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When her brother sat the throne, Sansa became Queen in the North. When Bran became King of the Six Kingdoms, she became the Stark in Winterfell.
Her father had said there must always be one, but for a very long time she hadn't understood that. She'd assumed he meant that Winterfell belonged to them and so keeping it was their responsibility, but now she sees it was entirely the other way around. Winterfell does not belong to them; they belong to Winterfell. And though she knows while he lived she was the child least like her father, she is now her father's daughter more surely than she's ever been.
Her advisers say she doesn't need to wield the sword herself when a man of the North is condemned to death, but she does so anyway; she doesn't rule exactly as her father did, but in this way they're alike. She had Brienne teach her how to do it, hacking at tree stumps until her arms ached bitterly, and now in spite of all misgivings she can take a man's head from his shoulders should she have to. Six times now, she's had to, and then washed her hands in the melting snow till it drips pink from her fingers.
That day, at her city's gates, she expected that she'd use her sword because the word had traveled forward that they brought a traitor with them. But when they fetched him to her from the train, from where he'd stumbled for miles with ropes strung to a horse's saddle, when they knocked him down onto his knees in the snow there at her feet, she knew she couldn't kill him.
"Get it over with," he said, his voice raw from the rope that they'd bound around his neck. It was tied like a noose, in thick coils that caught his dirty hair and chafed his skin, and the fact of it was obvious: he expected to die. Of course, he'd expected to die for a very long time.
"Free him," she said.
"Your grace?"
"I won't repeat myself."
"But he's a traitor!"
"To whom?" she asked, as she cast the party's leader a sharp glance. "To a queen who died? Cersei? Daenerys? Am I also a traitor?" She held out her sword to him, hilt first, drawing the first few inches with her gloved hands there on the sharp-edged blade. "Will you take my head, Ser? You can take his after."
She made her point; the speaker withdrew. But she understood that a price must be paid for what her men saw as Sandor Clegane's desertion.
The years that had passed since her coronation had been hard, and not only because of the good people they'd lost. None of her lords dared question her rule, not yet and perhaps not ever, but she understood the pressures as her council explained them and, more than that, she understood the pressures of men vying for position in her new Kingdom in the North. Each man who came to pay respects would have tied his house to hers by marriage - if not with himself then with some son or other. Perhaps the next king would be a Karstark or an Umber. But then what of the Stark in Winterfell?
"So, he took your eye," she said. Not a question, she thought; what must have happened with his brother was obvious. For that alone, she couldn't call him her enemy, no matter what her men might think.
"Seemed fair," he replied. "I took his life."
"Was it everything you wanted?"
His mouth twisted as he looked at her. "No," he said. "It wasn't."
"So there's more you want?"
He reached out with both hands, tied together as they were; she might have ordered him freed, but not a single man had yet moved to do so. They did move then, though, going for their weapons, and she held up a hand to stay them. As she did, Sandor wrapped his hands around the scabbard of her sword. He didn't try to draw it.
"Not long left for what I want, though," he said, and he gave the sword a pat. "I hear you do it yourself."
"I do."
"Then you'll do me?"
"Is that what you came here for?"
He snorted. He looked up at her. "Better you than these cunts," he said, and as their gazes met she couldn't quite avoid a smile.
Sandor Clegane was not a lord. Sandor Clegane was not even a knight, because he wouldn't have taken the title even had she offered it. He wouldn't mourn the end of House Clegane and its three black dogs. And kneeling there in the snow before her, she saw the answer to her problems, convenient and clear. She saw the answer to his. Perhaps she might even have been thrilled by it.
She stepped closer. She tilted up his chin with one gloved hand.
"We have our own laws here in the North," she said. "Old laws."
"They're all the same."
"Not quite." She leaned down, low, by his rather ruined ear. "We have laws that will save you if you let them. If you'll let me." She drew back. She raised her brows, cocked her head, traced the orbit of his lost eye with her leather-gloved thumb. He wasn't pretty, no, but she knew him. And she couldn't help but feel the poetry of it.
"You would have saved me once," she said. "Will you let me save you now?"
He swallowed. He looked away, and clenched his jaw, and nodded. "I will," he said. "If you wouldn't rather have my head."
"Betray me and I'll have that, too," she replied. But she didn't think she need worry about that.
They took him back to Winterfell; there was no horse spare, so she had him helped up onto hers behind her, and perhaps he didn't smell his best after weeks or perhaps months making his way North, but she couldn't help but think she'd known worse. Especially when his big hands found their way to her hips, over her cloak, to keep himself upright. And once they arrived, she understood what needed to be done: she took him in, and took him to her rooms, stripped him, washed him, stropped the razor and shaved his face. When he said she didn't have to do that, the look she gave him told him he was wrong. The old laws were quite clear.
And when she took him to the godswood, to the heart tree, he frowned at her.
"You were a Lannister man for a very long time," she said, as she held out her sword; its blade glittered silver in the sunlight through the leaves. "Could you be a Stark man now?"
He laughed. "I could be your man," he said. "Not as you need one. Not these days."
She didn't deny it. But she took his hand over the blade of her sword and when their blood ran together, just a little, just enough, it was done. When she said her vows in front of the old gods of the North, he said them with her. When she made him her husband, their laws absolved him of his crime and made him her responsibility, and she found she didn't mind at all.
Years have passed. And as they make their way to bed, another long day done, he's by her side. She takes his hand and he sweeps her off her feet, into his arms; she doesn't need him to, but she does like the way it feels.
That day outside the city, he expected the blade and he got it. Just not quite the way he expected.
That day, he let her save him. She likes to think that's what he wanted all along.