Chapter Text
Alayne Stone is dying.
She knows it before the maesters are called, faces grave and weathered above her bedside. She knows it before sweetrobin, her cousin, weeps and huffs while clutching her hand, proclaiming that she must get better, for he is the Lord of the Vale and orders it so. She knows it before she sees, for perhaps the first time, fear in the eyes of her father, Lord Baelish as he lingers in the doorway to her chambers.
Part of her thinks she knew it the first time she set foot in the Vale of Arryn.
As soon as she saw the lofty mountains, snow-capped though it was still summer, something inside her cracked. Even more than it did when her father’s head was removed from his shoulders, or when Ser Meryn Trant beat her until her back welted. At the sight of the Eyrie–that impenetrable fortress that looked like it rested on the clouds—something shifted.
She knew then she would never see the North again.
The sickness came months later, after she had shed her name.
She is no longer the last Stark, the red wolf, bride of the Imp. She is now a bastard, barely a smudge on the lengthy family tree of her supposed father’s house. Her hair, what other father once called “kissed by fire” is now a ruddy brown, nearly black.
In those first months, Alayne spent more time alone than she ever had.
There were friendly faces, of course. There was Myranda Royce, who tried her best to help Alayne adjust to life in the castle, and Rose, the sweet ladies maid who helped her get ready in the morning. Even Robin provided some relief. She would walk with him sometimes, in the mornings, but she never stayed long. She envied her not-cousin, in a way that made her throat burn.
She could only watch him laugh, play for so long, reminding her of the childlike innocence she once possessed, bearing a frightening resemblance to her brother.
Her brother, whose body now laid in the ground.
But however welcoming they tried to be, most of her time was spent in her head—flipping through memories as if they were pages from a history book.
Alayne Stone is made of memories; ones she treasures, guards behind her eyes like gold, and others that haunt her, that bleed. All of them kept inside her, locked tight away, along with a name she knows she will never utter again.
She keeps them that way.
By the first time her father heard that the Spring Sickness had come to the Vale, it was too late.
It has been nigh on a hundred years since the strange ailment swept over the kingdoms and took thousands with it. Then, the Vale had been spared. This time, it strikes the Vale first and hard, and by the time the Lord Protector of the Vale hears of it, it has already taken the lives of more than thirty smallfolk.
By the next day, Alayne is barely lucid.
In her sickbed, the past overtakes her, flashing like summer sunlight beneath her eyelids. She is powerless to stop it.
In her memories, Sansa Stark runs in a godswood with her brothers at her heels. The air is crisp and she shrieks when Theon Greyjoy, her brother in all but name, throws her over his shoulder.
“No!” a voice that is far too high, too young to be hers calls. “Theon, that’s not fair. You peeked.”
A boy laughs from behind her and she is placed on her feet again.
"She’s right,” Robb Stark cannot be any older than fourteen, still lanky and tall, youth coloring his features. His auburn hair hasn’t darkened, and his eyes twinkle. This is a joyful memory, but all Alayne feels is grief, as if an arrow has pierced her heart.
She tries to call out to him, but no sound leaves her lips.
“You cheated, I saw.”
“And how exactly did you see, if your eyes were supposed to be closed, too?”
She opens her mouth to respond, interject between the banter of her brothers, but before the words can leave her lips, she is somewhere else.
The great hall of the Red Keep is bathed in torch and candlelight. Music, lilting and lively fills her ears and Sansa Stark laughs.
Alayne’s stomach turns sour. Stupid, stupid girl, she thinks as she watches Sansa twirl.
She gazes upon the Prince, her golden lion, as they dance. He smiles back, and Alayne can see now that there is no warmth beneath it.
Sansa’s gaze shifts, instead finding the eyes of a man seated at the high table. He is in a place of honor, next to the King, who is already deep in his cups.
Her breath catches at the sight of him—his dark hair, beard flecked with gray, eyes the color of winter. Father.
Eddard Stark’s face is smiling, more at ease than she’s ever seen it, at the side of his closest friend. Beside him, Arya scowls at her plate, no doubt devising a way to leave.
Sansa Stark’s eyes flit past them and Alayne wants to scream. She could look at them for hours, days, she thinks. Whatever it takes to engrave their images in her mind, these family members long dead.
Sansa’s eyes move over the crowd of courtiers as she spins: Brackens, Hightowers, Lannisters and all. Her eyes catch on one figure, though. They pause there.
Alayne is confused, until she sees the half-burned face, and starts.
You're like one of those birds from the Summer Isles, aren't you? A pretty little talking bird, repeating all the pretty little words they taught you to recite.
