Already, beds had been constructed along the walls and filled with black soil. Delighted, Sansa laughed out loud.
He said, “The glassmith is working as swiftly as he can, and the steward found him apprentices in the winter town, two boys and a girl.” He gazed up at the glass roof, the scarring around his eye pinched as he smiled. His eyes were clear; since that night in the crypts she had not seen that dreadful cloudiness again. “I spoke with some of the farmers and the groundsman from Castle Cerwyn, and he spoke with the builders, and they think if they fix bolts and brackets on the walls a second trough could be placed above this one, though it wouldn’t be able to bear as much weight.”
“If it can be done, it should be,” Sansa said. “If the winter lasts half as long as people say, we will need as much food as we can grow.”
They both knew that even the glass gardens of Winterfell before she burned could not feed the castle, let alone those sheltering in the Wintertown. The glass gardens could grow enough colewort and winter beans to ward off scurvy; and they were a refuge for the sun-hungry in the brief hours when the sky was clear. They could not keep a castle alive. Sansa removed her gloves and tucked them into her belt, then pressed her hands into the soil. It gave under her fingers, loose and rich with loam. “What will we grow?” she asked.
“Anything,” Jon said. “Everything. You’re getting dirty.” His eyes were crinkled at the corners, though his mouth was solemn again.
Sansa bent to rinse her fingers clean in the stream, then flicked water at him. He twitched, tried to keep a straight face, and failed, a smile creeping across his cheeks. She laughed, unable to contain the sound, and splashed him again, then shrieked and twisted away as he threatened to put a handful of dirt down her collar. “Unfair!” she exclaimed. “That was water, not dirt— ”
“Fine, fine.” He dropped the dirt, and crouched to wash his hands, then flicked water right back at her. She shrieked, took a double handful of water, and tossed it in his face. Spluttering, he raised his hands in surrender, mopping the water off his face. They were both breathless and grinning.
“I was coming to you on another matter,” she said, remembering. “Robett Glover is arrived from White Harbour. He says King Stannis’s Lord Hand is a day’s ride behind him, and with him–”
His eyes rose to hers in shock. “Rickon,” he breathed. “Is he – are you sure it is truly–”
“He has a direwolf. A great black beast with eyes like wildfire, Glover said. I don’t think there can be a mistake.”
Jon’s brows drew down, concentrating; after a moment, he said. “Yes. I had not thought… I will send Ghost to him. A day’s ride?”
“No more. And so Winterfell must prepare to welcome its lord.” Sansa had dreamed once of a triumphant homecoming, banners flying; a Stark in Winterfell once again, and all restored to the golden days of her childhood. She could not welcome him with the feasting the Lord of Winterfell deserved, but at least Rickon would arrive to a living castle, not a carrion-field.
They went to the door to the glasshouse. The air tasted of cold, the end of the false spring. The glassmith had withdrawn to his workshop, the guards withdrawn to a respectful distance. Jon paused on the threshold.“Even when spring comes, it will take years to rebuild Winterfell,” he said. “And many and more years after that to restore the North.”
She thought of empty fields, of bread and salt. A generation of young men lost in the south. “Years?” she said. “I think it will take a lifetime.” If she and Jon could hold it; If Rickon could be tutored and raised to the careful governorship it would require. If; if.
“In the crypt,” he said, “Mother told me I had to choose. The living or the dead, the shadow or the light that casts it.”
“I remember,” she said. “You chose the living.”
“I chose to live,” he corrected her gently. “And given a choice, that is how I would choose to spend my lifetime.”
“You had a raven this morning,” she said.
“I did. News from the north.”
“You must return there soon, I think.”
“Yes.” He frowned at the sky, the scars around his eyes puckering and making him look older than his years. His eyes were very pale where the light caught them. She wondered if it was her imagination, or whether there was a hint of Targaryen purple in the grey. “I fear I’ve already lingered too long. I can stay until Rickon is arrived, but then I must ride out.” he turned to look at her then, his gaze direct. “Will it be well?”
Would it be well? Could she hold Winterfell, protect their brother, without his presence? Without his authority to bolster her own? There was a Stark in Winterfell when Lady Hornwood died. But he must ride out, she knew it; and he had to be able to trust that he would have something to come back to.
She said, suddenly, “When I was coming north I slept one night beneath the heart tree in an old godswood on the shores of the Long Lake. That night I dreamed you died. I thought it madness – I am sure I was more than half mad by then, with hunger and cold and desperation. But later I counted the nights and found that was the night your brothers betrayed you.”
“Sansa–”
“No, Jon, listen.” She drew in a breath. “The night I dreamed you died, I dreamed other dreams. I dreamed of Rickon, running with Shaggydog, and then Lord Manderly said it might be so. I dreamed of Bran, alive but sleeping, entombed in some dark crypt. And I dreamed of Arya in a city of stone. I had thought all three died when Winterfell burned. But if Rickon is alive, then perhaps… perhaps Arya and Bran…”
Her voice failed. She remembered chasing Arya through this courtyard in the summer snows. The way Rickon shrieked with laughter when Robb chased him around the yard. Bran, who had loved the same stories of southern chivalry that she did. Perhaps when spring comes we all might be together again, the way we were in the summer of our childhood. She didn’t dare say it aloud, but he took her hand and held it, and she thought he understood.
Notes:
With thanks to ‘Belfast Child’ by Simple Minds; Deathless by Catherynne Valente; Antigonick and ‘The Glass Essay’ by Anne Carson; TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, whence comes the title; Averno by Louise Gluck; the Narnia fanfiction of bedlamsbard, particularly the quintet In Constellated Wars, which inspired the assassination sequence in chapter three; My Love dwelt in a Northern Land, Op. 18, No. 3 by Edward Elgar; Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel; The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle; Jeannine Hall Gailey’s poem ‘Becoming the Villainess’; The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold; and of course George R.R. Martin. For all Jon and Sansa are at the centre of this story, it actually arose from Davos's and Theon's chapters in A Dance with Dragons: the wrath of Lord Manderly, the poisonous rule of the Boltons and the haunted wreck of Winterfell.
May The Winds of Winter come soon. I am sure it will be nothing like this.
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