#and next chappie will have sansa back north with kickass grandmothers and an oblivious as FUCK jon

[dialux]

a tempest, a cyclone, a goddamned hurricane, ii

First chapter can be found here. The premise of the story is that Sansa can see ghosts, but there’s quite a bit of worldbuilding going on behind that. 

Chapter Two: only the brave and broken are kind in this world

The Tyrells come and go, pity in their eyes as they stare at the pale red-haired girl who drifts through the Red Keep, bruises rimming her arms and face, as stern and proud as the North itself. Sansa braids the flowers Margaery offers her in the mornings, fingers as nimble as ever; during the nights, she burns them and uses the ashes to craft spells of protection around herself, around her family.

…

Sansa’s life changes slowly, in bits and pieces: the hours Visenya spends training her lessen, gradually, leaving her with time that she hadn’t realized she had.

It’s a gruesome sort of a schedule, but a schedule nevertheless- her mornings are spent dodging Cersei, praying in the godswood, practicing swords when she feels safe enough for it; her afternoons are spent at court with Joffrey’s threats and the Kingsguard’s fists; her evenings are spent embroidering and other tasks Cersei finds acceptable for Sansa to do. But before she’d trained under Visenya, Sansa’d snuck away on evenings as well as nights, and sleep had felt far less important than fighting against the Lannisters.

Now, Sansa has both sleep and knowledge. It makes the muscles along her lower back spasm sometimes, as the slow-burning desire to do something flares.

Which is why, when Visenya stands before her in the dark-lit corridor where Bloodraven had once hidden Dark Sister, Sansa doesn’t flinch away. There’s a light in Visenya’s eyes that’s frightening, but there’s a rage in Sansa’s heart that’s just as terrifying, and if she’s learned anything in all these months it’s that swords are not as intimidating as they’re made out to be, for all that they’re more dangerous.

“Did you never wonder?”

Sansa frowns up at Visenya. “Wonder?”

“I can teach you to fight,” Visenya announces. “I can teach you to be strong. But I cannot teach you to look at the world. That is something that you must decide on your own.” Her eyes narrow. “Thousands have died inside the walls of the Red Keep. Millions inside the city. And yet you don’t wonder why this city isn’t crawling with ghosts.”

“I thought most slept,” Sansa says carefully. “Like my grandfather.”

“That many? Impossible.” Visenya smiles- though it looks to be more a sneer, cold and bladed. “What have I taught you of assumptions?”

Sansa pulls herself back. “To ask before making them.”

“So ask,” she orders.

…

Foolish curiosity, perhaps, but Sansa’s always loved the old stories and Visenya’s always refused to speak of her own experiences. And what can a few harmless tales do, in the end?

Sansa learns, then.

(Visenya is many things, warrior and queen and sister; she is loved, she loved, she is loathed; she is cold, and terrible, and wrathful as the son she’d once borne.

Here is one thing she is not: harmless.)

“Daenys saw the dead,” Visenya tells her, the next day. They sit in the gardens; or, Sansa sits, and Visenya stands beside her, sunlight catching on the silver planes of her hair to shimmer gold. “Daenys, and then Daenerys, and then Viserys, and then Daeron, and then Aelora, and then- Brynden.” Her lips twist, cool disdain in the arch of them. “Three women after me, and all of them fools lost in their minds. Viserys did the best he could, but- he was only one. And Brynden!”

Brynden.

There is no Brynden in House Targaryen. Not unless-

“A bastard and a fool and a failure,” Visenya spits. “I ought to have slit his mother’s throat myself, I ought to have saved that blood for someone better suited for these deathful things.”

Sansa weaves the roses between her fingers. The petals are soft but the stems are hard, fibrous from being cut too late. It’s late summer. She can feel it: the air is different from only a few months previous, a bite accompanying the mornings, a tooth to the wind’s chill. Winter is coming, but few seem to know it.

“He did not do what you wished?” she asks mildly.

“He was strong,” Visenya says. “He had the blood stronger than all the rest. But he had ambition as well, ambition enough to swallow the world whole. And for that ambition was he banished by Aegon. I was close- so close- to allowing Rhaenys’ bones to sleep. I gave him Dark Sister, I gave him everything he ever wanted. Had he only gone to Dorne-” she slashes her hand down, and Sansa feels the wave of ice follow in its wake. “-but he did not, and he went to the Wall, and I had to wait for another hundred years.”

Her eyes are bright, Sansa thinks idly. Fever-bright. Star-bright.

War-bright.

“You’ve still not explained what going to sleep is,” Sansa says, dropping the rose. The thorns catch on her slippers, tear the edging of lace, but she cannot bend to lift it. There are cuts on her lower back that will open if she lets her posture soften a little. “The dead are dead, are they not?”

Visenya pauses. “They’ve not told you?”

“Who’s not told me?”

“Your uncle,” she says, flatly. “Your uncle and your grandfather. This is…” she trails off, staring at Sansa. Then she smiles, and she looks- frightening, as if a dragon were just leashed under her skin. “Unexpected.”

“Why would they have-” Sansa begins, but Visenya speaks over her.

“The Stark inheritance is not just a meaningless crown, nor a castle old enough to make dragons quail, nor a land cold and dead and hard,” says Visenya. “It is your blood, and the tales that every heir has been told, from Brandon the Builder down to your own father.” Her lip curls, faintly, and the air thrums with a chill that cracks in Sansa’s bones. “Perhaps- your father- has not been told. But that does not mean they can shirk their duties.” She straightens, proud and stern, more terrifying in one motion than Cersei could hope to be in a thousand. “You have power to make the seas shatter and the stars shake, and I am not one to hope that you will learn to tame it by accident. I will not make their mistakes.”

Sansa shivers, just a little, and the pain that follows down her back makes her teeth clatter like dice in a cup.

“The dead are dead,” Visenya tells her. “They will always be that, once their life drains from them. But some do not rest, if they are angry, or if they are strong, or if they are scared- it matters little, the reason. All that matters is that moment, between life and between death, when the soul is stretched between two realms.”

She flashes her teeth, glinting points that shimmer like so many crystals, and Sansa remembers the tales she’d once read in Winterfell’s library: of men and women who’d not ridden dragons but become dragons, who’d learned to take all of a dragon’s viciousness and flame and strength inside them and master it until one couldn’t tell when they would be human and when they would be dragon and when they would be a strange, terrible mix of both.

If ever there was a woman suited for such a thing, it would be Visenya.

Visenya, who smiles a smile too fanged to be anything called reassuring, and says, “Death is painful. It is a sundering of the soul from the body. It is more painful than stripping the flesh from your bones, than burning you alive, than making a thousand cuts upon your body. It is cold, to some: the cold that goes straight to your soul, and aches worse than you can breathe. It is heat, or stabs, or something else altogether.” Gold strands spread behind her, dancing in a wind that doesn’t exist in the living world; it looks, Sansa thinks, as if they’re caught in the wind of a dragon’s wings, fierce and buffeting, rolling. “And in that moment of all-consuming pain, when our life slips from us, we must want, desperately, yearningly; we must want something more than we want the pain to end. And if you want it badly enough, you will have it.

“It is a terrible gift,” she murmurs, calming a little, enough for the pale glow surrounding her to dim, enough for Sansa to look at her without spots dimming her vision. “There are so few times that we are given what we want in life, and we are trained to hone that wanting for so many years, and the one time we are offered a chance- we take it, without knowing the consequences, and we must wait for others to release us of that which tethers us to life after.”

Wanting, Sansa thinks. You must want something more than you want to live, more than the pain, more than all else.