The words ring in her head clear as the day they were uttered. Sansa Stark’s gaze remains fixed on him as he broods in the corner of the ballroom, broad and imposing.
Sandor Clegane’s piercing gray eyes land on her and Alayne feels Sansa Stark take a sharp breath.
As she looks away, the scene changes again; more memories, more ghosts.
No, no, no, she wants to scream.
How many times has she thought back to him in the dark of her room, trying to remember the cruel lines of his face? How many times has she tried to recall the feeling of his lips on hers? How many times has she imagined how different things could’ve been had she followed him when the Blackwater burned?
The gods are cruel, Alayne thinks. Giving her glimpses of her past, those she has loved, only to tear them away again.
The memories keep coming.
They come in flashes: Septa Mordane’s severe face in the midst of a lecture, the feel of Arya tugging at her braids, the weight of Rickon in her arms as a newborn, the rough feel of the Hound’s handkerchief on her split lip.
She can almost smell it: the North. It seems close enough to touch, but just out of reach at the same time.
In her memory, there is Lady, alive. Bran climbs the broken tower again, her mother sings. A melody from the Riverlands lilts through her mind in her mother’s gravelly drawl.
It has been years since Alayne has sung.
Then, she is home. Winterfell.
It is winter, and the chill bites at her heels as she is spun, dancing once more. Oh, how she used to love dancing.
Though this time, it isn’t a prince whose arms she is in. It’s her brother’s.
Robb laughs, throwing his head back, and Alayne’s breath leaves her chest. She had forgotten what his smile looked like.
She feels herself fading, the silvery edges of the memory closing in on her consciousness, and Alayne tries to scream. She tries to grasp it in her fists, to scream that she isn’t ready yet, that she needs more time, but then they are gone, and she is left to turn fitfully in the darkness.
- -
When the Stranger takes Sandor Clegane, he is alone.
There is something poetic in that, he thinks, underneath the ludicrousness of it all.
It happens three days into his journey from the Quiet Isle. The raven had arrived three days before that.
It had been from Oldtown—a maester friend of the Elder Brother, bringing news of the North, still in the Bolton’s hands.
Sandor had taken no vows of silence yet, but practiced them all the same. Since the Hound died, before Saltpans, Sandor had little to say. After living as the Lannister’s dog for so long, he found he didn’t remember how to be just Sandor Clegane, servant to no man.
When he heard that Arya Stark has married Bolton’s bastard, though, he felt a flare of that old loyalty again. Toward the girl who left him for dead, of all people.
There was little he remembered feeling toward the scrawny child save for annoyance and ire, but still, the thought of her up there, in Winterfell alone, made him flare.
His mind jumped to another girl, then. Another child, forced into a marriage she had no say in. A child he couldn’t save.
After the death of Joffrey I, Sansa Stark had disappeared.
When Sandor had heard of it, his heart, that organ he didn’t know existed any longer, ached. There were many nights he lay awake, on the road or at the Quiet Isle thinking of her–of how different things could have been had she come with him that night when Stannis Baratheon attacked.
He’d heard rumors of her whereabouts, like all of Westeros. There were whispers that she was in Dorne, aided by the Martells in exchange for her help in felling Joffrey. Others said she was in Essos, having pledged allegiance to the Dragon Queen and her Dothraki army. Some claimed to have seen her on the kingsroad, journeying to the Wall and the protection of her bastard brother, Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch. There were even some that said he had taken her, the Lannister dog run off with the little bird.
Those rumors made him laugh. But part of him, underneath it all, ached at the thought. Would that I had, Sandor thought.
What he did know of Sansa Stark was that he failed her. He’d be damned if he failed her sister as well.
That night, he’d saddled Stranger and begun his journey North, swearing he’d rescue Arya Stark or die trying.
It was three days into his journey, on a lonely stretch of causeway, when a passing fox spooked his horse. Before Sandor could think to grab the reins, hold fast to the beast rearing back, he was falling backwards.
He felt a sickening twist of his neck, before the world went dark.
He didn’t know how long passed before he woke again, only when he did, he couldn’t move. There was a throbbing pain on the back of his head, a warm, thick moisture gathered there. Blood.
Try as he did, Sandor Clegane could not move. His limbs had lost all sensation, his breathing labored.
He wondered absently if this is how little Brandon Stark felt after he woke from his fall. He doesn’t remember falling asleep, only knows that he does.
When Sandor Clegane comes to again, he knows he is dying.
He finds himself resigned to it. It’s only the thought of Arya Stark abandoned and alone in the North that gives him pause, fills him with anguish at yet another failure.
