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“Maybe she was nobleborn. Maybe that’s why your mother couldn’t keep you. Maybe Father loved her too, before he loved my mother. After all, theirs was a marriage of duty, and not love, when it was contracted and then tried by the rebellion.”
Jon is startled by what she has just said, and she doesn’t need to be watching him closely to feel him questioning her sanity in talking such of their father’s greatest sin in the eye of her mother. The quiet wind that blows from the sea in front of them is cold, but they have been sitting on this balcony for hours, and still neither wants to go inside.
“Maybe,” is all he says then, and she doesn’t know how to say what she truly wants to say, so she remains silent, watching the sea stretch from the balcony of the Red Keep. They’ll have a Council in an hour or so. Someone will come and fetch the King in the North and the Lady of Winterfell. There will be things to discuss, and decide, and negotiate. Deals to broker, and pretences to uphold.
But she keeps on thinking of the fair lady who threw herself from a tower, hair wide and dark, and she must have started fidgeting, for he asks: “Is there something else you have in mind with regards to my mother, Sansa? Half-tales make for poor stories, you know that.”
“I have no tale to tell,” she says. “Barely rumours, I’m afraid. Things I heard in King’s Landing, when I was held prisoner here. Maybe I heard them only because someone wanted me to hear them. So many things are coming back to me...”
“Do I have to bribe those rumours out of you with lemon cakes then?” It’s half an attempt at a joke, an effort at taking her thoughts away from her time in King’s Landing during the War of the Five Kings. It had taken lots of coaxing to convince her to come back to what she will always consider a prison; but he’d needed her by his side, now that steel was put aside in favour of quills and parchments, and drafts and treaties.
Now that the Dragon Queen has saved the realm of men, she wanted her kingdom to thrive on the good will of those who know it. It had been unthinkable for Jon to represent the North at the negotiation table on his own, when Sansa had displayed time and time again her political skill. Jon has learned in his attempts at coaxing her to come South with him that many scars of hers had faded from her skin but never quite disappeared from her mind.
Cakes, lemony or not, are not what this is about though. She had heard about Ashara Dayne, the Maid of Starfall, back in Winterfell, when she was young and clueless, knew it angered her father to hear the name spoken aloud in the corridors of his castle. But now, in the Red Keep, it is a name which holds so much more echo – faced with the Narrow Sea, it speaks of unfathomable depths, of a history Sansa knows shaped her entire life, and her parents’, and yet at the ripe age of two and twenty, she is barely starting to understand half of it.
“Merely rumours, Jon. I should not have spoken them aloud. You must have already heard of her, the lady Ashara Dayne of Starfall?”
Jon doesn’t react at all, which is the most potent of all the reactions he could have had.
“I’ve heard the name. Father refused to have it spoken aloud in Winterfell,” he says. His voice is cold and unwavering. “I imagined many things about her, but then another rumour told the tale of a fisherman’s wife. And then… but those are but rumours Sansa. Truth is, I have delved on them for endless hours when I was a kid, back home. But it was pointless.”
And suddenly, Sansa feels guilt strike through her chest. Those speculations, those rumours, they are a game to her – but they must be what Jon has fed his hope with for endless hours and endless nights for almost all of his life. She cannot imagine what it was like and she suddenly feels foolish, a feeling she thought she had grown accustomed to.
“I’m sorry Jon… I did not think before speaking.”
He grants her neither forgiveness nor dismisses her apologies, only remains silent, and she probably deserves neither.
*
He will regret it later. It’s a certainty. And still he suddenly says, “I know who my mother is, Sansa.” He doesn’t leave her the time to be startled by such a confession, for he immediately adds, “I have no desire to speak of the matter. But you should know that I know, now. And I have found it changes little to who I am, for that has been decided too long ago for a name or a story to destroy it entirely. I am our Father’s son. And I have decided that it is enough for me, and all I ever wish to be.”
It is not.
There was a time when he had wanted to be so much more than that to her. When Howland Reed had told him the truth, he had decided for a mad moment to throw the war away and run back to Winterfell, to its Lady, and declare to the whole of Westeros that he was not her brother, had never been – that he had the right to claim her skin, her affections, and her desire, to pursue her and make her his and love her anew once the Long Night was over. For a mad moment, he hadn't cared for people, or family, only for her. It spoke to his madness that he had only wondered if she would have him only much later.
But time had gone by, in the war and in the cold, and all he knows now is that nothing could be worth abandoning who he is so as to obtain what he wants.
No one knows who are his parents, just as he wanted it to be. He’s the blood of Winterfell, and he will rebuild their castle and their family and their kingdom diligently, standing by her side. He could have had more than that, maybe. His real lineage could have given him so much but even after sharing a bed with Daenerys Targaryen, he still doesn’t know how she would take to his parentage, to the possibility of a Blackfyre chaos starting at the apex of his lineage. Maybe she’d make him her consort, maybe she’d make him her heir, maybe she’d burn him alive. Maybe she’d love him as family, maybe she’d kill him as family.
He doesn’t want to know.
Sansa hasn’t said anything, and keeps on staring at him. He’s never found a streak of purple in his eyes, but even if it were here, he could blame it on Ashara Dayne. Maybe that's what Sansa is looking for. Traces of the woman her Father loved before duty took its toll. Ashara Dayne must have loved their Father a lot, to throw herself off a tower when he killed her brother. It seems to Jon that the trail to his birth is only littered with corpses, and senseless loss.
Sansa extends her hand to him then, in a silent offering, and he takes it. He'll never know if she would have accepted him in the way he had wanted her to for the maddest of moments. But she seems to accept who he wants to be. Jon will live his entire life keeping her in this lie Eddard Stark crafted for them, but at least this lie guarantees that he will be by her side, and she will be by his, and surely it could be so much worse than that.