Chapter Text
For Alayne Stone, the beginning of the end came at the feast after the first day of the Tourney of Winged Knights.
The tables were heavy laden with roasted capon and hog, turnips and carrots cooked in honey, fresh bread, yellow cheese and white. The wine and ale flowed freely, and the scions of the Vale drank and spoke politics. As they drank their voices grew louder, so that she did not even need to strain to hear them. They spoke of the last harvest, of famine, wolves and outlawry in the Riverlands, the Faith Militant in the Crownlands, ironmen in the Reach, storms on autumn seas and strange ships seen in the Stepstones.
Alayne listened with half her attention, sorting information from rumour, and rumour from boast, until Ser Roland Waynwood, made expansive with drink and emotion, slammed down his cup and exclaimed, “The Starks of Winterfell were ever friends to the Vale! Yet here we sit, in service to the men who designed the Red Wedding—while the Boltons hold Winterfell, and Ned Stark’s daughter’s been wed to the Bastard of the Dreadfort.”
Alayne sat up straight, as if struck. No, she thought, no, that’s not right, Sansa Stark is to wed Harry Hardyng, and Arya is dead. But Ben Coldwater was nodding. “Bad business,” he said. “The men from White Harbour and Ramsgate who come through Coldwater Burn tell tales of the bastard that paint him half a monster. What happened to his first wife…”
“What happened to his first wife?”
So Ben Coldwater told the story, as he had heard it from the Ramsgate fishers in the harbour of Coldwater; and behind him, Alayne listened in silence, her mouth gone dry with horror.
“I heard a strange story today, Father,” she said later, as she went over the final plans for the second day of the tourney in Lord Petyr’s study. “I heard that Lord Stark’s daughter has been wed to Lord Bolton’s bastard at Winterfell.”
“Lord Stark’s daughter?” Petyr’s smile was strange. “Why should you care for such tales, Alayne?”
“Mere curiosity.” She said the words calmly, though her belly was in knots. “The elder daughter is missing and wanted for treason, and the younger daughter is dead, so whom did Lord Bolton’s son marry?”
“My clever daughter,” Petyr said. “The Boltons needed a Stark girl to unite the North, so Tywin Lannister gave them one. The Lannisters always pay their debts… but sometimes they pay false coin. The girl is not Lord Stark’s daughter, you have that right.”
Alayne’s head was spinning. If not Arya, then who? Not some southern girl, surely. The lords of the North would have to be fools to be taken in by such a deception. It must needs be northern girl, one who knew Winterfell, who knew the Starks, a girl on whom the Lannisters could lay their hands… a girl who would not be missed.
If not Arya then who—frail memory dropped on her from as if from a great height.
She had returned to her room and Jeyne had been gone.
In the fractured, terrified days after Lord Stark’s arrest and the massacre of his guards and household, she had been locked in a room in Maegor’s Holdfast with Jeyne Poole, the steward’s daughter. The girl had been distraught, weeping as she whispered of soldiers come, northmen slaughtered, until she longed for quiet and peace. Ser Boros Blount had taken her to Queen Cersei, to write letters condemning her father and begging her family to surrender. Cersei Lannister had been seated in the council chambers, in a mourning dress covered in jewels like scarlet tears, attended by the king’s councillors: Grand Maester Pycelle, Lord Varys, and Petyr Baelish. She had asked… she had asked…
She had asked if Jeyne could see her father.
Cersei hadn’t wanted Jeyne upsetting her, she’d said so. Her voice had been so sweet. It was only in memory that she heard the poison. What shall we do with this little friend of hers, my lords?
Littlefinger had said, I’ll find a place for her. She had returned to her room and Jeyne was gone, and Littlefinger had never mentioned her again.
False coin. Lord Petyr was watching her, smiling, inviting her to share his humour, so she laughed, though she felt sick, and shared the other gossip she had learned, and listened to his plans for Lord Royce and Lady Waynwood and Harry the Heir with a smile on her face.
All the while her head was a tumult. Petyr helped her escape King’s Landing. He kept her safe from Cersei Lannister. Perhaps he did not know what had happened to Ramsay Bolton’s first wife, she thought, but the excuse sounded weak even to her. Petyr took such care to know everything. And Littlefinger…
…Littlefinger would sell Jeyne Poole to a monster without blinking. He would do it in cold calculation, with a smile on his face, and laugh about it later. When she kissed him goodnight, the mint on his breath tasted like poison. I would leave in a heartbeat, she thought miserably, but I have nowhere to go.
Yet hidden inside her was a secret, a promise: there was one person left to her still. He was half a world away, as distant as the moon and as impossible to reach, but his name gave her the courage to turn back in the doorway, an absent-minded frown painted on her brow. “Father,” she said, “Whatever happened to Jeyne Poole?”
The good humour faded from Littlefinger’s smile. “To whom, sweetling?”
She remembered the Vale lordlings and their morbid curiosity. Whatever happened to his first wife?
He locked her in a tower and starved her to death. They found her with her mouth bloody and her fingers chewed to the bone.
“No-one,” she said. “Never mind.”