The Targaryens are- or were- known for it- for being mad, and being great, and being something the world could not quite hold in its seams. But those were the kings, who spent their lives in the sunlight and the glare of the world; not the women, who played games of twisting, moonlit webs instead, who were offered little, who were given even less.

You learn to want, Sansa thinks, her hand clenching in her lap. That’s what you learn, for years and years, and then you die, and you want something even then- and of course you stay.

Of course you do.

Life is never easy, she knows, she’s learned, back under Winterfell’s steady, untrembling eaves. She’s listened to Sansa’s stories of Jonnel, and Lyarra’s stories of her mother, and Donnor’s stories of his father- she’s learned all of them, all of the older, harsher stories, all of the sharper, terrible tales.

Life is never easy, but death- Sansa’s always expected death to be simpler, somehow. Death is death, and it is terrifying, and it is inevitable, and it is beautiful, sometimes, but it is simple, too, or so she’d thought.

But maybe it isn’t.

Maybe it’s killing that’s easy, but death itself isn’t.

Sansa breathes, in and out, air in her lungs that freezes and aches.

“And the wanting,” she asks, “that’s enough?”

Visenya’s eyes narrow. “Those of Old Valyria have different rituals for when we die. From flame have we come, and to flame shall we return.” She says the last differently, as if she were reciting a song, or a catechism. “If our bones are not touched by flame, we remain. One can stay back by wanting- that is what happened with Rhaella, to hear her tell it- but the lack of flame chains us here just as much. It is why I know Rhaenys to be here still, and not beyond. And that- that is why I have stayed.”

For a long moment, Sansa cannot respond. Her muscles hurt, and she bleeds in rippling scars across her back, but there is another ache unfolding inside her, now: a kind that makes her chest quiver with a strange emotion, a kind that makes her eyes sting with tears she’s not shed in months.

“You could have left,” she says, quietly. Of course Visenya could have left- she’s met six people who could have passed her over, but she’s refused them all. She’s stayed, for centuries, helpless and aching and hurting, all for the slender hope of saving a sister a half a continent away.

“Of course,” says Visenya. “But Rhaenys remains here. Aegon has passed into peace, but she has not, and I am the eldest of us. If I do not care for them, there is none else who would, and so I will.”

Fierce enough to burn the world, thinks Sansa, lips pressed together until they’re bloodless thin. Not just madness, or greatness. Love, fierce enough to last through death.

“And you’re certain of it,” she murmurs. “Rhaenys- she is here. Not gone.”

“Of course,” Visenya repeats, but her eyes are sharper now, and colder. “We cared for her, both Aegon and I, since the moment she was born. Even Meraxes loved her as I’ve never seen a dragon love a human, before or after. No flame ever touched her. And none of us knew what would happen if flame did not touch us- a simple burn would have been enough- before death, but Aegon read it in one of our father’s books- they called it a deathless life- and he told it to me in passing. And I told it to Rhaenys, and Rhaenys told it to one of her lovers, and her lover betrayed her to Dorne.

“And then they fell, both of them- Meraxes and Rhaenys.” Her voice is clipped and toneless, but Sansa thinks there is a rage there, right beneath the control. It is always there, with Visenya. “And the Ullers tortured her for years. It was only- only after Nymor assumed the princedom that he sent a peace treaty. He told Aegon that he would end Rhaenys’ suffering with flame, and so ensure that she passed peacefully.”

Sansa tips her head to the side. If there is one thing clear in history, it’s that- “He took the peace.”

“He was a fool,” snarls Visenya. “I told him, I begged- but no, he took it, and the Ullers consigned her to death with poison, and Aegon had not the strength to remain here even after we knew the truth.”

“I- I don’t-” Sansa shakes her head, dislodging the rage that Visenya seems to blaze with, seems to infect everyone around her with. “Is that it, then? Flame, and you’ll pass over?”

But before Visenya can answer, another voice interrupts.

“I’ll thank you not to teach your blasphemies to my granddaughter.”

Visenya looks over Sansa’s shoulder and tosses her head as Lady had once done, right before she leapt at Grey Wind and bore him to the ground.

“Stark,” she sneers.

“Lady Targaryen,” says Rickard, and emerges out of thin air, beside Sansa’s left shoulder.

“What nonsense are you talking of now?”

Rickard moves one hand over the flat of the other, sharply, as if he were honing a blade- and light winks around his wrists for the briefest heartbeat, silver and bladed. “You have overstepped. She does not know her own histories, and she will not be taught them from a Valyrian conqueror. They are a Stark inheritance, and they are a sacred inheritance, and we shall not-”

“It is your duty, and you have neglected it,” Visenya murmurs.

She rests her hands against the smooth lines of her gown, but Sansa isn’t fooled- she knows how fast Visenya can be when she wants to be. The air had been cold with only Visenya present, but now there’s an electric tang there, one that makes her back ache and ache and ache.

“She is but a child.” Rickard flexes his shoulders, and Visenya’s face twists in disgust. “I will not have your quest for peace mar another child’s innocence, much less one of mine own blood.”

Another child? Sansa frowns.

“I am teaching her,” Visenya hisses. “She owes me two debts now, Stark, and both are heavy ones. You cannot deny that.”

Rickard remains calm, for all that Sansa can feel the blaze of power that Visenya’s wielding, for all that it must affect him even more. “I deny one debt,” he says, levelly. “You named the price of your teaching when you first met her, and knowledge imparted is not confined to one sphere alone. You cannot name a debt of death-knowledge, Lady Targaryen.” He smiles, then, and even Visenya swallows at the promise there, at the cold implacability of it. “I am not Torrhen, and I am not either of my sons, and I have told you once before: I care nothing if you wish to pass your sister on, but my protection is upon my blood and you shall not manipulate them to your ends again.”

He lifts one hand, and rests the other on Sansa’s shoulder, light and cold as the first breeze of spring after winter. “Begone, I say, for one sennight. That ought to impress upon you the strength of vows sworn.”

“Starks,” spits Visenya, looking as if she might just breathe out venom. “I told Aegon he ought to have taken your swords, but the fool didn’t listen. If he’d only taken Torrhen’s head…”

“Then you would not have Sansa, the first hope you’ve had in near a century,” says Rickard. “We are contrary creatures, we Starks, but when winter comes we are the only hope in all the world. And winter is coming, Lady Targaryen, no matter how much your dragons breathe flame.”

He bows, an incline that looks as severe as a mountain’s own silhouette, and waits. Visenya snarls again, though this time it’s soundless- and then she fades out of sight in the same manner that Rickard had appeared.

“Targaryens,” says Rickard, and it sounds amused, now, as opposed to the unyielding solemnity of before. “They have the pride to swear vows, and the temper to cross them, and the pride yet again to accept their missteps. A strange house, altogether.”

Strange, Sansa thinks, staring. You- you just- you just sent her away for no reason, and you don’t-

“I don’t understand,” Sansa says, finally, voice high and piercing. “I thought I did, but there’s- there’s vows, and debts, and she’s telling me about death, and-”

“-and, there has been enough talk of this for today.” Rickard gestures for her to rise. “Lady Targaryen is impatient- she has been forced to wait for so long- but she forgets that you are a child still. There is a reason our ancestors placed safeguards, granddaughter: until you have reached adulthood, you cannot be compelled to listen. And that shall not happen for some time yet.”

Sansa clenches her fists. “I want to listen.”

“You shall,” he promises, gently. There’s a howling sadness, though, in his eyes, when he says the words. “I have been remiss to trust in Brandon’s care. I have been even more remiss in avoiding you.” Rickard pauses, and waits for just long enough that Sansa starts to rise. It makes her hiss through her teeth as the simple motion pulls at the scars of her back, but she rides through the pain instead of surrendering to it. “This is a good lesson to you: grief is a potent drug, and you shall only lose more if you lose yourself to it. It feels so very good to surrender to it, but you must fight, fight as you do against the pain, and for your pride.

