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I.

In the courtyard her men cheer and drink, singing bawdy songs that she pretends not to know, and every now and again a cry rises up among them: ‘For Winterfell!’ The roar of their victory sweeps through the ruins. ‘Queen in the North!’

But she is not there. She has left the common soldiers to their war wounds and whores, the nobles to their baths and their suppers. She will feast them all on the morrow, reward their valor and loyalty, spill wine for the dead and thank men for their sacrifices — the brothers and sons lost to battle and sickness as they marched through the cold North to take back her home. Men of the Vale, men of the Riverlands, and most of all men of the North, who had fought in her name and in the name of her butchered kin. For how many moons now have their boots been snow-soaked and their stomachs empty? Tonight they will rest and drink, and, at last within the very ruins they’d fought for, they might even curse her. ‘What is the North,’ she reminds Brienne, ‘even the North protected and sovereign, with their families dead and their homes destroyed?’

‘Your Grace.’ Brienne shifts uneasily in the doorway of the lord’s chamber. ‘Their homes were already destroyed. Their sons already fought and died. You didn’t start this war.’

‘There will be more bloodshed. We have not won yet.’

A moment of hesitation, and then Brienne nods, her mouth set in a grim line. Of course she understands that the fight must continue. She is not some foolish maiden, this woman who pledged her sword to Sansa long before Sansa had any hope of Winterfell; no, she is a warrior, and carries scars across her face as proof.

A warrior is not what Sansa is. She is something else.

She touches the bannister of the bed where once her parents slept. As a girl, how many times did she beg to sleep in their arms, instead of her faraway chamber with her little sister? And how many times did they, sharing a soft look, indulge her? Just for tonight, my love. She can still hear her mother’s voice, but the room no longer smells of her. Winterfell has been taken too many times to imagine that Catelyn Stark was the last person to sleep in this bed. Theon took the castle, years ago. And then the Boltons, who had time enough during their occupation to rebuild much of the Great Keep and the Great Hall, before Stannis Baratheon came for them. Did Roose Bolton sleep here? He betrayed her brother, betrayed her family, and for his sins he’d won himself their home — at least for a little while.

She will not soon forget the coolness of his eyes when she took the Dreadfort and ordered his execution. She watched Brienne’s sword arc through the air, glinting white against the snow, and did not turn away when the blade bit into his neck.

His last words were, ‘What a pity.’

‘Your Grace,’ Brienne says, very gently, and Sansa forces her gaze away from the bed. Brienne is clear-eyed, tense-jawed, her hand heavy on the pommel of her sword. ‘It’s been a very long day. Shall I send for your handmaid?’

‘No, no, leave her.’

Merry will be dancing with the men and her friends among the whores, matching them drink for drink: a lowborn girl with no sense of propriety, but she braids hair tolerably well and she makes Sansa smile. For tonight Sansa will let it pass. One day she will be queen to more than ruins and terrified smallfolk, and she will have a lady’s maid who can teach Merry and help spare her from gossip, but for now propriety means little and less to Sansa, and means nothing at all to the girl she found selling her wares among the soldiers some weeks ago, a child much too young (younger than Arya would be now, if she’s still alive, younger even than Bran) for such dangerous work.

And if any man tries to hurt her, tonight or any other, they will answer to their queen and her Queensguard — if they survive the attempt. Sansa has given Merry a small dagger and has shown her how to use it. She needed such a weapon once, when courtesy and honeyed words and lies as delicate and intricate as her embroidery were not enough, and though Sansa will never be a fighter — no matter how Brienne, Seven save her, tries to teach her — she knows the value of a blade. Her own is never dull.

‘You look tired.’ Brienne drops her eyes. ‘I beg your pardon for saying so.’

In the clouded mirror on the dressing table, Sansa’s face reflects pale and drawn, the skin beneath her eyes darkened to a blueish purple. She touches two fingers to these bruises of exhaustion. ‘But of course you’re right,’ she says, taking a seat before the mirror as she begins to loosen her hair from its plaits, her fingers rougher and more impatient than Merry’s would have been. ‘It has been a long day. It’s been a long many years. And I think it may only be the beginning.’

She tugs hard enough that she has to bite down on a curse. Her scalp aches. Her head aches. She will be an old woman before the North is free. Before she is free, if such a thing is even possible.

After all, if she could not win this war in battle — and no war, she knows, can ever be won entirely in battle — then she will have no choice but to marry again. At least with Stannis that had been no option: Stannis’s wife yet lives, his heir is a girl, and even if it were not so, no flattery in the world could have persuaded him to part with that which he believes rightfully his. No, he never would have traded Winterfell to her, and so she took it.

But if she means to keep it, she cannot avoid marriage forever. Harry is long dead; he cannot serve as an excuse any longer. Mayhaps Willas Tyrell will have her, just as she dreamed in another lifetime, and the Tyrells will throw their money and their men behind her. They cannot possibly imagine that Margaery still has a right to the Iron Throne, not with Tommen dead, the poor child, and Cersei and Jaime Lannister too — so they might see the value in supporting the North’s claim against Stannis. Or she can try for one of the Lannisters’ bannermen, now that the lion’s den is in ruin, and bring the houses of the Westerlands to her side. But such a marriage was folly for Robb. She cannot but remember that. It might be best to solidify the North by marrying the younger son or beloved cousin of one of her loyal houses, but the Mormonts are all women — the only male heir, the nephew of Maege Mormont, was exiled by Sansa’s own father many years ago — and the Manderleys too, now. Albar Royce might serve, though she can hardly imagine it, and in any case with Sweetrobin and Harry and Petyr all dead, she’d prefer to keep the Royces in the Eyrie to defend her claim.

In truth, she can’t be certain any man will have her; she has passed between so many hands since Joffrey, and every great family knows it. A septon may have declared Alayne Stone a maid untouched, but no one can say the same of Queen Sansa Stark, and even respectably widowed as she is, the rumors will not easily fade. Not until she has the power to make them fade.

Better, then, to seek an alliance with the Targaryen boy: not marriage, she supposes, not if Aegon truly means to sit the Iron Throne, but she can offer her support against Stannis, in exchange for the independence of the North. She knows nothing of this lost prince — the realm hardly knew he existed all these years — but it is quite a tale he tells, and the people will always rally for a tale like his, the trueborn heir of Prince Rhaegar, miraculously recovered, miraculously alive. War is long and the people have grown sick to death of Lannisters and Starks and Baratheons. It might be they need another name to fight for.

‘Your Grace … ’

Brienne’s tall frame appears in the mirror, and Sansa sees her lift one tentative hand into the air, as if she might pat Sansa’s back, soothe her as one does a babe. Sansa has never asked how old Brienne is, but she can’t be more than a handful or two of years older than Sansa. Not a girl, no more than Sansa is anymore, but young, despite all she has seen and all that has been done to her.

There are so few women in her life now. Once, before Joffrey, before King’s Landing, they had been all she’d known, aside from her brothers and the traitor Theon Greyjoy, and she misses the presence of all those who have gone from her. Her mother, her sister, her septa, and poor Jeyne Poole, whose torment Sansa avenged on Ramsay Bolton but whom she knows she will never see again. Even the Tyrells had been a solace in their way, Margaery especially, and of course Mya Stone and Myranda Royce. So it is well that she has Brienne at least, Brienne who has shown her such loyalty and kindness, and who knew her mother, too, years ago.

Rising from the dressing table, Sansa smiles at Brienne, as honest a smile as she has. ‘You have been a true friend, Lady Brienne. And tonight you must rest. You fought harder than anyone in the battle today.’

‘A short battle — ’

‘Be that as it may. Tomorrow we begin strategizing in earnest, and I would have the Captain of my Queensguard at her best. Sleep, Brienne,’ she commands, ‘and send for Sandor Clegane. He will guard my door tonight.’

The lives Brienne has led, the battles she’s fought, have given her no cause to learn to keep the emotions from her face. Dislike, distrust, still turn the corner of her mouth, months after the man who had been the Hound swore his oath to Sansa, but Brienne knows better than to object. In the end she merely tucks her chin down in a curt nod. ‘Of course, Your Grace.’

Once Brienne is gone, the last remaining Stark of Winterfell retreats to the bed where her parents once slept untroubled, ignorant of all that awaited them in the cruel future, and she closes her eyes against her own foolish hopes. She isn’t safe. She will never be safe. But she is home.

II.

They rebuild what they can.

The Maester’s Tower and ruined side of the First Keep are unsalvageable, at least until she has the coin to hire skilled builders, and besides no man would agree to such a project in the dead of winter, but the men, bundled in furs and working with chilly planks of wood, build stables for the remaining horses to shield them from the piercing wind and ever-amassing snow. They repair the already-decaying repairs the Boltons and Stannis’s men left behind, and Sansa spends three days overseeing the few women in her company and a handful of the men as they cut and stitch bedrolls from ruined curtains and the tatters of old clothes. There are never enough beds to go around, and never enough blankets, but she won’t turn away the gray-faced smallfolk that have begun to find their way through the snow to Winterfell, begging for whatever food and shelter Sansa can provide. She is their queen, she cannot abandon them.

‘They say that something’s coming,’ Merry tells Sansa one morning as she brushes out her hair. ‘They say it’s something terrible.’

‘Who says?’

‘All the folks coming in. The refugees and orphans and that lot. They say they’re running.’

‘Running?’

From what? There are no armies anywhere near. The Ironborn are sticking to the shores, for now, after Asha Greyjoy was taken prisoner at Deepwood Motte and disappeared into a blizzard. They will strike eventually, and she will need to face them when they do, but for now the North does not appear to be their goal: she suspects they are after something more. And Stannis turned south long ago, when Aegon Targaryen took Dragonstone, though it is possible that, just as he left men to guard Winterfell, he also left some outpost at the Wall that she does not know about.

Not for the first time, she wishes Jon Snow were alive. He might be an ally, and a friend, and the only family in the world left to her, not to mention eyes and ears further north than she can afford to venture. But then again, perhaps not. When they were children, Sansa was never especially kind to him, and she knows he had not loved her as he loved Arya and the boys. Still, her heart had jolted with sorrow when Petyr told her he was dead, that the body of the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch had been dragged by his direwolf into the kingdom beyond the Wall. Never fear, sweetling, he’d said, you will always have me. His hand smoothed circles over the small of her back as if to comfort her but by then she knew better, and for many nights after, all she dreamt of was Jon’s wolf and his red eyes.

‘That’s right. Running.’ Merry tugs the comb through the dry ends of Sansa’s hair, wincing when Sansa winces. ‘Do you suppose it’s ghosts?’

‘That it’s ghosts they run from, you mean?’

‘Yes, miss. Your Grace. My mum always told me that the one thing you really need to be scared of is ghosts, but to tell the truth, I can’t say I really believe in ‘em.’ Twisting Sansa’s hair into a tight braid, her fingers confidently weaving the hair to and fro, she adds, ‘I’ve never seen a ghost, have I?’ She tugs the hair once more, harder, and reaches for the band. ‘A lot of evil I have seen, Your Grace, but no ghosts yet.’

With a pat on the back of Sansa’s head, Merry nods toward the mirror. ‘That looks awfully pretty, I think.’

It is a fine braid, perfectly even, down the length of her neck — far from the ornate stylings of King’s Landing, and all the more lovely for it. After all, Sansa merely wishes for a respectable Northern style to keep her hair from her face when she addresses the men or speaks with the smallfolk. She spent so long as Alayne, hiding her face behind her dark hair, and then as Harry’s wife, Petyr’s puppet, prettily turned out and nothing but a symbol for the ambitions of men, but she must be more like her mother now, more like her father, who’d possessed steely gazes and eyes as honest as she’d ever seen.

‘Very well done, Merry. Thank you.’

‘You have to be careful with them in the Great Hall,’ Merry warns as Sansa stands. ‘Superstitious folk don’t trust much but their own worries. I know. Mum was like that.”

What happened to Merry’s mother? Dead, she imagines, of starvation or sickness or war; dead of her worries, come to claim her at last. All mothers die, one way or another. Her own was murdered. But Sansa herself cannot get a child; in all that time that Harry came to her, and then Petyr, still her moonblood came each month, and with it both relief and sorrow. She did not want Littlefinger’s bastard, no more, in truth, than she wanted Harry’s heir, but if she cannot conceive a child, her house will die with her.

She straightens her skirts and turns to the door.

‘I will try to comfort them,’ she tells Merry. ‘Ghosts are only something from stories, meant to frighten children into being good. They aren’t real.’

She says it with more certainty than she feels. How can she pretend that ghosts don’t exist, when every night she dreams of her lost brothers, of Arya’s dirty face; when she catches glimpses of them, scents in the night that belong to another world — damp fur and too-sweet blood, the earthy odor of crumbling bark — but that are also, somehow, theirs? At times she wants to scream with frustration, for she knows they are there, she knows she could reach them, steal them back from the Stranger who claimed them, if only, if only, she understood how. Stupid Sansa, she rages at herself. I really am useless. No matter how she calls for them, her lost ones, they never see her and they never follow her home.

Those nights, she wakes shaking, and no matter how she tries, she cannot remember the feel of her mother’s arms around her or the warmth of her father’s smile.

*

The refugees have nightmares too. Some nights when she cannot sleep, she dresses by the dim firelight and pulls her guard along with her to the Great Hall to see where they lay, thrashing in their bedrolls and on their crowded cots.

Tonight it is Sandor Clegane at her side, the light of the corridor torches casting ghastly shadows across the carnage of his scars. He is silent. He is often silent these days.

In King’s Landing, before, he talked too much, drunk and overly familiar, sharp with bitterness, soft with some clumsy approximation of kindness, frightening, yes, but somehow less so than Joffrey, less so than the queen. She has not forgiven him for his behavior the night the Blackwater burned, just as she has not forgotten how he saved her from the mob, but it is clear he is a different man now, sober, more careful, and at last willing to pledge himself to something. To her. His language is still foul, his eyes still fierce, and his hands still built for killing, but he is loyal. He still calls himself a dog.

‘What do they dream about, do you think?’ she asks.

He shrugs, minutely, then seems to think the better of it. ‘Damned if I know. What every poor bastard dreams of, I should think. Gold. Women. Or men, I s’pose, in this case.’ The refugees are mostly women, many of them widowed, alone. ‘Comfort.’

‘Home?’

A nod. ‘Could be.’

He limps a little beside her as they walk amongst the sleeping smallfolk, and she wonders if he dreams of home, now that his monstrous brother is dead. But he is here, at Winterfell. He has sworn an oath.

A very young man, with hair brighter and more orange than her own, startles awake as she passes. ‘My — my Lady.’ He scrambles to his feet and she sees that he is a cripple; his arm is missing from the elbow down. ‘That is, Your Grace.’ He fumbles a bow, and Sandor Clegane edges in front of her, so that when the young man glances up again, the redness in his face drains away with fright.

‘Good evening.’ Sansa keeps her voice soft, and steps around her guard, who tenses but says nothing. ‘I apologize if I woke you.’

He forces his eyes away from Sandor Clegane’s scars. ‘Not — not at all.’

‘I’m sorry that we have so little to offer at present. I hope you are not too cold? Too hungry? I see that the people do not sleep well and I wish I could help ease them.’

‘No, no. You’ve been so generous, Your Grace. More than generous.’

She doesn’t know if he means it, or if he is simply afraid of her, afraid of what she might do if he complained. Her father would’ve known. Robb would’ve.

Still, she rests one a gloved hand on the young man’s remaining hand. He really is little more than a boy. He reminds her of Bran. ‘If there is anything, let any of my people know. We are trying our best.’

Color floods back into the young man’s face, and he stammers a thank you and stumbles through another bow as Sansa retreats.

As they return to her father’s chamber, she catches Sandor Clegane nearly laughing at her, his ugly face twisted with amusement. She bristles — it reminds her of King’s Landing. ‘What, ser, do you find so amusing?’

‘Nothing at all, Your Grace.’ His tone is easy, easier than it’s been in some time, and it gives his proper address a texture of sarcasm that she does not care for. ‘Only it is a fine way to rule, if it will work on the women too. A few words with that green little boy and he’s already in love with his queen. I’d wager he’s ready to carry a sword for you, cripple or no. I’d wager he’s ready to die for you.’

A chill creeps over her, and she thinks of Bran again. ‘Don’t be absurd. He is loyal because I am a Stark, I am my father’s daughter and my brother’s last living heir.’

His smile is gone, but he hesitates before he opens the chamber door for her. ‘Your Grace,’ he says, and this time is sounds like when he called her little bird, cutting in a way that hurts only himself. ‘The people have rallied for you. You. Not your name. Not your kin. Not only those things, at least. Don’t doubt that they will die if they must, and I daresay not a man among them would regret it.’

She ought to show her gratitude, she ought to acknowledge what his words mean: that his oath binds him fast, and he would not undo it if he could. That Brienne stays by her not only for a long-ago promise to a long-dead woman, but because she cares for Sansa, believes in her. That the families who have supported her do not look at her and see every way that she is weaker, and stupider, and more foolish than Robb had been — and (she cannot lie herself) Robb had been very foolish.

She doesn’t say anything to Clegane; she merely closes the door on his face. They will die, he said, and she knows he is right. They will die, so many more will die, and she will rule over nothing but corpses and worms.

III.

She meets with her people every day. The lords bring their concerns, their ideas, their strategies to her, and the smallfolk bring their fears and their complaints and their thanks. They bring their sorrows and their stories, too. She hears about their lost husbands and children, about the disease that has ravaged them, the cold that has blackened their limbs and numbed them to their own hunger. She hears their ghost stories too.

Something is coming, they warn her. The animals, what animals remain, have spooked, have broken from their paddocks, run south. Some of their men have gone out, hunting or collecting kin who live in the great nothingness of the vast north, and have not returned. They hear wolves howling every night, and one woman, with a brother at the Wall, has reached out to his mistress in Mole’s Town to try to get word of him, but she has heard nothing back. They say wildlings have settled in the Gift. They say the wildlings burn their dead. They say this winter has already taken too much.

She cannot help but agree.

IV.

A raven brings her an offer: Tanton Fossoway, the friendship of the Tyrells, promises of sisterhood from Margaery herself. As if Sansa has forgotten how quickly Margaery’s friendship vanished after her marriage to Tyrion, as if she’s forgotten that the Tyrells framed her for Joffrey’s murder and sold her to Petyr.

Yet she must consider it. The raven she sent to Aegon has met no reply, and if he has no interest in an alliance — or if that battle has turned against him and he has been taken prisoner, or killed — then she has no choice but to seek allies elsewhere. Her men will hold the North as long as they can, but once the war for the Iron Throne is settled, the winner will come for her. She needs support, even from those who turned against her in the past.

At least it means her prospects are not ruined. Though she can’t but feel that the Tyrells could hardly hold her husbands against her, with thrice-widowed Margaery still their prize bloom.

‘The Tyrells are the wealthiest family in Westeros now,’ Sansa tells Brienne, speaking just loud enough for the other woman to hear over the din of men and smallfolk supping on their meagre wares. ‘They won the loyalty of many of the Lannisters’ bannermen. Even without ruling, they will be a family of influence under a new king.’

‘If they survive.’

Sansa glances at the letter, unfolded before her, the sweet words in such a sweet hand. Margaery knows how to play the game. ‘They will survive. Olenna Tyrell is too smart to allow otherwise, and Margaery is free to marry again, if necessary. And Loras may be dead, but Willas, the heir, is still unmarried. The whole realm is scrambling for power now. With the right matches — they will do very well indeed.’

Brienne hunches forward in her seat, peering at the letter, and when she sits back again, her mouth is pinched.

‘I know you do not wish to marry again,’ is all Brienne says.

She sips her wine. ‘Wishes do not come into it. Without allies, this will all have been for nothing. Winterfell will fall again.’

‘I cannot advise you in this, Your Grace.’

‘You think it unwise?’

‘I am not your Hand. I understand why it could be an advantageous match, but it is not for me to say if it would be best. I only wonder … ’

‘Yes, Brienne?’

‘If you would be unhappy.’

‘I suppose you do not know the story of my parents’ marriage. My mother was meant to marry my uncle Brandon, but when he died, she married my father instead. She hardly knew him, and they did not love each other at first. They couldn’t have, or else why would my father have gotten a bastard? But you knew her, you must’ve seen — she did love him. Of that there can be no doubt. After he died, she must’ve been … ’ Sansa shakes her head.

‘I’m sorry, Your Grace. If you think it best, I have no objections.’ Brienne’s voice is flat, not stern, exactly, but still low with disapproval. ‘I know little of such things, of course, as I have never been married.’

‘I have. It was wretched.’ Tyrion had not been unkind, but she could never trust him. Harry had been a disappointment, drunk, unfaithful, a brute in their marriage bed. And Petyr — well, she had not married Petyr, at least. She sighs. ‘But even you must admit that I must eventually marry. I must try for heirs.’

‘Eventually. But so soon?’

‘There is Winterfell to think of. If I can’t save Winterfell, it’ll all have been for nothing, won’t it? So many years, so many lives. I — well, there is so little I will leave behind me if Winterfell goes. So little for the Starks to be remembered by. My family. My parents. My brothers and my sister.’ The world had tried to strip the Starks of their name, through slaughter and torture and betrayal, through years of subterfuge and dye to keep her hair dark. She cannot let this last pillar fall.

‘I would have the Starks live on,’ she says to Brienne. ‘Is that pride?’

‘Mayhaps,’ Brienne says. She leans close, pressing her hand to Sansa’s, and for a moment Sansa knows somehow that Brienne once comforted her mother like this too, held her hand as if she were a sister, or a friend. ‘Or it is only that you miss them. You want them to be proud of you.’

Sansa nods and drinks the rest of her wine.

*

She considers what her father would say, or her mother, or even Arya. Eddard Stark always said he wanted his daughter to marry a man who was strong and gentle and brave, but Sansa does not know if such a man exists anymore. The last one died with Robb, or maybe with Jon, who, baseborn though he was, had always been sweet with the children, and considerate, and surely must’ve been valiant to rise to Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch in so short a time. The last good men died with her family, and she has never known another man who could compare.

(In the morning she asks Brienne, ‘What do you know about Tanton Fossoway?’ and Brienne doesn’t hide her dismay.

‘He fought for Renly,’ she says, ‘but he bent the the knee to Joffrey in the end.’

‘Craven?’

Brienne’s lips thin. ‘No, but his loyalty lies solely with the Tyrells. His allegiance will change with their whims.’

‘Yes, I suspected as much. But is he … kind?’

‘I do not know, Your Grace. Few of the men I have fought alongside have shown me much kindness, but with a beautiful queen he may be a different man.’

Sansa does not like this answer, and she knows her father would not either.)

Catelyn was more practical. She wanted a good man for her daughter, yes, but she understood the necessity of smart alliances too. She understood the sacrifices that must be made in order to survive. But would a marriage to a Fossoway prove valuable enough to close the door not only to Sansa’s happiness — a negligible thing, in the grand scheme — but also, more importantly, to any other marriage alliance she might make?

Why did they not offer her Willas? That is what Catelyn would want to know. A Tyrell bannerman is not a Tyrell, and it would be foolish, and dangerous, to mistake one for the other.

Arya would roll her eyes and snap at her to stop worrying about boys. Arya always did have the right of it.