After the rest of it, the poison, the fire, and the clans from the Mountains of the Moon, Alayne fled the tourney on a stolen horse, with a steel dagger, a fat pouch of coin, two winter cloaks, and a rapidly darkening bruise on her face, courtesy of Ser Shadrich the Mad Mouse. Sansa Stark, he’d called her, and, a sack of golden dragons, before Ser Lothor Brune took his sword, his sword hand and his head.
The spray of blood had painted her face and dress in carmine. The field had been in chaos, men and horses screaming, thick, choking smoke in the air. She had taken Ser Shadrich’s horse and fled from it all, slipping away through the tattered stands and saplings, the low marshy ground in the valley, then up, up, into the hill passes to the north. The air there was cold and still, the scent of smoke lingering only in her hair and the thick wool of her dress, and as night fell she had been faced with a choice: go back—to safety, to poison, to Littlefinger, to her gilded cage—or go on into uncertainty, and an impossible journey.
With the night came the snowfall, soft and cool and smelling of home. She slept deeply that night, sheltered in a narrow crevice on the hard stones of the mountainside, and dreamed of the fells and open skies of the north, wind in crimson leaves and the rush of sulphurous water through stone. In the morning, she scrubbed Ser Shadrich’s blood from her face with the fresh-fallen snow, until her hands were pale and bloodless and her face numb, and she knew she had made her decision. Then she mounted the horse once more and continued north, through the hill passes to Heart’s Home.
She avoided the castle, where banners showed the ravens and hearts of Lord Corbray, and made for the river-docks. The traders there were rough men and women, but Alayne was nearly a woman and bastard brave. She sold Ser Shadrich’s horse for a handful of coin and bought passage to Coldwater Burn, in the Fingers; Coldwater, where sailors from Ramsgate and White Harbour shared gossip with the men of the Vale.
Autumn storms kept the harbour at Coldwater empty, she learned, and only two ships were from the North. The captain of the first eyed Alayne with undisguised hunger that made her skin itch, and the second ship looked liable to fall apart from the first big wave. She bought a bread roll and information from an urchin on the waterfront. “No,” he said to her question, “No other ships from the North in harbour. But if you’re meaning to head that way, you might try the sistermen.” He jerked his chin towards a narrow boat at the other end of the docks.
The boat was Fast Meg, out of Sweetsister, and her captain was a woman with strong arms and a squinting, weatherbeaten face. She was carrying a crate from the warehouses when Alayne found her, and she eyed Alayne suspiciously and said, “We don’t take passengers.”
“I can pay.” The woman’s eyebrows rose in blatant disbelief and Alayne felt the heat rising in her cheeks. She had washed her face and hands as best she could in the frigid water of the Burn, but her dress was stained and her hair ragged, and she knew she looked a fright. The captain turned away, making her way down the docks. Alayne followed after her. “If it please you, what’s your name?”
The woman sighed. “You’re a stubborn one, aren’t you?” she said. “My mother named me Thrift, like the flower.”
“It’s a pretty name.”
“What’s yours?”
People sought Sansa Stark still, though they looked for a highborn maid of three-and-ten with auburn hair, not a bastard girl with a murky mess of brown, salt-stained and tangled. She had hacked it off to the shoulder in the mountains above the Gates of the Moon, weeping as she did so. And people would be seeking Alayne Stone, as well, but not as hard, nor as far, for who would care about Littlefinger’s bastard but Littlefinger? Still she could not be Alayne, not where any would remember her.
Thrift was watching her, mouth wry, and she knew she had hesitated too long. “I’m… Catelyn,” she said. “Some call me Cat.” Inwardly she winced. If Littlefinger heard the name, he would know instantly, but surely no-one else would connect the name with her.
“And you mean to go to White Harbour?”
“I have family there,” she lied.
Thrift stopped, then, turning to face her. “What are you running from, Cat?”
Unbidden, her fingers rose to her cheek, where the marks of Ser Shadrich’s fist still lingered. “My, my… uncle,” she said. “He… he wanted me to be wed.”
“Was it your man that gave you those marks?” Thrift said. “Or your uncle?”
She snatched her hand away. “He was not my man.”
Thrift gave her an odd smile at that. “Good,” she said. “There’s enough harm we girls face in this world without facing it in our own homes.” She resettled the crate on her hip. “I don’t travel to White Harbour, Cat. I travel to Sisterton. But if you tell me true and you can pay, I will take you that far… aye, and mayhaps find you a boat to take you onward to White Harbour and your kin.”
Thrift’s ship was a fisher, a narrow creature with two masts and a lean-to shelter on the deck that made scant protection from the weather. She sailed with two nephews and a cousin for hands, sturdy young men who eyed Alayne with curiosity but made no effort at conversation. Alayne stayed out of their way insofar as it was possible on so small a ship, wrapping her second cloak around her against the chill and damp as the boat tossed nauseatingly on the waves.
