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It starts when she is a girl.
When she feels hopeless or angry or frustrated or powerless, she writes on a small slip of paper and goes to bury it in the godswood, under the heart tree. She keeps the Seven, as her mother does, but when she wishes for things, somehow she always finds herself in the godswood, hands digging through the earth, burying her heart's desire along with her tears.
Sometimes they come true, but never how she imagines.
When she wishes to go South, she does, but it is nothing like she thought it would be.
There is no heart tree in King's Landing, but she keeps wishing anyway, though she does not dare to write them down anymore. She writes them in her mind, buries them in the Winterfell godswood in her mind.
When she wishes to no longer be betrothed to Joffrey, she is set aside for Margaery Tyrell.
But then they marry her to the Imp.
When she wishes to be away from King's Landing and her new husband, Petyr Baelish secrets her away to the Vale.
But then he hides her for himself and she watches her aunt die, one of her last remaining kin (for who knows where Arya is, and she has heard no news of her Uncle Edmure since Riverrun was taken).
When she wishes for family, she gets Jon Snow.
At the Wall, she finds that one of her other wishes had come true - for a true knight to take Janos Slynt's head – and once again, it did not happen as she thought it would. It was no knight, but Jon Snow himself that had done it.
When she wishes for Winterfell, Jon takes it for her, but they lose Rickon.
She begins to write her wishes again, begins to bury them at the foot of the heart tree.
When she wishes for hope, Bran arrives, Arya arrives.
When she wishes for a miracle, they survive the Long Night.
Jon announces he is to go South with the Dragon Queen and she buries wish after wish under the heart tree, but she has lost her magic. Her wishes do not work, she buries them with her tears and, once, with her blood (later, when Jon sees her hand, he asks what happened in that concerned voice of his and she wants to scream because he is leaving).
She stops making wishes the moment he rides out the gates of Winterfell.
She understands now that her wishes never came true, they were simply coincidences. Magic does not exist. She has no wishes when the news arrives of the destruction of King's Landing, of Jon's imprisonment. She buries no slip of paper beneath the heart tree before she heads South, she sheds no tears.
In the South, in the city she loathes, with strangers surrounding her and Jon in chains, it is a promise she makes, not a wish – a promise of a Northern army willing to fight for his freedom.
She loses Bran to the South and Jon to the far North and Arya to the West. She is alone and she makes no wishes.
She is crowned. She rules as well as she can – she tries to be as honorable as her father, as kind as her mother. She tries to be as strong as Robb, as brave as Arya, as wise as Bran, as fierce as Rickon (she tries not to think about Jon at all).
She tries and tries and tries and still she feels empty. Tired and lonely, with the crown she wanted as a little girl resting like a punishment upon her head (though she knows it is not the crown she hates, it is the loneliness, but it is easier to blame the crown than to remember that her family has abandoned her once again).
It is coming on a year when she loses the battle with herself, when the loneliness is too much to bear and she rises out of her bed and makes her way down to the godswood, refusing her guard's company. It is at the foot of the heart tree that she kneels and she realizes she has not written her wish down, and so instead she digs her hands into the cold ground and she whispers her wish into the earth and her tears fall like they have not in so long.
She hates herself when she is finally back in her rooms, shivering from the winter air with dirt beneath her fingernails. She curses the little girl still inside her, for giving in to her silly belief and her childish dreams. She goes to sleep with hot tears staining her cheeks and she tries not to think about it again.
A month later, when a guard comes to tell her of a visitor, she does not think of the tree, she does not think of her wish whispered into the earth. She thinks of nothing at all until she hears the delighted shouts from the courtyard and her feet move faster and her heartbeat thrums in her ears and then she sees him, standing in the falling snow with Ghost at his side and a smile on his lips.
And all she can think, as she throws herself into his arms, is that magic is real, her wish did come true.