But Eddard and Catelyn and Arya are all dead, and Sansa lives. She must make the choices of the living.

Still, she cries that night in her parents’ bed, thinking, what do I even know about Tanton Fossoway, picturing instead Tyrion Lannister’s nervous hands, Harry’s indifferent thrusts, Petyr Baelish’s thin lips, his body pressing hers to the ground, and the blood that poured smooth as silk from his stomach where her dagger pierced him. His voice murmuring, ‘Sansa … Sansa … Cat … ’

*

Sansa spends the night shifting uneasily between sleep and consciousness, her dreams fragmented with wolves with red eyes and trees with red mouths, and her half-brother Jon trying to tell her something important, something very important, until at last she wakes violently to the sound of a heavy knock on her door. Her heart leaps and she reaches out, but of course her bed is empty. No wolf. No protector. Another solid knock, and Sansa, struggling to recover her voice from the remains of her dream, calls out a weak, ‘Yes?’

‘Your Grace.’ It is Brienne, breathless. ‘I beg your pardon, Your Grace, but we must speak.’

Sansa slips into her dressing gown as fast as she can. Something’s happened. She’s certain of it. The granaries have burned. A plague is spreading through the smallfolk. Stannis Baratheon’s troops are at the gate. Something is wrong.

But when she pulls the door open, Brienne merely seems puzzled. Her voice gives no indication that disaster has fallen when she says, ‘I hope I didn’t disturb you, Your Grace. But the Maester brought this — a raven has come and I think you will want to read it right away.’

‘A raven?’ She takes the letter from Brienne and stares at it without opening it. The seal … she knows that seal, but it doesn’t make any sense. The heat of anger flares through her. ‘The Greyjoys? Euron? Theon?’

Brienne shakes her head. ‘Asha Greyjoy.’

Sansa opens the letter and reads the words with hungry eyes.

V.

Not only is Asha Greyjoy alive — hidden away for years, apparently, building up an army of her own among the Iron Islanders and biding her time against her uncle’s rule — but she wants an alliance with Sansa, and will vow to protect the North in exchange for Sansa’s support in her own battle of succession. But that is not all. That is nothing, really, though if Sansa accepts it means she does not have to marry Tanton Fossoway. But it hardly matters, not when Asha, with her heavy, slanted letters and careful words, wrote:

You may be wary to trust me, as our families have had many unhappy dealings in the past. Two of my brothers died in a war with your father, and my brother Theon is said to have killed your youngest brothers in cold blood. I write to dispel your fears. Know that the wars of our fathers do not matter to me now. I hope only for eventual stability and the sovereignty of the Iron Isles. Most of all, please know that I spoke with Theon some time ago, and he swore by every god in Westeros that he did not kill either of your brothers, but that they fled Winterfell and were not heard from again. Though he could offer no proof, I believed him then and believe him now. I do think that your brothers were alive when my brother last saw them, and if you agree to an alliance with me and my people, I promise that I will help you find the entire truth of what happened to them, and find them if they can still be found.

She added, If it gives you any peace, please know that I now believe Theon to be dead.

*

‘I may be a fool,’ she tells Sandor Clegane, ‘but I believe her. Brienne does too, but you think her an even bigger fool than me.’

She has called a meeting with her Queensguard: Brienne and Clegane and Alysane Mormont. She has a small council too, sparsely staffed to soothe egos and flatter those in need of flattery, but she prefers to consult these three before speaking to a wider audience.

‘You are both fools,’ he agrees, but he reads the letter again. He’s read it three times already — she’s been watching him — and if he truly thought it was all a lie to trick Sansa, he would’ve said so by now. Wouldn’t he? And does it even matter? Sansa believes Asha Greyjoy’s words, whether or not her guards and her people do — believes because Asha too is a girl whose whole family has been ripped from her, and it was from this perspective that she wrote. From one lost girl to another, both drinking from the same dark well of sadness. Impossible to imagine such a thing could be pure pretending, just another strategy in the game. Sansa has been manipulated enough to see through such subterfuge.

And even if it is manipulation, Sansa knows how to manipulate too. She can use Asha, that’s what matters.

‘Even if she’s not lying,’ Clegane says at last, ‘it doesn’t mean — ’

‘It doesn’t mean Theon wasn’t. And if Theon wasn’t lying, that doesn’t mean they’re still alive now. It’s been a long time. I know that, I do.’

He looks at her, pained, and from his expression she can see that he does not know what to say. They have all spent so long bracing themselves against grief and battle and fear that he does not know what to do with her hope. She hardly knows herself.

‘I will write to her and discuss terms,’ she tells them. ‘I wish we might meet first, kiss each other’s cheeks and shake hands the way queens ought to, but it was a good letter, don’t you think? We want the same things, after all: independence for our lands, independence from the tyranny of King’s Landing. I might be able to trust her.’ She steadies her teacup on its platter. ‘Better than I can trust the Tyrells, at least.’ She turns to Clegane. ‘So?’

‘I am not your Hand,’ says Clegane.

‘That is just what I said,’ says Brienne.

‘You really must appoint a Hand,’ says Alysane Mormont, who hopes she will choose from amongst her family. In truth, were her sister Lyanna older, she might be Sansa’s choice, but she cannot be seen taking advice from a child, a girl. Even a girl as wise and brave as Lyanna Mormont. And though Sansa likes Maege Mormont, the girls’ mother — she had only fought with Stannis on Jon’s behalf, because she believed all Starks but him to be dead — she does not have the temper to give sound advice.

Alysane herself might do, but even if she accepted, she too is a woman. The lords have tolerated their queen and the women she keeps around her, but they will notice if she does not seek the counsel of men. They will notice and they will think her weak.

Sansa nods. ‘I will think on it.’

As they rise to leave she calls Brienne back. She lifts the letter and smooths her fingers over the words. ‘I don’t know who to choose,’ she admits. ‘I don’t know who to trust. Is it strange to say that some days I almost miss Petyr Baelish?’ At Brienne’s look, she says, ‘Not him, but … he was clever. I learned a great deal from him, more, I think, than I ever wanted to. And even if I could not trust him, at least I knew what he wanted. I understood him.’

Brienne, trying to be diplomatic, says, ‘You haven’t asked my advice, Your Grace, but I believe you need a Hand who will offer you authority, wisdom, and integrity. I do not think Littlefinger would’ve suited.’

‘Yes, I suppose you’re right. I suppose I should ask some old Manderly, or a Karstark, but I fear … ’ She sighs. A Hand must be trusted implicitly, or else they could sabotage her, make a grab for her power. And these old men of her father’s, her grandfather’s, generation: what true loyalty would they have toward a girl, even a Stark? Sometimes she doubts whether they think her a Stark at all, for she’s shed a thousand other names and perhaps has no right anymore to her own. They want her to prove her loyalty to the North, and that, she supposes, can only be done through marriage.

Once again it all comes back to who she will sell herself to, which man she will allow to touch her again.

Sansa almost smiles at her next thought, but she knows better. ’You know, if Bran and Rickon are alive, they are the true heirs of Winterfell. Perhaps I can be Bran’s hand. Then I might not have to marry at all.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘No,’ Sansa says. Her voice is flat. ‘I will marry. Some well-connected lord, just as I always dreamed.’ A nightmare that is bound to come true, if she lives long enough. ‘But not yet.’

She sighs. ‘Leave me,’ she says before Brienne can take pity on her. ‘I have a letter to write.’

VI.

For a time, she has hope. Her bannermen are initially uneasy about her alliance with a Kraken, but she persuades them of the prudence of her plans, and soon it is not only Brienne who has begun to speak with confidence about their chances in a battle for the North. Iron Islanders have always been stronger on water than on land, but Asha’s correspondence assures her that she has not neglected her troops’ abilities on land. My people have lost our independence again and again because we could not win on land. I will not allow that to happen under my rule. The Manderleys praise her for inspiring admiration even among longtime enemies, and even Sandor Clegane admits that the numbers — between the North, the Vale, the Riverlands, and the Iron Islands — may very well be on her side, once Stannis and Aegon are finished battering each other’s forces. And she has Winterfell. It should be a harder job to take it than to keep it, especially in the winter. Even for Stannis, who has done it once already, at great cost, and especially for Aegon, who comes from Essos and has never known the cold.

She begins to plan the search for Bran and Rickon as well. Asha Greyjoy adds what she can to her initial account of Theon’s confession, and it is less than Sansa hoped for, but Asha renews her pledge to aid the search, first by reaching out to her contacts and spies across the realm, and then, when the Iron Islands are secured, by mobilizing bodies to follow any leads she or Sansa may uncover. If her brothers have gone south, Sansa prays that her counter-offer to the Tyrells — an alliance, but no marriage — will be accepted and that she might rely upon them to search for the boys. Perhaps one day Bran, rightful King in the North and Lord of Winterfell, would wish to marry Margaery, who, for all her faults, is intelligent and beautiful and would surely be kind to a cripple. Margaery and Sansa might be sisters after all.

If the boys fled north, it is difficult to believe they could have survived the arrival of winter, but she will look for them nevertheless.

In this way, the days pass, then weeks, and Sansa allows herself to consider what it might mean to survive this war, survive this winter. What it might mean to build a better future for her people.

Whenever the snow lets up, however briefly, smallfolk arrive at the gates of Winterfell, all of them dull-eyed and half-dead, carrying the last of their food in bundles and dragging their too-thin children in carts that can barely cut through the snow. Today there are more of them than she has ever seen. ‘We must make more stew,’ Sansa orders. ‘Tell the cooks. It’s the only thing that will go around. And if there aren’t enough blankets, tear down every curtain and every tapestry still hanging. They will have to do.’ Alysane directs the men in their tasks, while Brienne, at Sansa’s side, counts the people pouring into the Great Hall.

‘How many?’

‘Dozens,’ Brienne says. ‘I count eight-and-forty, but that’s not including the children.’

‘So many all at once … ’ Sansa shivers. ‘What does it mean?’

‘Likely that they are starving and thought it worth braving the trek to Winterfell on the chance there might be food.’

Of course that is all. Merry’s talk of ghosts is just talk, and the smallfolks’ stories just stories. Sansa’s dreams are only dreams. Jon Snow is dead and has nothing to tell her. The eyes of the Weirwoods are not watching. All that waits for her in the impenetrable whiteness of winter is an army that wishes to steal her home away and kill the men and women whose loyalty she has earned and whose protection she has promised.

‘Oh,’ Brienne says and then Sansa hears it too — a wail, a long, ugly sound that echoes through the hall. ‘There,’ Brienne says, gesturing.

A woman, her face all white and red, weeps into the bundle in her hands, her cries just below the pitch of a scream. Why cry now? She has made it to the warmth of Winterfell, has crossed the snow and the cold, and there will be food, there will be safety. She will have a blanket. Sansa swore to find a blanket for every one of them. She will keep that promise.

Brienne leans toward Sansa and whispers, ‘Her child. The woman’s child is dead.’

Sansa understands at once that the bundle is not a bundle. It is a baby.

The woman continues to wail, and the other smallfolk edge away from her, more interested in the supplies being brought to them than the grief of a young mother. But Sansa cannot turn away from her. She knows she cannot bring this woman comfort, cannot bring her that which she most desires — her child, alive again, fat and healthy and warm — but still she crosses the hall, Brienne at her side, and stands silently with the mother until at last she quiets, noticing Sansa’s presence.

Sansa sees her take in her furs, her sigil, the silver circlet across her brow.

‘Your Grace?’ she asks, voice still thick with tears. ‘Beg— beg pardon.’

With the baby still pressed to her chest, she attempts a curtsy, and Sansa’s heart aches as she reaches out her hands, gesturing for the woman to remain upright, hoping that she sees that she has nothing to fear from Sansa. But Sansa can see the wariness in the woman’s eyes and knows that she does not understand. How can she? This woman has always been a pawn, but unlike Sansa, there had never been any path out. Even with a dead baby in her arms, this woman knows her life depends upon the whims of a girl she has never met before.

‘Please, you don’t have to — ’ Sansa shakes her head and starts again. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to intrude. It is only — ’

But what was it? Why has she come here?

She says the first thing that she can think of. ‘What was the child’s name?’

The woman looks startled, and then unbearably sad. ‘Edwin.’

‘A very good name. And what is yours?’

‘Rose,’ she says. ‘Like the flower.’

Sansa lays a hand on Rose’s arm, close to where the baby is nestled. How long has she been carrying the poor child? Did she think he slept, and when she went to rouse him, found him dead? Or had she crossed the snows and the storms with a child she knew did not live, unable to let him go, unable to mourn him as the march to Winterfell continued?

‘We will make sure he receives a proper burial, Rose. I promise you.’ The ground is frozen solid, but she’d known that they would need some burial place within the walls of Winterfell, for those who do not last the winter, so she’d told the men to dig a handful of trenches, out of the way, that might serve if things became dire. She has no desire to see her people thrown into a mass grave, but she knows they may not have the time or ability to do it all properly, not in the middle of winter, not if there is a siege.

This baby, though. Edwin. Surely Sansa can arrange a small service, a burial. A marker so that the mother might visit him, the way Sansa can walk through the crypts beneath the castle and stare upon the faces of her beloved dead.

But Rose shakes her head, squeezing Edwin tighter, heedless, perhaps, of harming him now. Her voice trembles, but she holds her chin high. ‘No, Your Grace. I thank you greatly but you know what must be done.’

Sansa sneaks a glance at Brienne, who seems equally baffled, then turns back to Rose. ‘And what must be done?’

‘Burn the dead. That’s what the messenger said. Burn the dead, burn them all. Take no chances.’

‘The messenger? What messenger?’

Rose meets her eyes this time and says, ’The one from Castle Black.’ Sansa’s stomach flips. ‘The one with the white wolf.’

*

It cannot be Jon. Jon is dead.

Petyr had told her so, and, yes, Petyr was a liar, but when she marched North from the Vale, she’d confirmed his story. She’d sent a raven to the Night’s Watch to inquire after Lord Commander Snow, half-brother to the rightful Queen in the North, and a man named Eddison Tollett wrote to tell her that he knew nothing about any queens or any kings, not anymore, but Jon had been murdered by his Brothers and now the Night’s Watch had fallen into disarray. Jon was my friend, he’d written, but he would’ve wanted the Night’s Watch to survive to fight the enemy to the North. We are trying to make things right. If you have any good men that you can send to us, I beg that you do so before winter comes in earnest.

She’d burned the letter. She had no men to spare, and she did not know what to make of the Night Watch’s troubles or Jon’s friend’s confusing message. But it did mean Petyr spoke true: Jon was dead. Sansa did not cry for Jon Snow, but she cursed her own naïveté in hoping, even briefly, that she was not alone.

And now she is to believe a rumor?

She reminds herself that she’d believed Asha Greyjoy, but Asha had provided details, insight, carefully contextualized information about what may have happened to Bran and Rickon. Rose had only spoken of a man with dark hair and a large white wolf. If he is real, he might be a wildling, a hunter, he might be anyone. For that matter, the wolf might very well be Ghost, but after Jon’s death, there is no reason to think he didn’t find a new companion. Perhaps another brother from Castle Black.

Except, of course, Lady never would’ve abandoned Sansa. She knows she wouldn’t have. And Grey Wind had died with Robb. It is unthinkable that Ghost would simply curl up at the feet of a man who very well may have helped to murder Jon.

She sends Alysane to speak with some of the other refugees, because she doesn’t want to face the questions in Brienne’s soft eyes and Clegane intimidates the smallfolk too much. She tells Alysane to ask if they too have encountered a messenger who urged them to burn their dead, and if they have, she wants to know everything he said, she wants to know what he looked like. She wants to know what his reasons were for his commands.

Sansa does not mention the wolf. Saying it out loud feels too much like believing it could be true.

There is much to do that day, with the influx of smallfolk and the discontentment of nobles who would prefer that so many commoners were not so near at hand. ‘We must feed them and shelter them, of course,’ one of the younger Karstarks tells her with an obsequious smile. ‘But we must prioritize the distribution of our supplies very carefully. Do not let your heart be so gentle, my queen.’

She lets her annoyance slip. ‘Do you mean to say that we should make sure that the men of this room are fed till their bellies ache while we allow the women and children who come to us for shelter to subsist on gruel and hardtack?’

Karstark’s expression hardens momentarily before it smooths back into a smile. ‘Of course not, Your Grace. I would never suggest such a thing. I merely wish to be certain that you and your most trusted circle are well taken care of, that you are well-fed and well-nourished so that you may be the queen you must be. Winter or no, your beauty should not be dampened.’

‘And in time,’ says the young man’s father, ‘you will have heirs. A lady’s health is a delicate thing.’

She feels Brienne stiffen beside her; this is too familiar, and they ought to know it. It occurs to her that the Karstark boy may wish to woo her, for they are of an age and he has always been very attentive. The thought makes her feel ill.

‘I thank you for your concern,’ she says, and she does not keep the coldness from her voice. ‘I assure you I will turn to a Maester if I am feeling too … delicate. In the meantime, we must make thorough inventory of our rations, while ensuring that the people, all of the people, are fed.’ She pauses before glancing around the room at her bannermen. ‘And where are we on repairing the glass gardens? We cannot rely entirely on what can be brought from White Harbor. We must begin planting crops of our own before the next turn of the moon.’

She leaves the meeting with a headache and, after taking tea in the silence of her own chamber — her parents’ chamber — she tracks down the master-at-arms. As expected, he’s in the yard, bashing his practice sword against boys of no more than three-and-ten years. The boys stumble around, failing to block, failing to strike back. She tries not to look alarmed.

‘You’ve taken in new recruits from among the refugees?’ she asks when they look up from their practice.

‘Yes, Your Grace. Not as many as I’d’ve liked. Not many strong boys in the bunch.’

She hesitates, then asks, ‘What about girls?’

‘Girls, Your Grace?’

‘Lady Brienne is my sworn shield,’ she says, gesturing to the woman beside her, whose lips have turned up in a faint, proud smile. ‘And Lady Alysane serves in my Queensguard. It seems that, despite all we’ve been taught, women may in fact be quite competent fighters.’

‘I do not mean to cast aspersions on Your Grace’s guards, but surely you would agree that they are exceptional — ’

‘Yes, they are exceptional, but perhaps if I’d been encouraged to hold a sword in my hand as a girl I too might be exceptional.’ She thinks of Arya then, and pushes the thought down. ‘You will ask among the smallfolk if any of them wish to join my army. If there are any women or girls older than three-and-ten who wish to train to fight, you will let them.’ She nods decisively and adds, ‘If you cannot bear to train girls, I will have Brienne do it. The girls may like that better anyway.’

After that there is supper, which she would rather eat in her solar, but she knows her bannermen wish her to be present, even when they are in their cups and rather uninterested in anything Sansa might have to say. They like to look at her, alone at the table that once sat her parents, her siblings; they like to see her beauty and her sadness and her strength, and remind themselves that (whatever Sandor Clegane may have told her) this is what they have sworn themselves to. Not Sansa Stark, the blue-eyed girl who’d loved songs and lemon cakes and the feeling of her mother brushing her hair, nor the Sansa who went south and learned, lesson by painful lesson, how to rule, but rather Eddard and Catelyn’s last living child, Robb’s last living sibling, a monument to the Stark family, a symbol of the past for those who stand by the Stark name, a possibility of the future for those who hope that her loss might mean their gain. She is a pawn no longer, but she is still a piece in the game.

She is retiring for the night when Alysane finds her. ‘Your Grace.’ She bows her head. ‘I have heard some strange things today.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Not all of them have seen the messenger, but many have. They say he rides a powerful horse and a white wolf runs at his side. They say he looks Northern. Dark hair, beard. One said — ’ She hesitates.

‘Yes?’

‘One said he looks like the ghost of Ned Stark.’ Pretending not to notice the expression on Sansa’s face, Alysane continues, ‘He accepts their offers of food and drink but never takes coin, never does violence. He says he’s from Castle Black but he never gives his name. He always seems to have the same message. Prepare to fight. Burn the dead.’ Alysane grimaces, rubbing the back of her neck as if sheepish. ‘He says the White Walkers are coming.’

‘White Walkers?’ Sansa takes a seat at her dressing table and blinks up at Alysane. ‘And the people believe him?’

‘They say he carries a rotting hand with him, a dead hand, packed with ice in a little box, but when he takes it out it moves by itself.’

‘Some kind of trickery?’

‘I do not know, Your Grace. Some think so. But many believe him. They say he first convinced the wildlings who’ve settled the Gift. I suppose they are more superstitious.’

Sansa closes her eyes, tries to take it all in. Petyr taught her that, taught her that she cannot focus only on pieces of the story, but must understand the whole, must visualize every moving part in every war, every alliance, every event. She must anticipate every turn.

She remembers Eddison Tollett’s letter: he would’ve wanted the Night’s Watch to survive to fight the enemy to the North. She’d assumed he meant the wildlings, but maybe that wasn’t what he meant at all. She remembers Old Nan’s stories to Bran, and how Sansa had always protested that she’d rather hear a romance than stories of terrible creatures in the long dark of a long winter. She remembers her dreams: Jon’s face, Ghost’s eyes, the Weirwoods bleeding sap. She remembers her family’s words, her father’s solemn face. Winter is coming.

The picture is still coming together when she hears it — a sound in the distance like thunder, except it doesn’t stop, it doesn’t relent, if anything it grows louder and louder, the realm itself howling its pain and its anger.

‘What the fuck is that?’ Alysane yelps, forgetting herself.

But Sansa knows.

‘The Wall,’ she says, her blood running cold. ‘I think it’s falling.’

Chapter Text

I.

He pushes his horse too hard, wary of the coming storm and impatient to be home.

The snow falls a little less heavy once he leaves the Gift, and past Last River, at least, the Kingsroad allows his horse better purchase. The road is still far from clear, but innumerable feet and hooves and carts have packed down much of the snow into a navigable path. He hasn’t been this far south since he was a boy, and that time, he’d been riding the other way. Then, the road had been wide open: there’d been no true snow yet, not down here, and when his party had camped at the top of Long Lake, he’d sat eating his supper and watching the rippling water flash blue and gold beneath the sun. Now, partially frozen, with a surface of clouded gray, the lake is just another of winter’s dangers that might swallow him whole, and he decides to give it a wide berth. Besides, if he rides through the night, he might make it to Winterfell by morning.

Winterfell. For a long time he’d believed he would never see it again, and even now, part of him wonders if it will bring him any comfort. The castle will not be the same as the one he’d left behind all those years ago, the home of all his happiest and most bittersweet memories. It’s been burned and stormed and sieged. So has he.

But Bran had said, When the Wall falls, go home — and so he is going home.

It was because of Bran that Jon stayed so far north for as long as he did. After all those moons he’d spent beyond the Wall, more wolf than man, more dead than alive, his only thought, when the Red Woman brought him back, was to run. A craven impulse, but a powerful one: go as far south as he could get and never look back. He knew he no longer had a place with the Night’s Watch, and Melisandre’s whispers of destiny held no temptation for him. He was cold. He’d been cold for so long.

Before he could find warmth, Bran found him.

At first Jon had not known it was Bran; it took some time for him to recognize his little brother in the cawing of the crows and the murmuring of the trees, and it took longer still to truly understand him. Even after Melisandre’s magic, even after all Jon had experienced with Ghost, he had not been prepared for the Three Eyed Raven. He had not been prepared for much of anything Bran told him.

