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It was weird that, after all the time she called it home, the walls of Winterfell looked so different and unwelcoming to her. She could almost understand how it might have been for most of those who came from the South and, maybe, a part of her did become a Lady from the warmer places of the Seven Kingdoms. It would have made sense, after spending so long in King’s Landing and then in the Vale.
She could barely believe she was there for real, summoned by the Lord of Winterfell, someone whose identity was still a mystery to her.
She knew Rickon and Bran were alive thanks to a letter Littlefinger tried to hide from her from Asha Greyjoy and Ser Davos Seaworth, but that was all the preparation she got from the meeting, that and Harrold’s sword making Bealish’s head fly through The Eyre great hall. The Young Falcon had then told her he wouldn’t hold it against her if she decided to go back North, and that she did.
Still, it was weird. The memories in her mind did nothing to compare with what was in front of her eyes, the reality of what many turns of the moon without any Stark in Winterfell clear as snow in the ruins of what had once been a home to Sansa and to the Lady herself. Most of the people she associated with her home were long dead or lost, and those who remained grew colder like stone and ice.
Maybe. not knowing who had summoned her was a last gift the Old Gods had for her. Because thinking about any other Lord, any other of her bannermen using the title which had once been her father’s would have shattered what still remained in Sansa of the naive girl who left the thick walls of Winterfell so long ago.
Still, she owned the people she could still call family that much, and that alone was the reason why she chose to get on the road and why she was standing there, waiting for someone to take notice of her presence.
It was clear that the same dark fate which fell on the Starks didn’t foregore their ancestral seat, as the yard was filled with soldiers in colors she didn’t recognize and didn’t remember and wagons seemed to be ready to leave. In the confusion going on around her, even her pale and still figure seemed foreign, and yet the few who took notice of her didn’t move to ask her anything, as if it was common to see people just stand amidst the chaos of the war.
It was something as peculiar as she supposed to be though which got her attention: a flash of white, soft and silent, parading through the gates and, shortly behind, a woman, tall and blonde, with eyes as blue as a summer sky.
“Ghost,” The woman called, and the creature stopped, turning his muzzle toward the source of his name. Sansa fell under the same spell of the direwolf. Who was that woman? Why was Jon’s wolf there? Where was Jon?
The last she had heard of her bastard brother, he was Lord Commander of the Night Watch and one of the few of her keen she had idea where she might have found them, and the Lady of the Vale just knew that none of her siblings would have left their direwolves with some stranger, not even if their lives depended on it. Especially not Jon.
So, why was Ghost alone in Winterfell, with a woman Sansa was sure she had never seen before? And why was the wolf listening to her command and sniffling at her fingers when he had always been the weariest of the litter?
“Did you come to fight or are your men coming to battle?” The woman asked, finally aware of Sansa’s presence. She didn’t seem too interested in getting an answer, as another man presented her with what seemed to be a spear. The blonde woman had time to balance it in her hand before Sansa managed to think about what to say next.
“I’ve been summoned by the Lord of Winterfell,” She said, studying the stranger in front of her. She was probably the age Robb would have been, hadn’t he died at the Twins, and had a certain almost casual beauty, the kind of which just happened, without having to worry about taking care of. Her long hair was kept together in a braid more practical than pretty and some strands ran free from it.
At Sansa’s words, her face scrunched a bit, as if she was thinking about what those meant. It took some moments, and then her eyes brightened up with recognition. “Oh, you must be Sansa! - She said, as one would with an old friend. - Come, he’s waiting for you.”
Sansa wanted to say she wasn’t going to follow some random girl parading her through her home, at least not without knowing her name or who was waiting for her, but the truth was that she was too curious and apparently, it didn’t matter what she had to live through, she still had many lesson to learn. Not that she felt like she had many opportunities to say no to the woman: she was still holding the spear and even if she wasn’t doing it in a threatening way, she didn’t want to risk it. Also, the fact that Ghost seemed to be more than comfortable around the blonde helped a bit to ease Sansa’s nerves.
Still, as she followed her up the covered bridge and inside of Winterfell, toward what had once been her father’s solar, she couldn’t help but study the way the woman was dressed. The way she carried herself had tricked Sansa into believing she might have been an highborn, maybe the daughter of some bannermen survived to the Boltons’ domain over the North and the fact that she wasn’t wearing a gown wasn’t that uncommon between the Ladies of the North as it would have been in the South, but now, taking the time to actually looking at what she was wearing, the Lady of the Vale couldn’t help but notice that not only her clothes seemed to be styled for a man, but they were the ones worn by Wildings.