“We shall speak on the morrow,” he tells her, and disappears.

No one accompanies Sansa back into the castle.

…

“I do not know the whole story,” Rickard says, when he meets with her the next day- this time, they’re in the godswood, and Sansa has a bruise over her cheekbone, reddening into a deep purple. “Do you remember the story of Rickon? The Stark who died in Dorne?”

Slowly, Sansa nods.

Rickon had died in Dorne, fighting in Daeron’s Conquest, but he’d not left his daughters, Serena and Sansa, defenseless; he’d named his own half-brothers their champions before he’d left Winterfell. He’d not expected those self-same champions to seize his daughters’ rights, however, and certainly not expected them to name themselves Lord. Serena hadn’t lived in Winterfell when she died, but her sister had.

Sansa’s named for her.

And she knows all of her stories.

“The stories were lost with him,” Rickard says. “I shall tell you as my father told me- Eddard does not know what he lost, when he lost Brandon and I in one day- and he never will.” It’s a dull shock in her belly to realize that it’s her father Rickard’s referring to. “You are lucky you can listen, Sansa, so that you can tell your brother’s children, and pass on the knowledge.”

“I still don’t know the knowledge,” she points out.

“That will come,” Rickard replies, with more patience than seems fair, particularly with the sharpness of her own tone. “First I shall tell you the sundering, and then I shall tell you the beginning, and then I shall tell you of another half-a-hundred tales I once believed false, and now know to be truth.” He leans forwards. “The year has not yet turned- we are just past two of its thirds. By the time we reach the turning, you shall know all that I know. That is as far as my protection shall carry.”

“Your protection against other ghosts,” she says, quietly. “Like Visenya.”

“I am a Stark,” he says, proudly, simply. “We do not fear death and we do not fear dying. It is our legacy. And you are a daughter of my son, blood of my blood. There are protections that I can offer you, simply because of that. But even more: I did not let Visenya meet with you until I was certain of her control- she swore a vow to me, to not kill you as she did Daeron. And so I could send her away.”

“I,” says Sansa. “I do not understand.”

He nods. “You need not know everything to understand this. All you need understand is that we are not Targaryens to search for peace in unknown lands. We are Starks, and we are descendants of Brandon the Builder, and we stay on forever. There are rituals you can do, to make it easier- Lady Targaryen spoke truly, when she said it was painful beyond imagining- but in the end it is your own will.” He doesn’t smile, not exactly, but Sansa’s seen the way her father’s face shifts when he’s satisfied with something. “And we have never lacked in that. Sense, yes, and honor, often- but not will.”

Sansa lifts her head, flattens her shoulders, imagines her bones to be as long and lithe as a wolf’s. “And when you lack that will?” she demands. “When you must do something you dislike, as you are doing now.”

What then, grandfather? Do not think that your reluctance has gone unnoticed. You hate this, but you are still doing it. And you are not doing it properly, either.

Rickard looks at her- just looks- and that’s enough to silence Sansa. He looks like Lyarra, a little, and like her father too, but more than anyone else he looks like Brandon Snow, Torrhen’s bastard brother. He looks sad, and angry, and sad that he’s angry.

“It is my duty,” he says. “I ought to have protected my family better. My ambitions and my loves outweighed the duties Brandon gave us, and I let both Stark lord and heir die together, for the sake of a vengeance I have not yet found. And you are too young for this, far too young, but there are ghosts waiting to teach you falsehoods, and there are whispers of terrible things from the North, and I am afraid you have not the time to learn slowly.”

“The duties,” Sansa says, as a question.

A smile, small and bright as a flash of moonlight on waves, darts across Rickard’s face. “That is the beginning.” His voice deepens, shifting into the same cadence with which Visenya had spoken the day before. “We shall begin with the sundering, which was Rickon, Rickon son of Cregan- who died in Dorne and would have let the hopes of the world die with him had he not loved his sister so dearly.

“He told her the truth of our heritage, though not the whole of it, and so when he died she could preserve it- she was also a speaker, and so knew the truth- away from Jonnel, and away from Edric, but alive for the next of the Stark line. From Sarra it passed to Serena, and from Serena to Arrana when she had the gift of the sight; from Arrana to Arsa, who bore the burden of telling it to her brother Beron when he showed his gift; from Beron to Donnor, eldest and dearest child of Beron; from Donnor to Willam when he lost his breath of a wasting sickness; from Willam to Rodrik, when they were captured at Long Lake and Artos negotiated the release of one of them; from Rodrik to Edwyle, who took up the Lordship of his father; from Edwyle to Rickard, who did not believe in the tales; and from Rickard to you, dearest: across death and across generations.”

He reaches out, and catches her hand. Her palm blazes with the cold of it, but Sansa holds still, keeps her eyes fixed to Rickard’s.

“Eight thousand years,” he says, with the inexorable weight of the ending of a story, “this tale has been carried, from one Stark to another. We have lost pieces, and added pieces, but we are the hopebringers and the dreamspeakers and the wolfsingers, and we shall not falter, not through war, not through death, not through the greatest pain, not through the oldest hurts.”

He shudders to a halt, and reaches out to brush against her wrist.

Then he fades.

…

The next day, he tells her of Brandon the Builder, who had founded their house, and of Brandon the Breaker, who had defeated the Night’s King all those millennia ago.

The day after that, he tells her of the wolfsingers, people who could become wolves when they wished it, people who sang songs in their wolf form of such ferocious beauty the Starks had managed to conquer the Vale and half of Essos before being turned back.

The day after that, he tells her of the history of the title hopebringer, for when all of Westeros faltered in the winter, when both wildlings and Northmen were on the verge of dying in snows higher than mountains and colder than death, it was the Starks who stepped forwards, and the Starks who fought it back, and the Starks who slayed the Night’s King when all the rest could not.

He’s already taught her dreamspeaking, but not of Cregard’s penchant for making his enemies scream the night before a battle, nor Jocelyn’s iron ambition that had ensured highborn marriages for all three of her daughters by twisting their desired husbands to the same cause.

(“But it’s wrong,” Sansa says, when he tells her of how Cregard had made Dagon Greyjoy scream for a fortnight before Beron truly confronted him. Rickard flickers when he sees the horror on her face, in and out of sight, before he says, fiercely, “Dagon would have slit half the North’s throats in their sleep if he thought he’d get away with it. In battle- you do not let honor dictate your motions. It might be wrong, or it might be right; what matters is the tools, and whether you use them.”

He says, “It is the truth. Shall you turn from it?”

Yes, thinks Sansa.)

She folds her hands over one another, parchment pale, and bears through it, breathes through it, through the instinctive horror and the twisting pain. She is a Stark yet, and the first princess of the North in more than three centuries, and she has survived both swords and words sharper than swords.

Sansa will survive this too.

…

Visenya approaches Sansa a sennight later, when Rickard’s order ends, but Rickard transposes himself between them before she can speak.

“I am not Torrhen,” he says warningly, and Sansa remembers what he’d said before, in the gardens- I am not Torrhen, and I am not my sons. She wonders what the words mean. “Do not forget that, Lady Targaryen.”

“I could never,” she says, baring her teeth. “Now move, you old fool. I must speak to the girl. I am her tutor yet, and there are things I must teach her that you have no right to hear.”

Again, Rickard bows, but this time he’s the one to fade from view. Visenya spends the rest of the afternoon training her on the way of swords, of turning and twisting and dancing to the music of steel and death.

…

It’s at the year’s turning that Joffrey strikes her.