Perhaps this is what I deserve, he thinks. A slow death for failing them both.
In those hours, he is alone with his thoughts, not even the slow cadence of his horse’s trot beneath him to accompany them.
His wound is a pulsing throb on the back of his head, and he thinks it’s still bleeding. Sandor knows that head wounds often bleed more than others, but he knows this is more than that. He has seen men felled by less.
This wound will be the end of him. He is sure of it.
The cold drops of moisture that begin as he loses consciousness are the North come to send him off, he thinks in that fading way that all near-dead men think. A final judgment. A pardon, he hopes.
He cannot move, but if he could, he would laugh that this, after everything, will be what takes him.
As if in a final farewell, the gray sky of the Riverlands opens up and lets loose a downpour, rumbling deeply.
When the cool drops of rain fall into his eyes, Sandor closes them, and kisses his last view of the sky goodbye.
In the end, it is not the wound that takes him, but the rain. The cool, torrential downpour that floods his eyes and nose, obstructing his windpipe.
Here, within his own head, he thinks on his life, on the few he loved.
He sees his sister, her dark hair the same as his, only more wild. He hears her laugh, ringing like a bell as they played in the wood by their small keep. She is unchanged in his mind, young as the day she died.
His mother is there, also. Her memory is fuzzy, faded. He cannot remember her face, but he remembers the feel of her hands cupping his face, the smell of wild honey and flour sticking to them always.
Joffrey is there, even, as a child. When he was young and not yet cruel. When he and Myrcella were the only two at court who would not flinch at the scarred face of the sworn shield of Cersei Lannister. Any fondness he held for the prince was squashed when he ascended the throne, though. After he massacred Ned Stark’s household, tortured and killed whores, humiliated and beat young girls.
And then there is her. Always, there is her. In his thoughts, his memories, his very dreams. In his blood.
He remembers—a curse, he thinks. Every look, every laugh, every cry of pain that he has ever witnessed from her. He remembers them all.
Her pinched look of anger that she tried so hard to hide, those Northern dresses that fell above her ankles by the time he left, her cool hand against the gnarled flesh of his scars.
He had once drank to forget her, and still it was her name he called in his drunken stupor. There would be no wine strong enough, no time long enough, no space large enough that could make him forget her.
He suspects death will be the same. He will haunt every corner of the seven hells calling the name of Sansa Stark.
As the rainwater invades his nostrils, his airway, Sandor imagines he is in a river. The Trident, perhaps, in the Tully lands of Sansa’s mother. In his mind, he lets himself sink to the bottom, his back resting on the smooth stones of the riverbed.
She is there also. He cannot see her—doesn’t know if he could recall her face even if he tried—but she is there nonetheless.
The trickling of the running river fills his ears, and he feels the tiredness loosen his limbs. He floats on the river floor.
He feels the urgent pain in his lungs then, the need for air, the panic, and then, calm.
For the first time in years, Sandor Clegane rests.
- -
Alayne Stone knows by the time her father calls a maester it is too late.
She has felt the slow pull of death seep into her bones. It is cool, saccharine, like a balm to the burning pulse of her feverish blood.
She realizes then, like Arya, that Sansa Stark will be lost to the wave of history. A footnote in the War of Five Kings, never heard of again after her disappearance. Sansa Stark has been dead a long time, though, she thinks.
“Will she recover?” Petyr Baelish asks, panic in his voice. It is the first time she has heard him so frantic, almost angry.
Alayne wonders if he sounded the same when he discovered her mother was promised to Brandon Stark. Her eyes feel as though they have been sewn shut, and she cannot open them when she tries, but she imagines his face pinched in pain. The thought almost makes her smile.
“Her condition is grave indeed,” Maester Colemon’s voice warbles from where he stands over her sickbed. A dry hand presses to her forehead, cool to the touch. “I will know more if she makes it through the night.”
“If?” Her father hisses the words. “Is she dying?”
“I know not, my Lord. The Vale has never seen cases in these numbers. I have not seen a case of Spring Sickness since my time at the Citadel, more than thirty years past. Some recover, albeit slowly. Others…”
“Others?” Her father grinds out. The maester sighs.
“Others are lucky to last a day.”
Alayne hears her father curse under his breath, words that once-upon-a-time would’ve left her aghast.
“And what say you? Will she live?”
To anyone else, Lord Baelish sounds like a concerned father, already bereft at the possibility of losing his only child. Alayne knows better. It is not her he is scared of losing, it is her identity, her real one he is scared of losing.
She is not a daughter to him; she is just one piece in his game of cyvasse. One step closer to the North, to the throne.