He shakes his head and presses on. Best not to think about that now, with Winterfell ahead of him and Bran’s words still burning in his mind:

Go home, Jon. Go to Winterfell.

It will need you.

She will need you.

II.

He remembers dying the way you remember a story you’ve been told since you were a child. He may not recall every word, but he knows all of the important parts by heart: the confusion, the pain, the creeping darkness, and then a howl that seemed as if it would never end. Jon was just a body, a thing that could not move or think or act, but something inside him, something instinctive and elemental, reached out — and there was Ghost, waiting.

Ghost has always been a part of him, and never more so than now. Even enfleshed in this fragile human body, Jon can still feel the wolf’s hunger and anger and grief as if it were his own. In a sense, it is his own, just as everything that is his is Ghost’s. More often than not Ghost knows Jon better than Jon knows himself, bringing him freshly-killed game before Jon notices the emptiness in his belly, leading him to nearby villages when the solitude is almost more than Jon can bear.

When Winterfell is at last in view, it is Ghost who races forward, loping past Jon and the tired horse, his red eyes intent on the castle gates.

III.

At first the guards do not want to let him enter, their nervous gazes flickering between Ghost at his side and Longclaw at his hip, but when Jon dismounts and lowers the hood of his cloak, their moods shift. The Stark look, the Northern look, has won him more favor than anything else these past long months. The smallfolk have no love for the Watch, or for men who carry themselves like soldiers, but sometimes those he encountered in his travels — those who’d seen the last true Warden of the North, in some long-ago world — would tell Jon how much he looked like Eddard Stark, and Jon would bite down on the lie: He was my father.

‘I must speak with the queen,’ Jon says to the men who meet him inside the gate. One man wears the trout sigil of House Tully, but the other has the look of a Northerner. Jon at last finds the sunburst pressed into his leathers. Karstark. The sun of winter. Jon tells him, ‘I bring word from the Wall.’

The Tully man furrows his brow. ‘It’s true, then? It’s come down?’

‘Aye.’

‘The queen said it was so,’ says the other man. He shakes his head, rueful. ‘And you … ’

He squints at Ghost, and his mouth turns down in thought. Jon doubts he’s ever met the man, but it’s plausible that even an unknown Karstark vassal could make a sound guess at his identity.

But the time for guessing games has passed. Jon has no patience for them, especially now that he knows that everyone, himself included, has been guessing wrong.

‘The queen,’ Jon says again. ‘Tell her that I must speak with her. Tell her — tell her that I bring news of her brother.’

This, at last, seems to convince them. The Tully man agrees to deliver the message at once. The Northern guard stays to keep watch over Jon, his brow still creased with suspicion, but when Jon asks if someone can take his horse, he nods tersely and whistles to summon a stableboy.

‘He’s in bad shape,’ Jon warns, handing the reins to a lad no older than twelve. ‘I rode him too hard when the Wall fell. Didn’t want to get caught in the avalanche.’

The boy passes a hand over the horse’s too-skinny haunches, frowning, but all he says is, ‘I’ve seen worse,’ before he leads the poor creature away, toward what appears to be a hastily-built stablehouse. The old stables must’ve burned with everything else.

In truth, Winterfell looks both better and worse than Jon expected: fire is clearly responsible for the bulk of the damage, though not all of it, and entire portions of the castle are in disrepair; but that which is still standing looks secure, prepared to withstand the ravages of winter. More than that, Winterfell is bustling with life. All around him are knights and smallfolk and working women and children, crossing the yard and tending to repairs, carrying baskets and passing messages, practicing for a fight with wooden swords. Some of the youngest even seem to be playing games, chasing each other around in circles. One of the little boys makes a mean face, his brow furrowed, his eyes narrowed, his mouth turned down in a grimace. ‘I’m King Stannis!’ he shouts. ‘Winterfell is mine!’ He raises a stick as if it were true steel, but it takes little time for the evident heroine of the scene — a small yellow-haired girl with several missing front teeth — to duck past the whip of the thin branch and push him the ground. ‘I’m the queen of winter,’ she taunts, kicking snow at him. ‘Now you have to do what I say.’

Gods, when he was a boy, he played games such as these. He knew no better. Aemon the Dragonknight, he remembers. Florian the Fool. Sparring with Robb and chasing Arya around the training yard. Bran begging Old Nan again and again for stories of the Targaryen conquest, tales of slaughter and subjugation treated as bedtime entertainment.

How foolish and how innocent they were, playing war games, knowing nothing of what was to come.

Before Jon can witness the boy’s retaliation to the little queen’s attack, the Tully guard returns, clearing his throat and announcing that the Queen in the North will see him.

‘She also said … ’ He hesitates.

‘What?’

He glances suspiciously to where Ghost sits obedient as a dog at Jon’s side. ‘She said,’ the man says slowly, ‘that the wolf should come too.’

***

The guard escorts him down halls he could walk in his sleep, past the Great Hall and away from the family wing, toward a room that he has entered only a handful of times. It was Ned Stark’s office, once — not the warm private solar where Lady Stark would sit, pursed-lipped and knitting, while Lord Stark lectured one or all of his children about some minor misdeed, but rather the austere quarters where Jon supposed he met with other men on delicate matters of business or sorted through the paperwork that accompanies the running of a castle, away from the noise and the affection of his family.

There’s a big woman with a scarred face standing outside the door; she’s dressed in trousers and boiled leathers. The pommel of her sword is gold. A lion, he notices, with eyes of ruby.

Jon, holding tight to the scruff of Ghost’s neck, can feel the wolf begin to stiffen, but Jon urges him to keep still. Bran said the Lannisters were dead, didn’t he? There is still too much Jon doesn’t know.

‘This is the messenger from the Wall,’ says the Tully man.

The woman’s bright eyes pierce him, but she only bows her head and knocks once on the door. ‘Your Grace,’ she calls. ‘The messenger from the Wall.’

‘Let him in.’

The woman frowns at Ghost. ‘Begging your pardon, Your Grace, but are you sure — ?’

‘Let him in, Brienne.’

The woman — Brienne — keeps one hand on the pommel of her sword and nods for the Tully man to open the door. She has no intention of allowing Jon inside alone, that much is obvious.

However, as soon as the door opens, Ghost wrenches out of Jon’s grip and races past her, knocking into her hip as he barrels into the office. Jon shouts, not knowing if he’s calling to Ghost or to Brienne, who’s bared her blade, but he’s stopped short by the sound of laughter. Even Brienne seems to freeze when she hears it.

The queen is laughing: a soft laugh, not like he remembers at all, but unmistakable. She’s on her knees, her arms thrown around Ghost, her nose buried in his fur. Her hair gleams in the sunlight, redder than it was in his memory. Her voice is lower too. Gone is that high and girlish giggle, the sweet, thin sound that she shared with him so infrequently in their last years together. Gods, when was the last time he heard her laugh?

‘Sansa?’ It comes out a whisper.

He watches her hands tighten in Ghost’s fur and then relax, sliding free as she stands and looks at him. ‘Jon.’

She’s grown tall, taller than her mother was, and terribly lovely. Somehow he did not expect her to be so lovely. Since he received Bran’s message — Go to Winterfell, go to Sansa — he’s been trying to remember all he can of the girl who was once his most distant sibling. She’d been beautiful, he knew that; some flattered her parents that she was the most beautiful girl in the North, and for all he knew she was. He couldn’t recall that girlhood beauty well, but the impression lingered: Sansa dancing with Robb in the Great Hall, cheeks glowing with exertion; Sansa watching them in the training yard, rolling her eyes when Theon tried to flirt with her; Sansa with flowers in her hair, calling herself Jonquil and crying out for her true love to save her.

Sansa on Joffrey’s arm in those last days at Winterfell, exquisite and highborn and more distant than ever — at least to Jon. She was to be a queen, and he, bound for the Wall, was never going to see her again.

It seems he was only half right.

She’s still staring at him, eyes as deep and blue as the sea, and he remembers himself, dropping to his knees. ‘My queen.’

There is a long silence. Finally he hears, ‘You’re alive,’ in a voice so strange he has to look up. ‘I thought — ’ Her pretty lips compress, her jaw tensing: an expression he recognizes from her girlhood, the face she would make as she tried to hold back tears. She’d cried a lot back then, whenever Arya sabotaged her embroidery or Theon pulled her hair, but never, he thinks, for him.

‘Stand up,’ she gasps, ‘oh please, stand up.’

He does, though it takes the help of the big woman, Brienne, half dragging him onto his feet, to manage it. Even then, he doesn’t know what to do or what Sansa wants of him. All she does is look, her eyes wide and unblinking, almost fearful. A few tears spill down her cheek.

It may be those tears that do it; it may be something even more foolish, like the way the color of her hair reminds him quite suddenly of Ygritte. Whatever it is, he reaches for her without quite meaning to, and at the very same moment she reaches for him. When he closes his arms around her, it’s easy. Her breath is hot against his neck when he pulls her closer still. He hasn’t been touched in a long time, not with any true kindness, and neither, he suspects, has she.

‘I dreamed of you,’ Sansa murmurs against the shell of his ear. The words set his heart racing, a curious sensation that makes him hasten to let her go, but she’s dug her fingers into his furs. ‘You and Ghost,’ she says. ‘I dreamed of you both.’

***

He explains what he can. He tells her about his death and resurrection, and about the Three Eyed Raven that Bran has become. He tells her how he’s spent days and weeks and months rallying the North’s second line of defense, riding through the Gift and the woods of Last Hearth, preparing the Free Folk for what is coming, then traveling east all the way to Karhold and the Grey Hills, and once across the Bay of Seals to Skagos, where he found out too late that Rickon had come and gone. He tells her about the night the Wall fell, and warns that the Others will march south, but Winterfell’s stones have old magic that should offer some protection when the final battle arrives — as it will.

Eventually, he finds the words to tell her about his mother and Rhaegar Targaryen and the lies of Eddard Stark.

She cries again then, mourning, he suspects, the fresh stain this casts upon her father (for she must wonder, as he does, why he never told anyone, not even his wife, the truth), but when she finally speaks, what she says startles him: ‘I’ve had a raven from Aegon Targaryen.’

Aegon Targaryen?

‘The son of Elia Martell — and Rhaegar.’ She won’t look at him. ‘He’d be your brother, wouldn’t he?’

‘But he died. Him and his sister both.’

She bites her lip, a nervous tick he thought she’d lost long before she went south, and it lends her a vulnerability that makes his chest ache. Part of him still can hardly believe she’s real. ‘It’s said that he escaped the slaughter somehow,’ she says quietly. ‘And now he’s come for his birthright.’ She seizes a scroll from amidst the papers on her desk. ‘Here’ — she hands it over — ‘read for yourself. Stannis is dead. Aegon has taken the Iron Throne. He means to rule Westeros.’

He looks at the letter, not truly comprehending it, but Sansa continues, ‘I wrote him some time ago, after we won Winterfell, offering to support him against Stannis in return for a guarantee of the North’s sovereignty. He never replied. It seems he had no need for my support. Now he says that the North is one of his kingdoms too, and if I do not go to King’s Landing and bend the knee, he will come to Winterfell and take back what is his.’

Jon stares at the letter a moment longer. At last he says, ‘This isn’t Aegon.’

‘What?’

‘Whoever he is, he’s not Aegon Targaryen. Not the real one. Bran told me I was the last living child of Rhaegar Targaryen.’

And then there is Daenerys Targaryen. His aunt. The mad king’s daughter. The woman they call the Dragon Queen, who once ruled Mereen and had sent Slaver’s Bay into such disorder. He knows only rumors and the little Bran could tell him. Apparently she has long claimed a right to the Iron Throne, but until now she has remained in Essos, biding her time.

Something has changed: everyone agrees that she is sailing westward with Unsullied troops and Dothraki hordes at her back and three dragons above her, and Jon doesn’t know what has finally called her here — was it the message he sent at Bran’s urging, a plea for help in a war that cannot be won without powers of her magnitude, or has she simply come to take what is hers from a pretender who had the audacity to steal it first?

‘Jon? Are you all right?’

Sansa brings her hand to Jon’s cheek, her thumb like silk on the rough edge of his beard, and his face grows so warm that he has to wrench away from her touch. He regrets it the moment he sees the hurt in her eyes. He is not used to such affection, that’s all. He can’t remember the last time he encountered such gentleness.

He lays his scarred hand over her softer one, squeezing an apology. ‘I’m fine.’ With a grimace, he says, ‘Whoever he is, he’s not anything to me.’

Something changes in her face, a kind of opening up, the sun appearing from behind a cloud. ‘I’m glad,’ she says. ‘Please don’t think terribly of me, it’s horrible what happened to them. I am not glad that the real Aegon is dead. But when you said that Rhaegar was your father, I thought I’d lost you all over again. Your brother would be the king of Westeros, and I am — ’ She glances down to where their hands touch. ‘I know I was never your favorite sister.’

‘Aye, and I was never your favorite brother,’ he jokes, but when her bright eyes dim, he hurriedly continues, ‘But that doesn’t matter now. We may not truly be brother and sister, but we’re family. Ned Stark raised me like I was his own. I’ll always be loyal to the Starks. And to you.’

Her hand moves, and with a sinking feeling he realizes that she is trying to pull it away … but no, he’s wrong, for, to his astonishment, what she actually does is turn her hand over, palm up, in order to lace her fingers through his own, holding on to him firmly. When she smiles at him, he forgets to breathe.

‘You were his own,’ she says. ‘Father loved you, and even if I hardly showed it, I loved you too. You were my brother. You — you still are. You belong at Winterfell.’

The words are sweet, but something in him feels hollow, that same scraped out feeling he had when Bran first told him the truth about his parents. Still, Jon forces a smile and agrees, ‘I’m of the North. This is my home.’ More gravely, he adds, ‘And there is a war to be fought up here.’

IV.

At first Sansa’s bannermen look upon Jon with suspicion, and her guards are little better. The various lords recoil at the name of Targaryen, either remembering the Mad King or resenting the (false) Aegon; that Jon was raised as the son of Ned Stark is not enough, it seems, to compensate for his dragon’s blood. No one treats him as an enemy, at least not openly, but it is clear they do not believe him when he talks about the White Walkers, and they do not want Sansa to spare any of her soldiers for his fairy tales. Some may even fear that Jon means to steal Sansa’s crown. Meanwhile, Brienne of Tarth, the commander of Sansa’s Queensguard and one-time ally of Jaime Lannister, regards Jon every bit as warily as he regards her. Sansa swears that she is a true and loyal woman who once pledged herself to Sansa’s mother, and indeed all evidence suggests that this is the case, but Jon cannot but mistrust the gold glint of her sword.

One night, not long after his arrival, Sansa scolds him for his prejudice against her sworn shield. They’ve just finished a late dinner in Sansa’s solar, and she is sipping at her second glass of wine, smiles coming more easily as the night wears on. At last, she says, ‘I do not know exactly what Brienne felt for Jaime Lannister, but try not to hold it against her.’ Then, almost teasing: ‘Haven’t you ever cared for someone you oughtn’t to?’

He looks away. He has not told her about Ygritte. Somehow, the words will not come, so he says nothing at all.

Later, when the wine begins to wear off and her good humor fades, Sansa tells him some of what has befallen her since she left Winterfell. He’d heard, of course, about her marriage to Tyrion Lannister, and had done all he could not to think about it. Tyrion had not seemed to him a bad man, but he was a Lannister, enemy of the Starks, brother to Cersei and uncle to Joffrey, and moreover infamous for his lustfulness. And he had evidently agreed to marry a girl of Sansa’s age and station, despite the insult of it all. Ned Stark’s eldest daughter, the flower of Winterfell, wed to the Imp and expected to bear him children, all while little more than a child herself.

It seems, in truth, that her first marriage had been humiliating, but she’d emerged from it unharmed, at least physically. ‘Tyrion … he resented me, I think, because I could not love him. I couldn’t even really like him. But he didn’t … ’

Jon clenches his fist at his side, wanting to reach for her, even to comfort her, but not daring.

She says little about her second marriage. It was arranged by Lord Baelish, Littlefinger, who’d married and murdered her Aunt Lysa. Petyr, she calls him, her voice distant and cold. Littlefinger married her off to Harry Hardyng, heir presumptive to the Vale, and when Harry died in a hunting accident, Baelish presented himself as the natural choice for her third husband.

‘You didn't marry him?’

She blinks a few times before shaking her head. ‘We had to wait for an appropriate amount of time to pass after Harry’s death. Petyr wanted our marriage to be as respectable as possible. It had to be beyond reproach. He said that, but — ’ She presses her lips together, swallowing whatever else she’d meant to say. ‘It doesn’t matter. He’s dead now too.’

He cannot tell if she’d cared for Littlefinger. He was her uncle by law and old enough to be her father, but he’d saved her from King’s Landing, snatched her from the lion’s den and away from her unwanted husband. He’d killed Lysa Arryn, true, but Sansa said it had been done in her defense. Could it be she’d loved him?

But her eyes are still so faraway, neither bitter nor grieving so much as not even there. Although she sits before him, flesh and blood, in truth she is somewhere else. In her heart she is somewhere else.

No, he does not believe she’d loved Littlefinger.

‘That was when Brienne found me,’ she continues after a soft sigh. ‘I was Lady of the Vale but I was so alone. My aunt, my cousin, my husband, all dead. Petyr had promised he’d find a way to take me home, but I didn’t know how to do it without him. I was afraid.’ She meets his eyes now, and she’s come back again, her gaze now fierce, the eyes of a wolf. It almost dizzies him.

‘Brienne made me feel safe for the first time in a very long time. Without her, I never would’ve made it home.’ She reaches across the table to take his hand, and he freezes: caught, somehow. They have not touched since that first day. ‘So please trust her. For me.’

Jon can’t find it in himself to refuse.

***

On the issue of Sandor Clegane, however, Jon cannot be swayed. It doesn’t matter that Brienne begrudgingly admits that he has served Sansa well, or even that Alysane Mormont (one of the few Northerners who seems genuinely happy that Jon is alive) won’t indulge Jon’s suspicions. ‘He’s a nasty fucker,’ Alysane says, ‘but he’d die for the queen without hesitation. He almost has, once or twice.’

Be that as it may, Clegane spent years as a Lannister dog, Joffrey’s Hound; he spent years fighting and killing at the command of that little shit, and before that at the command of Queen Cersei. He’d been there in King’s Landing when Ned Stark was executed, and he’d stood by while the Lannisters held Sansa hostage, and now Jon is expected to simply trust that his loyalties have changed.

And then there is the way he looks at Sansa.

The man is unsmiling, ugly and gruff, but he watches his queen with the kind of fierce devotion Melisandre showed her pyres, and that kind of passion too. The sight of him, trailing behind Sansa, sets Jon on edge, but he holds his tongue — for a time. Almost an entire fortnight passes before he actually speaks to the Hound.

Jon meets him by accident in the training yard, where he is beating the master-at-arms quite handily, his bulky body quicker than Jon would’ve imagined. The Hound blocks an upswing with his broadsword, pushing hard against his opponent, whose feet skid backward over the snow. Panting hard, the master-at-arms yields.

The Hound, stepping past him, spots Jon. The moment he does, he grimaces, but he keeps his sword down, the tip almost dragging in the snow.

‘Come to fight me at last?’

Jon ought to know better, but he cannot forget how the Hound’s heated gaze had bored into Sansa that very morning, and the way he’d brushed by her when he stationed himself beside her seat in the hall, and it is as if Longclaw leaps into Jon’s hands, blade singing for blood.

Both men had spent the morning in the small hall where Sansa hears the petitions of the smallfolk. Many of the petitioners are refugees who would’ve, in any normal winter, settled the wintertown, but recent battles and sieges have left the wintertown uninhabitable, in a worse state even than Winterfell, so Sansa has opened up the castle, her home, to countless widows and orphans, as well as to a number of farmers and serfs and craftsmen. She ensures that they are fed and that they do not freeze, and finds work for them in the kitchens and among the staff when she can. Every relatively healthy man and even some women are also eligible to train for the Northern army.

Even with all this, still she sits for at least an hour daily to hear from her people’s own mouths what else they wish of her.

This morning, a widow of perhaps five-and-twenty stood before the queen, carrying each of her wailing twin babes in her arms and asking for more bedding for the all of the children coming into Winterfell. Her voice was low and husky, the exhaustion apparent in the hunch of her shoulders, in every line on her face, even in the perfunctory way she soothed her sobbing children, more muscle memory than conscious decision.

As she spoke, the babies continued to cry, no matter how she tried to calm them. ‘I beg pardon, Your Grace,’ she said again and again, each time a thin wail rose up to drown her out. ‘I do beg your pardon. Ever since I lost their father, it’s not been easy.’

Sansa nodded thoughtfully and then, after a moment’s hesitation, she’d stood. ‘May I help?’ she’d asked, her arms falling open as she reached toward the mother.

Flustered and pleased, the woman’s cheeks brightened to a rosy red and she passed one of her babes to Sansa, who drew the child close and rocked him against her breast until his tears had subsided. With some of her burden lifted, the twins’ mother at last managed to calm the child she still held, and she and Sansa continued their conversation, each of them swaying softly with their sleeping charges.

Jon had not been able to look away from them. It might’ve been Sansa’s own child she held, so natural did she look with a babe in her arms. It didn’t help that the boy had a shock of dark hair, as if he were a Stark, and Jon remembered his own foolish dreams of fathering children one day, raising little boy he called Robb. Oh, but Sansa would be a wonderful mother. She had all of her own mother’s dignity and depth of love, but she was warmer than Lady Catelyn had ever been, more generous of heart even to those who were not her blood. She cared for the friends of her enemies, welcomed the poor and the starving into her home, and wanted nothing more than to be a queen worthy of her people. His heart was full with admiration for her.

Just then Sandor Clegane caught his attention: the man’s gaze had slid past Sansa and onto Jon. When Jon met his eye, he’d smirked. Somehow his smiling mouth was more gruesome than his usual glower. Jon had tried to suppress the fury rising within him, pulsing in his chest, calling out for vengeance.

As he and the Hound face each other now, however, there is no smile on the Hound’s face. The yard has come to a standstill around them. ‘Don’t make trouble for yourself, boy,’ the Hound says. ‘She’s not even here to see it.’

Jon’s nostrils flare. ‘What?’

‘The little bird. Our wolf queen. She’s not here to watch you bleed for her. Too bad.’ His low chuckle turns Jon’s stomach. ‘I’m sure her worry would be a pretty sight.’

‘Watch your mouth. She’s your queen.’

‘Aye, she is, and she’s your sister, isn’t she?’

Jon holds himself back, but he extends Longclaw, daring the Lannister dog to draw closer. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he spits out.

Clegane, unperturbed, is already turning away. ‘Not a thing,’ he says, before pausing to bend the ruined half of his face closer. ‘But I saw you watching her this morning. I know that look.’ There is something like pity in his eyes. ‘Like you’ve not tasted water in days and you’ve suddenly come across the whole fucking sea. It’s the only thing you want and you can’t drink a single drop.’

Understanding pierces Jon like a shard of ice through his gut, as cold as death. No.

The Hound sheaths his blade and stalks away, his ugly laughter echoing through the yard, but the bile is rising in Jon’s throat and he is no longer listening.

V.