It’s the first time that he does it himself- it’s fast, two slaps that sting more than hurt, that surprise more than ache- but Elia appears at it, and she makes a noise that hurts Sansa’s throat to think of, all high and scornful.

“When we wed,” he says, wrenching her chin up to meet his mad green gaze, “you will scream. I will present your brother’s head and your father’s head and Winterfell’s cornerstone at the feast, and you will drink wine made from your bitch mother’s blood, and you will thank me for putting a crown on your head.”

For months now, Sansa’s been silent.

She wonders if anyone has noticed it, but she’s quite certain that nobody has. The ghosts whom she’d once been close to had stopped spending so much time with her after Visenya started teaching her swords, and both Rickard and Visenya- the ghosts she spends most of her time with- are too lost in their own minds to pay much attention to how quiet she’s been. Brandon’s the one who might have realized, but he’s been sulking off in a corner after Rickard shouted at him.

But Sansa’s been quietly shifting her mind for months now, learning movements from Visenya that would kill a man without much more than the scrape of a nail, learning truths from her grandfather that would leave Joffrey’s mind broken more cleanly than the Mountain crushing it- she’s changed, and she feels something flare up within her to match that change, through the cracks of her mind where she’s grown up.

She has a mountain’s steadiness in her. But she also has a wolf’s ability to smell when tides are turning, when duty calls her elsewhere, and Sansa lifts her lips to smile at Joffrey.

Sansa wonders, briefly, if he knows who last smiled like this.

(Not Visenya, who smiles like a dragon. Not Rickard, whose smiles are more elusive than a wolf in the midst of winter. Not Brandon, who smiles like the cut of a broken blade.)

(It’s a smile Sansa has seen only once before, a smile she yet has carved into the curve of her heart: Elia’s smile, when she saw her brother come to King’s Landing, when she heard his bitterness against the Lannisters.

It is a terrifying smile.)

It doesn’t matter. Joffrey will know of her rage, and he will fear her soon, but the time for that has not yet come.

“Yes,” she says, because she is a girl who can be hurt.

Within, she says, in a swirl of cold that echoes of a vow: I am a Stark. I am a princess. And when my brother comes to King’s Landing, he will take your head, and my father shall take the Kingslayer’s head, and I will drink of your mother’s blood and then- and then, my vengeance shall be satisfied.

Septa Mordane’s head is a husk, now, little more than a skull. Jeyne’s has more hair stuck to it, but there’s nothing of the girl that had once sat beside her and loved her. Sansa stares at them when Joffrey brings her up here, and every single time she has thought of her grief and her fruitless rage.

Rickard’s protection would last her until the turn of the year. A fortnight to plot, and plan, and fight her way out- it’s not enough, but it will have to be. Sansa’s been making do with cobbled-together hopes and hastily-considered plans for a long time now, and she has little hope her escape will be any better.

She tilts her head back, eyes affixed to her first friend and oldest mentor. If she’d been born before Aegon’s conquest, Sansa would have bowed and called Septa Mordane her second mother- but her Septa would have hated to be remembered in such a manner anyhow, so she only nods and whispers, “Goodbye.”

Joffrey, as always, doesn’t hear.

Elia, beside her, does. There’s a longdrawn inhale, like a choked-off cry. Sansa waits for her to speak but Elia doesn’t. There’s only silence, and then she winks out of sight.

It doesn’t matter. Sansa has done what she has to, and when she leaves she will not leave regrets behind her to fester.

Goodbye. Her footsteps echo in the red-stone hallways. Goodbye. Goodbye.

Sansa will not leave anything of herself behind.

…

That night, for the first time in months, Betha appears to her.

“You shall leave soon,” she says carefully.

Sansa nods. “My grandfather’s protection shall fade at the turn of the year. I’ve learned all that I can, and I’ve spent long enough here, I think.”

More than a year and a half. Sansa wonders if anyone has ever ached as much as she has, in these past months; the pain has sunk into the weave of her skin, right up until she cannot imagine life without it.

“Not only your grandfather’s protection,” Betha replies softly. “Ours as well.”

“Yours.” Sansa frowns. “I don’t understand.”

“Rickard Stark bound Visenya Targaryen in chains borne of blood and debt,” Betha murmurs, before she lets one hand lift up, slowly, as if she were unzipping the fabric of the world. “But they are not the only cages possible, and they are not half so powerful as chains of blood thrown by blood.” She smiles, almost confiding, but there’s a nasty edge to it that makes Sansa’s want to flinch. “Naerys rather enjoyed hearing Aegon’s screams.”

Sansa can feel herself pale. “He hasn’t passed on?”

“Not him, nor Aerys, nor Maegor. It takes a strong soul to stay on, Lady Stark- strength that comes from pain, or madness.” Betha smiles again. This time, the very air chills at the bitterness in it. “The Targaryens have always had overmuch of both.”

“I thought myself safe,” Sansa replies faintly. “I thought myself safe.”

“And so you are,” says Betha, briskly. “For another fortnight. Our chains are strong, but they shall last for the period of a year alone. When it shifts from old to new, so too do the bindings, and if any of them evade us then, they shall likely attempt to hunt you down.” She reaches forwards and cups Sansa’s cheek, frozen fingers blazing pain down her neck. “We cannot allow it.”

“So you wish me to leave?”

“I wish you to be safe,” Betha says. “It matters little how.”

…

Naerys comes to her next, and Alysanne is supposed to come to Sansa after, but it’s no woman who appears to her on the third night.

It’s Brandon, instead, and it’s a Brandon with a set to his face that leaves Sansa wary.

“I shall have to be quick,” is what he tells her, before anything else. Sansa straightens further, painfully stiff. “We have little time before we’ll be identified. If we’re found-”

Even as he speaks, Sansa sees a faint silver curtain float away from his body. It creeps forwards until it envelops her, filmy and insubstantial. Sansa’s experienced many types of cold in her life; the cold of winter, the chill of ghosts, but never before the emptiness of death. The cold that it slices into her muscles is worse than anything she has ever known before.

“-it won’t be good,” Brandon finishes, before he notices her wincing. “I will leave it soon enough. This takes far too much energy for me to maintain the shield for overlong. But this assures privacy in a manner that none other can.”

She tilts her head to the side, watching him. “Why?”

Brandon, bless him, understands immediately.

“Because Father believes you a child,” he says, voice low and fast. “I would not have interfered, but there are rumors from the North of- eldritch things. Terrible things. Our blood has defended the realms of mankind for millennia, and we cannot falter now, not for all that you are a child.” His face twists. “Sansa, I am very sorry for this. But there is no room for pity, or compassion, or whatever- whatever my father believes, here. You must go North.”

So my grandfather is still hiding things from me. She shakes her head, lets the irritation drop away from her as water off a dragonflower’s leaves. I will have to look, and see, and take note of even more, then.

“I don’t want your pity,” Sansa retorts sharply. “I want to understand. But even if I did understand what you want- and I don’t, not at all- I can’t listen to you. I’ve promised Visenya to burn Rhaenys, and Rhaenys is in Dorne.”

“Yes,” says Brandon, “but you must know where she is, first.”

“She’s in Dorne,” Sansa repeats slowly, exaggerating the syllables.

“Where in Dorne?” Brandon demands. “Hellholt? Sunspear? Is she lost in one of the half-a-hundred deserts the fuckers live in? You’ll never find her if she is. No.” He leans forwards, places his palms on his knees and swings close to her face up until her eyes sting from the sheer pain. “What you must do is find the last person who found her.”

And in that moment, Sansa sees it: the plan, unfolded in front of her, gleaming as a sword the heartbeat before battle. Brandon’s always been brasher than he’s smart, but that’s saying little; he’s bolder than most any other man Sansa’s seen. And when he puts his mind to it…

“Oh,” she says.