Alayne has had enough of these grasps for power; now all she wants is rest. Perhaps dying will be her final victory.
“I cannot say, my Lord.” Maester Colemon’s voice is resigned.
In a voice cool and deadly as Valyrian steel, her father’s voice nears her bedside once more.
“You will alert me at any change in her condition. She will survive the night, or the consequences will be dire.”
“My Lord,” Maester Colemon’s voice wavers. “All are fond of your daughter. It would pain me deeply to see her lost.”
“Then see to it that she isn’t,” Baelish seethes. His footsteps echo against the stone as he leaves.
Maester Colemon sighs from above her.
“May the Seven protect you, child,” he sounds resigned, melancholic. He knows what she knows: she will not last the night, like her father hopes.
She thinks he makes the sign of the seven-pointed star over her sleeping body, but she cannot be sure. Behind her eyes, all is black. Lonely, empty. If this is what death is like, she fears it.
Alayne almost wishes for the delirium to overtake her again. At least in her feverishness, she had company, no matter how fleeting and unsatisfying it was.
Alayne is tired of being alone.
She remembers warm stone walls, rooms filled with laughter and arguing, Arya’s cold feet beneath her legs in the winter. She aches for them.
Let whatever comes next be different, she wishes to no god in particular. Let it be less cruel. Do not let me be alone again.
It is not long before she succumbs to the fever again.
This time, memories don’t visit her. Instead, confusing dreams plague her as she sweats under the covers of her sickbed.
In her dreams, she is in the black cells under the Red Keep, awaiting her execution. She is shackled to the wall like her father was, a dead direwolf at her feet. It is not Lady, or Ghost, or any of the other wolves she has known.
Though she wants to, she cannot weep. She can only watch as inky blood leaks from its neck and drips down the flagstones at her feet.
She is in that purgatory, that in-between place where she isn’t awake or asleep, when she feels a small hand take hers.
“I’m scared, Alayne,” Robin’s voice betrays his youth. Alayne has almost forgotten just how small he is. “They told me I was not to see you, but I disobeyed. Lord Royce is ill. Maester Colemon says he will die.”
Alayne’s heart cracks at the smallness of his voice. In it she is reminded of another girl with auburn hair and high cheekbones, faced with the deaths of those closest to her.
She wishes she could squeeze his hand back, whisper to him that he will be alright, but she is just a spectator. The sickness has already taken her strength.
“You are hot, Alayne,” Robin remarks. “Maester Colemon said you had a fever. I shall open a window. The night air will help.”
Something within her sighs at the thought of something, anything, but the heat of this stifling room.
The effect of the open window is instantaneous. Alayne feels relief from the fever raging in her blood when the cool, frosty breeze of the Eyrie kisses her face. It tells of a summer nearing its end.
Winter is coming, she thinks, the cold licking at her nose like the tide reaching the shore. I will not be here to greet it when it does, but come it will. Father is always right in the end.
Robin sings a song, then. It is one of the Riverlands, the homeland of their mothers. One of knights and romance. The rhythm is off, and Robin cannot hold the tune. It takes her a moment before she recognizes it.
Florian and Jonquil, she thinks.
Once, this had been her favorite story. A story of love, passion, knights and ladies. She had dreamed of a love like that, Sansa Stark. She imagined herself married to a gallant knight, noble and kind. She had once fancied Ser Dontos her Florian.
The very thought of that—of any knight—makes her cringe now. She was naive then. She believed, in the hazy past of her childhood, that all knights were noble. Honorable, like her father. What a fool she had been.
There are no true knights, no more than there are gods.
She realized a long time ago how true those words are. Listening to her sweet cousin warble and muddle through the song, she internally scoffs at the naivety of it all. The Hound would, too, she is sure.
Then a thought grabs hold of her—a memory. Of a time he held fast to her and demanded a song.
She is taken back to the night the Blackwater burned.
She remembers the smell of it: The electric, charged scent of the wildfire in her nose, the iron of blood, the stink of the wine on his breath.
I’ll have that song from you, little bird.
That night was the last time she sang. She was another girl then, with another name. Even then, Alayne thinks she knew the falsity of the ballad. Then, when her head had been muddled by the promises of Dontos the fool, she refused the Hound his song.
Instead, she hummed a hymn of the Mother, held him as he wept.
She recalls the feel of her hands on his face, his tears on her neck, as she drifts off again.
When the Stranger takes Alayne Stone, she is alone and she is ready.
Lord Baelish’s bastard dies with the great window in her chambers open and ice crystals sticking to her lashes. And a smile on her face.