Sick with shame, Jon keeps his distance, dedicating himself with tireless fervor to the war effort and the training of ever-more fighters. (Despite the skepticism of the bannermen, the queen has pledged that her people will fight when the White Walkers come.) Jon no longer dines with Sansa in her solar, letting her voice lull him half to sleep; no longer seeks her out as she sees to the management of the castle, only to pretend it was Ghost (her now-constant companion) he was looking for; no longer watches her as she conducts the business of queenship with earnestness and grace until she is pale with exhaustion, and even then she keeps going. He distributes the few shards of dragonglass he brought from beyond the wall and sends letters full of questions about the White Walkers to Sam at the Citadel and receives long and useless replies — and all the while he tries to remember that Sansa was once his sister. It is an effort, trying not think about how it felt when she wrapped him in her arms, that day he arrived at Winterfell, or the warm sound of her laugh.

She says that he is still her brother.

He cannot feel this way. He cannot want her. He cannot —

Yet when she appears at his door late one evening, he cannot turn her away. He may be craven, he may be a monster, but even more than that, he is weak: weak to her, weak for her. He would carve himself open if it would make her happy.

Ghost accompanies her, of course, nuzzling at her hip as she glides through the doorway and, bypassing the set of chairs by the hearth, she seats herself on the edge of his bed. With barely a sniff in Jon’s direction, the wolf trails Sansa, jumping onto the bed and resting his head in her lap. Ghost’s adoration is obvious, such a marked preference that Jon is seized with the certainty that she must know what it means. But she just scratches Ghost between the ears and levels her gaze at Jon.

‘This was Robb’s room,’ she says.

He nods. She was the one who told him to take it; she’d said that he deserved it, and that she would sleep better knowing he was just a few doors down. Perhaps she’s changed her mind.

‘I spent so much time in here when I was a girl. Robb spoiled me terribly. Any time I fought with Arya, I knew I could come running here and he would wipe away my tears and call me his little princess.’ Her fragile smile might shatter at any moment. ‘I loved him so much. I never knew how lucky I was, to have a big brother like him to protect me. Until he couldn’t protect me anymore.’

Cautiously, Jon says, ‘Robb would’ve done anything for you.’

Her face darkens for a moment. ‘Anything? No. He could’ve come for me. He could’ve traded a Lannister for me. He didn’t. Oh, it would’ve been stupid of him, certainly none of his bannermen would’ve approved, but he could’ve done it.’ She smooths down a tuft of Ghost’s fur. ‘But he was my brother and I loved him. He was my family.’ Regarding Jon from behind a mask of icy indifference, she asks, ‘Are you my family?’

His heartbeat falters. ‘Of course.’

‘Then tell me why you’ve received a letter from Daenerys Targaryen.’

She produces a scroll from a pocket and holds it out so that he can see the wax seal: the three-headed dragon, the sigil of House Targaryen. It’s already been opened. He takes it from her and reads it quickly.

Jon Snow—

If you are who you say you are, then you are either my family or my enemy. Which would you prefer? I am the rightful queen of the seven kingdoms. I am the mother of dragons. I will not cede my throne to a mere boy for no reason save that he is a boy. My nephew Aegon, your brother, has already betrayed me. He has chosen to become my enemy, and he will answer for his crimes. I have already taken Dragonstone and King’s Landing will be next.

Yet I cannot deny that I would be very happy to see more Targaryens in the world. I believed myself to be the last. If you will stand by my claim against your traitorous brother, then we may call ourselves family.

As to what you write about these dark creatures, it concerns me greatly. After I am recognized as the rightful queen of Westeros, I will send an envoy to investigate these claims. I want nothing more than to protect my people and my lands. There has been too much tyranny and bloodshed in this realm. I will bring it to an end.

The message closes with the name Daenerys Targaryen, followed by a string of titles that Jon merely skims. There is nothing else. He had hoped — he doesn’t know what he’d hoped, but it had been for more than this, more than threats and vague concern.

Sansa seems to be expecting something, her eyebrows raised, her expression cold. She looks so much like her mother. ‘Well?’

‘You read it. I’ve asked her for help in the war against the dead. She has dragons, not to mention tens of thousands of troops.’

‘Which she will only lend you once she kills her imposter nephew and all the great families of Winterfell have sworn fealty to her. After everything — ’ Sansa’s voice breaks, and she swallows hard before resuming, ‘After everything that’s happened, am I to hand over the North so that you can be her family instead of her enemy?’

The harsh noise he makes surprises even him as he bites out, ‘You really think I care about that? Gods, Sansa, I don’t give a shit about being her family.’ Taking a deep breath, he pinches the bridge of his nose. She must understand. ‘But I can’t be her enemy, not if it means she will not help us in this fight. We are running out of time.’

‘I will not sacrifice our home,’ she says in one long exhale. ‘I will not sacrifice our people.’

‘I’m not asking you to.’

He approaches slowly, and when Ghost lifts his head wearily and lumbers off the bed, Jon knows that he must set aside his fear and his shame and sit beside Sansa. True, it will hurt, the nearness of her, and her scent, rosehips and lavender, sweetly warm; it hurts to feel as he does, the wrongness of it like a knife against his desperate heart. Still, he takes the warm space that Ghost cedes to him, and when he reaches out to grasp both of her hands in his own, she allows it. Her hands are not as rough as Ygritte’s had been, but nor are they as soft as they once were: she has known work, and in her way, has known war too. She is not made of porcelain.

‘What you’ve done is incredible,’ he tells her. ‘You’ve rallied half of Westeros to you.’

‘To the Stark name.’

‘To you.’ He cannot resist reaching up to tuck a loose copper strand behind her ear. His hand somehow remains cupped against her cheek. ‘You’ve done more than I ever thought possible. A foreign queen can’t undo that with a few threats. Even a foreign queen with a dragons. But we have to be strategic.’

The breath goes out of her. ‘I know,’ she admits.

‘I died once for my stupidity. I can’t let it happen again, not before this war is done with. And if anything happened to you … ’ He looks at her pink mouth, and before he can second guess himself, and before he does anything even more stupid, he presses a firm kiss to her forehead. Even that chaste contact makes his lips tingle.

Seven hells. He does not just want her. After Melisandre brought him back, he thought that perhaps he would never know the heat of desire again, let alone the sweet, dark ache of love. Was it possible for a dead man to love? He has his answer.

A long moment — perhaps too long — passes before Jon pulls away, and even then, simply the sight of her eyelashes fluttering open to look up at him sends his stomach swooping into his bowels.

One breath. Two. The silence stretches on as he watches her tongue dart out to wet her lips, and all at once the air between them thickens, heavy with the inescapability of Sansa’s parted mouth, the soft puff of her slow exhale. He drags his gaze away from her lips. He can’t quite catch his breath.

‘You’re right,’ she says slowly. ‘We must be smarter.’

She leans out of his grasp, and he withdraws his hand from her cheek so quickly it startles them both. ‘I — ’ Shaking her head, she stands and crosses to the hearth, and then, in a voice so low he can barely hear it, she says, ‘I’ll have to marry again.’

‘What?’

‘Alliances are not just made of sweet words, you know that. I’m the Queen in the North. You said it yourself, I hold three of the seven kingdoms.’ Her hands fidget together, but otherwise she betrays no sign of uncertainty. She carries all the authority of her title and her birth. ‘I cannot marry the mad king’s daughter, and to my knowledge she has no son or heir, but she will have families that support her. She will have allies and advisors, men she must reward. They will want wives, or their sons will.’

No, there must be another way.

‘If anyone has to marry, let it be me,’ he says.

Her mouth twitches, almost a smile. ‘You have nothing to offer.’

He doesn’t mean for her to see the shame that flares within him at her words, but she must, because her face softens and her tone gentles. ‘No, please listen to me, Jon. I don’t say it to be cruel. You are a good man. It might be you are the only good man left. Any woman who’s not a fool would see that. But you have no ancestral claims — not unless you mean to try for the Iron Throne and start a whole new war. You have nothing to deliver in a political alliance.’

Of course. It doesn’t matter that he is the son of a Targaryen prince, or that he defied the laws of man to rise from the dead. In the end, he is what he always was: a bastard boy, nameless, titleless, alone.

More carefully, she says, ‘Write to your aunt. Tell her that she must fight with you against the White Walkers, and if she does so, I will marry a lord of her choosing.’

‘I can’t — ’

‘Listen. I will resign my rights to everything south of the Neck. As for the North … I wish for it to remain in Stark hands until my death. When my children inherit Winterfell, the North will be reabsorbed into the Seven Kingdoms, and the child of her chosen ally will become the Warden of the North. Tell her this will earn her Westeros more wholly and more easily than any war could.’

He is aghast. ‘Sansa, I won’t — ’

‘Write the letter, Jon.’ She turns to face the hearth, and in the dim room, the firelight haloes her in gold. ‘Write it,’ she says again, ‘or I will.’

VI.

In the end, Sansa does write the letter, though Jon is the one to sign it, and within a moon, shipments of dragonglass begin to arrive from Dragonstone, the fruit of a tentative alliance with Daenerys Targaryen. She was pleased with the promise that the North, the Eyrie, and the Riverlands would never recognize the legitimacy of the boy who called himself Aegon Targaryen, and she’d said that she would think on Sansa’s offer of a marriage alliance. The dragon queen has not yet committed herself to Jon’s war, but she mentioned that she wanted to discuss it with him in person. I would like to hear you out, nephew, and to know what sort of person you are. She’d given no timeline, of course. Her priority still seemed to be unseating Aegon.

Still, the dragonglass is a good start, and Sansa has the armory working long hours to produce as many weapons from it as possible. Arrowheads, daggers, spears: glimmering black beauties dark against a backdrop of snow as the new soldiers of Sansa’s army train with them in the yard.

Their improvement is slow. Even if these were battle-hardened soldiers with years of muscle memory to lean on, they would not be prepared for this kind of fight; as it is, they are mostly scrappy peasants and skinny villagers who have no fighting instincts whatsoever. They are as raw as the recruits of the Night’s Watch and Jon’s time to train them is running short, but at least they, far more than the bannermen and noble lords, believe in the monsters that Jon tells them are coming.

He spars with everyone, testing their capabilities, trying to determine how they can be best used in battle. One morning, when he’s sparring with a quick lad five or six years his junior, he realizes that Sansa has been watching. She looks down on them from the balcony, her hair streaming in the wind, the brightest thing anybody can see in the washed-out light of winter.

The blow the boy lands is dumb luck. Even distracted, Jon is ten times the swordsman he is, but something happens between the moment Jon spies the gleam of copper and the moment he feels a sudden sharp heat across his bicep — something Jon cannot account for. Dumb luck, he thinks again. But dumb luck can kill you. It’s the sort of mistake he might’ve made as a boy, fueled by jealousy of Robb and the petty desire to impress his father and prove his worthiness to Lady Stark.

‘Shit!’ the lad gasps, eyes wide, before he drops his weapon. Jon can’t help but crack a grin. The boy has a natural talent for swordplay and it was time for him to practice with sharpened steel, but it’s evident he’s never drawn blood before. ‘Shit, shit! It was an accident, milord. I didn’t mean to.’

‘’Course you did. You’re trying to hit your opponent. You’ve done well.’

‘I have?’

‘Aye. But if you aim to survive, you’d better keep your sword in your damn hand. No more throwing it on the ground.’

The boy flushes and stoops to retrieve his sword, but before he can resume his lesson, Jon hears his own name being called. He turns too fast, first his neck and then the rest of his body, irresistibly drawn to the sound. His heart is already thundering inside his chest.

Sansa has descended from the balcony and is crossing the yard, her skirts dragging in the dirtied snow. The training soldiers all bow their heads as she passes, murmuring, Your grace, your grace, good morning, your grace, and though she is too courteous to ignore them entirely, she does not break her purposeful stride, instead offering only brief flashes of a smile as she passes them and approaches Jon.

‘You’ve hurt yourself,’ she says when she stands before him. To Jon’s great alarm, she removes one of her gloves and begins to lift a hand to his bleeding arm.

He jerks away. ‘You’ll get dirty.’

With an unladylike roll of her eyes, she crowds even closer and nudges the torn fabric of his shirt out of the way to inspect the wound. ‘Not too deep,’ she declares, ‘but we ought to stitch it up to be safe.’ Jon blinks in surprise as she pulls a beautifully-embroidered handkerchief from her sleeve and ties it around his arm to staunch the blood.

‘I’ll see the Maester later.’

‘Don’t trouble him,’ she says, ‘I’ll do it now.’

Without another word, she is leading him back to the castle, one hand warm against the handkerchief already blooming a red stain. His feet shuffle along, step after step beside her, though he’s certain he never told them to.

He doesn’t know when or where she learned this skill — he does not like to imagine the necessity of it, in her time as a queen or before — but she performs the task with ease. Once they arrive in her chambers and she pushes him into a seat at her desk, she helps him remove his jerkin, tosses the handkerchief aside, and cuts away the bloodied sleeve before cleaning the wound with a wet cloth. Her touch is gentle but unfaltering, and when at last she pushes the needle through his skin, the stitches are so fast and so neat that for the first time in his life he suspects he may be spared a scar.

After she clips the end of the silk thread, she wipes away the rest of the blood on his arm, seeming not to care that her fingernails are stained with it. Her hand rests for a moment on his bicep.

‘Thank you, Sansa.’

She nods, but instead of stepping back, as he expected her to, she leans closer. ‘Jon?’ Her voice is lower than a whisper.

‘Yes?’

‘Would you show me your scars?’ He gapes at her, dumbfounded by her words and the faint pink blush that creeps up her cheeks, but she persists, ‘From when — from when they killed you. Could I see them?’

‘Well … they’re not a pretty sight,’ he tells her. It’s the only thing he can think to say.

‘I don’t care about that,’ she says quietly. ‘That’s not why I’m asking.’

Then why are you asking?

Her blue eyes pin him and the words stick in his throat, so he does what he can do: he unlaces the cord at the collar of his shirt with shaking hands, and pulls the whole thing over his head in one smooth motion.

Her gaze drops, and he closes his eyes to her horror.

He never wanted her to see this. He has not lied to her about what’s happened to him, but nor did he wish to remind her that he is something unnatural, inhuman. He shouldn’t be here. The marks on his body are not even really scars; the wounds never fully healed, so the gashes are preserved in his flesh, the skin split where each and every knife tore its way in.

He keeps his eyes closed, even when her fingers trace the marks, a slow mapping of his murder, and the muscles in his stomach twitch and jump beneath his skin with every touch. Jon has to hold his breath. Entire seasons seem to pass as she conducts her thorough examination.

‘Does it hurt?’ he hears her whisper.

He shakes his head, swallowing hard when her palm slides across his chest and comes to rest over his racing heart. She must feel how frantically it batters against his ribcage.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry they did this to you.’

Only when she takes her hand away and his pulse has slowed to a merely insistent thrum does he allow himself to look at her face. There are tears standing in her eyes, but they do not fall.

‘Sansa … ’

‘I was in the Vale when it happened.’ She withdraws abruptly, her hands disappearing into her sleeves as she distances herself from the desk and turns her back to Jon. ‘Petyr told me.’ A pause. ‘No, he didn’t tell me. He told Alayne — that’s who I had to pretend to be then. Alayne Stone, his daughter. He dyed my hair black, black like yours. No one could know who I really was.’

Stone, Jon thinks. A bastard.

‘One day he told me that the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch had been murdered by his own brothers in black. He watched me. He wanted to see if I would react, if I would betray myself. The death of Jon Snow shouldn’t have meant anything to Alayne Stone. I had no reason to be sad, that’s what he said. He told me he was my only family.’

She faces him again, and again her eyes drop to his chest. ‘I wasn’t allowed to mourn, but I dreamed of you. I should’ve known … I’m sorry.’

When he can bear the weight of her gaze no longer, he slips his shirt back over his head, not bothering with the laces. Her face is still white, as if she were ill.

‘There’s nothing to be sorry for. We’ve all suffered,’ he says, trying to keep his voice mild. ‘Not all scars on the body.’

‘No,’ she agrees. ‘Some of them are in the body.’

His throat goes dry, but he keeps his mouth shut.

With a casualness that he suspects is feigned, Sansa faces her dressing table, body angled toward the mirror, and in the reflection Jon can see her toying with the various jars and baubles sitting atop it, creams and oils she must use on her skin and in her hair, jewelry he has never seen her wear, the sorts of things he cannot allow himself to imagine.

‘I don’t have a warrior’s scars, not like you or Brienne, but I have scars enough from my time in King’s Landing. Harry complained about them. He told me I was a fool for not having a Maester see to them properly at the time, as if Pycelle wasn’t right there beside his beloved king when Joffrey ordered his guards to beat me.’

Jon clenches his jaw, his teeth grinding together so hard they hurt, but otherwise he holds himself very still, simply watching Sansa as she lifts a pendant — a silver bird — from an engraved golden box and coils the chain in her palm.

‘Petyr never complained about my body,’ she says, ‘and he never beat me. He gave me gifts. He bought me dresses. Jewelry. When I was Alayne, he wanted me to call him Father, even when he … ’ Jon comprehends in a moment of terrible clarity, just as Sansa’s hand closes around the necklace in a tight fist, and for a moment she looks as if she might cast it into the fire or crush it beneath her foot, but after a few deep breaths she simply lets it drop back onto the surface of the table with a clink. She continues, ‘When I was Sansa again, it was almost worse. Sometimes, when he was in his cups or still half-asleep, he called me Cat. He swore he loved me.’ In the mirror her face seems clouded, lost. ‘Maybe he did. I don’t know anymore.’

Then her delicate features harden and she looks at Jon again. ‘I will marry whatever man Daenerys wishes,’ she says. ‘I have promised to do it, and I will. But it is cruel of her to take so much time making her decision.’

Gods. Of course. He should’ve shot down that raven before it passed Winterfell’s walls. He should’ve found a way to stop this.

He still can.

‘I won’t let this happen.’ He speaks as coolly as he can, though he can feel himself almost shaking with anger. If Petyr Baelish were still alive, Jon would strangle him with his bare hands. He would do worse.

‘Oh?’ She doesn’t laugh, nor does she seem especially amused, but there is a dark kind of levity in her words. ‘You’ll condemn us all die just so I don’t have to marry again?’

‘She might reject your offer. She might think she can get more by fighting.’

‘True, she might be a warmongering fool — in which case I don’t know that I want the world as we know it resting in her hands, whether she has dragons or no. If she will not take my offer to win the realm with as little bloodshed as possible, I fear she may be no better than her predecessors.’

Though still several paces away, she is close enough for him to see the delicate blue lines beneath the white of her skin, down her throat, across her chest and lower, like a guide for a lover’s mouth.

He should not be noticing such things.

Every nerve, every tendon, pulls taut with the effort of staying quiet and motionless, of not showing her how much he cares. How he longs to hold her, to protect her. How he aches to drive Longclaw through the skull of anyone who ever even thought to touch Sansa against her will.

‘But you’ve told me that the dragon queen is necessary,’ Sansa says finally, her mouth flattened into a stern line, ‘so I will do what it takes to make an alliance with her.’ Her voice is hard, clipped. ‘You should be grateful. I’m doing this for you. You’re — you’re my brother — ’ She sucks in a long, ragged breath, and something inside of him frays. ‘You’re my brother, so if you say we need Daenerys Targaryen — ’

It frays, and it snaps.

‘Fuck Daenerys Targaryen!’

Somehow he’s on his feet and across the room, near enough to feel the heat radiating from her body. He breathes heavily, inhaling her scent into his tight chest, and before he can think the better of it, he says, ‘You don’t have to sacrifice yourself like this. You don’t have to sell yourself. You’ve already had enough men — ’

‘Sell myself?’

Her eyes blaze out of the white of her face and two blotches of red burn at the top of her cheeks, and he snaps his jaw shut so fast it hurts.

‘That’s what you think?’ she demands. ‘I sold myself to Harry? To Petyr? I suppose I’m just a whore to you?’ Her glare, more bitter than the snows north of the Wall, stops his tongue. ‘Get dressed and go back to your training, Jon. I need to scrub your blood off my hands before I meet with the new steward.’

***

Brienne, stationed outside Sansa’s chambers, watches Jon as he drags himself, shamefaced, from the room. Judgment radiates from her, her eyes narrowing to slits as they take in his torn sleeve and the undone laces at his throat. He is loath to imagine what she is thinking, or what she may have heard.

‘That girl has been through enough,’ Brienne says, voice low and venomous. ‘She’s been used enough by people who should’ve protected her.’ Her lip curls in disgust. ‘You’re supposed to be her family.’ It is nothing short of an accusation.

She’s right, of course. She’s completely right.

He shoulders past her, guilt coiled around his throat like a noose.

Chapter Text

I.

Asha Greyjoy, thank the gods, does not doubt that a war is coming. It seems her own shitstain of an uncle — which one, Sansa is not entirely certain, as Asha seems to despise them all — made an unsuccessful attempt to woo the dragon queen not long ago, and in Asha’s own travels, she’s begun to hear countless rumors of the terrible things beyond the Wall. Not only does she believe Sansa’s claim that monsters surround them on all sides, but she even admits that she cannot keep her people out of the fray.

In this morning’s letter, she wrote: We will set sail within the fortnight.

If they have to stay at Winterfell for any length of time, it will be more people to protect and feed and shelter, but Jon needs men badly, so Sansa will do what she must to ensure he has them. Between shipments from the southernmost keeps and the output from Winterfell’s glass gardens, no one will starve, at least not for another year. More of her guests will have to share rooms, and Sansa herself will have Brienne or Alysane bunk with her. She hasn’t shared a room with anyone since Petyr, but with luck it will only remind her of childhood, when she and Arya slept in one bed and everyone she’d ever loved was just down the hall.

She should tell Jon about Asha and the Greyjoy forces. There are a lot of things she should tell Jon about.

Like the raven that arrives that afternoon, not long after Asha’s. The maester brings it to her in her solar, while she sits eating her luncheon over her ledgers, trying not to spill either ink or soup across her sums. She’s been at it all morning, save for her usual hour of hearing petitions, and her head won’t stop aching, the numbers rattling around inside her skull — this many bushels of grain, that many barrels of wine, this many Ironborn soldiers, that many bedrolls — so when the maester produces a scroll from within his sleeve, she nearly leaps from her seat in her eagerness for a distraction.

The sight of the sigil sends a jolt down her spine. It’s from her mother’s uncle, Brynden Tully, the Blackfish. Sansa has met him only once, during her short stop at Riverrun when the Tully forces declared for her and she began to believe that she truly might make it home someday; yet, even from that short acquaintance, he has proven himself trustworthy.

And, for the past many weeks, he has been on a mission of the utmost urgency and delicacy. He had not left Riverrun since he took it back from the Freys — not until now. This is more important.

She unfurls the scroll with shaking hands, but the news she’d hoped for is not there. He is close, he says. I must go further south than either of us expected. It will be too dangerous to stay in touch. I will not write again until I have accomplished my task.

She reads the words again and again, at least a hundred times as the afternoon fades to evening and her ledgers lay forgotten. If only he’d written of his success, she would find Jon and tell him everything, most of all that she is sorry. It hadn’t been fair that she’d lashed out at him that day, she knows it now, but she’d felt so horribly bare, as raw as the exposed muscle and nerve she’d seen on the bodies of dead prisoners at the Dreadfort. As raw as the red wounds on Jon’s own chest.