They had passed the Paps and the island called Pebble when the autumn storms caught them. For a night and a day and another night waves tossed the ship about like a giant playing with a ball. Thrift and her nephews managed rope and sail and Alayne huddled in the shelter of the lean-to, terror clenching her guts like a fist. The morning dawned clear and calm, though the winter sun was cold. Wet to the bone, nauseous, she sat on deck with Thrift while the men slept.
“It’s as well the wind was in the east,” Thrift said. She was showing Alayne how to coil the ropes that lay tangled in the bottom of the boat. “Storm like that could have driven halfway across th’ Narrow Sea, else.”
Alayne’s hands were clumsy with the rope, her movements slow. “Are we lost, then?”
Thrift smiled. “No, lass. I know these coasts. Sailed them all my life. See—” she pointed to the distant shape of the land behind them, grey against the blue sky. “Winds blew us past the Sisters to the south, deep into the Bite. It’s a barren coast, but safer in a storm than most, for the water goes deep, without rocks to claw us open. We fare north now, and then we’ll turn northeast for Sweetsister.”
Alayne shuddered. “I’ve heard of the rocks around the Sisters,” she said. “Aren’t they terribly dangerous?”
“Aye, there’s danger in it.” Thrift’s smile was fae. “And glory, too, in threading the needle by starlight or foiling the wrecker’s lights. You’ve made an extra twist in the coil, there. Best start over.”
Wreckers, storms and rocks, Alayne thought. She had been ill since Coldwater Burn, barely able to hold down a little water; and she could not even coil a rope correctly. “This was madness,” she said. “I was safe in the Vale. I never should have left.”
Thrift shrugged. “Why did you?”
“I wanted to go home.” She said it without thinking, and when she did stop to think on it she nearly cried. Home, yes; she wanted to be home, to run between the hot springs in the dark shadows of the godswood, to laugh and gossip with Jeyne Poole, to hear her mother singing and her father’s gruff voice as he spoke with Rodrik Cassel and Maester Luwin. She wanted her brothers Robb and Bran and Rickon, and her sister Arya as well, but they were dead, and Winterfell burned and held by strangers.
She ducked her head, dashing away her tears. Alayne, I must be Alayne. Alayne had no brothers, no sister. Alayne held no grief for the dead of Winterfell. Alayne did not know Jeyne Poole.
Thrift hummed, a slight frown on her face as she adjusted sail and rope. “Before he died, my father was a fisher, like me,” she said. “He would say, a boat ashore is safe, but it’s not what boats are built for. He took a boat into the Bite every day I knew him, and the fish he caught kept us fed and in our home.”
“What happened to him?”
“One day a storm took him and broke him to pieces on the rocks off Sweetsister.” The woman sniffed. “The Lady of Waves and the Lord of the Skies took their tribute of him, as they always do. In the Three Sisters we live at the mercy of the gods and the storms. We are home… but we are never safe.” She smiled. “That’s a good-looking coil. You’re getting better at this, Cat.”
Sweetsister did not smell sweet. It smelled of seaweed, fish, and the dangling entrails of the hanged men on Gallows Gate. “Smugglers,” Thrift explained. “Smugglers stupid enough to get caught.” And in the town Alayne found her luck was in: Thrift’s kinsman was sailing for White Harbour. “He’s a sullen one,” Thrift told her. “Don’t mind his silences, though. He’s a kind heart beneath. He’ll get to your kin if anyone can.”
Though Alayne would never be a good sailor, the weather was kind from Sisterton to White Harbour and she managed to hold down a little water and bread. Thrift’s kinsman was taciturn, and his silences left her long hours to contemplate her next steps in the salt and sea air. Lord Manderly had been her father’s bannerman, and loyal to House Stark. She had considered begging audience before him in the Merman’s Court, proclaiming her name for all to hear.
But what proof could she furnish? What lord or lady would want an unwashed girl turning up at their door with claims that could not be proven? And as Thrift’s kinsman’s boat slipped into the outer harbour, she knew it for a false dream. New Castle wore its banners proudly: the merman with his trident, the flayed man of the Dreadfort, and above them all the lion and stag of the boy king. She would find no help there.
Alone, then. It was rank folly, she knew, to set out on such a journey. She had never been meant for such a life, not like Arya, not like her brothers. Madness, she thought. But if it was madness, it was a seductive madness, the madness of danger, of living life at the mercy of the old gods.
She bought a garron in the White Harbour markets. It was old and cantankerous, nothing like the fine steeds knights and ladies rode, but neither knights nor ladies had cause to travel such barren valleys, unless, like her, they fled from some hunter. She bought food that would keep, and oats for the horse, and a pungent sheepskin to guard against the cold, and on a clear, harsh day at the end of autumn she left White Harbour.
In her father’s solar at Winterfell had been a great map of the North, etched in black and red ink on the hide of an aurochs in the days before Torrhen Stark bent the knee. As a child she had delighted in the stark lines and ragged curls, the faded ink, the holes in the leather where the scraper’s knife had slipped, the ancient, rune-like text of the annotations.
Later, her interest had turned to the south, the land of her mother’s kin, of tourneys and songs, maps on linen and vellum and precious paper in which King’s Landing was the centre of the earth. But she had never forgotten the map, the mountains and rivers, the castles and the wolfswood, moor and fen, the swamps of the crannogmen, the barren Gift; and Winterfell at its heart, a crowned castle limned in gold.
