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She has been here nearly three moons now, and still the cold is a shock. It’s a living thing with long fingers that worm through the heavy layers of furs and boiled leather to grasp her wrists and ribs, stealing into her lungs like water and freezing there, prickly icicles raw in her throat. What little breath she has turns to fog that blurs her vision and stings her eyes.
This, Margaery supposes, is winter, winter in the north. As they make their way across the grounds, boots so heavy she can barely walk but dry, at least, she thinks that it explains a great deal. A creature of this place would melt away to nothing in the sticky warmth of the south, and the woman walking beside her is, if nothing else, of the north. When she speaks, her voice is as quiet and sharp as the air biting their skin.
“Do you miss being queen?”
Margaery’s lips, chapped from their time outside, twitch into a queer half-smile. “If you’ll remember, I never quite made it that far,” she says. “'Thrice wedded, never bedded.' I was never married in truth.”
“I suppose not in truth,” Sansa concedes, “but in King’s Landing, you were far more of a queen than Cersei ever was.”
“And what of you?” Margaery asks, not answering, and clasping the fur of her muff more tightly. “I admit that I was surprised to see how well the crown suits you. I don’t think it would have fit so well when we first met.”
Sansa sighs. In the half light of the evening, her skin is paler than ever. In King’s Landing she had burned so easily; Margaery remembers rubbing ointment into her shoulders, the soft hisses that the younger girl tried to bite back, but that had been before she’d truly learned. Margaery suspects that it would take a great deal more to elicit even a grimace from her now.
“No,” Sansa finally murmurs. “No, it wouldn’t have.” She smiles suddenly, slight and sharp. “You know, when we met, I felt so sorry for you. But even then, I thought that you would be such a lovely queen. You were just like the ladies the singers wrote about. I hoped that Joffrey wouldn’t take it from you, because we could have used someone like that.”
There is nothing to say to that, not now; she knows as well as anyone that this is not the world of songs. She might have been a queen once but now she is little more than a hostage, a handmaiden to the Queen of the North, here at the mercy of the Dragon Queen. There are so many crowns.
She thinks about the question, thinks about the women she has known, the royals of Westeros. There was Cersei, yes, every bit as mad as Aerys by the end, and on the other hand Myrcella, bright and sweet and just as dead. There was the Young Wolf’s wife, who had faded away as quickly as she had appeared, and the Red Woman, lost in the final battle.
They are left with Daenerys, the silver queen who arrived on dragonback and joined Jon Snow to burn the armies of dead creatures pouring through the Wall. That had won her support quickly, great houses across the continent bending their knee in the wake of Stannis Baratheon’s execution. Margaery rather thinks that the dragons inspire more loyalty than their mother, but it has served her well enough, and in the thick of winter, everyone seems to be content with fire.
And then, of course, there is Sansa, the Queen in the North, who was left with ruins and rubble and is building a kingdom from it. Margaery doesn’t know the details of her agreement with Daenerys, only that her Targaryen cousin was instrumental in arranging it, and comes to Winterfell twice a year. He last departed shortly after Margaery’s own arrival, though she never spoke to him, just as she doesn’t speak now - she has always known which secrets must be kept. The lack of stained sheets to change, the queasiness her queen tries to hide and the way she doesn’t pull her laces quite so tightly, these are things that are best left unacknowledged.
Sansa doesn’t seem perturbed by the silence, allowing Margaery her thoughts (or perhaps lost in her own) as they pass under the torches and into the blessed warmth of the castle, and then Sansa’s chambers. She remains pensive as Margaery hangs their cloaks and furs to dry, stripping to her shift and wrapping a thick robe around herself before pulling one of the furs from her bed to the rug by the fire. There is a chair, but she sits on the floor in front of it, her hair damp and loose down her back and her thin body barely discernable under the heavy layers.
These are the times that Margaery remembers the girl that she used to know. “Your Grace,” she begins, but Sansa shakes her head.
“Have a drink with me,” she commands, and Margaery knows that this night will be another thing that they do not acknowledge.
She undresses herself, taking one of her own robes from where it is hidden at the bottom of the chest, and pours the wine. It thaws her from the inside while the fire softens her stiff, frozen skin. Sansa’s dark eyes flicker with the reflection of the flames, and Margaery sits behind her, in the chair that Sansa had foregone. Sansa sets her goblet on the floor and tilts her head back, resting it against Margaery’s knee.
These are the moments Margaery likes best. She strokes her fingers through her queen’s hair, catching knots and the remnants of snowflakes, and Sansa closes her eyes but doesn’t move.
Margaery thinks that Sansa is right - she would have made a lovely queen. In King’s Landing, when she had played the role, she had done it well; she had given the people her time and company, had made them love her and offered them comfort as the world fell apart around them. She had been kind and gentle, but now it is time to rule, to rebuild, and that is not a job for kind, gentle queens.
Though Sansa is lovely, especially like this, with her eyes drifting shut and her lips half parted. They don’t share many nights like this. For all that Margaery knows how hard Sansa fought on her behalf, knows that her head would be on a spike outside the Red Keep had Daenerys had her way, the queen still keeps her distance, and her silence. Even the little gasps and whimpers that Margaery had used to know so well are gone, replaced by harsh, held breaths and bitten lips.
She kisses those lips now, bending down, pressing her fingers into Sansa’s shoulders, and Sansa arches up, turning to press closer and thread her own fingers through Margaery’s tangled curls. She is warm and wild, soft and smooth and so very desperate, but when that fades she knows that everything will turn cold again, and that tomorrow they won’t speak of it.
She’ll never tell Sansa, but she does miss being queen. The power, she can live without (and has a better chance of it, she thinks, remembering her father, her husbands, the kings and queens who wanted it so desperately), but she had liked making people happy, liked being loved.
Once, she thinks that this girl could have loved her, but that was a long time ago, and now all Margaery can hope to do is make her a little less sad.