Chapter Text
Chapter 1: Sansa
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Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.— Robert Frost
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Sansa dresses quickly in the cold. She doesn’t look at the mirror hanging across from her bed until her dress is secure around her neck and wrists, the embrace of fabric restrictive and comforting. Only her face and hands are left bare to the world. She faces her own reflection and carefully brushes a comb through her hair in even strokes, forty times just as her mother taught her. She looks like a spectre, a floating white head with detached pale appendages. The dark grey of her gown is barely perceptible in the low light, blending into the inky darkness around her. Gone are the light, airy, pastel-coloured dresses of her time in the South (the gowns Cersei liked to dress her in, when she was held captive in King’s Landing; the gowns she donned during her stay in Highgarden, doing her best to hide and blend in with the ladies of House Tyrell). Now she only dresses in dark colours, blacks and greys and deep reds. The colours of death, mourning, battle. Of cliff and rock, mud and night, the stones of Winterfell. Nothing else seems to fit the barren North with its empty trees and cowering structures. It is a dark land, empty of frivolity, empty of waste, of luxury and creature comforts. Sansa once found this simplicity oppressive. She dreamt of the warmth and brightness of the South. But the South poisoned her. The South promised her freedom and reprieve, and gave her only imprisonment and misery. The South tried to tame her, tried to kill her, and she no longer thinks fondly of the warm breezes and towering cities of her childhood fantasies.
Life is difficult in the North, but Sansa wouldn’t have it any other way. It would be ostentatious, not to mention an affront to her people, if she allowed fineries in Winterfell that were unattainable to the smallfolk. Where she once might have found her northern dresses drab , now she feels powerful when she puts them on. Serious. Queenly.
As queenly as one can be without a title or a crown, that is.
Sansa places her comb back onto her vanity and flexes her fingers. The skin of her arms and shoulders stings as it pulls against the heavy fabrics of her thick dress, the black fur shaved close, the inside lined with suede. The throat of it closes just beneath her chin with an ivory toggle; a wolf’s tooth, carved like fine ivory.
Her surface wounds have long since healed, but the skin that covers them is still new. Young and raw. Virginal, compared to the rest of her.
Her late husband (perhaps it would be more appropriate to call him her ‘former captor’) enjoyed many varied tortures; cruel, gruesome, horrible things. Things Sansa can no longer think about without her heart palpitating sick and cold. But he particularly liked to cut her. Never her face — he needed her face, like he needed her image, like he needed her name, like he needed her womb — but everywhere else. There’s hardly a square inch of skin anywhere along her torso or back that doesn’t bear the mark of Ramsay Bolton in one way or another. She still hurts from it. She thinks she always will.
Still, it is easier when she doesn’t have to see the evidence.
Her body is a mess of hurts both large and small. Her skin stings as it comes into contact with fabric. Submerging herself in baths makes her gasp and tremble away from the tender overstimulation, as she shivers against the sensation, tears leaking freely down her face. Her bones ache and creak when the wind blows too cold, icing straight through her spine. The Stark ancestors shame her if they could have seen her shaking like a spring leaf in the last frost.
Starks were bred for the winter, made to withstand its icy cuts. Weakness is not tolerated in the North. Not when winter is bearing down on them.
Though the dead have awoken, luckily Winterfell’s catacombs remain quiet. So Sansa’s shame is a secret from all but the gods.
So she wakes early in the morning, before sunrise, and dresses in the darkness by herself. She’s practised and precise in her motions. She has to be. She is a Stark, and winter has arrived. There is no room for mistakes.
She hears the echoes of a disapproving voice (Catelyn or Cersei, Margaery or Olenna, she cannot tell; the voices of the women who have counselled her in how to behave are many, and after the years she’s lived she can no longer distinguish one’s lessons from another’s), telling her “A lady never dresses herself. That is for commoners.” Her mother would turn over in her grave if she knew how Sansa took care of her own routine.
(She doesn’t have a grave, of course. None in her family were given the dignity of a proper burial. The tombs beneath Winterfell bear their names and images, but in their mausoleums are nothing but dirt and stone.)
In truth, the decision was not entirely her own. Her castle has been transformed into a fortress preparing for siege, and no such frivolities could be allowed. No bodies were to be wasted on inessential tasks like dressing the nobles of House Stark. There were weapons to forge and soldiers to feed and children to comfort and a war to win. Sansa would have long dismissed her handmaidens from her service if she had had any handmaidens left to dismiss.