Whoever that person was, wasn’t a Lady. And while she had known that most of the dangers came in gold and brocade just as much as seal leather and tattered furs, she couldn’t help the shiver which ran up her back. Still, as she looked around, as if to assess if she could run away, the woman stilled in front of the solar door and knocked.
The voice that came from the other side of it, while muffled by the heavy wood of the door, was somewhat familiar to Sansa and that reason alone was enough to stop her mind and ease it for a moment.
“Come in,” The Lord of Winterfell said, and he sounded extremely tired. The door swung open and the white direwolf throttled though it as if he owned the place. Jon smiled at the wolf before turning his dark glance toward the two people who were standing there.
“I thought you wouldn’t be back until sunset,” He said, and it was clear he was speaking to the blonde woman. “Did Dalla already kill the queen and the Red Woman?”
A part of Sansa barely registered the answer of the Wildling woman by her side because the majority of herself was focused on something else: two very different somethings, running in circles in her mind. The first thing was that the person who was speaking was really Jon, her brother, and he was there, in their father’s solar.
After all the time she had spent dreaming of coming back home, only now that she was witnessing that scene her mind really realized she was there, and at least another of her siblings was alive and, from what she could see, not injured or dying.
The second one, almost as surprising as the first, was that he just cracked a joke. Maybe, hopefully.
“Jon,” She whispered, and the next step she took inside of the room seemed to take forever, before she felt strong arms wrapping around her shoulders and dragging her closer. Tears she didn’t even realize she had been crying were cleaned by callous fingers and familiar grey eyes, shining with unshared tears, were looking into her Tully blue ones.
“Jon,” She said, once again, almost incapable of saying anything else. She had no idea who might have sent her the letter in the Vale, but not even once her mind went to her half-brother. “I… You…”
He smiled at her. “I’m sorry if I didn’t say anything else in the raven, - he said, almost as if he was thinking her loss of words was for his lack of manners and not because of the shock of seeing someone of her family right in front of her. - I didn’t know who might have read it even if Stannis tells me the Vale is loyal.”
She nodded, she could understand why he took every possible precaution he had. “Loyalty is a fickle thing,” She answered, and while politics was the last thing she wanted to speak about with Jon she came prepared. “Did Stannis help you to take Winterfell back?”
“It’s complicated, and I’ll meet with him shortly. I don’t want you to think I’m keeping you away from those discussions, but, for now, it’s better if he doesn’t know you are in Winterfell. Val will keep your company and then we’ll talk,” He promised, smiling to the woman who was still at the door. Sansa’s glance lingered for a moment between the two of them and a part of her wanted to ask why Jon trusted a Wildling woman, but she was more worried as to why her brother wanted to keep her presence a secret to Stannis Baratheon.
“Will you tell me everything?” She asked. She was tired of half truths and people deciding for her, and she was technically the Lady of Winterfell, being the oldest trueborn daughter of Ned and Catelyn Stark.
“It’s not a happy story but yes, I will,” Jon said, his smile was just as sad, and Sansa knew that her own was mirroring it.
“And I’ll tell her what you’ll try to keep hidden from your little sister,” The blonde woman, Val, interrupted, winking at Sansa while she turned to walk outside of the room. Sansa threw a questioning glance to Jon who just shrugged.
“That’s Val for you,” He said, while she followed the woman. There was something, in that exchange, the childish undertone of it, which had Sansa going back to when they all lived between those walls and nor the war or the death had ever touched the heirs of House Stark.
—-
Sansa didn’t dare to ask anything to Val until they reached the Godswood and she could see that, at least there, the destruction she met outside didn’t seem to have spoiled the old and cold beauty of Winterfell. It was, somehow, comforting, even if everything around it and the people inside of the walls were perfectly strangers to her, to know there was a place which was still just like she remembered it warmed her more than everything else, but her meeting with Jon, could ever have.
And gave Sansa strength to ask all the questions she suspected Jon would have avoided once they had time to talk.
“Are you a Wildling?” She asked, her eyes on the Heart Tree in front of her, as if she was asking the question to the Old Gods and not Val.
“You already know the answer, but yes, they call me the Wildling Princess. But we of the Free Folk don’t have any King, let alone Princes and Princesses.”
“Then why the name?” It wasn’t a question she wanted to ask, but the way Val talked, the pride in her voice, more focused on how really her people considered themselves more free than in telling her she was a princess had the Stark girl’s curiosity spike. She had met Kings and Princes and Princesses and while the only one who used his title as a shield and a sword was Joffrey, nor Myrcella or Tommen would have ever denied their titles.