It had stung, being so exposed — and she’d flinched.

Still, she would apologize, if she had good news for him. If she could tell him that although she may have let herself be vilely used by a man like Petyr Baelish, and although she may be foolishly willing to offer herself up on a platter if it means saving her people, she is not stupid. Nor does she take her duties as a queen lightly. If only Uncle Brynden had written of success —

But he hadn’t, and all of Sansa’s schemes may yet fall through, and Jon will never look at her as if she’s something precious ever again.

She shakes herself from the thought and wonders instead how far south Uncle Brynden will have to go. The capital? Dorne? The last report on Rickon’s whereabouts said he’d been on his way to White Harbor, in the company of a wildling and an old man, but the Manderleys say he never made it. Can it be he ended up in that snakepit, King’s Landing? And if he did, how could he possibly have survived? He’s only a little boy.

No, it’s better to tell Jon nothing, not yet. If Rickon is found, everything will change. If Rickon is found, they may still stand a chance. Until then, she will keep her hope to herself, in the dark place inside of her where all of her secrets, and all of her dreams, wait in silence.

II.

In the two moons that have passed since Jon arrived at Winterfell, he’s received ravens from allies throughout the North, informing him that despite the Wall’s destruction, the enemy has yet to be sighted in great force. A wight is occasionally found and burned in the Gift, and people still go missing in the night, but no army has marched past the wall into the kingdom of the living. Not yet. It is a letter from Sam at the Citadel that offers the most plausible explanation: although winter has come, and with it shortened days, the long night, when the sun stays hidden all day and the realm is cast into endless darkness, has not yet begun. The wights are weak to daylight, but once the long night comes, there will be nothing stopping them.

Sam believes that Jon must march north to meet the enemy and destroy them before they make their move, but Bran had said to stay at Winterfell until he sent word.

Bran knows things beyond what even Sam, brilliant and bookish as he is, could ever know. Bran also has not reached out to Jon — through the weirwoods, through his dreams, through a bloody raven — in weeks. Not for the first time, Jon fears that whatever remains of his little brother has disappeared into the Three Eyed Raven.

Maybe Sam is right. Go to battle now, and he might destroy the dead before they have a chance to come south … or he might fail, and get himself and most of Sansa’s army killed.

And then who will be left to protect Sansa?

She’s not spoken to him in three days, and whenever he crosses her path, she never pauses, never reacts; she simply pretends not to see him. It is a trick from childhood, something she and Jeyne Poole might’ve done, looking straight through the bastard of Winterfell as they passed him arm in arm or while preening before some highborn young man there to pay respects to Lord and Lady Stark. But that was careless indifference, perhaps embarrassment, not this glacial anger that bites at him even as she refuses to acknowledge his existence. Meanwhile, Brienne, at her side, glares; the Hound smirks; only Alysane offers any kindness.

It’s for the best. It must be. Since that night she confronted him with Daenerys Targaryen’s letter, he hasn’t kept his distance as he’d meant to. His unnatural feelings have had no chance to fade. He should welcome this chance.

Yet, deprived of her company, his evenings are empty and far too long, lonely without her conversation and her jokes and the sight of her, his Sansa, emerging from behind her queenly veneer.

Eventually, with nothing else to do, he finds his way to the godswood.

It is no easy thing to pray when you know the gods do not listen. Still, there is peace to be found in the godswood, even if it is only the peace of familiarity. His father, the only one who truly mattered, came here to think and to pray. Ned Stark, somber and silent, carrying secrets he never would speak, could breathe a little easier here, beneath the red leaves and a gray sky. Anyone could see that.

Jon does not voice his prayers. They are not even prayers, not truly. They are just wishes, the foolish hopes of a foolish boy — for a quick end to the White Walkers, for the health and prosperity of the North, for the safe return of his siblings, for the happiness of Sansa. He hopes that Daenerys Targaryen will fight in the coming war and will ask nothing in return, so that the North need not give up its freedom and Sansa need not marry for anything less than love.

He prays for himself too, wishing that he could be the brother he ought to be. It’s what Sansa expects of him, surely. It’s what she needs.

Yet even as he wishes it, he knows it is a lie. He is a traitor, an oathbreaker, a damned man, so it is no surprise his prayers are full of lies too. Fool that he is, he cannot truly wish not to love Sansa. Loving her is the only thing that’s given this second life of his any meaning at all.

Sometimes, in the solitude of these woods, he imagines a different kind of prayer, dreaming of all those things he was never meant to have. Take no wife, father no children. That’s what he’d sworn. Still, he wonders, could she ever come to care for him? Would she marry him, if things were different? Oh, she would be a good mother. In another world, if Jon had been raised as her cousin, a prince of the Seven Kingdoms and not a bastard in black, could she have loved him?

It it as he is sitting beneath the heart tree one night, dreaming these impossible dreams, that he hears a familiar voice on the wind: Jon… Jon… It’s almost time.

***

The crunch of snow shakes Jon from his daze, and when he opens his eyes, he recognizes Ghost, red eyes glowing in the darkness. Just behind him stands Sansa, her cloak wrapped tightly around her and her hair hidden beneath a hood, her face opalescent in the moonlight. She watches him with knowing eyes, and then, as if she hasn’t avoided him for days, she settles on the stump beside him, her thigh pressed alongside his own.

He holds his breath until she breaks the silence.

‘Bran was in my dream,’ she says. ‘He told me to find you out here. What’s happened?’

Jon forces his gaze away from her, staring instead at the cloudy surface of the pond. Heat pools along the line where their legs touch. He tries to ignore it. ‘He spoke to me … he said that it will be soon. We have until the next moon, maybe a little longer.’

‘I see. And if Daenerys Targaryen doesn’t come by then? What can we do?’

‘Fight with what we have. Northerners are strong, the free folk are strong.’

‘But not strong enough.’ Her hand clamps down on his wrist and she looks at him, really looks at him, for the first time since that night he fled her room in shame. ‘I’ve received word that Asha Greyjoy will bring her forces too, but it won’t be enough, will it? It’s not enough men.’

‘I don’t — ’

‘Tell me the truth. Please.’

‘You’re right, it’s not enough men,’ he admits, ‘and we need worse than men to stop what is coming. But we have to fight anyway. What else can we do?’

She hides her face behind her gloved hands, and he lefts a tentative hand to her shoulder, offering what he hopes is a comforting squeeze.

‘And if we win,’ Sansa says, ‘will that be the end of it? No more war? No more battles?’

Before Jon can reply, Sansa tugs him closer, her arms sliding beneath his cloak and around his waist, her hands fisting at his shirt. Her head tilts into the crook of his neck. ‘Will our home ever be safe enough for our family to come home?’ she whispers into his skin. ‘Will we ever see them again?’

He presses his lips to her temple, but can offer no answers to her questions. Ygritte always had the right of it. You know nothing, Jon Snow.

***

‘I’m sorry.’ His voice echoes down the empty corridor as he escorts her back to her room. With her hood lowered, her hair flows around her shoulders in waves and he must try to keep his eyes fixed elsewhere. Ghost walks ahead of them, tail wagging to and fro, and Jon traces its movement. ‘For what I said the other day,’ he adds.

Her feet still, and he stops beside her, but she too keeps her eyes straight ahead. They both watch Ghost turn the corner without them. ‘I was wrong to get so angry. I know you didn’t mean it. Not the way I imagined.’

‘You had every right to get angry.’ Jon’s still flush with shame over his careless cruelty. ‘No one should talk to you like that. You’re … you’re the queen. You’re … ’ He lets out a long breath. ‘I’m no good with words, never have been. But all I want is to protect you, Sansa. You know that, don’t you? I will protect you.’

‘Thank you.’

They walk on in silence, until at last they arrive at Sansa’s door, where Ghost sits waiting, and she turns to him at last, eyes pale as glass in the dim light. She watches him and says nothing for a long time, long enough that he fears she’s waiting for him to say something, or do something, but then her lips quirk into a faint smile and she leans close to press a kiss to his cheek, light as a snowflake against his warm skin and gone just as quickly.

‘I know you’ll protect me,’ she says, already turning away. ‘And I’ll protect you.’

Then she is gone, back into her room with the door barred behind her, leaving only her scent and the memory of her kiss. Eventually, Jon’s feet carry him down the corridor to his own room, but Ghost, needing no encouragement to stay behind, drops to his belly outside the door and drifts off to sleep.

III.

With the snow falling heavier each day and the cold winds blowing sharp as needles, Sansa decides that she must make a new cloak for Jon. His black Night’s Watch cloak suits him, even if he is no longer a brother on the Wall, but she doesn’t trust its craftsmanship. Who knows how many years he’s had it? And was there anyone at the Wall to reinforce any torn straps or patch any holes? Anyone with true skill? She doubts it. Jon ought to wear — well, not finery, she supposes, for with her limited supplies she cannot right now promise such a thing, but quality, at least. Something that will keep him warm when the war takes him away from Winterfell, away from her. Something that will remind him that she is waiting for him to return.

The idea comes to her very early in the morning, a faint impression left by some already-forgotten dream, and then she is out of bed, rummaging through her sewing basket before she knows it. She must have some silver thread somewhere, the perfect shade for embroidering a direwolf into the leather ... or should it be a dragon? But she frowns at the very idea. No, she decides, threading her needle, it must be a direwolf. A direwolf as sleek as Ghost, and as fearsome. She begins.

It is only when Merry knocks, some time later, that she realizes the sun has long since risen, and Sansa, setting her work carefully aside, calls for her maid to enter.

‘Good morning, Your Grace,’ Merry says, depositing a tray of tea and currant scones on the long table beside the door. ‘You’re in a good mood. I could hear you humming.’

‘Could you?’

‘Mm. Your voice is pretty.’ Merry notices the half-sewn cloak Sansa has draped over the back of her chair. ‘Working on something new?’

‘I’m making something for my cousin.’

‘It looks very fine, Your Grace.’

‘Thank you.’ As Sansa takes her seat at the dressing table and gestures for Merry to begin brushing her hair, she asks, ‘Do you sew, Merry?’

‘My mother taught me a long time ago, but I never was much good. She said my hands were too clumsy.’

Sansa smiles. ‘Nonsense. You’ve got deft hands. I’ve noticed that you’ve been practicing your braids.’

In the mirror Sansa sees Merry blush but the girl doesn’t dispute Sansa’s claim, and indeed, the intricate bun she produces this morning looks near perfect. The style is more formal than Sansa prefers, the sort of thing her mother would’ve worn on holidays or at feasts, but still a far cry from the ostentatious styles of the south. There is no harm in it, and it is evident when Sansa praises Merry that the maid enjoys the chance to try more than a simple plait. It occurs to Sansa that she might teach Merry to take up sewing again. She might like it.

Strange as it seems, Sansa dearly wants Merry to be happy.

With the influx of women into the castle, Sansa could begin looking for someone to replace her maid, or to train her, as she had once considered. But she finds she likes Merry as she is, guileless and frank, intelligent but not cunning — and besides, Sansa has grown used to her touch. She never flinches when the girl helps her dress or undress. She even likes Merry’s off-key singing as her fingers twist the strands of hair around and around, nothing at all like Petyr’s whispers at the back of her neck or the syrupy sweetness of Cersei’s voice when she petted Sansa like a dog in King’s Landing.

Once Sansa’s hair is done, Merry laces her into a gown of pale gray that Sansa made while she was at Riverrun, dreaming of home and thinking of her mother; along the hem and cuffs, silver fishes swim and winter roses blossom pale blue. Despite herself, Sansa cannot help but admire herself in the mirror. She is proud, and saddened, when she sees so much of Catelyn Stark in her reflection.

Merry interrupts Sansa’s reverie. ‘Will you be marrying him, then?’ she asks. ‘Your cousin?’

Sansa, whipping around to face the maid, manages to drop one of her gloves as she hisses, ‘I beg your pardon?’

At once, Merry’s demeanor changes: she grows smaller, her face cast down as she stoops to retrieve the gray leather glove. ‘I’m sorry, Your Grace,’ she says, so faint and frightened and that Sansa curses herself for her sharpness. ‘I didn’t mean to be forward. I just heard … ’

Gentling her tone, Sansa says, ‘It’s all right, Merry, you just surprised me. What have you heard?’

‘That you’re to marry Lord Snow.’

Jon is no lord, neither of House Stark nor House Targaryen, nor even of the Night’s Watch anymore, but it hardly matters — and certainly not to the little maid, who holds the stray glove out to Sansa without looking at her.

Instead of taking the glove, Sansa squeezes Merry’s hand lightly, and the girl’s deep brown eyes flicker up. Despite all that Merry has seen, despite the life she’s known, she is still so young. Sansa offers a small smile. ‘I’m not angry with you, Merry, I promise. Only surprised. I just want to know where you heard this gossip.’

‘A friend of mine. She … knows Lord Cerwyn a bit.’ A whore, mayhaps, or a serving girl who’d found her way into Cerwyn’s bed, hopefully willingly. Sansa will have to ask around to be certain the man isn’t taking liberties with the women of the castle. ‘My friend says he’s always grumbling about it, how he’s afraid you’re going to marry Lord Snow.’

‘Is that so?’

Sansa pulls on her gloves, thinking. Lord Cerwyn sits on her small council, and has been one of those most vehemently opposed to her support for Jon’s war against the dead. ‘Targaryens are not to be trusted,’ he’s said more times than Sansa can count, and always she has replied, sweet as a fresh-plucked rose, ‘Thank you for your counsel, my lord, but Jon is not a Targaryen.’

Nor is he your brother, Sansa thinks, her stomach churning.

She has tried to pretend that things are as they have always been, or rather, as they always should have been: where once she was distant, now she can be the sister Jon deserves. She has tried to treat him as she would treat Robb, were he still alive, or Bran and Rickon, if she ever sees them again. Yet, when he accused her of selling herself, she’d been hurt in a way she could not and would not explain. She’d been hurt as something other than a sister.

Sansa knows it, and it seems the lords of the North know it too, if they’ve begun to speculate about the possibility of a marriage.

Has Jon heard this gossip? She prays not. He’s only just forgiven her for her behavior that afternoon in her rooms when she’d stitched his wound and stared far too long at his chest. If she feared his contempt for what had happened with Petyr, she cannot imagine how much worse it will be if he believes her so wanton as to scheme to marry her own brother.

‘Is that all? Can you tell me anything else Lord Cerwyn has been saying?’

‘Yes, Your Grace, but it’s a bit … ’

‘Indelicate? That’s all right, go ahead.’

‘Well,’ Merry says, exhaling through her nose, ‘what Edyth says is that he keeps complaining that if you marry some Targaryen bastard — ’ A flicker of annoyance must show on Sansa’s face, because Merry adds hurriedly, ‘No offense meant to Lord Snow, I’m only telling you what Lord Cerwyn said.’

‘I know, forgive me. Continue, please.’

‘He says if you marry Lord Snow, then the northern lords may not always stand with you. He says,’ she continues, more apologetic now, ‘your brother married an outsider and look what happened to him.’

As if she could ever forget.

Undoubtedly Cerwyn’s frustration is not helped by the fact that he has an unmarried son and brother who might, through the right alliance, bring House Cerwyn unprecedented preeminence. Nor has Sansa forgotten about the young Lord Karstark buzzing around her. Cerwyn may not demand she marry into his own house, but he — and indeed most of her bannermen — may expect her to marry a man of the North.

Is Jon not a man of the North?

Sansa shakes her head and forces herself to smile. ‘I see. I suppose that’s to be expected.’

‘But I think Lord Cerwyn is wrong,’ Merry says firmly. ‘He’s a stupid man. The handmaid for Lady Lyanna is my friend, and she says all the Mormonts would cut off Cerwyn’s co— his parts ... before they turned their back on you.’ Merry’s face flushes, as if she’s only just heard herself. ‘I beg your pardon, Your Grace.’

Sansa can only laugh. ‘I don’t doubt it’s exactly what Lady Lyanna would do,’ she says, and then it is Merry who cannot contain her giggles.

Before Merry leaves her, Sansa can’t resist asking, ‘What do the smallfolk think? Do they think it would be a mistake to marry my cousin?’

‘I don’t think they much care who you marry, as long as you’re still their queen.’

With that, Merry curtsies and slips out the door, seeming not to notice how Sansa’s smile fades.

If Daenerys accepts her offer, will she still be a queen? Yes — the queen who gave away her kingdom, who sold herself to her enemy, who sold her children’s birthright to a conqueror. The Mormonts will not want such a queen. None of the northerners will.

But if Rickon is alive, then any deal Sansa makes cannot hold, for by the law of succession he is the true heir to the North and to the Riverlands, and Daenerys more than anyone must respect the law of rightful inheritance; her own claim rests on it. Once the White Walkers are defeated, there may be no more need for an alliance with Daenerys. Peace terms could be worked out. Sansa might resume her role as Lady of the Vale, and she might serve as regent until Rickon comes of age. She would try to teach him to be a good king. In time he might marry some daughter of the North, someone like Lyanna Mormont, and they could build a strong future for the North, much stronger than anything she could build. Rickon’s children would carry on the Stark name.

There is also the other matter, the one Sansa worries about when sleep will not come, as she stares up at the canopy and tries to ward away visions of the future.

If she is barren …

Yet she and Harry had not coupled regularly in their four months of marriage. Even in the earliest days of their union, he had openly sought the company of mistresses who would do more for him than just lie there, cold and dry beneath him. Of her time with Petyr, she remembers very little. Those nights when he came to her bed, she searched out a place inside of herself to wait until it was done; her body moved and spoke and touched just as he asked, but she herself was elsewhere, far out of his grasp.

At any rate, Petyr was a careful man and had taken pains to hide their relationship from the lords and ladies of the Vale, so undoubtedly he knew better than to put a babe in her, and as a brothel keeper, he must’ve known what precautions to take.

A maester might be able to tell her something, but if word of her doubts reached anyone’s ears, it could be fatal.

Downing the last of her tea, Sansa looks out at the snow-clad world beyond her frosted window and shivers. Somewhere in the distance waits the army of the dead. Sansa cannot picture it, no matter how Jon has tried to explain, but the fear she sees in Jon’s eyes makes her afraid too. She knows that there is a war coming that they may not win.

She turns away from the window and presses a hand to her flat stomach. No sense fretting about a future that may never come.

IV.

Lately, Robb is often on his mind. Jon misses him — his brother, whatever anyone may say — and he cannot help but remember him as he was when Jon last saw him, a boy on the cusp of manhood, his entire life before him. A prince in all but name, handsome and auburn-haired and grinning. But Robb died, and now Jon sleeps in his bed and lusts after his sister, and he wishes to the gods he knew how to make everything right again. He wants to go back, before they ever left Winterfell, to when Robb was alive and Sansa was happy and Bran was a boy he could recognize. When Rickon and Arya were home and safe. When Eddard Stark was his father.

He could accept Lady Catelyn’s resentment, he could even accept Sansa’s indifference, if it meant their family was whole once more.

But such things are not worth thinking about. The long night is almost upon them. All that matters is their survival.

So Jon tells himself as he lies awake at night for long hours, staring at the canopy and waiting for the dark veil of sleep.

Eventually he must drift off, because when he opens his eyes again, the fire has almost gone cold. For a moment, he is confused as to what woke him. Ghost is out hunting and the sky, black as pitch, tells Jon daybreak is still many hours away.

Then, there is quiet shuffling sound in the hallway outside, followed by a short, sharp rap on his door and a familiar voice calling softly, ‘It’s me.’

Without a thought, he leaps from the bed and across the room, pulling the door open almost violently. ‘What’s happened?’ he demands, already reaching for Longclaw. ‘What’s wrong?’

Before him stands Sansa, her hair loose around her shoulders, her blue eyes wide but not frightened. She carries a candle that illuminates her face, revealing no distress on her features. She’s wearing her dressing gown, a pretty thing the color of a robin’s egg, and when his eyes skate down her body to be certain she’s unhurt, he realizes she’s in her stockings. He hasn’t seen Sansa in such a state of undress since they were both young children. His face grows warm.

‘Ahem.’

A moment too late, he notices Brienne at Sansa’s side, her eyes narrowed in Jon’s direction. As if he was the one who turned up at Sansa’s door half-dressed in the night!

Seeming not to notice her guard’s hostility, Sansa says to Jon, ‘I’m sorry to wake you, but there’s something we must discuss. Urgently.’

‘Is everything all right?’

‘Yes, just let me in. Brienne, I’ll only be a moment.’

Jon takes her candle from her, using it to light the few candles littered across his room before setting it atop the hearth. When he turns, he sees Sansa standing a few steps inside the doorway, her arms folded over her chest, her hands rubbing absently at her upper arms. In the candlelight, the tip of her nose seems to glow pink.

The dying fire will take a few minutes to build back up, so he fetches his cloak instead. ‘Here.’ He drapes it over her shoulders and pulls it tight around her, so that she is well encased in the furs. It’s a battered old thing, almost falling apart in places, but it should warm her.

Somehow he ends up holding the cloak closed for her, his fists bunched in the furs in front of her belly, close enough that he need only lean forward a hair and his knuckles could brush over the soft silk of her dressing gown, the soft stretch of her flesh. Close enough to feel her shiver.

He must let go, because in the next moment he’s several steps away from her, fighting the heat that is rising to his face, and her own hands have come up to secure the cloak around her. ‘Sorry,’ he mutters, at the very same time she says, ‘Thank you.’

He swallows. ‘You, uh, you needed to talk to me about something?’

‘Oh. Yes.’ With a little shake of her head, Sansa reaches into the pocket of her dressing gown and produces a small scroll, which she hands to him. ‘I told the maester to tell me instantly if anything came with the Targaryen seal.’

Jon blinks down at the red wax, stamped with the image of the three-headed dragon. He runs his thumb over the raised edge. ‘It’s unopened.’

‘You’ll tell me what it says,’ Sansa says, so earnest he has to look away.

When he breaks the seal and opens the scroll, he finds a message from the dragon queen, one that has him slumping against his desk, his relief warring with his terror. Wordlessly he passes the scroll to Sansa, and watches her mouth harden into a firm line.

Daenerys Targaryen is in White Harbor, and she is coming north.

V.

So little time remains until everything must change.

No matter what happens in the war, things cannot go on as they have. It is true — perhaps even likely — that they will all die, but more terrifying is the knowledge that even if they live, Sansa cannot predict what the years ahead will look like: the long, bitter winter; more food rationing, more starving, more dying; three dragons flying free, leaving nothing but scorch marks and ashes in their wake; a new ruler on the Iron Throne and no telling if she’ll be better than the last.

And Jon …

Will he stay with her, even when she marries some southron lord and installs him as Lord of Winterfell? Will he forgive her, if she never finds Rickon? There are days she wishes it had all been different, that somehow Jon had found his way to Winterfell and been named King in the North like Robb before him, that it had never fallen on her shoulders, hers alone, to rule. There are days when she wishes he could rule it with her, shepherd it and steward it with her, at her side, always.

But in weeks, maybe days, he will be gone — and the only wish she will hold in her heart is that he comes back to her, alive and himself, unbroken by the horrors he will face.