She doesn't mind not having them on-hand. It stops her having to ignore uncomfortable looks of pity. It stops the poking and prodding of her body by foreign hands. Sansa hates being poked and prodded. She shudders whenever anyone touches her bare skin. She doesn’t know if she ever enjoyed being touched. Since she was a girl, since she went to King’s Landing, she has rarely been touched gently. She doesn’t know if she ever enjoyed it, or if she ever would have had the opportunity to enjoy it, had her life gone differently, had she not learned the cruelties of the world and the violence of men first-hand. She only knows now that the feeling of skin on hers makes her itch and recoil.
But it is easy to forget the tingling beneath her skin, that sharp, knifing pressure that digs under cuts and stings against lotions. She has power again. She is respected again, even if only in the North. It is easier, now, to keep her distance. Easier to wear her clothing like armour.
Easier and safer, certainly, which is the same thing to her.
Her walk through Winterfell is silent and solitary, a solace this morning as every other. It’s early still — the only souls awake are soldiers patrolling the wall or cooks manning the kitchens. Women in the yard beat rugs free of dust, or change the water in chamber pots. Masters of sword can be heard buckling their leather armour, no words staining the air between them. It’s this lack of lightness, this lack of jovial camaraderie, that sets the line in Sansa’s shoulders.
This morning she needs to discuss food storage with Maester Wolken. Maester Luwin kept extensive notes of every raven scroll from the last winter, but Sansa doesn’t like to leave anything to chance. They will only survive the coming storm if they have enough rations, and Sansa will not let her people go hungry.
The Boltons did an abysmal job shoring up for winter, and with so many smallfolk seeking refuge inside of Winterfell, their embarrassingly meagre stores are being tested already. Another thing to add to Sansa’s persistent unease. After factoring in three fully grown dragons and three armies, Sansa thinks they might not last a half year, forget the whole of winter. When her father commanded Winterfell there was always enough food to guarantee the North would survive ten years, perhaps more, of perpetual winter. If he could see the state of the North now he would skin the Boltons alive himself.
That particular thought is perhaps more pleasurable than Sansa wishes to admit.
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Sansa doesn’t know what is to be done about the food. If the Dragon Queen intends to keep her armies at Winterfell longer than a month, with her dragons alongside, they will be picked bare. The Queen promises food and supplies for the North, once she seizes the Iron Throne. Sansa cannot rely on her promises, empty as they are. Her armies are large and her dragons fearsome, but she underestimates the Lannisters’ ability to withstand. The Lannister crest may as well be the cockroach, instead of the lion. They will not die easily, not even in fire.
Winterfell does not have the time to wait out a civil war. The snow has already started, and the dead have begun their march.
She doesn’t know how to make Jon listen to her. He won’t think of the North; his eyes are too focused on Westeros, his attention diverted by shiny baubles of blonde hair and violet eyes. He says their problems are bigger than the stores. He says there will be no people to feed come the depths of winter, if the dead cannot be fought back now. He says the dead cannot be fought back without the Dragon Queen. He says they need her, but he cannot see that she needs them more. He cannot see their power, nor the North’s leverage. He is blinded by something — lust or something stupider, like love — and he has given up his bargaining chip. He has already knelt to her.
He says they must do whatever they can to protect their people. Sansa agrees.
He says this is the only way. Sansa disagrees.
Perhaps it is down to how he was raised. Jon was always kept separate from the Starks. To Sansa and her siblings he was their brother in full, there was never any doubt that he was a Stark in everything but name, but Sansa and her siblings did not have a say in Jon’s position within the family. Catelyn orchestrated to keep him always apart, always othered. He was not trained in devotion to the North until he joined the Night’s Watch, those men devoted to nothing but the wall and the spectre of the undead. Perhaps it is not Jon’s fault that he fails to place the needs of the North above all. He was born a Stark but prevented from training to be the steward of Winterfell. It was only through the grisly process of elimination and annihilation of all other true-born heirs that he became the reluctant King in the North. Sansa understands this fault of his — he has always taken reluctantly to leadership, treating it as a necessary evil as opposed to a sovereign ancestral duty — and is not unsympathetic to it. She also cannot help but resent him for it.
There is no Westeros without the North’s protection. There would not be Seven Kingdoms worth ruling, without the stalwart North. There would not be survival anywhere, without survival here first. And the North cannot survive without its people. And its people cannot survive without food. There will be mouths to feed after the Queen’s armies have finished their battle, after they beat back one army with two of their own, after she turns her forces south and abandons the North to its chilly fate.
As if the interests of squabbling Queens in King’s Landing matter up here. As if the machinations of Southern rulers have ever meant anything but death to the people of the North. The Starks are the first and most apparent examples of this.
But Jon has bent the knee, and pledged himself — pledged all of them — to the Dragon Queen’s cause. If they can survive the assault from the dead, they’ll all be marched south, too. To certain death. To the death of the North, with no army to protect it, and not even food to keep their bellies full. Death by starvation, death by Lannister, death by dragon; it’s all the same to Sansa. Dead is dead.