North, she told herself, drawing the map in memory. North, and only north. She would follow the White Knife, staying off the kingsroad, staying off any travelled road. She would take goat paths through the mountains, paths no army knew.
The wind blew sharp as a flensing knife, she was alone, and she had all of the North to cross before she would be safe. But as she rode, a great bubble of joy rose up in her chest until she thought she might sing; it burst out of her in laughter, in long-denied delight.
The moon turned. Where the White Knife was fed by streams and rivulets she could cross them easily enough, but she did not trust the ice on the larger streams. More than once she had to climb up into the hills to find a place where the tributaries were safe to cross. It slowed her progress to a crawl, so when she dared she cut north across the hillsides and ridgelines, keeping the river ever on her left hand.
The days were cold and the nights colder, and she thanked the old gods and the new for her flint and tinder, for Ser Shadrich’s cloak and the sheepskins she had bought in White Harbour. Some nights, where the land was bare or the snow thick, she could not light a fire, and she caught scattered hours of sleep huddled against the side of her garron.
Where the White Knife met the Sheepshead Hills the land was low and peaty, heathers and moss dusted with snow. The valleys were frozen bog, all too easy to mistake for solid ground. Her garron put a hoof through the ice one day and cut itself on the shards. She cleaned the cuts as best she could and bound them with cloth, and then she prayed, a desperate, wordless plea to any god that might hear. If the garron died, so would she. The old gods of the north heard her prayer, and for once they were kind: the wound healed cleanly.
After that, Alayne kept to goat tracks on the hillsides, where soil scraped thin over lichen-eaten rock. The land had been farmed once: drystone walls marked out the edges of fields until the hills grew too steep even for goats. But the farmers were gone. And still the moon turned, and she travelled north. She had seen no living thing in days; the sheep and goats grazed on these hillsides in summer had moved down the valleys for winter.
In a rill in the hills she broke the ice on a stream with a stone, wincing as the noise echoed from the hills. The trickle of water beneath was stained amber from the soil. It was harsh and earthy, and cold as time, but she thought it the sweetest thing she had tasted. She drank deeply and broke the ice further so that the garron could drink as well.
When she looked up, a man stood on the other side of the stream.
She stumbled back, fumbling at her belt, her fingers clumsy in their gloves. She drew her knife from its sheath and held it before her with hands that trembled.
The man made no move to come closer, but spread his hands to show them empty. His fingers were bent and crippled with age. He was dressed in heavy wool, a sheepskin wrapped about his shoulders for warmth. “Night’s coming on,” he observed. He was a Hornwood man, for his cloak’s toggle was carved as a moose’s head with curling horns. His beard was wild and flecked with grey, and his dark eyes were wary as they watched her knife trace a trembling circle in the air. “Dangerous for a boy to be travelling alone in these times.” He studied her face, tilted his head. “More dangerous still for a girl.”
“Do you—” She hadn’t spoken aloud in days. Her voice scraped, and she had to clear her throat and start again. “Do you mean me harm?”
“I mean no harm,” the man said. “But night’s coming on, as I said, and snow comes with it. We’ve a roof up the way, my womenfolk and me, if ye’ll bide a time.”
Do I take this offer? Can I trust him? She looked around, but the ice and lichen and her poor exhausted garron had no answers for her. “Bread and salt.” The words spilled from her mouth. “If you’ll share bread and salt, I’ll come.”
The man’s eyes creased when he smiled. He rummaged in the pouch at his side and she drew back, wary, but when he finally moved forward, it was with a heel of brown bread in one hand and a finger-horn in the other. He stopped at the edge of the stream and held them out to her.
The salt tasted of leather, and the bread was three days old and hard as stone, but she chewed it until it was soft and swallowed it down, and could have eaten more. Then she sheathed her knife and took her garron in hand, and followed the Hornwood man up the valley.
There were three huts at the head of the valley, where the stream was dammed into a shallow pool, but smoke only rose from one roof. A flock of some twenty sheep were penned along the riverbank, guarded by a ramshackle shelter and windbreak. A woman was scraping a sheepskin on a frame, but she straightened as they approached. “What’s this?” she said.
“A traveller, given guest right.”
The woman’s eyes were cautious as she looked Alayne up and down. “Dangerous to be travelling in such times.”
“Less dangerous than it was,” the man said, “with the flayed men gone west.”
The woman turned her head and spat. “You can pen your horse here,” she told Alayne. “What’s your name?”
“Alayne.” She said it without thinking, and wondered if it was still true.
“A fine name. I’m Meg, and my man is Owen. We’ve little enough, but our hospitality is yours.”
“I thank you.” She stripped the garron of her bags and cared for it while the old man and woman talked in quiet voices of wind and weather. The horse was growing thinner. Beneath the snow the grass was thin and dead, and she had to ration the oats that she had bought in White Harbour. They would not last much longer, and she did not know what she would do when they ran out.