As soon as Sansa learns of Daenerys Targaryen’s plans to come to Winterfell and join the fight against the dead, she redoubles her efforts on Jon’s cloak, reinforcing every stitch, ensuring that every part of it is perfect. She sews late into the night and early in the morning, and exhausted as she is, she pricks her finger more than once, sacrificing a drop or two of blood for her efforts. She lets the drops seep into the cloak; she knows it’s foolish, the sort of thing she’s read in books or heard in songs, but part of her believes those drops will protect Jon. There must be some power in it, the blood of kin, the blood of a queen, the blood of someone who —

She keeps sewing.

When at last she finishes the cloak, Sansa cannot resist bringing it to him straight away, even though he is still in the yard in the middle of his daily training. Merry, upon seeing the cloak that morning, had said, ‘It will look very handsome on Lord Snow,’ and Sansa hopes she is right. It ought to suit him beautifully.

Waving him over, she says, ‘I made this for you,’ and lays the cloak in his arms.

At first she cannot read his expression, the way his eyebrows draw together and the corners of his mouth tick down for just a moment, but then his face breaks open and his eyes crinkle when he looks at her, and though he says little more than ‘Thank you, Sansa,’ she catches him running reverent fingers over the embroidered silver-white wolf.

He fastens the new cloak around his shoulders at once — oh, he does look handsome— and then, with an awkward smile and a little nod of his head, he returns to where he’d been showing a group of boys and girls some new defense tactic. But before he lifts his training sword, he glances over at her, and there is something oddly vulnerable in his face.

Behind Sansa, Sandor Clegane rasps, ‘Be careful.’

She turns to frown at him. ‘Be careful of what, ser?’

‘I know you’re not stupid, girl. You know what.’

Instead of chiding him for his tone, she follows his gaze to where Jon stands, his attention back on his task, one hand clapped on the shoulder of a skinny adolescent boy as he tells him something, probably some word of encouragement, some simple, kind thing that will make the boy stand a little taller. That is who Jon is.

As if sensing her gaze, Jon’s eyes turn toward her once more. He doesn’t smile, doesn’t even wave, but something strange and warm blooms in Sansa’s stomach all the same.

‘Your lady knight thinks it’s not her place to say anything, but she knows. Mormont knows too. We all know.’ Sansa, forcing herself to look away from Jon, feels her cheeks burning as Clegane continues, ‘Watch yourself around that brother of yours. He’s a man like any other and it’s obvious what he wants.’

VI.

Reports from the south confirm that a sizeable contingent of Dothraki and Unsullied forces are on the march, and dragons have been spotted as far north as Hornwood. Meanwhile, Asha Greyjoy’s army has landed outside Deepwood Motte and, despite the still-lingering animosity between the Glovers and the Ironborn, it’s been agreed that Theon’s sister and her people will march north with a company of Glover men the moment they receive word from Winterfell, to join the battle wherever it may be.

When Sansa had told him this plan, the relief had been evident in her voice. Housing two thousand Ironborn, including yet another queen, would’ve been a disaster. They will have trouble enough handling the armies that Daenerys is bringing, and that’s assuming Daenerys has truly come as an ally and hasn’t decided to simply burn Winterfell to the ground.

‘She wouldn’t have written to warn us if she meant to attack,’ he tells Sansa’s small council, who grumble and complain at the prospect of Daenerys Targaryen’s arrival, and though Jon cannot blame them, they are fools who cannot see the bigger picture. They still do not truly believe that the dead are coming.

‘We are fighting for our very survival,’ Sansa adds with a reassuring smile. ‘You trusted me when I brought a kraken to our side. Trust me now when we befriend a dragon.’

‘With all due respect,’ a young man with a close-trimmed beard cuts in, ‘your father fought to overthrow the Targaryens, who murdered his father and his brother and kidnapped his sister. Now you welcome the Mad King’s daughter.’ This lordling is no older than twenty, and he has a way of speaking to Sansa that has Jon grinding his teeth. ‘You consort with his grandson.’

‘Lord Karstark, I am well aware of what my father did. I am well aware of the Mad King’s crimes. But my father would also understand that we cannot fight three full-grown dragons in the middle of winter with White Walkers themselves bearing down on us. Winter is coming. Those are House Stark’s words. Do not forget.’

‘Your Grace, your cousin — ’

‘I know who my cousin is, Lord Karstark, but it seems you’ve forgotten. Jon was raised by Eddard Stark, who was once your liege lord. He was raised as the brother of Robb Stark, the last King in the North. He was raised as my brother. Your queen’s brother. And he is leading the fight for our survival. I will not allow him to be treated like an enemy.’

It is only later that Sansa admits her own fears about Daenerys Targaryen’s sudden change of heart. ‘I pray this means she’s accepted my offer,’ Sansa tells him in her solar, ‘but I wish she would’ve said so in the letter. She has three dragons. I don’t think we could stop her from taking the North if we tried.’

That night Jon dreams of the dead crawling unscathed through ribbons of black fire, a thousand wights climbing up the scaly back of a dragon as it takes wing. It soars over Winterfell, casting a shadow so big it seems to block out the sun, as it rains down fire and death.

When he sees a dragon for the first time, however, it is nothing like his dream. That creature was a formless mass of darkness and heat, but when he watches from the battlements as the beast rips through the air, the rider on its back gleaming bright as a polished blade, he is struck with the realization that this creature is real. It is real, and it is upon them.

As agreed, the dragon flies past the castle walls, to the moors beyond. The dragon and its rider are alone, which in anyone else Jon would call foolhardy, even arrogant, but it is clear that the advantage is entirely hers.

Confident that Sansa has a handle on the panicked smallfolk and uneasy-looking lords, Jon rides out to meet his aunt, flanked by Alysane Mormont and a handful of Valemen.

For a moment the dragon is all he can see. More enormous than he ever imagined, it shines black as a beetle, with a horned face that is somehow nothing like the illustrations he’s seen in books. Even when the drawings had the details right, mere ink and parchment could not capture the power emanating from this beast, or the dark fury of its eyes. Its heavy exhales have already begun melting the snow around it, and when its mouth lolls open, each tooth in its terrible maw is taller than Longclaw.

The woman standing beside the dragon’s snout can be no older than Jon himself. Though she bears herself with all the haughtiness of a queen, Jon can see that she is not much more than a girl, very dainty beside her monster.

‘Your Grace,’ Jon greets, daring only a step or two closer. ‘I am Jon Snow.’

‘Nephew.’ Her smile is beautiful, but he doesn’t let it fool him. The beast behind her can kill them all in the space of a single breath. ‘You may care to know that I’ve deposed the pretender who sat on my throne. He was no Targaryen.’ She tilts her head, violet eyes sweeping him up and down. ‘Though he looked more like one than you do.’

‘I take after my mother.’

‘Ah yes,’ Daenerys says, ‘the famed Lyanna Stark.’

Jon reminds himself that this woman is kin, the closest he will ever come to the man who fathered him. Yet he is acutely aware of the direwolf sewn into his cloak, the cloak Sansa made for him, which is the handsomest thing he’s ever worn and one that makes his loyalties clear. In his heart, he is a Stark. He can never be anything else.

The dragon queen’s attention slides past him to where the rest of the soldiers stand assembled. ‘And where is your cousin, the Queen in the North?’

‘Waiting inside for you, Your Grace.’

The dragon queen’s eyebrow quirks. ‘Surely you cannot expect me to leave my dragon and go with you unescorted? I must say, I’ve faced subtler assassination attempts.’

‘You are here to be our ally, Your Grace. No one here wants to hurt you.’ He nods at Alysane, who brings forward the bread and salt. ‘We offer you guest right. We offer you protection and hospitality within our walls and at our table.’

She considers for just a moment. ‘But we’re not within your walls or at your table. We are, as far as I can tell, quite a distance from those walls.’

‘All of this land is Winterfell, not just the keep. We offer you protection and hospitality on our lands, too. No harm will come to you.’

In the end, Daenerys eats the bread and salt, though she does it with a roll of her eyes and still she seems unwilling to leave the dragon’s side. She’s lived in Essos her entire life. It may be she does not know of guest right, or what it means to Northerners, to the Starks in particular, but if she can’t be bothered to know that much, what kind of ruler will she make? Does she know Westeros at all?

Unable to hide his impatience, Jon asks, ‘Why come here ahead of your armies if you think we’re plotting to murder you?’

‘Curiosity.’

‘Curiosity?’

‘I wanted to meet you. I wanted to meet your cousin.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we are family.’ She strokes the dragon’s muzzle. ‘And because I’ve heard a lot about you.’

Before Jon can reply, a screech pierces that air that has him nearly jumping out of his skin, and at least one of the legendarily brave knights of the Vale lets out a whimper. Two more enormous shapes are careening closer, descending through the fog.

An attack?

But Daenerys remains at ease, and she doesn’t move to climb astride her dragon. Glancing up with a smile, she says, ‘I thought it best to bring all of my dragonriders here. They are my closest advisors.’ Her laugh is bright and clear, like that of a child, or the sound of a bell ringing. ‘But they’re still learning. They tend to be a bit slower than me, but they’ll be down shortly.’

Alysane Mormont, attempting joviality, says, ‘It’s hard to imagine a Dothraki riding a dragon. Or are they Unsullied?’

‘I’m glad you asked. They are neither. They’re Westerosi.’

‘Are they really?’

‘You’ll find them both quite familiar. As I understand it, one of them is your cousin’s first husband — ’ Her smile seems almost mocking. ‘ — and depending on how I feel about it, he just might be her husband again.’

Jon bites down on his tongue, hard, to keep himself from saying anything stupid, and he suspects Alysane, beside him, has tensed up for the express purpose of physically restraining him, if need be.

‘My other dragonrider,’ Daenerys continues with calculated casualness, ‘is the one who convinced me to trust you, Jon Snow.’

The coyness in her voice sets his teeth on edge. She likes her games, this dragon queen, but Jon can do little but indulge her, letting her dangle her knowledge over them, waiting for answers.

With a thump, a second dragon lands beside the first one. It’s smaller, a cream-colored creature with black teeth like shards of dragonglass, and when it lowers its belly to the ground, it is, as promised, Tyrion Lannister who slides down its wing and jumps clumsily to the ground.

‘I’m getting better at that,’ he says, climbing to his feet.

Before anything else can be said, the final dragon, a beast of green and bronze, swoops into the clearing, and another small figure, far more graceful, leaps from her perch on its back. Dressed in tall boots and a coat of heavy furs, this dragonrider is the only one who looks prepared for winter. She looks as if she knows cold.

Her grin is enormous and her hair is wild — and Jon’s heart bursts.

‘Arya,’ he hears himself gasp as his little sister comes running toward him, arms stretched wide, eyes shining bright, and for just a moment, they are children again.

***

Even Sansa, clever as she is, cannot pull together a feast on little notice in the midst of both winter and a war, but still she manages to feed and entertain her guests. Though the Great Hall is full, it is decided that the smaller hall, where she hears petitions, will do just as well. Sansa ensures that all the juiciest cuts of meat go to Daenerys, and though no one else eats as well, there is wine and ale enough to go around. By the time the small army of Dothraki and Unsullied soldiers appears at Winterfell’s gates, and the ramshackle remains of the wintertown grow populous with tents and horses and strangers speaking languages Jon has never heard before, the night promises to devolve into riotous drinking that seems capable of bridging cultures, at least momentarily.

Throughout the supper, Sansa keeps Daenerys occupied in conversation, her voice friendly, sincere even. Still, more than once Jon catches her eyes darting over to where Arya sits beside him, and he knows she would rather be spending the evening with her family. But she must be a queen before she can be a sister, and she does her duty.

When Sansa met Jon and Daenerys at the castle gate, her crown balanced upon her head, Jon had not known what to expect. Sansa, younger still than the dragon queen, had kept her chin raised as she said, ‘It’s an honor to meet you, Your Grace,’ and Daenerys, smiling thinly, had replied, ‘And you as well, Lady Stark.’

Jon saw the insult land. It had been as if Sansa’s veins had filled with ice. Her cold eyes seemed capable of freezing a man.

Just then, Brienne cleared her throat and pointedly said, ‘Pardon me, Your Grace, but I believe it is customary to address a queen by her title.’

Daenerys’s eyebrows shot up, displeasure spoiling her benevolent expression. Yet all she said was, ‘Of course. Apologies, Your Grace. It’s been some time since I’ve enjoyed the company of anyone with a legitimate claim.’

Jon still doesn’t know what to make of this pretty speech, or the idea that Daenerys might acknowledge Sansa’s claim as legitimate, but Sansa, thawing, waved her hand. ‘It hardly matters,’ she’d said, which by now even Jon realizes isn’t true. Such things matter a great deal, but Sansa didn’t win half the seven kingdoms to her without diplomacy.

On their way into the keep, Jon saw Sansa press her hand to Brienne’s and show her a brief, lovely smile.

Now, as Sansa spears the lean, white rabbit meat on her plate, she says to Daenerys, ‘I am glad to hear that your campaign in the south was such a success.’

‘Yes, it was far easier than I anticipated. My troops faced few losses. It seems the boy pretending to be my nephew had already rallied a number of houses to my cause. He thought to win Westeros for me, and to rule beside me as my king.’ She drinks deeply from her cup of wine, and her pitying frown is stained purple. ‘Unfortunately for him,’ she says, ‘I’ve chosen my own king.’

‘Oh?’

It’s Tyrion Lannister, seated at Daenerys’s right side, who replies. ‘Arrangements have already been made with House Tyrell.’

Jon catches Sansa blinking away her surprise. ‘House Tyrell has declared for you, then?’

‘My enemies in Westeros would call me a barbarian and a foreign conqueror, so I took the capital with the Tyrell army to show them otherwise. It is your very own people — my people — who want me to rule.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, Your Grace.’ Sansa sips her wine. ‘You know, I once knew Margaery Tyrell rather well.’

‘So Tyrion told me. She’ll be coming to court after I wed her eldest brother. I understand she’s had little luck in marriage, so I’ve agreed to find her a suitable match.’ With a playful roll of her eyes, she adds, ‘No one told me how much of queenship is arranging marriages.’

Her tinkling laugh irks Jon, who cares nothing about such alliances as long as they don’t hurt Sansa, but Sansa giggles prettily at the joke.

After the servants have cleared the food away and filled the tankards to the brim again with ale, Jon thinks to ask, ‘What of Stannis’s men?’ He’d known some of them, at the Wall.

Tyrion looks up from his wine, a little glassy-eyed, and when he speaks, there’s something oddly gloomy in his voice.

‘Aegon, whoever he really was, decimated Stannis Baratheon’s forces and the remainder deserted when Stannis was executed. There may have been those still loyal to him, but Aegon kept his daughter in the Red Keep as a hostage to prevent further insurrection.’ Tyrion’s laugh is humorless. ‘Even if they wanted revenge for their king, Aegon’s dead now. All his people are dead. Burned.’

Burned.

A chill goes through Jon. Aegon had not been Jon’s brother, but he might’ve been. And did Shireen Baratheon burn too? She’s only a young child, but as long as she lives, she will be a threat to Daenerys, a rival to her claim.

What kind of woman has he invited to his home? What kind of woman has his little sister chosen to follow?

But, if nothing else, he must trust Arya.

She’s deep in conversation with Alysane Mormont, and has been for most of the meal, so he touches her shoulder to get her attention. The moment he touches her, she whips around so fast he recoils. He thinks he sees the silver of a dagger disappearing up her sleeve.

What happened to you? he wants to ask, but instead he says, ‘What happened to Shireen Baratheon? Was she burned too?’

He meant to be quiet, and to keep the suspicion from his voice, but the ale must’ve hit him more powerfully than he’d realized, because Arya winces and then he hears Daenerys saying crossly, ‘She’s been sent to foster at Highgarden. Do you think I’m a monster?’

It is, of course, Sansa who smoothes over the awkward moment. ‘Of course he doesn’t. Your very presence here shows how benevolent you are.’ She sidles closer to Daenerys, turning away from Jon, and though he cannot see her face, he can tell from her voice that her manner has grown suddenly girlish, an eerie imitation of the romantic, giggling child she once was. ‘Especially when you’ve so many other things you could be doing that are far more enjoyable than war. Like planning a wedding. By the way, when will you wed? Have you decided yet? You know, when I was in King’s Landing, Margaery always spoke very highly of Willas. I wish you both much happiness.’

Daenerys, breaking off her glare at Jon, offers Sansa a thin smile. ‘How kind of you. We’ll marry within the year, once I’ve settled things in King’s Landing.’ She sighs. ‘I met Willas at Highgarden. He seems kind. You know he’s crippled?’

‘Yes, of course. But he’s handsome enough, is he not? All of the Tyrells are quite beautiful. Loras was known as the most handsome man in the kingdom, once. Before the war.’ A beat, and then her teasing tone returns: ‘And I’m sure the dragon queen has no need for someone strong to protect her.’

At this, Daenerys laughs. ‘It’s true. I’ve long since learned better than to rely on a man for my protection. I have my children. And I have no objections to Willas Tyrell. If I don’t like him, I’ll simply take a lover. Now,’ she says, climbing to her feet before Sansa can say anything else, ‘do you northerners dance, or is it too miserably cold for music up here?’

Sansa calls for music, and servants begin to push the tables clear to make room for dancing, and then, after a pointed look from Daenerys and an even more pointed look from Sansa, Jon finds himself leading his aunt out onto the floor.

For all of Jon’s grace on a battlefield, the complex steps of most dances somehow elude him. He supposes he never spent much time practicing as a boy. Luckily — or unluckily, for those in their vicinity — Daenerys doesn’t know the steps either, for this is not only a Westerosi dance but a northern dance.

Still, they make do, and soon they are moving in time with the others on the floor, roughly on tempo if not quite in sync.

‘I admit, I feel as if I know you,’ Daenerys says over the music, a flush high on her cheeks as she twirls a moment after the other women. The severity of her earlier anger has vanished, and she seems but a girl again. ‘Your cousin’s told me so much about you.’

‘My cousin?’

‘Arya.’

He almost laughs. Somehow he’d forgotten. With Sansa it has been impossible to ignore that he is not truly her brother, but with Arya it seems to matter so little.

Daenerys continues, ‘I know you don’t know me, but I meant what I wrote you. I am happy to have more family in the world. I thought I was the last.’ Releasing his hands, she draws back, spinning along with the other women, before joining him again. ‘My dragons are the only children I will ever have, Jon. I will never have an heir by Willas Tyrell. But if you, the son of my brother, were to marry the lady Margaery … ’

Jon goes stiff, his feet sticking in place so that she has no choice but to stop dancing.

She peers at him with those sharp violet eyes. ‘But I admit Lady Margaery does not seem suited to the North, and Arya tells me you will want to remain up here. Is she right?’

‘I ... ’ He pulls his lips into another grimacing smile. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t thought much about what comes after the war, Your Grace. But yes. If I live, I want to stay here. It’s my home.’

‘Home.’ Her heavy sigh surprises him, as does her own unconvincing smile. ‘Westeros is meant to be my home. When do you think it will start to feel like it?’

There is no answer he can give her, not one that will satisfy, so he merely shrugs and takes up the dance again. The woman in his arms is his family, and he knows he ought to try to know her better, but his eyes already drifting back to where Sansa sits at the head of the room, Arya at her side, saying something that makes her sister laugh. Their faces are warm and open, and he recognizes the girls they once were in them. In that moment he vows that if he survives the war, he will never leave them again.

VI.

‘So,’ Arya says with a smirk, ‘Queen Sansa, huh? Your childhood dream comes true.’

‘I didn’t mean for it to happen. I just wanted to go home, and before I knew it, this was how it happened. Besides, you can hardly tease me. You rode here on a dragon!’

‘I just wanted to go home, and this is how it happened.’

Sansa rolls her eyes at Arya’s mimicry. Yet it’s comforting that some things never change.

‘Is he safe?’ she asks. ‘Rhaegal, I mean.’

‘He’s a dragon.’

‘But are you safe?’

‘Seven hells, of course I’m not safe. Haven’t you heard, there’s a war on. The dead are marching. The stories Old Nan used to scare us with are coming true.’

Biting her lip, Sansa says, ‘You do believe it, then? About the White Walkers?’

‘Jon said so. Why? Don’t you believe?’

‘Of course I do. Jon said so.’

‘Good.’

Sansa watches Jon clumsily spin Daenerys across the floor. Despite both her partner and the unfamiliarity of the dance, she stills seems graceful. Her silver hair and silver gown catch the firelight as she turns, casting reflections on the walls, and more than one man and even a few women stare at her with undisguised awe.

Beside Daenerys, Jon looks, if possible, even less like a Targaryen. If he’d been born silver-haired and violet-eyed, what would Father have done? He wouldn’t have been able to pass him off as his own. Sansa would’ve grown up knowing Jon to be her cousin, a disinherited prince, the product of a tragic romance. She might’ve fawned over him as she’d fawned over Joffrey.

But of course if Jon had been born looking like a Targaryen, he would be dead.

She turns to her sister. ‘Arya, you know about Jon, right? About his parents? He’s not our brother.’

‘Don’t be an idiot. Of course he’s our brother. Who cares if his father was really Rhaegar fucking Targaryen? It doesn’t change anything.’

‘It does, though. He’s Daenerys’s nephew. Our cousin. I think — ’

‘He’s our brother, Sansa. I know you never really cared about him before, but — ’

‘That’s not fair! That’s not what I’m saying.’

‘Then what are you saying, Your Grace?’

‘Please don’t. I care about Jon! He’s family, and I would do anything to protect him. I’m only saying … oh, never mind.’ She sighs. ‘I don’t want to fight.’

Arya throws up her hands, laughing. ‘Then don’t fight. Here, drink some more ale.’ She leans closer and whispers, ‘When she gets tired of dancing, Daenerys will probably want to give a speech or two, and then if we’re really unlucky, Tyrion will take a crack at it too. Take my advice and get well and truly drunk, because they can go all night.’ She props her chin on her fist, and looks out across the hall.

‘Ever since we left Meereen,’ she tells Sansa, almost wistful, ‘feasts with this lot are such a bloody bore. Everyone’s working so hard to pretend they’re happy and they’ve gotten everything they ever wanted. I tried to tell them, the Iron Throne’s just an ugly, uncomfortable chair.’ Her mouth tugs down into a frown. ‘It’s never made sense to me, this dream of hers. Why would you want to rule when you can fly?’

Chapter Text

I.

Much later that night — once the dragon queen has retired to the guest chambers Sansa arranged for her and Tyrion Lannister has stumbled off with one of the serving women; once Jon reassures himself that no trouble is brewing between the Dothraki and the northerners, and confirms that at least some of the guards on watch are still mostly sober — he does what he’s longed to do for hours, and seeks out his family.

Arya flings open the door to Sansa’s chamber the moment he knocks, not at all surprised, it seems, to see him. She’s no longer the little girl he loved so much, a careless child with an untamed spirit, but she is unmistakably Arya. He can’t hide his joy. Seeing her climb off that dragon, it had been as if an unbearable weight has been lifted from him; as if all the fear and all the grief he’s felt for her evaporated at the sight of her mischievous grin, of that damned sword he gave her so long ago hanging at her hip.

‘We’ve been waiting,’ she says.

Across the room, Sansa sits at the hearth, no longer in her dress but instead wearing that same slate-gray dressing gown she wore the night she came to his room. She’s pulled her hair over her shoulder and is drawing a brush through the long, auburn waves so that they shine like molten copper in the firelight, and though she must know he’s arrived, her gaze remains fixed on the crackling fire.