Jon says there is no way to survive this without the Queen. Yet, he mustn’t believe that. He must think there is no survival at all, for he cannot see what it will mean to survive after this.
After her.
Her conversation with the Maester was frustrating. He won’t divert stores away from the armies, not even when Sansa appeals to his Northern loyalties, not even when she pulls figures from Maester Luwin’s own notes to raise the alarm. Maester Wolken’s arithmetic is sound. He understands how dire their situation is. But he won’t do anything without Jon’s permission, as Jon is King. Jon says the warriors must be fed, and so they are.
Sansa’s arms itch. They do that, when her skin flushes. The scar tissue reacts negatively to rising blood pressure.
She tugs at her thick sleeves as she storms onto the ramparts, looking for a breath of fresh air to cool her heated disposition. She thumbs at the clasp at her throat, swallows thickly against the fang as her thumb slips against the edge, avoiding a prick or gash by luck, rather than dexterity. She’s distracted, and hot, and her face is red from the cold and from Maester Wolken’s dismissal. Perhaps that’s why she doesn’t realise she isn’t alone until it’s too late.
“Oh,” a voice says and Sansa freezes, her hands awkwardly tugging at the high collar around her throat. She looks up, or rather down, and meets the Dragon Queen’s eyes. “Lady Stark,” the Queen says, tipping her head in acknowledgement. “I wasn’t expecting you.” Her smile is guarded and certainly not warm. Sansa does not feel the need to return it.
“I’m sorry, Your Grace.” Sansa bows her head much lower than the Queen did, and averts her eyes to the stone beneath her feet. She knows better than to disrespect a woman who commands dragons and armies with equal ease. She knows when she’s outranked, even if Daenerys Targaryen is hardly Queen of anything. “I did not know anyone else would be up here.” She turns to leave, her eyes briefly pausing on the soldier who stands at the queen’s back, the Unsullied man who never leaves her side. He is tucked into the shadows, almost invisible, but his dark eyes are locked on Sansa, calculating and untrusting. Sansa again averts her eyes down. She is well-trained in the art of appearing unassuming.
“Please stay,” the Queen says. It’s unclear if it’s a command or an ask. “This wall is hardly too small for two. And truth be told, I’ve been wanting a word with you, Lady Stark.” Sansa will never get used to being called ‘Lady Stark’, no matter how many times she hears it. She was ‘Lady Sansa’ her whole life. ‘Lady Stark’ was reserved for Catelyn. It sounds wrong when used on her. It sounds wrong on the Dragon Queen’s lips.
Sansa hesitates. She doesn’t want to stay, but equally she does not think she can leave. She doesn’t know how well this Queen would take her refusal. Cersei’s requests had always been thinly-veiled demands, and she never liked being refused. But the Dragon Queen appears to be playing at civility in her diplomacy. At least for the moment. Jon seems to trust her motives, for whatever reason, for whatever his judgement is worth. (Sansa trusts it less and less as the days grow shorter and the nights grow longer.)
Sansa calculates. Decides she would not be punished for disobeying.
Still, Sansa has always played a calculating game, and she knows the power of information. Perhaps forging a little intimacy will help her. She could stand to learn something about the woman who claims she will lead them one day. (Sansa will believe that when Cersei Lannister is dead and buried, and not a moment before. She is not so foolish as to trust in the bravado of an idealogue. Words and beliefs are nice, but Sansa has learned to guard her faith for actions and results.)
There is power in knowledge, and knowledge cannot be gained from avoidance.
Sansa stays.
The Queen does not speak to her, not for many long moments. The silence is not comfortable, but neither is it painful. Sansa doesn’t know if they’re feeling each other out or simply regarding the activity below them. She trains her eyes toward the bustle of the early morning, the halls of Winterfell finally grinding awake to begin the day’s tasks. An endless list, as the snow continues to gather.
War mounts, as does the tension in the halls. The people are active but not rowdy. A grim determination has settled on all their faces. Conversation, when it passes, is stilted and quiet, prioritising economy of words. Gone are the days of laughing children dancing in the courtyard. Gone are the days of rowdy drinking games and archery practice, of smiling Maesters and genial soldiers tipping their heads when the young Starks giggle and speed by.
Men always grow sombre when they sense death is approaching.
Finally, the Queen simply asks, “Have you ever been in love, Lady Stark?”
Sansa blinks, and hides the moment of surprise she feels at the question. She had expected a thousand different sentences to leave the Queen’s mouth; this was not one of them.