When she was done, Owen and Meg walked with her in the fading light to the crofter’s hut that was their home. At the door, Owen turned to her. “Be welcome beneath my roof,” he said, his tone oddly formal, “and at my table.”
The hut was a single stone room with a sod roof, home to Owen and Meg, their good-daughter Tansy, three grandchildren, Owen’s mother Nella, who had no teeth and reminded her of Old Nan, a scrawny dog and a nanny goat. The air was thick with peat smoke, manure, and unwashed people, but after days on the road Alayne could only be grateful for the warmth and the company. She had thought she might never be warm again.
They would not let her help with the food, and anyway she would not know what to do, so she sat and helped the children card the last of the autumn fleece while Nella spun thread and told meandering stories of giants and ice dragons.
“You’ve a touch with the little ones,” Tansy said. She was mother to two of the three children, and aunt to the third; their fathers had gone away when Lord Hornwood answered Robb Stark’s call to war, and no one had heard of them since.
“They remind me of my little brothers,” Alayne said. No, that wasn’t me. Alayne has no brothers. But it was harder to hold onto Alayne in a croft in the north than it had been in the Vale.
“How old are they?”
“They’re dead.”
Tansy’s eyes were sympathetic, and she asked nothing further. Children’s deaths were all too common a tragedy, and winter was coming.
I pray you old gods, she thought, let these children live through it. Let them live and have children of their own. That was not Alayne either; Alayne kept the Seven, not the old gods of the First Men. She rubbed her eyes. I am tired of being Alayne, she thought. I want to be Sansa again, to swear by the old gods and the new, to be a child, and have a family, and be safe. But Sansa Stark was hunted still, her family was dead, and she would never be safe again.
The food was a pottage of pease and turnip. Once she would have turned up her nose at it, but it was hot and there was enough of it to fill Alayne’s shrunken belly. In the dim, warm croft she thought it the best thing she had ever tasted.
After the children were settled in the bed, the adults invited her to sit with them at the fire, and they spoke in soft voices long into the night. The winter would be hard, all agreed. Once, three families had lived in the little valley, but the men had answered Lord Hornwood’s call and followed Robb Stark south, and after, the others had taken their herds over the pass to the Hornwood proper, where there were more to help with the work.
“We’ll not be able to stay longer,” said Owen. “There’s little enough grazing left here, and winter is almost come. Twice already the snows have trapped us here.”
“Winter is coming,” said old Nella, “As the Starks promise. It shall be my last. But you, lass, you’re just a young bit of a thing. Do you even remember the last winter?”
“I was born in it,” Alayne said, “Though I lived my childhood in the long summer.”
“You’re a child still,” Owen said. “And a foolish one, to be travelling so late in the autumn.”
“I’ve had luck with the weather.”
“It’s been uncommon good these past days,” he agreed. “Might be the old gods smiling on you and your foolishness.”
Alayne folded her skirt hem into pleats and smoothed them out again. “When the snows come truly,” she said, and stopped.
“Go on, lass.”
“When the snows come, will you travel west? To the town beneath the walls of Winterfell?”
“No,” Nella said. “Not while the flayed men hold Winterfell.”
“No,” Tansy said. “No more would any Hornwood man or woman.”
“No,” Meg said. “Never, so long as the bastard of Bolton draws breath.”
Their vehemence took Alayne by surprise. “What grudge does the Hornwood hold against the Dreadfort?”
“I served m’lady Hornwood when she was a Manderly in White Harbour,” Meg said. “I went with her when she wedded our dead lord, before I found my husband at a harvest feast.”
“I had not heard Lord Hornwood was dead.” There was much and more Alayne had not learned, while a prisoner in the south.
“Lord Hornwood and his son both, fighting the Young Wolf’s battles in the south. Well, and all men must die; but what happened to Lady Hornwood, that was… monstrous.”
The sailors of Ramsgate call him monstrous. “It was Lady Hornwood?” Alayne whispered. “That the Bastard of Bolton married, that he killed.”
“I’d thought all the North had heard the tale,” Owen said.
I have not been in the North, she thought. And I must know. “If you can bear to speak of it,” she said, “I would hear it now.”
In hushed voices they told her of Donella Hornwood’s capture, her rape and death, starved and prisoned in a tower. Alayne was weeping when the story was finished, and so were they. They meant to wed this man to Arya, she thought. No, that was not Arya. Arya died when Winterfell burned. It was Jeyne who was wed to the monster; it was Jeyne she wept for. “One day,” she said, “If the gods are good, Lady Hornwood will have justice.”
“Justice,” Meg said. “The word has a strange flavour. When did the North last taste justice?”
“Before Winterfell burned,” Tansy said.
“Before the wolves went south,” Nella said.
“It was different,” said Owen. “It was different when there was a Stark in Winterfell.”
Meg scoffed. “Aye, when there was a Stark in Winterfell, the days were long and warm,” she said, her voice thick with scorn. “When there was a Stark in Winterfell, the sheep were fatter, the harvests were plentiful, and the rivers ran with milk and honey. But there was a Stark in Winterfell when wildlings raided in the wolfswood and the Bay of Seals. There was a Stark in Winterfell when the Bastard’s boys hunted on the Weeping Water. There was a Stark in Winterfell when Lady Hornwood died.”