‘Where — ’ He clears his throat, averts his eyes. Conscious of himself, he turns back to Arya. ‘Where’s her guard?’

‘I sent him away. I can’t believe that fucker’s still alive.’

‘I don’t like him either,’ says Jon, ‘but someone has to guard her.’

Arya’s gray eyes gleam. ‘I’m guarding her.’

Before he can object, Sansa calls to them, ‘Come sit down, both of you. It’s already late and there’s so much to discuss.’

Once they are all settled, their stories, or versions of them, come out in pieces, elliptically, as if they are afraid to give too much away. At least that is how Jon feels. He talks about dying, about the war, about Bran, but he says little about his life since returning to Winterfell. He fears what would come spilling out of his mouth if he did.

Sansa, setting aside her brush, busies herself with braiding and unbraiding her hair as she cooly explains how she survived King’s Landing and Joffrey and Cersei and Littlefinger, how she became Lady of the Eyrie and eventually Queen in the North. Her weaving fingers grow slow, almost clumsy, and it occurs to Jon that she may have had too much to drink at the feast. Through increasingly frequent yawns, she describes the rebuilding of Winterfell and the alliance she has made with Asha Greyjoy.

It is Arya who is most reticent. After she left the Hound to die, she went to Braavos. ‘To train,’ is all she says. Now she claims to be better with a sword than all of Sansa’s guards combined. But eventually, for reasons she does not explain, she cut her training short and traveled to Meereen to meet Daenerys, the so-called dragon queen and breaker of chains.

‘Do you trust her?’ Jon asks.

Arya watches him with eyes that are flatter than he remembers, more calculating. ‘No.’

He inhales sharply. It’s a disappointment, but hardly a surprise. Even if Daenerys were the sweetest, most docile child on earth, she could not be trusted; anyone with so much unchecked power is a threat, not just to their family or to Westeros, but to the entire world.

‘She’s not a bad person. She tries to do good. She does do good, sometimes. But she’s impulsive and dangerous. Too dangerous. We have to be careful around her.’

‘Does she trust you?’

‘I think so. As much as she can trust anybody who isn’t her. I helped her in Meereen. She hasn’t forgotten that.’

Jon wants to ask what Arya was doing in Meereen in the first place, and what kind of help a skinny child from a disgraced Westerosi family, even one who is handy with a sword, could offer to the mother of dragons. He wants to know what’s happened to her since he last saw her — and yet, watching the easy way she twirls her dagger in in her hands, and hearing the evasiveness in her tone every time she speaks of training, part of him fears what she would say.

‘What’s her plan?’ asks Sansa. On this braid, she’s missed a strand that hangs loose over her ear, and Jon clenches his fist to prevent himself from tucking it back.

Arya shrugs. ‘To rule.’

‘What’s her plan for the North?’

‘That’s less clear. She wants to rule it, but she hasn’t figured out how yet. She knows threatening you all would displease me, and she’s afraid Rhaegal might obey me over her now. And Tyrion, thank the gods, finally convinced her that burning people alive isn’t a way to win anyone’s loyalty.’

‘He’s her Hand?’

‘Weird, right?’

Sansa inhales shakily, combing her hair loose one last time before bringing her hands to rest in her lap, where she folds them primly together. Her voice is flat, emotionless. ‘Does she mean for me to marry Tyrion again?’

For what feels like forever, the room goes still, but then Arya shakes her head. ‘No, but you’re an idiot, you know that?’ she says, too sharply. ‘You never should have made that offer.’ She points her dagger at Jon. ‘And you never should have let her.’

Sansa goes rigid in her seat. ‘And you,’ she hisses, ‘never should have let us get to the point where we had to beg for Daenerys’s help. You should have told us you were with her all along. I made that offer because while your new queen has been worrying about the bloody Iron Throne, we’ve been worrying about the end of the world.’

Arya scoffs. ‘She isn’t my queen.’

‘You expect us to believe that? You’re her dragonrider. Her advisor. She said so herself.’

‘It’s more complicated than that!’

‘Is it?’ Sansa bites back. ‘Then try to understand that the choices I’ve made have been complicated too.’

Arya sucks in a short breath and Jon winces. Before they went south, when Sansa and Arya fought, they sometimes resorted to kicking, hair-pulling, the tearing of clothes. Jon had rarely witnessed it, but he heard plenty of stories from Robb and sometimes Bran, how Sansa would scream insults at Arya and Arya would throw Sansa’s favorite dolls in the fire and their septa would scold them to no avail and eventually Lady Catelyn would have to drag them both away by their ears as they cried.

But all Arya says now is, ‘Look, I’m trying to talk her out of taking your offer. She wanted to marry you to Aegon.’

Jon only just hears Sansa’s noise of surprise over the thump of his heart. When he looks at her, she’s grown soft again, wide eyes fixed on her sister.

Anger fading, Arya says, ‘She would’ve done it. She was furious when she found out he was a fake. He swore to be loyal to her, even if she didn’t make him her king. Maybe he loved her. I don’t know. Men seem to. At any rate, she considered betrothing you to him as Aegon Targaryen, until she decided she couldn’t let an imposter pass on her family name.’ She scrubs a hand through her messy hair. ‘And Tyrion ... for some reason she likes him, but I don’t think she’d ever trust a Lannister with the North. He’ll get Casterly Rock or some stupid southron seat, but never the North.’

Sansa, worrying her hands together, stares into the fire and a long moment passes in silence.

‘I have to tell you something,’ she says finally. ‘Both of you.’ She still will not look at him. Why won’t she look at him? ‘It may not be the North that I give her. The North may not be mine to give.’

Arya makes a noise of confusion, but Jon doesn’t tear his eyes away from Sansa, who swallows before she says, ‘I’m searching for Rickon.’

***

Part of the way through Sansa’s explanation, Arya storms out, more overwhelmed, Jon suspects, than angry. Rickon may yet be alive. It should be good news. But he also may have been in King’s Landing when Daenerys took the city, or when Aegon took it before her. He may have died while Arya feasted in the Red Keep. He’s been south all this time, and Arya never even knew to look for him. She probably feels that she failed him.

It’s a feeling he knows well.

‘I couldn’t have told her,’ Sansa says quietly once Arya is gone, ‘but I should’ve told you. I’m sorry.’

Over the course of the evening, Sansa has slowly curled up in her chair, shrinking in on herself until her arms circle her bent legs, her chin resting on her knees. She looks younger than she has since they reunited. His chest aches at the sight of her.

‘Aye, you should’ve, but I understand why you didn’t.’

‘I just wanted to be able to give you good news. I wanted to give everyone good news.’

‘You know, don’t you, that even if your uncle finds Rickon, there’s no guarantee the North will want to see him crowned?’

She tilts her frowning face toward him, blinking sleepily. ‘Of course they will. He is Father’s son. Robb’s heir. If Bran cannot come home, then it’s Rickon who — ’

‘What about you?’

Her response is almost sullen: ‘What about me?’

‘The North chose you. They want you.’

‘They didn’t have another choice.’

He bites off the beginning of a curse and pushes out of his seat, pacing several steps away so that he can hide his frustration. With his back turned, she cannot see his anger. Nor, he thinks, can she see how distracting he finds her like this, with her delicate night clothes and her shining hair, her cheeks flushed pink and pretty. There is also the way she is too sleepy to maintain her queenly armor, her eyelids growing heavy, her voice deepening as the words stretch out, slowing like molasses. It is all far too intimate for Jon’s comfort.

He must stop thinking about her like this. It’s wrong. It’s monstrous. How can he feel such things, even here, in this room, where their shared father lived and slept?

After a few deep breaths and with his back still turned, Jon says, ‘I want Rickon back. He was just a babe when we left, but already he had so much life. So much energy. If the Blackfish brings him back to us … ’ He falls silent, imagining that little auburn-haired boy he’d teased and held and kissed so many years ago. How old must he be now? What life has he lived? If he came to Winterfell, would he even remember Jon, or Sansa, or his parents? But it doesn’t matter, because he would be home.

‘I pray your uncle brings him home,’ Jon says at last. ‘But you can’t just crown him king and walk away. It will be more complicated than that. I know you’re smart enough to see that.’

She doesn’t reply.

Minutes pass, or maybe hours. His heart is beating far too fast to keep time by it. At last he turns around to face her — only to find she’s tucked her head into her arms, which have come to rest atop her bent knees. Her eyes are closed, her cheek pressed against the back of her wrist, her slow breaths stirring the hair that’s fallen across her face. She makes a noise, a little sigh at the back of her throat, before she nuzzles even deeper into her own sleeve.

Something inside Jon’s chest burns. He’s damned. He’s base and broken, a monster. He does not care.

The intensity of his feelings almost sends him running, every bit as cowardly as he was after Melisandre brought him back, and yet — he cannot leave Sansa like this. Alone. Undefended. She’s not even in her bed. Jon’s slept rough enough times, in cramped spaces, on hard surfaces, that he knows how sore it can leave you.

He’ll wake her, just enough to tell her to go to her bed, and then he will leave, get out of this room, out of sight of her. He can stand guard outside her door himself if Arya does not return, just as long as he can breathe again.

He approaches, slow and wary, careful not to startle her. Keeping his voice low, he calls her name, once, twice, and again, but she doesn’t stir, not when he crouches at her side, not when he touches a tentative hand to her elbow. Not even when he shakes her shoulder, one fast jostle, before he leans away.

Finally, holding his breath, he brushes the hair away from her face, his fingertips tracing the high curve of her cheekbone. ‘Sansa,’ he murmurs, a little louder. ‘Wake up, sweetling.’

Her eyes flutter open, a furrow appearing between her brows. ‘Petyr?’

His hand snaps back to his side.

But then she sees him, and her expression softens, a faint smile appearing on her lips. ‘Jon.’

‘You … you fell asleep in the chair. I thought … ’

Already her eyes have begun to drift closed again, so he steels himself and gives her shoulder another shake, more firm this time, rousing her enough to help her up to her feet. Without seeming to hesitate, she leans into him, smelling of rose and a little bit of wine, the heat from her body seeping through her dressing gown. Hurriedly, he leads her across the room to her bed, where, docile as a child, she slides beneath the linen sheets, curling on her side and closing her eyes.

He pulls the coverlet up over her body. ‘Get some sleep.’

‘Thank you,’ she murmurs, reaching out to give his hand a gentle squeeze. ‘G’nite, Jon.’

‘Night, love.’

Outside, he finds that Sandor Clegane has resumed his post, but for once Jon’s in no mood to pick a fight with him. ‘The queen is asleep,’ he says, already striding away. ‘Don’t let anyone disturb her.’

II.

It is said that Daenerys Targaryen is the most beautiful woman in the world, and perhaps it is true. Cersei had been utterly beautiful, even in her cruelty, and Margaery Tyrell might’ve been even lovelier, but there is something undeniably striking about the dragon queen’s silver hair and violet eyes, her milk-white skin that has never blackened or peeled in the heat of a fire. Today, her last day at Winterfell, she reveals vast expanses of that unburnt skin in a sleeveless gown of blood red silk and a capelet of rabbit fur as black and glossy as any maiden’s hair. The gown fastens down her torso with silver clasps shaped like dragons and studded with rubies.

As a girl, Sansa would’ve begged to examine the stitching. She would’ve wanted to know where the fabric had come from — Essos? Dorne? Asshai? Even now, whatever Sansa may feel about Daenerys Targaryen, she admires whoever makes her dresses. Each one is more stunning and perfectly tailored than the last, though, it cannot be denied, they are all rather impractical for winter.

‘Are you sure you don’t want me to build up the fire more?’ Sansa can’t help but ask, watching Daenerys’s bare arm lift through the air as she drinks from her goblet. ‘I can call the maid in.’

‘Please don’t worry about me. I’m perfectly comfortable.’ She smiles innocently. ‘Unless you are cold, Sansa?’

Sansa, in plain gray wool, says, ‘Not at all, Your Grace.’

‘Good.’ Smiling, she takes another sip of her wine. ‘The meal was lovely.’

‘I wish we had more to offer, but — ’

‘I’ve gone hungry before. I’m not foolish enough to complain about a hot, filling meal.’ She scoots her chair a little closer to Sansa. Daenerys seems to think that if she treats Sansa with familiarity, Sansa will not notice the lengths to which she goes to avoid using her title. ‘Now, I must thank you for all your hospitality these past days.’

‘Your Grace, you are very welcome here. On behalf of all the North, we are truly grateful for the aid you offer us in this war.’

‘Nonsense.’ She waves Sansa’s gracious words away. ‘You may formally thank me in the morning when we depart. I asked to eat with you because I wished for us to speak, woman to woman.’ Her expression grows serious. ‘I know you thought you wouldn’t like me, when I first came to Winterfell. I know what people say about me, that I am a foreign invader. That I’m the Mad King’s daughter.’

‘I — ’

‘It’s all right. You mustn’t be afraid to be honest with me. All of my advisors are truly honest with me. But I think, these past few days, we’ve come to understand each other. Your sister is my dragonrider, your cousin is my nephew. And you and I, we’re friends, aren’t we? We are almost like family, in fact.’

Sansa manages a smile, as real as any smile she ever gave Petyr or Cersei. But the dragon queen won’t know the difference. ‘Of course, Your Grace.’

‘Good. I am so glad I let Arya persuade me to come north. And you see, I’ve had no need to arrange a marriage for you, at least not yet. Something to discuss after the war.’

With a sinking feeling, Sansa nods. ‘You’re too kind. When the war is won, you are welcome to visit the kingdom of the North at any time. I would be very happy to see you here, and we can discuss … whatever matters you see fit.’

She can’t quite read Daenerys’s expression, those pinched lips and raised brows, but it is apparent enough that she has not truly given up her hopes of claiming the North. The matter is far from settled. For now, however, Daenerys just says, ‘And you must come visit King’s Landing. I’m trying to convince your cousin to come south with me. He’d be a good match for Lady Margaery, don’t you think?’

The words don’t quite make sense, and for a moment Sansa feels rather stupid. A match for Lady Margaery? But of course — she must mean Jon. Jon and Margaery. It’s laughable.

Jon, quiet and loyal and unfussy, a Northerner through and through, could he ever be made happy by someone like Margaery Tyrell? And yet … Sansa once thought of marrying Bran and Margaery, had she not? Margaery is beautiful and can be kind, witty, clever. Her family is one of the foremost in Westeros; her brother will be the consort of the queen. It may be she is no longer a maid, true, but Jon wouldn’t care, not about that.

Sansa drains the rest of the water in her cup and pushes the thoughts away. Now is not the time.

‘I know Jon would prefer to stay in the North,’ Daenerys says, ‘but he must realize he has no true place here. I could offer him a lordship and a family seat. I could legitimize him as a Targaryen. You’re a practical woman. You should advise him in this.’

‘Of course,’ Sansa says weakly. ‘It makes sense.’

‘Once we return from the battle, of course. I suspect once he’s no longer worrying about the war, he’ll be much more amenable to the idea of a beautiful wife in the warm south.’ Daenerys looks almost bored. ‘With the battle won, I suspect we’ll all be much happier.’

Daenerys’s confident worries Sansa, but at the same time, she wants to believe her. Wants to trust that the White Walkers will be as easy to defeat as Daenerys seems to think.

‘If I may beg a favor of you, Your Grace?’

‘Yes?’

‘Win the war. A quick victory with few losses.’

Daenerys flashes her sharp grin and lifts her goblet in a toast. ‘A quick victory with few losses. That’s the plan.’ She tips her cup back and drains the rest of the wine, and if she has any doubts, they do not show.

***

On Jon’s orders, and apparently at Bran’s insistence, the army of the living is set to march out at first light, and so Sansa spends the rest of the day ensuring they’ll be ready. After breaking her fast with Daenerys, she oversees the portioning of food rations and double-checks that every northerner is equipped with armor, boots, and some kind of weapon. Some of the remaining supplies can go to the Dothraki and the Unsullied, but Sansa has made it clear that she will not allow any of her people go unprotected even for the sake of the alliance. Daenerys had not seemed particularly concerned either way; her faith in the loyalty of her men is, Sansa thinks, naive. A starving man, a freezing man, has no master but the will to survive. But she lets Daenerys do as she pleases.

(In her missive from Deepwood Motte, Asha Greyjoy assured Sansa that she’d outfitted her troops appropriately and had even brought enough food to keep them fed. I’m not stupid enough to rely on Glover’s charity, she’d written, and it had made Sansa laugh. If Asha makes it back to Winterfell alive, Sansa may not be able to resist throwing her arms around the woman as if she were a long-lost sister. It is a relief to have at least one ally she can trust — especially one with whom she’ll never have to discuss marriage alliances.)

By the time supper is served, Sansa has spoken with the captain of the castle guard about the new watch schedule, now that a portion of the guards will be leaving for the battle. She’s also spoken with her own queensguard. Alysane Mormont will be joining Jon and Arya, not to mention her sisters and mother, on the battlefield, but Sansa must reassure her once more that it is the right thing to do. Sandor Clegane scowls and tells Sansa that she shouldn’t leave Winterfell or herself so unprotected, and Sansa can’t resist teasing him for his fretting. Brienne, dear Brienne, vows again and again that she will stay by Sansa’s side no matter what, until her dying day. Sansa grows misty-eyed at her devotion and can only thank her, her truest friend.

When at last Sansa arrives late for her supper, she finds that Jon has left his seat at the table in order to walk amongst the drinking soldiers, stopping to speak with them in quiet tones, listening to their concerns or their war stories or their bawdy jokes. Men and women alike respond to Jon’s gentle authority, sitting up taller when he casts his attention on them.

‘He’s so much like Father,’ Arya leans over to whisper.

Sansa smiles and says what she’s been thinking for days: ‘So are you.’

She’s like Mother too, and like Robb as Sansa remembers him, brave and bold. Sansa never could’ve predicted the person Arya would become. Part of her wants to fuss over her sister, coddle her, demand she stay at Sansa’s side all through the dinner, all through the war, but when Arya stands to join in amongst the revelry, Sansa does not stop her. She knows she will see her before the morning, and she will find a way to say her farewells. She will find a way to let her go. She knows she cannot keep Arya — the dragonrider, the swordfighter — back from the battle, but gods how she longs to. You’re just a little girl, she wants to tell her sister, but it isn’t true. She’s a woman grown, as is Sansa. They have been for some time now.

Sansa rises to deliver a speech thanking her people for their strength and fortitude, for their valor, and they lift their voices up in a familiar cheer: ‘For Winterfell! For the North!’ How many of them will never make it home? She hides her fear behind another toast.

When the meal is done, Sansa excuses herself to meet with the steward and the head of the kitchen, and then she takes the time to speak with some of the smallfolk, men and women, boys and girls, who will leave tomorrow — those stationed in the Great Hall, as well as those lodged elsewhere. She even visits the Dothraki and Unsullied briefly, as a show of good will, but Sandor Clegane does not let her stay long. On her way back to the keep, she stops to speak with the head groom, who is pessimistic about the horses’ chances in the snow, and when she runs into Tyrion Lannister, she pauses long enough to inquire politely about the comfort of his stay and the morale of his troops.

‘You know, I never thought I’d see you again,’ Tyrion says, grinning and drunk, but harmless. ‘Certainly not under these circumstances. It has been a strange few years. We have both come quite a long way.’

‘I never imagined I’d see you again either,’ replies Sansa, keeping her tone light. Tyrion had not been unkind to her, yet she knows better than to trust him, or to allow him to presume an intimacy with her that they do not share. She is not the same girl she was in King’s Landing. She is not the same girl he married. ‘Yet here we are.’ She smiles and moves past him, claiming she has another errand to run.

The hour is late by the time she is free of her duties, later than is entirely proper to visit Jon’s chamber, but when they arrive outside Jon’s door, she orders Sandor Clegane to leave her, ignoring his dark look, his undisguised scowl. Whatever he thinks he knows, Jon is her kin and she has the right to speak with him if she wishes.

Once her guard has rounded the corner, she knocks, her fist barely tapping the door before it swings open. Jon stands in the doorway, lean and dark and so grown up. It’s enough to set Sansa’s heart racing, thinking of him leaving tomorrow, heading toward an otherworldly force that might kill him.

‘Hello,’ he says after a moment.

‘I meant to come by earlier. Is it too late?’

‘No, no, I was just … I was going to visit the crypts.’ He’s wearing his cloak, she realizes, and his gloves.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, I can — ’

‘No. Please. Would you, would you like to come with me?’

‘Yes.’

He flashes his broad smile, such a rare sight, before clearing his throat, his eyes skimming over her. ‘You’ll get cold. We should stop for your heavy cloak.’

Without thinking, she shakes her head. ‘Is your old one in here?’

He hesitates, then nods.

‘I can wear that ... if you don’t mind.’

The last time he wrapped her in this cloak, she’d been struck by the smell, dark and damp like soil, not unpleasant, not unpleasant at all, but strong enough that she could still smell it on her skin when she went back to bed that night. Now she finds herself tempted to bury her nose in the furs, inhaling all she can of him before he is gone. Instead, she simply nods her readiness and follows him in silence through the hall, out of the castle, to the crypts.

She hasn’t been down here in a long time, not since Jon’s return, and she finds herself lingering before the statue of Lyanna. The girl’s face is lovely but emotionless, and Sansa strains to imagine her as she was when Rhaegar stole or seduced her away. She tries to imagine her, belly swollen with Jon, and happy, Sansa prays she was happy, at least for a time, not knowing all the tragedy that awaited her, nor how near was her own death.

‘She was beautiful,’ Sansa says at last.

‘I wish I could’ve known her.’ Jon sets the candle at Lyanna’s feet, ducking his head for a moment before he looks back up at the statue. ‘I wish I knew anything about her. I barely even paid attention when— when Lord Stark mentioned her. I didn’t know to.’

‘I’m so sorry, Jon. I wish it had been different. But if I know anything for certain, I know she would be proud to be the mother of a man like you.’

He glances at her, something soft and sad in his face, but all he says is, ‘Have you spoken with Arya?’

She touches his arm, a sympathetic squeeze at his elbow, because it’s not enough to be sorry, and it’s not enough to be sad. It doesn’t undo what Jon has lost. She wishes her father had found a way to make everything all right, but she learned long ago that her father was just a man, no more capable of miracles than she.

So she lets Jon change the subject.

‘I tried to talk to her,’ she says of the little sister she cannot bear to lose once more. ‘I don’t want to say goodbye. She just came back.’ The recently-chiseled statue of Ned Stark seems to sit in judgment over her, asking her how she can fail in her duty to protect Arya. Beside him is the unfinished statue of Robb. Sansa has vowed to see it completed when the war is done, but even the beginnings of that familiar face sting her heart like nettles.

‘I never knew how much I’d miss her,’ Sansa admits. ‘But I have, I’ve missed her so much. Ever since Father died, I’ve prayed to the gods to bring Arya back to me. I thought she might be dead, but still I hoped. And now she’s returned and I’ve no choice but to let her go again.’

‘She’s strong,’ Jon tells her, and because it is him, it almost reassures her. ‘She will make it through this. And she has a dragon. That can’t hurt her odds.’ He flashes his crooked smile. ‘You know I’ll protect her.’