But Sansa is adaptable, and her surprise is quickly covered. Forge intimacy, she thinks. She presented the opportunity. Better take it. She lets her eyes flick to the Queen, whose face is soft and pondering as she stares out over the landscape. Sansa wonders at the purpose of the question, what goal the Queen could be angling for. She wonders about Jon, and what he might have said to her. What he might have divulged about his family. About his sister.
Sansa answers truthfully. The truth is safer, for the moment, if only so she can’t get caught in a lie. “No, Your Grace.” She once thought she was in love. She thought as much with Joffrey, but schoolgirl romance is not love. Sansa has known no love but the love for her kin. They are the only ones who have never betrayed her.
When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.
“Good,” the Queen says without looking at her. “I do not recommend it.”
Sansa can’t help the second look that flashes, briefly, over her features. Raised eyebrows, a small quirk of interest. Twice now, the Queen has surprised her. She curses herself for her lack of preparation. Maester Wolken’s dismissal must have affected her more than she realised.
Luckily, her blunder goes unnoticed, and she schools her expression a moment later. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, Your Grace.”
“Love is terribly frustrating. And it complicates… everything. I would not recommend it.”
She did not start this morning expecting to find herself on the walls of Winterfell discussing love with the Queen who hopes to conquer her homeland. The bizarreness of the situation, combined with her confusion, loosens Sansa’s tongue. Or maybe it’s that itch under her skin, the blood she can feel racing through her veins even now, beneath the puckered skin that marks her as a creature who has been wounded countless times, yet never killed. “I don’t think I can love, anymore,” Sansa says quietly, contemplative as she looks over the yard that she grew up in, crowded with wretched huddled bodies and already covered with a light dusting of snow. “Not in that way.”
The Queen regards her, and there’s something in her look that says she knows far more than she should. Her eyes, when they meet Sansa’s, hold no pity. It’s a small comfort, but it is a comfort. Sansa is tired of people looking at her with pity. Instead, the Queen’s gaze seems to soften with understanding.
Looking at her is a dreadful experience. Sansa wonders, with the part of her brain that isn’t focused on keeping her face expressionless, just how much Jon has told the young queen about Sansa’s past. About her marriages. She surreptitiously tugs one of her sleeves lower down her wrist, just to make sure Queen Daenerys can’t see her skin, and stares straight ahead of her.
“The first time I laid with Kahl Drogo,” the Queen says, her voice soft and her expression contemplative, “the night my brother sold me to the Dothraki, I was only a child. A girl, no more than sixteen.” Sansa glances at her. She, too, is looking off into the distance, unblinking as she surveys the barren, icy landscape that stretches from Winterfell north, ever north; an unbroken plane of wasteland. It’s the most beautiful landscape Sansa has ever seen, though she didn’t think so until years after she’d left it. Back when she was captive in King’s Landing; when she was sequestered in Highgarden; when she was Alayne Stone, the mask she wore as Petyr Baelish’s bastard daughter, she used to close her eyes and think of the North. She would try to conjure up the feeling of standing on these ramparts, with the wind whipping across her face and the world stretched out in front of her, vast and endless and hers for the taking. It never was as cold then as it is now — it was summer then, where now winter rages cruel and unrelenting, beating its heavy fists against the stones that surround Winterfell — but that matters little to Sansa. She can barely feel the cold anymore. Not the cold of the wind, anyway. The cold she feels creeps outward from her own heart. Her skin ignores the outside chill. Her body is cold enough as it is.
Queen Daenerys, after a few moments of silence where she seems to be waiting for a response Sansa is incapable of giving, continues. “He was huge. A giant of a man. I’d never seen a man like him before. I’d never seen any men like the Dothraki before. Barbarians, my brother called them. In a way he was right. He should have known. He was an expert on savagery. Of course, his was a more insidious kind. Barbarity and savagery are different, though they’re often mistaken for the same thing.” She shakes her head, crosses her arms over her stomach. Her fingers move unconsciously. Sansa knows they must move of their own accord, without the Dragon Queen’s knowledge or permission, because she stares at those fingers, long and thin and gloved as they rub over the Queen’s sides and abdomen, and they do not stop moving in their unconscious gesture of comfort, even after long seconds of Sansa’s eyes following the movement with something like rapt attention.
“Kahl Drogo lived in a hut. His hands were large, and rough, and he was strong enough to pick me up and throw me however he pleased. I could never have stopped him, even if I’d wanted to. Even if I’d known to want to.” Sansa’s jaw tightens. It’s the only movement she makes. “He was kinder to me than he had to be. Not gentle, but this world is not gentle. Our marriage wasn’t terrible, and I learned to love him, eventually. So I was luckier than most. My brother called them savages, but the Dothraki are the most loyal men and women I have ever known. They have fought for me since I was made Khaleesi. They have died for me, crossed oceans for me. Though I was not born to them, they still follow me. They love me. They respect me. They are my people, and I am as loyal to them as they are to me.