“You go North.” Brandon smiles, feral and triumphant. “You fight whatever is worrying the ghosts of Winterfell. And then you speak to Bloodraven, find out where the Targaryen’s bones are buried, and burn the ashes to dust. Your debts will be paid thrice over, and none shall ever speak against it.”

“Oh,” she says, again, but this time the surprise is tempered with disquiet. “The ghosts are worried?”

Brandon tips his head forwards. “Terrified might be a better term. They’re not saying why, though, and that’s even worse.” He taps his lips. “Means it’s a Stark secret, and gods only know how dangerous it’ll be. Mother hasn’t sent a message in almost half a year.”

Sansa stills. If Lyarra is afraid… “She sends them more often than that?”  

“Once a month,” he affirms. “For more than ten years, now. It’s how I counted time before-” Brandon shakes his head. “Before.”

“We certainly tend to attract dangerous secrets,” Sansa murmurs, smiling weakly.

“The cold,” Brandon replies, but doesn’t smile. Of all Rickard’s children, Brandon looks the most like Lyarra; he has her flatter features, as opposed to Rickard’s hatchet-like face. But in that moment, he looks the same as Rickard had, in facing against Visenya. Stern and terrifying, made of an old, proud wrath. “Death. It is coming for us all. Father has still not told you the truth of our burials, has he?”

“No,” Sansa says, but before she can say anything more Brandon drops the silver veil. Heat rushes back to her, painful in its suddenness, and Sansa bites back the reflexive urge to hiss. Brandon’s face is shadowed with sympathy, but there’s a grim undertone to it that’s more eloquent than any of his words could be: he’s frightened, and Sansa feels her own stomach tighten to match.

A moment later, he fades out of view, and Alysanne enters.

She doesn’t speak to Brandon alone after that.

……

Sansa doesn’t tell anyone else what she knows, either.

…

Four days later, she breaks enough to ask Rickard what the Starks’ death rituals consist of.

“Brandon,” Rickard says, instead of answering. His face darkens rapidly, as if thunderstorms were scuttling across the bridge of his nose.

“No,” replies Sansa. “Only- the Targaryens burned their dead, and they all seem to want to go beyond. But every Stark who died with the death rituals has remained here, and none seem ready or willing to go either.” She tilts her head up and looks at Rickard, steadily, calmly. “Why?”

“You are too young-”

“I’m old enough,” she snaps. “I’m old enough, Grandfather. Rodrik the Crusader led his men at the age of thirteen, and none spoke against him despite his youth. I am only a year younger, and I am not asking to lead armies- only for information! What is so dangerous in words?”

What is so harmful in tales?

Her own thoughts come back to her, and Sansa represses them with a shudder. Visenya might have spurred her grandfather to teach her, but there has still been nothing truly dangerous in what she’s been told.

“You ought have been older,” Rickard says wearily. “This burden is too terrible.”

“But I am not.” Sansa remembers the way her mother had once set her jaw, when her father wished to go out riding in the middle of a snowstorm; Catelyn had set her jaw and given Ned a look, and that was all it took for all of Winterfell to know that no such ride would take place. She does her best to emulate that tilt of the head, that mocking smile, now. “I am not, but I am enough. And you will have to tell me anyhow.”

Rickard pauses. Then he says, in the same practiced rhythm of a memorized tale: “Brandon the Breaker defeated the Night’s King, all those millennia ago. The Night’s King, whose Queen was of the Others- it was a bitter battle, and at the last Brandon slew him. It was too late, however. When he returned to Winterfell, it was to a slaughter: of daughters and sons and wives and husbands, all by the Night’s Queen’s hand. He killed her after he cut up the corpses of his sons she sent after him.” His eyes shadow. “She cursed him, Sansa, before he killed her. For slaying blood of his blood, she cursed him with a prophecy: that the Others would rise again, and the Night’s King with them, and all Brandon had lost would be in vain. So he answered by using her power and binding his line as close to death as the living can walk. When he died, he became the first ghost in the North.”

“She cursed him,” Sansa says, quietly. “For what?” Because she heard, but no, it can’t be true-

“For slaying blood of his blood.” Rickard smiles, sweet and bitter. Sansa thinks she knows, now; or Brandon slew his sons and daughters, his own blood. But Rickard isn’t finished; he continues: “For the Night’s King was Brandon’s brother, trueborn and of his own heart.”

No.

Sansa imagines it: seeing Robb at the other end of Dark Sister, pale and blue-veined, hollowed. She imagines driving that sword forwards, and she sees the pain that erupts in Robb’s eyes, feels the horror that erupts in her own stomach.

And then Brandon returned to Winterfell to see it broken, blood running down to the White Knife in a river, and he faced the specters of his sons, his daughters-

“That’s why it’s called Winterfell,” she says, abruptly assured of it.

“Yes,” says Rickard. “For winter fell at Winterfell, and the man who let it fall was thereby named its King. We have been called Kings of Winter ever since.”

“If Brandon was the first ghost-”

“-most other ghosts are his descendants.” Rickard smiles, barely. “The Targaryens come by the ability separately, yes, but the ghosts that remain without Targaryen blood have some measure of Stark-blood in their veins. Either that, or a will to overcome a pain more overwhelming than any you can imagine. They might not be direct descendants, but- enough. By spirit, at the least.”

Sansa leans back. “That’s not what Visenya told me.”

“Lady Targaryen knows far fewer secrets than she believes herself possessing,” Rickard says quietly. “And knows even less what she pretends. Stark secrets shall remain secrets, granddaughter, never fear.”

“There are so many ghosts,” she says, then, remembering: silver flashes have lit up her eyes for so long, the corners of her vision shimmering strands of gossamer; Sansa can only imagine how many people she has met, how many people of Brandon Breaker’s line she has met over her scant years.

“Eight millennia is a long time,” he replies. “The Targaryens have not been here for even a half of a tenth of that time, and they’ve wreaked havoc on the continent. Imagine- eight thousand years.” The smile fades. “But that is not why I hesitated to tell you, Sansa. There have been whispers from the North of terrible things. The usual channels of information are hesitating, and those ghosts who are communicating are speaking less- as if there were little to say, or they were afraid to say it.

“There is only one reason for it. Can you think of one?”

What would the dead fear? Sansa frowns into the distance. Why would the dead be silent? Brandon said it would be a Stark secret. If Brandon Breaker did bind us so close to death, then…

“I can’t be right.”

“Say it,” Rickard orders.

“I cannot be right,” Sansa repeats. “It’s impossible. It-”

“The dead are afraid,” says Rickard. “Lyarra has not spoken to me in months, and there has not been a Stark in Winterfell for just as long. The dead are terrified, and Winterfell has scarcely spoken more than a few words on this subject. If you hide behind your fears and call them impossible, all your training shall have been for naught.”

I can be brave, yes. As my grandmother before me, and my namesake before her. I will be brave.

“Someone is reanimating the dead,” Sansa says flatly.

Rickard inclines his head.

“The Others are reanimating the dead.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“The question is how,” he says. “And how to stop them. There is one last tale I have not told you, Sansa, and then you shall know all that I do of our stories- all that is worth knowing, anyhow.”

“Tell me,” she demands.

Slowly, Rickard shakes his head. “This is a tale that another shall tell you. It is not my place. But when you reach Winterfell, tell Lyarra that you’ve heard all the tales but one- she shall know what to do.” He reaches out and brushes a hand over her face, gentle for all its pain. “You look so much like my daughter, for all that you are so different. May the gods guide you well, when you leave.”