“A child,” Owen said, uneasy.
“Aye, a child, and a cripple, but a Stark nonetheless. And now the wolves are gone. The lords died in the south, the pups were slaughtered when the ironmen took Winterfell, and the daughter is wed to the monster of the Dreadfort. She will die soon enough, and when she is dead there will be no more Starks.”
“There was another daughter.” Sansa hadn’t meant to speak, but the words spilled out anyway. She touched her lips, as if she might swallow them back again.
Her hosts exchanged looks. Tansy said, “There was?”
Owen nodded. “Lord Stark had two daughters, that’s so.”
“What happened to her?”
“She went south,” Sansa said. “With her father and her sister.” She married her enemies.
“Likely she’s dead as well,” Owen said. “It’s a curse, I tell you. Northmen should stay in the North, and the Starks of Winterfell more than most. The south spares none of ‘em.”
It’s true, she thought, and said nothing further that night. I survived, but I have not been spared.
North, and ever north.
The moon waned and waxed again. The White Knife climbed through Sheepshead Hills to Long Lake at the ragged edge of the mountains. The lake spread on her left as broad as the ocean. Each time the surface had frozen the wind-driven water shattered the ice and layered it in jagged sheets upon the shore before freezing again like a pile of broken glass.
Across the water, near the Kingsroad on the western shore, Sansa saw toy houses, thin columns of smoke rising from their roofs. Rushes stood out from the ice along the shores, and small figures fished on the lake. On the eastern shore the land was wilder, and there were no settlements, only steep hills rising out of the water. She picked her way along them. The oats had run out, and her garron tired quickly now. She spent as much time afoot as astride, leading him by hand along the narrow goat-tracks.
She rode the shore of the lake for three days, sleeping as best she could in sheltered nooks out of the wind. On the fourth day the lake widened until the far shore was out of sight, and the goat track she was following curled down over the shoulder of the hill into a sheltered valley where scrub and lichen gave way to thick moss forest. The summer trees were skeletons, but a handful of sentinel pines stood dark and green, and in the centre of the forest a weirwood’s crown of russet red stood proud against the grey sky.
Out of the wind, the valley was still and quiet. She let the garron picked his way in under the trees. Three roofless drystone houses still stood there, and a ruined fourth; an elder tree grew from its collapsed walls. She fixed the garron’s reins to the elder’s boughs, and continued on foot.
The heart tree was an ancient, sprawling weirwood, half-collapsed under its own weight. Its carved face was solemn and weeping, but there was a terrible joy in the curve of its mouth. I have seen fire, flood, and a thousand winters, it seemed to say, and I have laughed in the face of them.
Sansa slept that night under the weirwood’s branches, and dreamed.
In her first dream she walked the halls of Winterfell as they burned around her. In her father’s solar, a man with the long, stern face of the Starks stood at the map table. He made no sound as his armour melted and ran down his body, and his skin blackened and peeled away from the bone. His eyes were steel grey and staring; they never left her face. Cinders danced around him. They fell on the great map of the North, and everywhere they fell, new fires sprang up.
In her second dream she stood in the throne room of the Red Keep. The iron throne stood empty, the galleries filled with shadows that chittered and laughed. A net of strangling cord had been twisted between the pillars and the high rafters, tangled as a spider’s web. A man was caught within the net. Each time he struggled the cords cut tighter into his skin, slick with blood and dripping. And each time he struggled the shadows in the gallery roared with laughter like a sea in the storm.
In her third dream she saw a lavishly appointed room, scented with cinnamon and summer flowers. In the centre of the room was set a gaming table where a man played a game against himself. Every time he took a piece from the board he broke it and threw it to the floor, and replaced it with another. A thousand broken pieces lay about his feet, but he never ran out, and the game was never done.
In her fourth dream she sat at a feast, surrounded by shadows who drank and laughed and danced, and the air was loud with music and shouting and the tinkle of little bells. The fare was plentiful and the ale and wine flowed freely, but when morning came it came in silence, and the sun rose over a kingdom of flayed and mutilated corpses.
In her fifth dream a boy lay dead in a castle made of ice, his grey eyes open and staring, snow falling in his ear. His body was torn by a dozen stab wounds that smoked in the cold, and his blood had frozen hard on the frozen ground.
She gazed down at him and knew him, and woke weeping. The tears came hot and wretched and wracked her to the bone, shuddering through her until her face and hands were stained with salt and her entire body felt raw and tender. Too late, too late, a voice lamented within her. I am too late.
When she could weep no more, she struggled free of her blankets to kneel before the bole of the heart tree. In the darkness the weirwood’s face was fierce and fearsome, a gargoyle stretched by centuries of growth. She brushed her hand over the carved face. “You old gods,” she whispered, her voice raw with tears and disuse. “Why have you shown me this dream? Is my last brother lost to me?”