“You see, I was trained from a young age to be married. That was always my worth, my only value as a woman in my family. After Robert Baratheon killed Rhaegar, after my brother and pregnant mother fled to Dragonstone and my family was left exiled and broken with nothing, my womanhood was our only bargaining chip. My name and my youth, my beauty and my virtue. Viserys thought that selling me to the highest bidder would secure him the army he needed to take back the Iron Throne. I was raised to be a Queen, but all I ever was to him was a thing to sell.”
The Queen pauses for a moment. Her hands stop moving, and as if she suddenly realised they had been raised, she drops them like stones to her sides.
Finally, she turns to look at Sansa. Were she a younger woman, Sansa might have blushed to be caught staring, or averted her eyes in deference or fear. Instead she meets the Queen’s gaze, who does not seem bothered by her unblinking attention. Her lips quirk up. An imitation of a smile, without any of the warmth. “Yet here I am, all these years later, with armies of my own, and three dragons, poised to take back what is rightfully mine. And my brother died a terrible death at my husband’s hand. At my command. Clearly, he underestimated me.”
“Brothers underestimate their sisters.” It surprises Sansa when she says it, for she hadn’t meant to let anything slip from between her sealed lips. But Queen Daenerys Stormborn, First of her Name, Breaker of Chains, Heir to the House Targaryan, does not reprimand her. She relaxes at the interruption.
She turns her body just slightly toward Sansa’s, her lips quirking up so softly it’s almost imperceptible. Warmth, finally on her face. The set of her shoulders eases.
Nothing in Sansa feels at ease.
“Men underestimate women. They can never smell the shifting of power. Our perfume is too strong, it masks the scent. They think they wield power until the day their head is removed from their neck.” She turns back to the snow. “Men only understand the power of death. But you know better. Don’t you, Lady Stark?”
Sansa doesn’t respond. She can see now where this conversation is going. She should have seen it precious minutes ago, when she still had the chance to dismiss herself, but she didn’t, and now she feels blind-sided and furious with herself for missing the obvious signs, for not predicting this possibility in the looming confidence of the Queen’s posture.
Jon is King in the North, even if he has abdicated, and Lord of Winterfell through popular decree. But he hasn’t taken the Stark name. He can’t, or he doesn’t want to, Sansa cannot be sure which. Perhaps he thinks he lacks the authority to take it. Sansa would give it to him if she could, but only royalty may declare a name and title. Tommen gave Ramsay Snow the name Bolton. Perhaps this Queen can give Jon the name Stark.
Curious that she hasn’t already. It would make her legitimacy stronger, to have a Stark kneel for her. Sansa certainly has not knelt. She has no plans to. She is loyal to the North and to her King. She’s had enough of grandiose queens and their false promises.
But Sansa is a Stark. The eldest of the House, and the legitimate heir to Winterfell, for all that anyone cares about those technicalities (and evidently, they care very little). The Queen does not trust her, and rightly so. Jon has bent the knee but Sansa has not, not to anyone but Jon. The Queen must know that Sansa has no allegiance to her. Sansa was almost the Queen, after all, and how is Daenerys to know the difference between thirst for power and a woman bartered for it? Margaery Tyrell wanted nothing more than the crown, and she engaged and married her way through eligible and ineligible men until she got it, twice.
Sansa, similarly, was once engaged to the supposed son of the man who ended the Targaryen rule, the False King of Westeros (and the first of her many captors). She was married to a Lannister, the man who now acts as the Dragon Queen’s Hand. And she married a Bolton to secure Winterfell.
At worst, she is a conniving political actor chasing whatever throne is in front of her, shifting her loyalties and plans as the winds of power shift, slowly and deliberately furthering her own ambitions. At best, she cares about nothing outside of this small kingdom of climate hardened warriors who are one misplaced statement away from outright rebellion. Either way, she isn’t to be trusted.
In a way, the Queen is not far off. Sansa does not trust the Queen either. She does not care for the game of thrones. All Sansa wants is security for the North. And the North is loyal to the Starks. There are no Seven Kingdoms without the North. Westeros would fall without Winterfell, and Winterfell cannot stand without a Stark.
Sansa is the strongest one left.
Sansa is a threat. She is maybe the only real threat to the Queen’s power, outside of Cersei Lannister. Because Sansa could take the North, if she wanted. The North is loyal to the Starks, and Sansa is, for all intents and purposes, the last of them. The only one able to lead, with her father’s name and her mother’s family instilling loyalty in even the most wary of houses. The bannerman, the honest ones, would come when called. They would answer to her. She knows they would. They have before.