Of that Sansa has never had any doubt.

Picking up the candle, Sansa walks deeper into the crypts, past the faces and names she knows too well, until she is staring down the old kings of winter, a long line of ancestors whose legacy somehow rests with her. Her parents never prepared her for this, and even in all of his tutelage, Petyr never warned her what to do when the dead rise and walk again. He never taught her how to rule when she must risk the safety of those she loves most in the world in order to protect the realm. He’d never cared much for protecting the realm, only for controlling it.

Footsteps echo behind her, and without turning around, Sansa says, ‘It’s not fair. I have to watch you leave and I can’t do anything to help. Robb rode into battle with his men. Father fought side by side with his soldiers. But I can’t do that.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

She turns on her heel, unable to fight the flicker of annoyance that rises in response to his naivete. ‘It does matter. Imagine how different it would be if they’d chosen Arya. She rides a dragon! She knows how to fight. She knows how to protect the people she cares about. All I’ve done is … ’

Her nails dig into the palms of her clenched fists. He already knows what she’s done.

But what he says is, ‘You protect people, of course you do. You won Winterfell. You won the North. You did that.’ She allows herself one quick glance at him, his face shadowed in the darkness. ‘Sansa, you must know that Father, your father I mean, would be so proud of you. Your mother too, and Robb. Arya is, I know she is. And so am I.’

That was what Brienne thought Sansa wanted, wasn’t it, all those months ago? To make her family proud. And it is true that the words pry open some closed-off place in her heart, spilling light and warmth inside of her. He is proud of her. They all are, or would be, if they saw her now. Could it be true?

Still, she can’t help but confess, ‘Petyr always said it was my claim, my beauty, that would win me Winterfell. His cunning. His plan. His power. But my claim.’

‘Whatever that man said —’

‘He was despicable. I know he was. But he was right. My claim is all I have, and what is it even worth? It was Arya who won Daenerys to your cause. She did it with her bravery. I couldn’t do it even with the most powerful thing I have to offer. It’s the only thing anyone will ever want me for and it’s still not good enough.’ She looks at her feet and blinks until her vision clears, but when she lifts her head again she finds him standing right in front of her, staring at her with those kind gray eyes, his brow creased, his lips beginning to part. ‘You were right too,’ she tells him. ‘That day when we argued and you said I was selling myself. I was, and it didn’t even matter.’

He is fierce when he says, ‘It’s not true.’

‘Isn’t it? I know it’s not what you meant, but there is truth in it.’

He reaches out, a slow fumble that stops short of touching her, his hand simply hovering near her own — waiting for permission, she realizes, to touch her. He is still so careful with her. She doesn’t quite nod, but he understands her assent and grasps her hand in his own, which is large, rough. Scarred and warm. So very gentle.

‘Sansa, you are every bit as brave as Arya. You’re every bit as strong. You have done an incredible thing, uniting the North, and you did it because you’re you. Littlefinger didn’t do it. Some man who wanted to marry you didn’t do it. You did.’

His hand tightens around hers, holding it steady, and it’s only then she realizes she is trembling.

‘You think so well of me,’ she says at last. ‘Why? I told you about Petyr. You’re the only person I’ve ever told. I thought if you knew, if you saw me for what I really am … ’ She squeezes her eyes shut.

‘I do see you.’

‘No. You think I’m a good person. But the things I had to do to survive — ’

‘Sansa, look at me. Look at me.’ He leans even closer, and even in the low light of the candle, she can see that color has risen to his cheeks. ‘We’ve all done things that shame us. Gods, Sansa, the things I’ve done … I’ve lied. I’ve killed. I’ve done terrible things. I’ve broken nearly every vow I ever made. More men have died by my hands than I can count. I betrayed the woman I loved.’

Her breath catches. ‘The woman you loved?’

A pause, and then a sharp nod. ‘Aye.’ Releasing her hand, he edges back. ‘Her name was Ygritte. She was of the free folk. A wildling. She had red hair, like you. They call it being kissed by fire.’

She thinks of him watching her as she braided her hair at the fireside that night; she thinks of his warm gaze in the darkness of his room as he wrapped his cloak around her and lifted her hair over the collar.

‘She died,’ he says at last.

The howling wind outside does little to drown out their panting breaths, or even, Sansa is certain, the hard thump of her heart. That Jon has killed does not surprise her. It does not upset her. Sandor Clegane had been right about one thing, the world is built by killers, though nothing could persuade her to believe that Jon relishes in killing. He is only a man who’s been made to carry too much.

But that Jon loved someone — that is something else. Ygritte. A pretty name. She hopes that it was a good love, despite his betrayal, despite her death. Jon deserves a good love, the kind Sansa could never find.

She means to tell him so, and to ask him more about this woman he’d loved, but instead when she opens her mouth she finds herself asking, ‘Is that it? Do I remind you of her?’

He stares at her.

Her cheeks grow hot, and every self-protective instinct she’s relied upon all these years screams out for her to be quiet, to feign innocence, feign stupidity, but she cannot. She will not. If she is making a fool of herself, if she is driving him away, it doesn’t matter. She must forge ahead. She is brave. Jon said so himself.

‘Ever since you came back,’ she says slowly, ‘I’ve wondered …’ She shakes her head, tries again. ‘The way you are with Arya, it’s so different from how you are with me. I know it’s always been like that, and I know you always loved her more, so I didn’t question it at first, but there’s something different now, isn’t there? Even since before she came back. Sandor Clegane says that you don’t look at me the way a brother looks at a sister. My maid even said something to me. Are they right? What am I to you, Jon? Am I truly your sister?’

His mouth opens but he remains wordless, staring in what she can only take to be mute horror, so she licks her lips and keeps talking, the words spilling out in a giddy rush of desperation to know the truth. To know how Jon feels. She cannot wait until the war is done, and simply pray that he survives, and that he doesn’t run south to Margaery Tyrell or any other ladies Daenerys might tempt him with. She cannot wait and wonder.

‘Do you think of me as your cousin? Do you think of me at all? Is it just that I am a Stark, and honor demands that you care for me? That you protect me? Does it mean anything, the way you look at me?’

He’ll no longer face her, his gaze lowered to the ground, his hair falling across his eyes, but she presses on nevertheless.

‘I know beauty can make men think they feel things they do not truly feel. Is that it? Or do I simply remind you of your dead lover? Am I — ?’

‘You’re my queen.’

The words come out rough, harsh even, and when he raises his eyes to meet hers, her heart stops at the ferocity she sees there. All at once she again becomes aware of his proximity, his heat, and the smell of him, his cloak, all around her. She shivers.

‘I used to think Melisandre made a mistake bringing me back. I knew I should’ve stayed dead. I wished I had. But because of her, I found you again, and gods, Sansa, you are more than I ever could’ve imagined.’ A prickle of gooseflesh breaks out across Sansa’s skin, all up and down her arms. ‘Against all odds you’ve held the North together. You’ve made allies of enemies. You are willing to sacrifice yourself for the good of your people. And no matter how hard things get, you take care of them and they love you for it. How can they not? And you love them. You respect them. You don’t think you’re better than them, you don’t expect them to fear you or worship you. You just want to take care of them, and so you do.’

Sansa’s knees almost buckle beneath her and she braces herself against one of the ancient monuments.

Jon is still speaking. ‘In a hundred years, they’ll be singing songs about Daenerys and her dragons, and maybe even about Arya and her adventures. If we manage to survive this damn war, I’m sure they’ll sing songs about it across the whole of Westeros. But it’s you they’ll remember as the queen who got them through winter. You will be the queen who saw her people through to the spring.’

He takes a deep breath and shakes his head, taking one step back and then another, until he stands outside of the pool of light. ‘No, I don’t think of you as my sister, and I am sorry for that, I truly am, but — ’

‘Jon.’ It’s barely a croak.

‘I know it’s wrong of me — ’

‘Jon,’ she manages, louder, stumbling toward him in the dark. Even though she cannot see their color, she can feel his gray eyes on her, can feel the comfort of his soft, heated gaze.

‘Yes?’

‘Will you kiss me?’

He breathes her name.

‘Please, Jon. Kiss me.’

She waits in the darkness, closing her eyes and tilting her face up toward him. His shaky inhales and exhales seem to roar in her ears, and her own heartbeat pulses erratically within her breast. Enough time passes that she begins to doubt herself, but then she smells him, sweeter and lighter than the scent of his coat — earthy, like the godswood, like Winterfell itself — and she feels the heat of his breath puff across her lips, and then —

Then her thoughts spin away faster than she can catch them. All she knows is the soft pressure of his lips, the tender, almost shy way he cradles her face. His thumb strokes along her jawline, gentle, so gentle, it’s enough to make her cry. No one has ever kissed her like this, as if they are giving something instead of taking it.

When she opens her eyes, his brow is furrowed, and he brushes away a few unshed tears from her eyes. ‘Are you okay?’ He gulps. ‘Did I hurt you? Shit. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I’m so sorry — ’

But even in the darkness he must see the way her mouth stretches into a toothy smile as she presses her forehead against his, because he stops talking, and when she leans in once more, he holds her even closer. Less gently now, but no less giving. His murmuring lips slide across her jaw, beneath her hair, down her neck. Finally she hears what he is saying.

‘I love you.’

Some dam breaks inside of her, and she cannot help but laugh out loud, dragging him back into the candlelight. She grins at his slightly wounded expression. ‘We have terrible timing. You leave me tomorrow.’

‘Sansa, there is no good timing for this. We’re … ’ He looks around, taking in the faces of ancient patriarchs, and seems to remember all at once where he is. ‘Gods. Your father would kill me. Your mother would kill me.’

But she shakes her head. ‘They were in love too. They knew what it is. What it means.’ Her cheeks hurt from smiling so hard. ‘They would want me to be happy.’

‘Can I make you happy? Can I truly?’

‘You can. You do.’

Touching her cheek, he says, ‘But you’re crying.’

‘So are you.’ She leans up to press a kiss beneath his eye, and comes away with salt on her lips.

‘You make me happy,’ she promises. ‘So as your queen, I order you to live. Live and make me happy. I don’t know what will happen when it’s all over. I don’t know if we’ll get Rickon back. I don’t know if we’ll have to fight Daenerys. But you are going to live, and Arya too, and we are all going to spend the rest of our lives here, in our home, with our family.’

‘That’s all I want.’

He sweeps her into his arms, and though she can still sense his tentativeness, she only loves him more for it. He gives her another sweet kiss, but when she opens her mouth beneath his lips, he responds, tongue sliding alongside her own, sending sparks all down her spine. His slender body radiates heat as he slots himself against her, his hot hands sinking into her hair, his muscled chest firm against her breasts. He kisses her and kisses her, until she is dizzy and breathless. Her hand slides down his spine to the small of his back, and she swallows his gasp as she presses herself even more insistently against him.

If he asked her to come back to his room with him, she does not think she would say no, but of course he is still Jon, gallant Jon, and the moment she feels him grow hard against her thigh, he drags himself away.

His mouth, obscenely swollen, falls open as he pants, and his hair sticks up in the back where she must’ve been pulling it. His pupils are blown wide, black swallowing the gray irises, and Sansa wonders if she looks as wrecked as he does. She tentatively pats her hair.

He offers her a sheepish smile. ‘Sorry.’

‘I love you.’

If the gods were good, they would never ask her to let him go, but Jon belongs to the world, not just to Sansa. He belongs to the heroes.

Pressing a brief kiss to his coarse cheek, Sansa says, ‘I should find Arya and tell her goodbye.’ When he moves to follow her, she holds up a hand to stop him. ‘Stay. Confer with the dead. Say your prayers. And tonight … sleep well.’

Pausing at the edge of the ring of light, she looks back at him once more, so that she might engrave the memory of his soft eyes, his bittersweet smile, into her mind. She memorizes the shape of his hands, broad and skillful, and the way he holds himself, like a soldier, like a knight.

‘Dream of me.’ She wraps herself more tightly in his cloak. ‘Dream of spring.’

***

Outside the crypts, she finds Ghost waiting, and she no longer bothers to hold back her tears. She lets them fall as she throws her arms around the wolf, pressing her cheek to his muzzle.

‘I’ll miss you too, boy,’ she says, meaning it. ‘You must protect him. Protect them both. Bring them home, bring them back to me.’

When she pulls away, Sansa thinks she sees a promise in Ghost’s red eyes — red like the leaves of the weirwoods, red like the blood that connects her to what remains of her family. It is a Northern kind of promise, steadfast as the stones of Winterfell and as certain as the winter, and just this once, Sansa allows herself to believe.

III.

He remembers dying the way you remember a story you’ve been told since you were a child, and he remembers kissing Sansa as if it was a dream. On a field of fire, wet with sweat and blood and snow, he holds onto that dream, the only real thing in a world of nightmares. Dead men draw their swords again and again, and dragons tumble from the darkened sky, and men fall all around him, men and women, children too, bodies that fall and rise once more and burn and burn and burn.

‘Kiss me,’ she’d said. ‘I love you,’ she’d said.

A White Walker lunges, spear in hand, and a searing pain rips across Jon’s face. Blood streams fast, too fast. He can’t see, he can’t feel, he can’t think.

‘I love you.’ He can still hear her voice, golden and sweet. ‘I order you to live.’

I tried, Jon thinks, in the darkness.

IV.

The bells ring from morning until night when the soldiers come home, but the celebration is nevertheless a somber one. Merry dresses Sansa in a simple black lambswool dress and a dark sable cloak, and she pulls her hair back into a single thick braid. When Sansa settles her circlet across her brow, she frowns at the severe face in the mirror.

So many dead. Impossible to ever really know how many. The remains of the recently-dead are all mixed up with the remains of wights, and all of them have burned beyond recognition. But stories have made it back from the battlefield, stories of gruesome deaths, brave deaths, needless deaths. Some of those who’ve died Sansa knows by name, and some she does not, but she prays for them all, in both the godswood and the sept, not knowing which they would prefer. She prays for the Dothraki and the Unsullied too, so many of them killed by the cold before the enemy ever got to them. One morning the sun did not rise and Sansa knew the long night had come, and winds more bitter than any she’d felt before shrieked through the trees like a child at play. That, she knows, is when most of Daenerys’s army started dying, but more deaths followed. She received word that Yohn Royce was dead, and then old Lord Cerwyn too. Three Mormonts, Alysane included, fell protecting Arya after Rhaegal was killed midair by one of the White Walkers. Sansa wept when she heard the news.

The North itself has been ravaged too, dragonfire, corpses, and stamping feet leaving scars across the land. Villages burned. Last Hearth was reduced to rubble. A battle in the wolfswood with a small contingent of wights who’d made it past Jon’s armies left half the forest in ashes, Winterfell’s remaining soldiers hastening to burn the enemy before it reached the castle. It was said there was magic in the stones that would protect Winterfell, but Sansa could not risk waiting to find out, not with so many innocents under her protection.

That was the battle that killed Sandor Clegane.

Sansa swallows her sadness. Today, she has vowed not to weep, because despite all that has been lost, the war is won. Still, when Arya steps through the gate, tears spring to Sansa’s eyes. Her little sister hobbles forward with the help of a crutch, her leg broken from when she fell from Rhaegal, but it is the burns that worry Sansa. Her hand is in wrapped in bandages, and from what Sansa has been told by the rider that had been sent ahead, the burns extend past her elbow.

‘Oh, Arya. Will you be able to hold a sword again?’

‘With this hand? Remains to be seen. I’ve still got my other one though.’ Her smile is strained but honest, and Sansa enfolds her in the gentlest of hugs.

‘I am sorry about Rhaegal,’ Sansa murmurs.

Arya shrugs. ‘I think dragons aren’t meant to exist in this world. They were beautiful and they saved us, but they destroyed so much. They killed as many of our men as the wights did. They … ’ She shakes her head.

‘How is Daenerys?’

‘Lost. Heartbroken. Angry. Furious, really.’

It is the latter that worries Sansa most, but with Daenerys’s forces diminished and her dragons dead, in truth there is not much she can do. Not unless she follows in her father’s footsteps and turns to wildfire. Sansa suppresses a shiver. It is not worth worrying about now.

‘Go get some food and get cleaned up,’ Sansa tells Arya. ‘You can sleep in my bed. Tell Merry to get you anything you need.’

The survivors continue to trudge through the gates. Few horses remain, and the carts that made it through the snow look as if they might fall apart any moment, so it is mostly people helping each other, propping each other up as they walk or limp into the yard. Sansa stays, watching them all. Ale and hot food wait inside for them, and there should be room enough for everyone to sleep. They will be taken care of, Sansa has made sure of it. And when the time comes, she will resettle them all, all of those whose homes have burned, as well as all of those who came from elsewhere and may wish to stay in the North.

In time Daenerys returns, one of the few to come through the gates on horseback. A handful of Unsullied soldiers escort her, and a burly man with a black beard helps her off the horse and remains close beside her, glaring around the yard as if ready to leap to her defense at any moment. The dragon queen keeps her face down as she passes, but it is evident that her eyes are pink.

‘Welcome back, Your Grace,’ Sansa says politely, expecting no response, and indeed Daenerys passes her without a glance.

Finally, after what feels like hours, she catches sight of him and the air rushes from her lungs. Jon, covered in filth and gore, but unmistakably alive, walking beside a short-haired woman she doesn’t recognize. Sansa knows the moment Jon sees her by the way his shoulders straighten, and by the way he softens the grim set of his mouth.

‘Sansa,’ he breathes when he rushes to greet him.

Her attention is drawn to the bandage over his left eye — over what was once his left eye. The wound trails all the way down his cheek, and even through the dressing she can tell it will leave a nasty scar. She’ll have to have a patch made for him, to cover the socket. She’ll speak to the maester about it.

Far more terrible things could have happened to Jon than losing an eye. Far more terrible things did almost happen, according to Arya. If not for Ghost, Jon would likely be dead.

Still, Sansa mourns his lost eye a little, not because he is truly diminished in any way but because he deserved to make it through this war in one piece. How much more can the world take from him? And of course, he had such lovely eyes. It is a shame there is now one fewer of them.

The woman beside Jon clears her throat. Though just as filthy as Jon, she seems less injured, only a few visible cuts and burns. There’s a sharpness to her smile that feels out of place amidst the bleak exhaustion of everyone else.

‘I’m Asha Greyjoy.’ She sticks out a hand. ‘Nice to finally meet you.’

Asha Greyjoy. Sansa can see it now, the shadow of Theon in this woman’s face, and a wave of gratitude rises up within her. If not for Asha’s letter, where would Sansa be now?

While the Tyrells sidelined her and the boy pretending to be Aegon Targaryen ignored her, Asha Greyjoy sought out Sansa’s friendship and support, and in return Asha has supported her unwaveringly, an ally she’d never dreamed of and whom she wouldn’t give up for anything. After all, it has not only been the northern lords and the lords of the Vale who have enabled Sansa’s rule; there have always been others, from Asha Greyjoy to the Riverlanders who remembered Sansa’s lady mother, from warrior women like Brienne and the Mormonts to the smallfolk like Merry who’ve shown Sansa such loyalty, such kindness. She forgets, sometimes, that the crown that sits on her brow was placed there by more than men, and it will take more than men to steal it away.

There is much Sansa would like to say to Asha, but all she manages is, ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’ She grasps Asha’s hand. ‘Thank you, Your Grace, thank you for everything.’

Asha scoffs. ‘Call me Asha.’

‘Sansa.’

After a few more moments of pleasant chatter, Asha excuses herself, pleading hunger, and when Sansa tells her about the food laid out in the Great Hall, she all but runs inside, offering one last nod to Jon, whose gaze Sansa can feel boring into her.

Aware of onlookers, Sansa pulls Jon aside, toward the mouth of the crypts. As much as Sansa has opened her home to those who have needed refuge, it is understood by all that only Starks belong in the crypts beneath Winterfell.

‘Are you all right?’ she whispers, when they are out of sight of anyone still passing through the yard.

He fingers the edge of his bandage. ‘It doesn’t hurt so much now.’

‘Good. But that’s not what I meant. Are you all right?’

‘I don’t know.’ There’s a bite in his voice, but then his tone softens. ‘Are you?’

‘No, I don’t think so. It’s as if we’ll never be allowed to stop mourning.’ She sighs, reaching for him. The embroidered direwolf shines from the dark leather straps of his cloak, and when she touches the smooth stitching, it still feels like new. ‘Tell me about Ghost.’

Jon tenses, his face growing hard, but the wall he tries to build crumbles at once and his sadness spills through. He sighs, his whole body sagging. ‘A White Walker almost killed me, and then Ghost was there before he could finish the job. He saved me. He died to save me.’ His expression is so bleak that Sansa, heedless of dirtying her gloves, cups his muddied and bloodied face in her hand. ‘It’s like I’ve lost a piece of myself. I have lost a piece of myself.’

‘I know,’ Sansa says, wrapping him her arms, letting the weight of him rest against her. ‘I know.’

Yes, the report of Ghost’s death had been perhaps the most painful of all, a shattering of Sansa’s already broken heart — but he’d kept his promise to her. Jon and Arya had come home.

She presses her cheek to his chest, feels the steady beat of his heart. He is here, alive and warm and real. ‘I love you,’ she murmurs.

A long pause, agonizingly long, and then: ‘Even now?’

‘More than ever.’

His arms tighten around her. ‘I love you too.’ He nuzzles his nose into her hair. ‘Gods, I love you.’

‘Then marry me.’

He startles backward. His remaining eye is so wide she almost laughs.

‘There’s so much to do, Jon. The North has to be rebuilt. Something needs to be done about Daenerys. Rickon must be found.’ She pushes back a dark hank of hair from Jon’s forehead, and smooths the wrinkle of consternation already forming across his forehead. ‘Even if the North will not have him as their king, he is a prince of Winterfell and our little brother. We have to bring back Bran, too, if it’s possible. I want our family to be together again. I want us to be a family again.’

‘I do too.’

‘Then don’t make me do it alone. I can. I have. But I don’t want to anymore, so help me.’ She bites her lip. ‘Marry me.’ She will not look away. She will not hide her face. ‘Be by my side, now and always.’

Jon gulps loudly, fingers trembling against Sansa’s skin as he lays his bare palm against her cheek. ‘Would you have me?’

‘Of course.’

‘There will be those who don’t like it. I don’t want to make things more difficult for you, Sansa.’

‘I’m the queen. I will marry a good, northern man who will be my true partner, or I will not marry at all.’ It is a vow to herself as much as it is to him, and a spark of joy flickers within her at the decision. Jon is worth fighting for. Her own happiness is worth fighting for. ‘The people will understand,’ she tells him firmly.

‘And Arya?’

‘She’ll understand too.’ Leaning close, Sansa brushes her lips across Jon’s mouth, not so much a kiss as the promise of one. ‘Marry me.’

He closes the gap between them, his dry, cracking lips sweeter than wine. ‘All right,’ he tells her, ‘I’ll marry you. I’ll do anything you ask.’ He kisses her again, more fiercely, and she winds her arms around his neck. ‘Whatever my queen commands.’

His slow smile, faint but full of feeling, is the warmest part of winter, and all at once she believes that they can do it all — grieve and grow and make the North anew. With him, she can face whatever comes, all the joys and sorrows that await them, all of the hardship and all of the beauty. Together they will survive the winter, and together they will see the spring.