The thought came murmuring to her like memory, like certainty, like the peal of a bell in the shadow of her ribcage. It whispered to her out of the dark. Winterfell is the heart of the North, it said, and the godswood is the heart of Winterfell, and the heart tree stands at its soul and centre. Through the heart tree, all forests are one, and each one is holy.
She found her belt knife and, wincing, sliced a shallow cut across the base of her thumb. Three drops of blood fell smoking on the snow before she caught the flow of blood on her fingers. She pressed the blood to the carved mouth of the heart tree so that the old gods beyond count might taste it and know her for the blood of the North.
“Give him back to me,” she whispered. “I beg you, give him back.” By some instinct she raised her fingers to her lips. The weirwood sap tasted like iron, like earth, like honey. Something moved in the back of her mind, like a great dark beast turning in its sleep.
Behind her, just out of sight, stood a vast and silent host of figures. Their breath on her shoulders was the cold, dry winter, the barren earth, the ending of the old world. Their stone fingers settled dust in her hair like a sacrament. She knew with the queer certainty of dreams and waking visions that they were the dead, risen from the crypts of Winterfell to walk the earth; and she was the last one left in a line of kings.
She felt too large for her bones, a raw decay in her heart, the taste of honey in her mouth. The earth shook, or she fell. All the earth and stone and the dead of the north pressing down on her. She lay on the frozen ground, her cheek on the frozen earth, and gasped to breathe, her heart hammering inside her ribcage.
At length the press of them eased, and she could breathe again, and turn her face to the sky. The eye of the ice dragon shone blue to light true north until the rising sun drowned it in light.
That day she travelled no further, but kept vigil beneath the heart tree. Her body hummed with some hollow energy, and dark spots moved at the corners of her vision. Snow, she thought, though the sky was clear, or leaves, though the trees were bare. She knew she should move on, but some instinct held her in solemn vigil beneath the weirwood tree. She prayed, and waited, and drank a little water; she prayed and prayed again, a wordless plea to the old gods, to the barren land beneath her and the promise of spring beneath the soil.
When the sky dimmed to a deep indigo she fed her garron once more and stood at the head of the valley, looking out over the Long Lake and smoke from the houses on the far shore.
She did not sleep that night, but visions stalked her, swimming before her exhausted eyes. She saw knives in the darkness, and a white wolf with eyes like chips of garnet. She saw a burning star arcing through the sky, like the one that had ushered in the new century a lifetime before, when she was a child. She saw the hot pools steaming in the godswood at Winterfell, and a man and woman coupling beneath the heart tree, their movements slow and languid. Afterwards they kissed long and tenderly and lay together entwined through the purple summer night.
Shortly before dawn, the tension that had been building in her all day and night spilled over like a cloudburst, like a storm after calm. The cut on her hand opened and bled freely, and she pressed the blood to the heart tree and laughed, and wept for joy, though she did not know why. At last, exhausted, she slept, and as she drifted off she heard, or thought she heard, a voice deep in her bones, whispering. You are the last in the North, it said. But you are not the last.
She dreamed of her brother Rickon, who had died when Winterfell burned. She saw him as he had never been: no longer a baby but a child stout and upright, dressed in ragged furs and sheepskin. He was yelling and wrestling with a black monster, and she cried out; but the beast turned, and she saw it was a monstrous wolf with eyes that shone like wildfire and she laughed in delight.
She dreamed she moved through a city of bridges and canals and secrets whispered in the night, watched over by a giant taller than the sky. In the centre of the city stood a pair of carved wooden doors. One was weirwood and shone beneath the moon, but the other was dark ebony and drank all light. A girl walked in the corridors beneath the earth, dressed in white and black, and though she wore a stranger’s face Sansa knew it was her sister.
She dreamed of Bran, precious, restless Bran. Father had said once that Bran had run before he learned to walk, and climbed before he knew to run. In all the years she’d known him he had never been still. In her dream, he lay on his back, his hair long and tangled, the baby fat gone from his cheeks. His eyes were closed and his hands folded on his chest, but his lungs rose and fell in the darkness beneath the earth.
There’s been a mistake, she thought in a panic. Someone’s made a mistake, they’ve put the living underground and kept the dead up here.
Behind Bran was a shape like a great dark bird, its wings made of ragged smoke. The shadow curled around him and he breathed it in. When he opened his eyes they shone red as weirwood sap.
Had her brother always had three eyes?
He turned his head, and in the dizzying moment before she woke she thought he saw her.
Then the sky was lightening in the east. Above, the moon peered down at her through the boughs of the weirwood. “Sansa,” whispered the leaves in the wind. “Sansa,” and, “Sister.”
Snow and storms in the west, snow and storms in the south and east, and a thousand miles away, white ravens flew from the high tower of Oldtown to announce the end of autumn; but where Sansa travelled the snows eased and the winds calmed. She moved between the wreckage of summer and the promise of spring, as if the land itself was trying to ease her passage.
She had finished the food from White Harbour and the food from the Hornwoods in Sheepshead Hills. As she moved north from the weirwoods at Long Lake instinct guided her to the gardens of abandoned villages, where she found scrawny, self-sown vegetables: woody turnips and beets, a handful of beans dried on the vine, carrots gone sour and to seed. A fearless child on the Last River sold her a fish from the frozen waters, and she cooked it and ate it so hot that it burned her fingers and the roof of her mouth.