Jon has respect, but Sansa has legitimacy. Arya has cunning and battle skills, the fierceness of a warrior, but Sansa has patience, temperament, and diplomacy. Bran has wisdom and limitless sight, but Sansa has experience and sympathy, tact, decorum, and the ability to feel emotions. More to the point, she is the only Stark alive who has demonstrated any desire at all to lead her people. She has held thrones before. She is well suited for the position. Arya and Bran are certainly not meeting with the Maester to talk about food stores for the coming winter.
(Sometimes she wishes she was like Bran. Cold and emotionless, a calculating shell. The entire world shifting behind his eyes, open and glittering with precious stones to sieve through. He can see every move on the gameboard before it’s made, and yet he has no care for any of the game piece actors on it. Sometimes she tries to be like him. But it’s no use. Despite how skilled she is at putting up her armour, the torment inside of her is too present, too pressing, too visceral to be anything but real. She can’t stop feeling. That’s her problem. But she is a Stark, and she is from the North, and she is not weak. So she hides it well.)
The Northern houses have pledged themselves to Jon because winter is closing in, because the dead are walking, because they are on the eve of war, and men need someone to lead them into battle. They are no fools. They know that there is no survival for one house independent of the rest, and there is no one more capable of survival than Jon.
Except, perhaps, for Sansa.
The Queen, somehow, must know this. Like she can smell it on the wind. There is no one more capable of survival than Sansa.
Except, perhaps, for the Queen.
Sansa knows this. She can smell it on the wind.
The North is loyal to Jon, because Sansa did not ask for their pledge. The Queen knows this. She is no fool. She will test Sansa’s loyalties, to Jon and to her. She will want to see to what lengths Sansa would go to follow her brother. She will want to see to what lengths Sansa would go to follow the Queen he has pledged himself to. She will judge, and she will appraise. If she is displeased, she will disarm. By any means necessary.
Sansa straightens. She’s taller than the Queen, for all that matters. It doesn’t, of course. Not here among women. Men care about inane details like height and strength. Women play a different game. Forging intimacy, faking friendship. They lure you in by getting you to put your guard down. Then, safe and vulnerable, their prey becomes an easy kill. Quick as a viper, they bite.
Sansa knows the game women play. She had the best teachers, after all. Cersei was a monster but she was clever, and she knew how to disarm. Margaery was an expert at using soft eyes and feminine intimacy to seduce and manipulate. Petyr was a liar and a snake all his own, but he was a good instructor. And Sansa is a slow learner, but she learns .
Find a connection. Forge intimacy. Offer sympathy. A piece of vulnerability, a shared resonance. If one does not exist, fake it. Build trust, and then, when trust is given, capitalise.
The Queen is lucky. She does not need to fabricate a connection between them. They are women in power, women who had power stripped from them, who had everything stripped from them. Women who stole that power back in fire and blood. They come from the same world. They have more in common than even they could articulate.
Mostly, they understand the exchange of power. They understand the price women pay for their families, their names, their aspirations.
There is only one way to kill a snake, and that’s to cut off its head.
There is only one way to really cut Sansa’s power off at the head: take away her name. And there is only one way to do that . Sansa knows it well. She’s been bartered between would-be-husbands enough times to make her an expert on the subject.
So has the Queen. She understands power intimately, and she understands the power of a woman’s name.
Sansa does not have designs on any throne. She would not dream of taking Jon’s Kingdom, nor Cersei’s, nor Danaerys Targaryan’s. Sansa does not want to rule, not if it comes at the cost of her brother, not if it comes at the cost of her people. The Queen does not know this, because Sansa is no fool. She understands power intimately, and there is power in the mere spectre of it.
But there is also a danger.
The Queen takes a step closer to her, but (as if she could read it in the stiffness of Sansa’s spine, or the tense lines around her mouth, or maybe in the heat coming off of her skin) she does not touch her. She could. It would weaken Sansa further, which is why Sansa tenses in expectation of it. There is power in being able to touch, knowing that it cannot be reciprocated; not if Sansa wants to keep her head attached to her neck.
Still, though she could, the Queen does not touch her. Sansa is grateful. She does not like being touched. (She knows this is likely another strategy. Kindness can be as disarming, as debilitating, as cruelty, when wielded by the right mind with the right hand.)
“I do not pretend to know what happened to you,” the Queen says softly, and Sansa’s hands clench tightly, her knuckles straining white against the pressure of every muscle in her body tensing. “Your brother revealed nothing, you needn’t worry about betrayed confidences. I can read your pain in your stance as clearly as if it was written. I can recognize like experiences.” Sansa's tongue is lead in her mouth. “Forgive me, Lady Stark; I do not mean to bring up memories you wish only to forget. I only wanted to say that… nothing that has been asked of you before will ever be asked of you again.”