“Who said that I was-”

“-the ghosts have known of your decision to leave since you told Elia,” Rickard says, the same faint smile on his face.

“I didn’t know Elia spoke so much with others.”

“She doesn’t. But this was more important than her resentments.”

Sansa juts her jaw out. “If Lyarra is afraid, then it is something to be afraid of. I must go North.”

“You must go south,” Rickard says evenly. He flickers, slightly, in and out of view.

“First the North,” she says. “To see my home, and my-”

“-and your oaths?”

She hesitates for all of a breath. Rickard’s mouth purses. Even as she opens her mouth to speak, Sansa feels the temperature drop, so quickly her blood feels as if it might crack in her veins. When she turns around, she sees Visenya.

A Visenya blazing brighter than all the stars in the night sky, causing frost to creep down the room’s walls from her sheer wrath. Had it been any colder- had Sansa been in the North; had winter been any stronger; had the sun been any lower- she’d likely have frozen alive before any action could be taken. As it is, there’s just enough warmth for her to bear through the initial pain and slip to her knees, teeth chattering wildly.

“Traitor,” snarls Visenya. “Oathbreaker, I name you, Sansa of House Stark. Oathbreaker and traitor and fool, all in one. Did you think you could rescind your oaths to me and live through the consequences? I will have your head for this.” She starts forwards. “And when you die, I will spend the rest of eternity shredding your soul to tatters.”

She swoops down, and Sansa rolls away, face turning towards the window just in time to feel a warm breeze enter. It feels like a slap across her face, turning all her bones brittle; warmth warring against the unnatural drop in temperature. She coughs, and feels the slickness of blood across the back of her throat.

Sansa speaks through it.

“If you kill me, you condemn Rhaenys.”

“I do not care,” Visenya spits. “I have waited almost three centuries; what is another? I shall wait for another, and they shall come. I have an eternity to wait!”

“An eternity of suffering for your sister, and an eternity indeed: for the dead come, and the Others with them, and there is little you can do for it at all.” Sansa twists her neck and spits on the floor, blood bright against the red stone. She remembers an old saying, one that Torrhen’s eldest son had been very fond of: Aegon built a castle of blood on the site of his triumphs. Her palms ache.

“I am not your tame pet,” Visenya whispers, seemingly so far beyond rage her voice cannot get louder. “I am not a person to let you walk away from broken vows. I am the first queen of these realms, and the strongest of them all, and the cruelest.” She bares her teeth. “And you, little girl, are soon going to be dead.”

Gods above, Sansa thinks, scrabbling backwards- she cries out, and falls, when Visenya slashes her hands down, but the expected wave of cold doesn’t come.

Had it touched her, Sansa’s sure she would have died from the inside out. She doesn’t know how she knows, but she does: her blood would have cracked in her veins and turned to blocks of ice; her heart would have burst from the water’s expansion; her muscles would have torn apart in a singular moment of pain-

But it doesn’t happen.

Rickard flashes between them, and he absorbs the cold that Visenya sent at her without even flinching. He straightens, instead, and says in a voice that rolls around them like thunder: “I have warned you twice now, and this is the third, Lady Targaryen. You have overstepped your duties, and your rights.”

“She overstepped,” Visenya cries. “It is your granddaughter who has broken her vows, Stark, not I! And you heard it with your own ears: she said it, promised to go North instead of south, stated a desire to see her blood before she ever saw her oaths through. You tried to convince her otherwise, and now-”

“-and I have not heard her finish,” he says, level as he’d been with Sansa. “If I thought her an oathbreaker, then I would not have stepped in.”

Sansa stares at him, horrified. Her grandfather needs her to convince him, and the only possible reason she might have to go North instead of south has been given to her by a person who does not deserve to be revealed in such a manner. But between Brandon’s desire for secrecy and her own desire for survival, Sansa knows well which she’ll choose.

“I swore to save her,” she croaks. “But she might be anywhere in Dorne, and I cannot spend overlong searching for her. So I must find the person who saw her last.” Sansa slowly, achingly, draws herself up. She doesn’t once look at her grandfather, not even when he frowns thunderously. “Brynden Waters, if you were wondering. And then I shall search for Rhaenys in all the deserts you wish of me.”

She turns and leaves slowly.

...

Neither of them curse her, but she half-expects them to do so- curse her in the back with waves of ice that tear her apart. Perhaps for all of Joffrey’s attempts, he’ll find her a red-ribboned corpse within her own chambers, slain by Westeros’ first queen and Sansa’s own grandfather, both of whom have been dead for decades.

Nothing happens.

Nothing happens, but Sansa only relaxes when she is in the sunlight. Her teeth still feel cold, and she shudders at it.

I will return, Lyarra. She stares into the sun and does not blink. I swore that to you before I ever swore anything else, and I shall hold to it.

I will return.

…

“I am not Torrhen,” Rickard says, days later, and it sounds like an apology.

Sansa’s throat is rawer than she’s ever screamed in front of Joffrey, and her hair feels like a weight along her spine.

“It took Visenya all of a breath to decide that I’d broken my vows,” she says softly. Out of the corner of her eye, she thinks she sees him stiffen. “Either someone alerted her to what was going on in the room, or she has been following me all this time.” For the first time in two days, she looks at her grandfather. Her voice is mocking when she quotes his words back at him: “Stark secrets shall remain secrets, granddaughter, never fear.”

You either told her yourself that I was going to break my vows, or you let her follow me without my knowledge. But Rickard would not have given away Stark secrets, not the kind that came through the lineage. Sansa knows which one will leave her heart in fewer pieces, but she also knows that she cannot flinch from the truth. You must have told her, when you touched me- you looked so soft, then.

Liar.

“I am not Torrhen,” says Rickard, again. “I am not my sons. I am a hard man, Lady Stark, and-”

“-and I am your granddaughter,” Sansa hisses, fury surging up her throat, rawer than any blood. “You might not be Torrhen, but at least Torrhen knew when to kneel. Knew when lives were worth more than honor. And at least your sons know what it is to love, for I am certain you’ve forgotten all traces of it.” She turns to the window, lets the breeze warm her face as she’d done when she laid on the floor helpless.

When Rickard stood by silently.

“You disgust me,” she finishes, and it tolls in her soul as a ringing bell.

Oh, Lyarra, I am sorry for this. But your husband is not a good man, and I cannot forgive him for choosing his honor over my life, when he knew himself to be all the family I had within a hundred miles of this city.

I am sorry, but I cannot forget this.

When she looks away from the sunlight, the spots are so bright in her vision that she cannot see whether ghosts are present or not. There is silence around her, and the sun feels very warm along her skin. It takes her a moment, and then Sansa realizes- Rickard’s left. This is likely the first time that she has been alone all her life, without any ghosts around her. This is how the truly living feel, every moment of their lives.

Sobs do not shudder through her shoulders, and there are no tears in her eyes, but she sinks to her knees anyhow. There is only silence around her: long and unfettered and terrible for it.

Her palms ache, as they’ve done since Joffrey struck her.

Her palms ache, but they do not shake at all.

…

She says goodbye to the ghosts she has met, over the months. There are more than she thought there would be: enough to make her wonder when she met them all. It is not so long a farewell as in Winterfell, but there are fewer ghosts in the Red Keep, and Sansa has not been so friendly either.

There are two ghosts she does not speak to, however, and Sansa has no intention of going to look for them either. Visenya and Rickard are far too capable of turning her words back on herself, of twisting her up until she’s uncertain of everything she’s ever done all her life.

Sansa’d decided to not go looking for them, but if there’s one thing that Visenya is incapable of, it’s taking a hint when she’s set her mind on something.

The night that Sansa plans to leave, she flickers into view, and Brandon- who hasn’t left Sansa’s side for almost a full sennight- growls low in his throat at the sight.