She re-joined the Kingsroad north of Last Hearth. Her horse staggered every other step now, and the occasional wayhouse was abandoned, gutted of all supplies. She slept and woke hungry, and though she did not starve, she wore very close to the bone.
The days were an endless grey of drifting winter fogs, the nights unbroken black, absent even of stars. Lady Hornwood walked through her dreams, her fingers bleeding, and her grandfather Lord Rickard, who had burned in the south.
Waking, the shades of the dead pressed close around her. She saw her uncle Brandon, a strangling cord wrapped around his neck, and Mikken the smith, his head and neck separated by a dozen brutal cuts. She saw a slender girl crowned in roses, her hands and dress stained with gore, who watched her with fierce, burning eyes. Once she thought she saw little Beth Cassel running at her side and laughing, as she had when they were children at Winterfell. When Sansa blinked and looked again it was not Beth but a stranger, a woman grown with dark hair and a hunting bow slung on her back.
She did not fear the ghosts. They were Starks and northerners, every one, and she knew their names and their stories. But they hounded her day and night, drove her north and ever north, and would not let her sleep. She was well into the New Gift, possibly as far north as Brandon’s Gift, but beyond that she did not know. She had lost count of the days, and moved in a haze of hunger and delirium.
She thought she saw the moon shining upon a wall of ice, and a burning shadow buried beneath it. As she watched the fire guttered and died, and all that was left was smoke. But it wasn’t smoke, it was snow, heavy as twilight, and dead things moved through it, with black hands and eyes like chips of ice.
She fled from them. The kingsroad dipped into a valley and crossed a frozen stream, then climbed again; and at the crest of the hill her garron put its head down and would move no more. She slid from the saddle and staggered a few steps. Behind her, the horse went to its knees, then lay down, and shuddered, and was still. She fell, and rose again, and staggered a few more steps and sat, heavily, on a granite boulder. She was so cold she had stopped shivering.
This is madness, she thought wearily. I will not make it to the Wall on foot. Her despair pressed down on her, a heavy weight. I could stop now, lie down and let the winter take me. I could sit here until I turn to stone. It seemed impossible, in the barren grey of winter, that she would ever return home; and even if she did, it would not be the same. Winterfell was broken and burnt, and made the habitation of traitors.
She looked up. The snow was falling faster, floating around her in great flakes that landed thick and white on the uneven earth.
It had been snowing on the day she left Winterfell.
So, so, she thought. It is impossible. But that does not mean I will give in to my despair. She stood. One step, she told herself, One step and then another. One foot and then the next. And when my strength is gone I’ll stop.
The first step was hard. The rest were easier. And she was walking, north and north through snow-covered hummocks and skeletal trees. After a time she realised someone was walking beside her: an ancient king of winter, his face grim and his beard white. He placed his hand over his heart and bowed to her. When she looked back he was gone.
She walked until the snowfall eased, and found that what she had taken for hillocks were piles of blackened beams and scorched stone. Before her a tree loomed, an ancient elm, and carved in its wood a scowling face. The cuts were fresh, the sap of their edges frozen in fury. The old gods of the north are watching me. She reached up to the face and placed her hands in the screaming mouth. “Please,” she whispered. “You old gods, gods of my father and his father before him, please.”
She did not know where the people came from. They surrounded her, solid shapes in the fog, wearing furs, carrying staves and cudgels. Woodsmoke came with them, and the smell of unwashed people. These are no ghosts. The strangers spoke to her, but the words were gruff and guttural and made no sense. I have come to the seven hells, and these are demons sent to torment me. “I’m sorry,” she said. She was whispering, her voice thin and broken in the cold. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand, please don’t hurt me, I’m sorry.”
They looked at one another and spoke some more in their strange tongue. Then one spoke. Her voice was clear and lightly accented. “Girl,” she said, “Who are you?”
It was a woman, her face lined and stern. When Sansa said nothing, she asked again. “Where do you come from? What do you seek?”
“I come from the south,” Sansa whispered. Her voice was scraped raw. “I seek Castle Black. I seek Jon Snow.”
One spoke in that same guttural language and another laughed, a raucous crack of sound. She flinched from it.
The woman snapped some words that silenced the others. She said, “Why do you seek out Snow?”
He’s my brother. She couldn’t say it. Sansa Stark is hunted still. It is not safe. Neither could she think of any other reason, so she remained silent.
“No answer? So be it. The grey girl seeks out a dead man,” the woman said. “Let us send her to him.” She nodded her head, and two of the men came forward to take her.
Then Jon is dead, and they are going to kill me. She cringed back into the bole of the tree. She had no strength to fight them. Perhaps it will be quick. And afterwards I can rest.
But they didn’t kill her. They levered her to her feet and tried to make her walk, but when she took a step, her vision swam and she fell. After that they carried her. The sky was clouded and dark, and she could not see the sun or stars, but she knew they were heading north still.