Sansa’s throat is tight. She thinks, Find a connection. Offer sympathy. Build trust., and she knows the Queen has had excellent teachers, as well.
The Queen’s eyes are gentle, but then again, so were Petyr’s, as he begged her for his life, as he lied and twisted her around his little finger, as he promised to keep her safe while selling her to a maniac. The Queen does not touch her, but then again, neither did Cersei. She understood how to wield power without using her body, without marring Sansa’s perfect skin.
“I can see in your eyes you don’t believe me.”
Sansa shakes her head, just once. “I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean, Your Grace. It is confusion you see in my eyes, not mistrust,” she says, a half-truth.
The Queen makes a noise in the back of her throat. She looks, for a moment, impossibly young. Sansa wonders in a brief flash of insanity if they might be the same age. She wonders if that could even be possible. She wonders if she would hold herself as this Queen does, if she had three dragons at her back. She thinks of the way this world has robbed youth from every child she has ever known, and every child she has never known as well.
“It was a habit for rulers of old to engineer politically beneficial marriages between important Houses,” the Queen explains needlessly, “in order to ensure alliances would be cemented and betrayal would be impossible. I am saying that I will not ask that of you. There are more important things you can do, and I would not have you wasted as some bannerman’s ladywife.”
Sansa speaks without thinking. She has been trained well, and she knows when she is being tested. She does not fail her tests. Not anymore. “It would not be a waste,” she says evenly, and only part of her rebels at the words. She is a Stark after all, and she always speaks carefully. Easier not to get caught lying if you do not lie, so next she says, “I understand my duties. To the North. To my family. As the eldest Stark and as my mother’s daughter.”
She can feel the Queen’s eyes on her, but Sansa does not wither, she does not falter. When she was younger perhaps she would have cowed under the attention. But she is not young anymore, not in years and certainly not in life. She is old, and tired, and she’s faced down more terrifying women than Daenerys Targaryen. She will not be intimidated. She will not show fear. She will not give the Queen any reason to focus her attention on her.
Sansa is very good at disarming, too.
When the Queen speaks next it is soft, not pointed. “Is that really what you want?” she asks.
“I want what my Queen wants—” up until our priorities diverge— “and I want what my Lord wants,” so long as it benefits the North. “I want what the Starks have always wanted.”
“You want the North safe. Independent.”
“I want my people safe, and my family strong.”
Half-truths. Safer than lies.
“Lady Stark,” the Queen says, and for the first time there is something hard in her voice. It might be ice, or it might be fire. The world is bound to end in one. Sansa’s not sure which would be worse. “Please speak freely,” the Queen says, but Sansa knows a demand when she hears it. “Is a marriage of political significance truly something you want, or is it a responsibility you feel has fallen to you, one you cannot ignore or brush aside?”
Sansa doesn’t understand the question. She doesn’t understand why the Queen is asking her. The game of thrones is not played by asking your opponent if they are playing you.
It’s a foolish question anyway. Sansa does not want for herself. She’s long since learned the price of dreams, the cost of hope. She is battle-hardened, the same as Jon. She knows only survival. She was built for it, being born of the North.
“What’s the difference?”
A breath. Sansa does not look at her, and the Queen does not look away. “There is a world of difference.”
Sansa considers for a moment. This Queen is a funny one. Sansa must remember that she is not from Westeros. She does not know the land as Sansa does, nor its rich history. She doesn’t know of the coming winter, or why there must always be a Stark in Winterfell. She has advisors who have doubtlessly told her. Tyrion would not allow her to step foot in the North without explaining the loyalties of the Northmen, at the very least. Threats are only really threats if they are unforeseen.
The Queen is familiar with their history, but she cannot know it in her bones, the way the North does. Perhaps Sansa needn’t appeal to her desire for power. Perhaps she need only explain what the name Stark means.
How to explain to a woman seeking to usurp her family’s legacy that all Sansa wants to do is uphold hers? How to explain to a woman who knows only the treachery of siblings what it is to be loyal to them?
Sansa did not ask for the North, and she would not ask for it, she will not, because despite his sensibilities and his occasional folly, she trusts Jon. The North is his, for as long as he wants it.
He trusts the Queen, for whatever reason. Perhaps she can be reasoned with. Perhaps Sansa can trust that Jon would not love a cruel woman, however untrustworthy she may be.