“My sister was married to Mance Rayder,” She explained, shrugging in her shoulder. “The one the Crows called the King-Beyond-the-Wall and, according to you Southerners, that makes me a Princess. It helps Stannis’s cause with the Free Folk which bothers me, but it also helped Jon’s cause with Stannis so…”
She trailed off and just for a beat of the eye Sansa could see something softer deform her otherwise unreadable expression. Something which appeared when she talked about her brother. “Jon’s cause with Stannis?”
Sansa had no idea how further she could push, how many questions Val would answer. She wanted to know and she never minded prying too much even if it wasn’t very lady-like; once, between those very walls, her favorite way to spend time had been to gossip with Beth Casell and Jeyne Poole, but thinking about it, it had been a childish game of three girls who knew nothing of how the world worked. Asking questions, it didn’t matter how innocent they might seem, usually lead to dangerous answers. But she needed to know, she was tired of being used as a pawn, and that happened too frequently because she was left in the dark.
“It’s a long story your brother will want to tell about himself,” Came the answer. “But Stannis helped him to take back Winterfell from the Boltons and the Freys, he wanted something back.”
Before Sansa could ask what Jon promised to Stannis, Val’s pale eyes brightened up as they fell on the spear she had been carrying before. “You didn’t answer my question in the yard: are you here to fight or will your knight join us soon?
“I can’t fight, and I didn’t know the Knights of the Vale were required here, the raven didn’t mention it,” She answered. Sansa couldn’t tell if Val asked that question once again to change the subject or if the thought just crossed her mind.
What was honest, though, was the Wildling Princess’s reaction to her first words: “What does it mean you can’t fight? You aren’t missing any limb and neither fingers, while you still could fight if it was the case!”
Sansa looked at her hands almost as if she was waiting for one of her fingers to simply fall off on the snow-dusted ground. Since it didn’t happen, she shook her head. “Ladies don’t need to learn how to fight.”
She said it as if it was the most known thing in the entirety of Westeros, she had kept that single value toward her entire life, partly using it to feel superior to Arya and partly because she really believed in it, and yet from the way Val had spoken just seconds ago, she had the clear impression that it wasn’t so obvious for the wildling woman.
A part of her always felt superior to whoever around her because of that single belief, and yet, what was a lady, for real? Get Val one of her dresses, and the blonde woman wouldn't have looked one bit different from any of the ladies she had met in King’s Landing, if not more regal.
How was Sansa different, superior, better than this beautiful woman who was a Princess and still refused that title because her people didn’t follow anyone, and was surprised because she didn’t know how to fight?
“If they don’t know how to fight, how can ladies protect themselves, then?” She asked, and another Sansa, a younger one, would have told her that knights would. She was almost giving her that same question in that moment, and then she remembered the white Cloaks back in King’s Landing, and those who came to bend the knee to Joffrey, and those who killed Robb and her mother at the Twins.
There were only so many men she could call false knights in her mind before she realized what she believed to be the truth were nothing but stories and fairytales.
“Their Lord Husbands protect them,” She answered, because it wasn’t a lie. Both Tyrion and Harrold protected her, as best as they could. And yet that was only half a truth, because she should have married Joffrey, and she knew for sure, at least at that moment, that he would have never protected her, not if it wasn’t convenient for himself or the Lannisters.
“And who protects them from their Lord Husbands?” Sansa had no idea if Val really asked that question or if it was her mind who turned that thought into the other girl’s voice. Still, to that, she had no answer.
She stayed there, in silence, chewing on her bottom lip, a habit she thought she had left in the past, until a single thought crossed her mind, a thought she was almost scared to voice: “Can you teach me, to protect myself?”
She expected Val to mock her, to laugh at her, or call her crazy or stupid, but the woman didn’t do any of this. She nodded and discarded the spear she had been toying with until that moment and took a couple of sticks from the ground. “You’ll need better clothes, if you really want to learn, but I will teach you. - She smiled and in that single smile, there was something feral and free as the winds beyond the Wall. - You’ll kick Jon’s ass in the mud in no time.”
Sansa had to fight back a chuckle as her hand wrapped around the rough surface of the stick. She was sure she would have ended up on the ground in no time, but there was something weirdly powerful in thinking about learning how to defend herself. “Jon is the best swordsman I’ve ever seen.”
“He is - Val conceded. - But he’s terrible with a spear.”
—-
When Jon reached them, after his meeting with Stannis - a meeting from which he got some interesting pieces of information he wasn’t sure how to feel about - was over, he found Val spinning a stick around Sansa who was looking in defeat at her hands as if they just grew at his wrists from thin air.
He had no idea what was going on, and a part of him was too scared to ask.