“You’ve some nerve showing your face here,” he says.

“I’ve more nerve in one finger than you’ve muscle, boy,” Visenya sneers back, before lifting a brow. “Though- that’s not saying much, I suppose.”

Brandon snarls low in his throat, but before he can answer, Sansa steps forwards.

“Why are you here?” she asks evenly.

Visenya keeps the eyebrow arched. “Has no one ever told you that leaving your tutor without any notice is the height of rudeness? I came to rectify the situation, as soon as it was confirmed to me.”

Which means that she didn’t know at all, and the other ghosts only told her recently.

“You have no right,” Brandon begins, but Sansa cuts him off again.

“There was one thing that I was wondering about.”

“Speak, then.”

Sansa’s palms feel damp; she wipes the sweat against the inside of her sleeves. “When Daeron died, he died without finding Rhaenys. According to you- he searched in Hellholt, and it was on his way to Skyreach that he was killed.”

Visenya inclines her head.

“Did you mourn him?”

“He died a great man,” Visenya replies. “He died a better death than any I could have offered him, in pursuit of a goal he came closer to than any other king in all of my dynasty. Of course I did not mourn him.”

I will not have your quest for peace mar another child’s innocence, Rickard had said, all those months previous. Sansa hadn’t known then, hadn’t known until now, how true Rickard’s fears had been. Had Sansa been more biddable, she’d likely be on her way to Dorne by now; she’d likely be half dead under the Dornish desert sun, and no one would be the wiser for it.

“He was eight and ten when he died,” Sansa murmurs. “Far too young.”

“Old enough.”

To die? To know his enemies so clearly? I think not. Not unless you told him those truths, whispered them in his ear until you had him more pliant than any cow raised for the slaughter. 

“So,” is all she says, lip curling just slightly: “You fed his hatred.”

“I ensured he knew his enemies.”

“He died,” Sansa bites out.

“Yes,” says Visenya, eyes wide and flat as pools of still water. “He died, as we all do. He died trying to do what he felt was right, and was good. It was a noble death.”

She swore a vow to me to not kill you as she did Daeron.

I trusted you, Sansa thinks, and curls her nails into her palms, straightens with all the fluid grace that Visenya has drilled into her over their practices. She feels Brandon hunch downwards, just a little, behind her left shoulder, and it feels like a second shield, a living protector, a net to fall back on. I trusted you once, but no longer.

“You killed him,” she says, and for all that she whispers, it is an accusation that hurts her throat from the fierceness of her delivery. “You told him whom to hate, and how to hate, and then you set him free. And if he’d truly burned Rhaenys- you wouldn’t have wept, would you? You wouldn’t have cared at all.”

It’s a secret that Alysanne had given her, one that she remembers from a childhood spent with her mother. Visenya had always hated many people, but the rage she’d set aside for Alyssa Velaryon was remarkable in its intensity. Alyssa had always returned it, and she’d won the best of their bitter rivalry in Visenya’s death: it was Alyssa’s line on the Iron Throne now, not Visenya’s.

And every day of her life, Alyssa had called Visenya a heartless shrew.

One of Visenya’s oldest wounds, but one of the most effective nevertheless. Sansa faces Visenya and bites her tongue before she rubs more salt in an already-stinging wound.

“You little bitch,” Visenya whispers. “I am your-”

“-you are nothing to me,” Sansa says, quietly. “I shall pay the debt you have named for knowledge rendered, but nothing more. When Rhaenys’ bones burn, there shall be nothing between us.”

Visenya’s mouth opens in a gaping maw, rage flickering over her face. But Sansa’s ready for this, has been ready for this, ever since Visenya covered a room in frost and left her on her knees for nothing but her rage. Even as Visenya swoops forwards, Brandon dodges in front of Sansa. They flicker in and out of sight, but Brandon’s not strong enough to hold her back properly. 

It little matters. Sansa reaches for the cloth she’s braided over the past few weeks, made of the flowers she’d requested of Margaery. It’s clumsily made, but it will do the job.

Bonds of blood are the strongest, but there are other kinds. And you bound yourself to me when you named yourself my tutor. These aren’t bonds of blood, Visenya. These are bonds of unforgiveness and unexpected betrayal. 

Soaked in her tears and the melted frost of Visenya’s temper, bound with the cloth that had once been wrapped around Dark Sister, made of rosemary flowers for remembrance. The physical aspect won’t affect Visenya, but the rage it was made with will surely burn her. 

Just before she readies herself to throw it, Rickard appears beside her.

“That will not work,” he says conversationally. 

“It will,” Sansa replies, before she lashes out; where it touches Visenya, the silvery edges darken, turning almost opaque where they’d once been translucent. Visenya throws her head back to howl, twisting to glare at Sansa, before she fades entirely out of view, taking Brandon with her.

“Those must have been well-made,” Rickard murmurs. “To hurt a ghost so strong as Visenya- strong indeed.” He frowns. “Not that it shall do you much good. You shall not be able to trap her half so easily, now that she knows what to expect.”

Sansa shoulders her pack and tightens the crude scabbard she’s tied around her waist. “It doesn’t need to," she says firmly. “It only needs to keep her away from me for tonight. By morning I shall be far from here, and Visenya’s power shall be faded.”

Rickard pauses. “You used rosemary for this. But you asked the Lady Tyrell for both rosemary and-”

“Lilies.” Sansa smiles blandly back at Rickard. “Sword lilies.”

He pales, staring at her, when Sansa pulls a thin slink of brilliant red flower. Sword lily meant strength of character and honor, and paired with the blood she’d coughed up from when Rickard had refused to protect her, bound with cloth the grey and white of their house, it’s all but an accusation of familial infidelity.

“Then I believe it is time for you to leave, granddaughter,” he tells her, and smiles, sadly. His eyes flick away, and then back to her. “If you can find it in yourself- tell your grandmother that I miss her, very much.” He hesitates, briefly, before continuing, “And that she has raised a wonderful granddaughter, with enough iron in her spine to forge a half-hand sword.”

Then Rickard starts to move towards where Visenya disappeared, but doesn’t stop speaking. “And worry not of Visenya. She shall not trouble you any longer, that much I swear to you.”

Then he disappears, and Sansa doesn’t pause to see the end of it; she turns and flees, slippers slapping against the stone floor.

…

When Sansa leaves King’s Landing, she leaves behind this: a doll of straw and wool, fitted for smaller hands than hers have been for near a decade; a cloak of white offered to her by a fire-scarred man, the bloodstains washed fastidiously away and hemmed with near-invisible stitches in a pattern that suggests a wolf’s teeth; and a braid, thick and red and tossed in a roaring flame before anyone could see it.

…

There are old sewage drains, leading out into the sea. According to Alysanne, they began as a method for emptying the castle’s waste out of the city, but the impact the drains had on fishing quickly stopped their usage. They’re small drains, all of them, but Sansa’s just slim enough to fit through the larger ones, and once she’s outside she can trace the shoreline until she reaches the Kingswood.

Sansa shoves her palms outward at the grate covering the exit. The metal grate is rusted almost fully-through and bends for the first two shoves, but it breaks across the middle after that. The pieces clatter down the hillside, a little louder than Sansa had thought they’d be.

It’s the turn of the year, though.

Anyone on guard will be drunk by now, and anyone who isn’t knows that this night is for eldritch things. Ghosts can break free of their bonds, or monsters of moonlight and stone can appear out of thin air, or tears in reality can become abruptly wider, more visible. One ragged-haired urchin will not draw anyone’s attention.