“My mother was a Tully,” Sansa begins. “She used to say that Tully’s only care about three things: Family, duty, and honour. The Starks have only ever cared about the North. Winter is here, Your Grace. And the North is in danger. I am Stark and Tully both. There is no difference between want and responsibility. Not for me. I will do my duty to my family, when I am called to do so.” She lowers her head, and speaks a truth only a woman can understand. “Jon cannot pass along our family name,” Sansa says, eyes cast about into the snow-filled nothingness around them. “Bran will never marry, and even if he did, he could never have children. Arya…” Sansa shakes her head. “Arya is no more a Lady than Bran is a knight. I cannot imagine she’ll ever choose a life of motherhood. Despite my parents’ best efforts, and despite all their children, the Stark name will die with our generation. The least I can do is try to continue the bloodline. In whatever way I can.”
There’s a beat of quiet. Sansa wonders if she’s spoken out of turn, but then again, queens like to be placated. Sansa cannot be threatened, if she makes the queen believe that her threats are anything but.
The Queen says she won’t arrange Sansa’s marriage? That’s a promise Sansa will never believe. She knows the power of names and children. She knows the games women are asked to play.
“I can’t have children,” the Queen says in response, her voice so quiet it is almost carried away on the wind. Sansa’s eyes widen, and she can’t help but flick them to Queen Daenerys, surprised, before she forces them away again. The Queen does not look at her. “My family name will die with me, too.”
A beat passes, then two. Offer sympathy. Build trust.
“I’m sorry,” she says, surprised at how easily it slips from her. It is easy to offer sympathy that wants to be given.
The Queen, bizarrely, shrugs. “It hardly matters. I have children already.” Mother of Dragons, Sansa thinks with something like sickness. “Besides, what is a name? Targaryen has meant so many different things for so many countless centuries. Dragons and fire, madness and slaughter, tyranny and hope and, perhaps someday soon, peace.” Her lips twitch again. That’s as much as she will smile. A lightening of her mouth and her eyes. The barest show of softness, but show enough. Like a spritz of perfume, innocently masking a smell. And all the more powerful for its subtlety. Sansa is impressed by the skill with which she wields her face. It is very expressive, built for softness and smiles, built to placate, built to disarm. Dangerous too, for its subtlety.
The Queen is a natural at this game, and Sansa is all the more wary for it.
But then, she says something that truly surprises Sansa. Which is difficult, because Sansa has made it her mission to never allow herself the luxury of surprise. You cannot be surprised if your guard is always up.
The Queen has surprised her several times already today. Sansa must be better about shoring up her guard.
“Maybe it’s better if the world is rid of us, after I’m gone,” the Queen says quietly. A private thought given a tentative voice. “Perhaps it could do with a fresh start.”
The Queen turns to her then, and reaches a hand out slowly. When Sansa doesn’t draw away, she lets it fall, gently, atop Sansa’s own. “Prior Kings and Queens have seen it fit to marry their allies off, whether for bribery or intimidation. Always to strengthen their coalitions and claims to land or wealth. For power. For a long time, it’s all that’s kept the peace in Westeros. But that peace was weak . I will not rely on the likes of noblemen to maintain peace in my kingdom.” She looks deadly serious. “I will never require that of you, Lady Stark. You may marry for love or not at all. But I will not force anyone into a marriage of political convenience. I will not be like my predecessors. You have my word.”
Sansa swallows. Her voice, when she speaks, wavers. Sansa hates the tremor there, but is proud of the way she keeps it from spreading elsewhere in her body. “And I am meant to trust your word?”
The Queen’s gaze does not waver. “Do or don’t. It is given either way. And it is binding. Whatever trust is or is not felt between us, it is binding.”
“Many people have given me their word.” Sansa never would have spoken so freely to Cersei, but Winterfell emboldens her. She is a Stark, and this is her home, and nothing can change that.
The smile she receives is icelike and distant. “We’re alike in that, too.” The Queen’s eyes meet those of her soldier, and he slinks from the shadows. He is not dressed for winter, but then, neither is the Queen. Neither one of them shivers in the cold. “I will take my leave. Thank you for your time, Lady Stark. I trust you feel it has not been wasted.”
Sansa inclines her head. She does not move to let the Queen pass her, and the Queen does not stop as if she expects her to. Their arms brush, and Sansa feels skin hot enough to burn her, even through her thick winter layers. Like there is a fire raging inside the Queen’s body. She’s heard stories, of course. Fire cannot burn a dragon, and Targaryens are dragons in their own right.
She hadn’t thought the stories were real. Sansa knows the power of a good myth, the strength in whispered rumours. She knows a ferocious reputation can make whole armies surrender before the first blood is spilled. The Queen is a myth, more than she’s a person, and Sansa gets the impression that she prefers it that way.
Sansa must get better at sifting fact from fiction. The Queen, despite the façade she has perfected, is more dangerous than even Sansa could have predicted. She will need to watch herself more carefully.
After all, what is a dragon, if not an overgrown snake?
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