She pauses, though, before she drops onto the beach- Sansa’s never been alone before, and now the ghosts she thought would walk beside her for a few hours at least are caught up keeping more terrible ghosts from catching her. When she flees the city, Sansa flees all alone. It’s more difficult than she’d ever considered.

Except- even as she pulls herself out of the drain, even as she finds some purchase on the soft hills- Elia appears before her.

Elia, who looks weary, and triumphant, and dangerous, all at once. Sansa’s seen even less of her over the past few weeks, as Elia’s been trailing her brother around the city, but there’s a solidity to her now that Sansa’s not seen in any ghost save Visenya at her angriest.

“Princess Stark,” she says, quietly, hovering over the open air. “You are leaving, now.”

“Yes.”

“You are afraid.”

Sansa breathes in slowly. “Yes.”

“You have no cause for it,” says Elia firmly. “You are a girl after my own heart, Sansa of House Stark: a girl whom the world hates, and whom the world cannot forget. I have a brother to carry my banner yet, but I think you- you shall not have need of any such thing. You shall carry your own banners, and when you fall, the world shall carry it for centuries to come.”

“Lady Elia-” I don’t want that, Sansa thinks, wildly. I don’t- I don’t know what I want. I just- I wish I was back in Winterfell with Mother and Father and Robb and Lyarra and-

I wouldn’t mind being forgotten if I was happy.

Elia smiles at her, terrible and true, as if she knows Sansa’s mind, as if she knows the epiphany Sansa has just had. “You have grown. You have grown in ways that none of us expected, I think, painfully and regrettably; but grown nevertheless.”

Rickard’s words echo in her ears, then, and Sansa finds herself staring: The ghosts that remain without Targaryen blood have some measure of Stark-blood in their veins, Rickard had said, either that, or a will to overcome a pain more overwhelming than any you can imagine.

Sansa cannot imagine that a Stark married into the Martells, not with the distance between the two realms, not when the Starks never managed to wed into the Targaryens. Which means Elia faced a pain truly unearthly in its immensity, and retained her mind through it.

“Yes,” Sansa says cautiously.

“For your strength, then, with all the tears you’ve never shed over months of terrible pain, I offer one knowledge to you: Joffrey shall not live out the next year.” Elia reaches up and casts something away, and a scrap of silver floats down to the sand below before winking out. She glows a little brighter yet. “And for your kindness, with all the courtesy you’ve offered me over months of captivity, I offer one advice: do not return to your family until you have done what you wish to do, not if you wish to keep the vows you have sworn.”

She turns, and throws her arms upwards, and the beach is flooded with a pale, beautiful light, as if Elia’s taken all the moonlight off the ocean and crystallized it on them.

“And for your humility,” she says, voice echoing, a strange after-beat that sounds like a hundred voices speaking through her own- “with your determination to send your family away despite losing your own freedom, I offer one vow: the House of Martell has no issue with the House of Stark. The oath of vengeance I swore when your aunt ran away with my husband is rescinded.”

Elia holds the position. And above them- far above them, growing out of one of the stars shining in the sky, Sansa sees a silvery tunnel, one which brightens the beach further and leaves Elia looking almost solid. There is no wind that Sansa can see, but Elia’s silks whip about her with more and more fervor, until she looks as if she were being buffeted by a typhoon.

Do you accept?

The voice comes not from Elia, but from the silver tunnel above her. If Sansa squints into the light, she thinks she can see other ghosts, a hundred-hundred of them, all with dark hair and tanned skin. The voice thunders up her bones and shakes in her mind, so powerful it hurts.

“Accept-” her own voice shrivels, but Sansa beats down the dryness with all of Visenya’s training. “Accept what?”

One of our blood has rescinded her oath of vengeance. Daughter-Elia has offered the price of false vengeance. Shall you accept the price, or do you require more?

Oath of vengeance.

Rickard had mentioned it, once, to Sansa. The oath of vengeance called for equality- from what Rickard had said, Sarra had sworn one against Jonnel when he wed Robyn Ryswell only a moon’s turn after Sansa’s death; Sarra had taken the oath in the name of all the children Jonnel had ensured Sansa could not bear, and in return Robyn Ryswell had borne none either. It’s why Barthogan became Lord after Jonnel, not any of Jonnel’s get.

Sansa doesn’t know what the price of rescinding the vow can be, but she thinks she has a fair idea now: the agreement of the oathsworn party. If she agrees, the oath is dissolved. If she doesn’t…

But dissolving the oath is not a singular issue.

Elia must have needed a reason to stay back through that terrible pain, and now Sansa thinks she knows what it is: hatred, of her husband and of Lyanna Stark. If she lets go of that hatred, then she can move on. Which means that if Sansa refuses to accept her offer, then Elia shall remain in the city where she was raped and murdered for- eternity.

In the end, there’s only one answer she can give.

“I accept,” she says, before correcting herself, “we accept. House Stark accepts.”

Despite the stutter, the ceremony seems to be concluded. Elia lowers her hands, and when she looks at Sansa, there is a deep satisfaction suffusing her face. She shines so brightly she looks as if the very sun were contained within her bones.

“Thank you,” she says, simply. “I shall have my vengeance on the Lannisters through my brother, Lady Stark, and peace through you, before this new year is finished. And in the next turning, I shall return to the light of my ancestors.” She flicks her fingers, and the silvery light fades away, replaced with the normal light of the stars. It feels so much darker now- Sansa exhales through her teeth. “Thank you, Lady Stark. May you find kindness in the world around you, and may the gods guide you to your destiny without grief. From one princess to another: may you live a long, fruitful life.”

Sansa scrapes for words, but before she can find them, Elia disappears.

Goodbye, Sansa thinks, and I hope you find peace, and may the gods guide you well.

But even as she slides down the hill and across the beach, footprints fading beneath the rolling tide- Sansa cannot help but remember the silver tunnel above her, showing countless Martells all looking down on their daughter.

She’s never seen anything of that for the Starks.

All the Starks have remained in Winterfell, bound to stone and to a half-life, all for the grief of their ancestor.

Unfair, Sansa thinks, and cannot shake it for all the time she heads North.

…

The road is hard, but not harder than the Kingsguards’ mailed fists. Sansa binds her breasts as Betha had taught her, smears mud over her arms and eyes and hair, learns to shift her center of gravity lower, rooted. She is slender, still, painfully so; the gentle swells of her breasts and hips are easily disguised in clothes a few sizes too large.

Ghosts help her on her travels- they tell her where old berry-copses are, or knives they’d hidden for centuries, or cloth that won’t be missed for weeks. Sansa learns to steal into a town and out of it without anyone knowing the better. Dark Sister presses bruises into her thighs when she sleeps with it strapped to her waist, but she cannot find it in herself to leave it anywhere else.

Finally, finally- weeks later, months later, Sansa crests a hill and sees Riverrun.

It shines blue and red. There are rivers roaring around her, ghosts whispering behind her, and her parents, her brother, they’re almost within sight. Sansa steps forwards, out of the shadows, into the light-

“Sansa,” a woman calls.

“Mother?”

A woman steps out of the darkness, smiling up at her. Shining down her back is dark, gleaming hair. Her eyes are light, but not lighter than Lyarra’s. She looks exactly like Sansa remembers her mother to look, only less substantial, only older, only- frailer.

“Hello, Sansa,” she says, and her voice sounds like Sansa’s mother as well, but- but there are differences. “It is good to see you, child. Catelyn spoke true when she said you’ve her look about you, albeit lovelier by far.”

Not Mother.

“Grandmother,” breathes Sansa.

She smiles warmly. “Eddard did mention your sharp mind.”

“Why are you here?”

Minisa’s face grows more solemn.

“Because,” she says, “I am here to tell you: you cannot see your family.”