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*
Rickon is ten when the Dragon Queen sweeps over the land and drives back the dark of winter with fire and blood. The war is long and winter is bitter, but when he is twelve a raven arrives from Winterfell. It is hardly any time after that when Rickon comes home.
He has little memory of Winterfell when it was ruled by Lord Eddard, but he does not imagine it was ever so sad as it is when he rides through the gates, his direwolf skirting the back legs of a mount that long ago learned not to be frightened by the monstrously large beast. It is not merely the scaffolding that encircles the keep, promising that smashed ramparts and burnt towers will be restored to something of their former glory. Rickon’s faded memories, bare impressions of a place abandoned when he was not even five, tell him Winterfell was a place full of laughter, of children playing in the summer snow before—
The yard bears the scorch marks of the pillage of the Ironborn and the occupation that came after. Rickon was neither present for nor old enough to remember, but Osha will speak of those days and he is glad that his memories from that time are faulty, though it might tell him something of his nearest brother’s fate.
Osha whispers something under her breath in the tongue of the freefolk. It sounds like a prayer, but she does not mean for him to hear and so Rickon pretends that he doesn’t know what it means. As they reach the yard at the heart of the keep, Rickon feels the pull of memory; a place calling out for him to remember it. It is quickly replaced by a violent emotion that strikes like lightning when Rickon sees the lord and lady waiting to greet him there. For a bare, helpless moment, Rickon sees only his parents as he remembers them, before he recalls that Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn are more than seven years dead, and that these must be the two of his five siblings that remain to him.
“Lady Sansa,” he greets formally, when he has slid from his horse with numb, leaden feet. Rickon tries to remember what he has been told about manners, all the social niceties he must observe now he is the Lord of Winterfell. Or, will be, when he reaches his age of majority.
He has the feeling he must have done something wrong when Sansa whimpers and leans heavily onto Jon’s arm. Rickon tries to think what he must say, what would be right, when a desperate sob escapes Sansa and she throws her arms around Rickon’s neck. Jon is as unrestrained as she, pulling both Rickon and Sansa close and saying nothing at all.
In all that is wrong then — all they have lost, all that is left for them to recover — Rickon feels at least that this much is right.
*
It is is not that simple.
Jon is not his brother and Sansa not the only survivor of the Stark children, only the one who returned home to await him. But Jon and Sansa have been companions for years, longer now than they were all away from home. They have an easy manner that bespeaks the sort of relationship that is close, but not that of siblings. Rickon has not even that.
But there are other matters which require the attention of the young Lord Stark. While the southron lords bent the knee to Queen Daenerys without more than token resistance, the North tasted the rule of their own king and resists hers. They will have no lord but a Stark, but Lord Rickon is not of an age to rule the North. The Dragon Queen cannot risk so politically powerful a steward as Lady Sansa, who commands the loyalties of the Riverlands, the Vale, and even the North itself. Any one of those might support her claim and plunge half the realm into the chaos of war again.
Rickon learns later that a compromise was struck long before Jon and Sansa felt it safe to recall him from Skagos. Jon’s place in the North is contested, son of a southern prince and heir to a southern throne, and the southron lords dislike the Queen’s heir cast so far beyond their influence. None of them are happy with this arrangement, but this tension is what holds it together. Rickon thinks it was Jon’s idea to keep the peace by allowing Sansa and Rickon to rule, but also thinks that Jon wanted nothing else but to be returned to Winterfell. He does not dare ask to confirm this, and Jon does not say. But it is necessary, and the compromise has granted Rickon the remains of his family.
At least, for as long as it please Her Grace.
*
Their days are consumed with the business of not only restoring Winterfell, but gently encouraging the slow recovery of the northern lands. Farms were ravaged not by white walkers and their armies of dead, but by the far more mundane evils of heavy snow and long, deep chills that froze soil to stone and stole the breath from babes in their mother’s arms.
It is difficult work. The land is scarred, but it will heal with time. It is the survivors who present a stranger affliction in need of healing. They carry dragonglass weapons still and shake with cold, even when the bitterest part of winter passes. They die, not of illness or age, but of grief and guilt and worse.
“They will love you,” Sansa tells Rickon, riding home from visiting an old crone who survived the winter through some miracle of the gods. Whichever gods blessed her, Rickon neither knows nor cares, but he is careful not to specify when he wishes the woman well.
Sansa continues, “You must always be kind. Even when things are terrible, you must be kind and just.” It sounds like a story, the sort of rehearsed platitude meant to give him hope, but something under the polished veneer of Sansa’s face tells Rickon that it is no less important, even if his sister has trouble believing it.
One day Rickon will be lord of Winterfell alone, with neither of his guardians to teach him what is right and wrong. He will be left to his own judgment.
Jon and Sansa are doing what they can with whatever time they are afforded, Rickon knows, but he will be sixteen sooner than any of them would like. They are happy, Rickon thinks bitterly, watching the ragged shards of his family in their slow orbit around one another. Much as he would like the quiet idyll of their life to carry on forever, this cannot last.
It is just that simple.
*
It is not that simple. Nothing ever is.
Rickon is thirteen when he realizes something is amiss with the way Jon memorizes Sansa’s profile in secret, when she is not looking. Sansa waits until Jon is in the yard and watches from her solar, unless she has a reason to be in the yard with him. They do it because they think the other does not see, because there is some long, taut cord of tension that strings between them. It pulls them together. It tears them apart.
But why should it be so difficult?
Osha sits beside Rickon in his solar, tenderly braiding his long, red curls into braids. Almost of an age to be a man, she explained when he first objected to this treatment. Kissed by fire, Lord Rickon. The freefolk would think you lucky.
Rickon watches the yard, where Jon shows a new recruit the proper form for his feet. On the other side, Sansa watches him from the place where Steward Chasind stopped her to discuss Winterfell’s accounts. Jon’s eyes float over the head of his recruit and meet Sansa’s for longer than an instant, sharing something that passes as quickly as if it had never existed. Perhaps they don’t think anyone sees them. Perhaps it means nothing. But Rickon hasn’t got to be thirteen without watching people and he doesn’t believe it’s nothing.
He gestures with his chin to the yard. “Why do they do that, Osha?”
She looks down at the yard to see who he means and gives a disappointed huff. “Because it’s easier for them to believe they can’t be happy.”
“Why would they think that?” Rickon twists his head around, though Osha’s fingers are still in his hair.
She roughly turns his head forward again so as not to ruin the intricate braid and her mouth twitches with a frown when she looks around at his expression. Sighing, Osha twists her fingers around another one of Rickon’s curls.
“That queen half a world away tells him he’ll be married to some princess, or that your sister will belong to some other lordling. She says where love ought to grow, as if love works that way and they brood over what they might change if they wished it.” She shrugs and turns his head back to the window so she can see her work, but adds, “Kneelers think all sorts of odd things.”
The idea that Jon and Sansa might be quietly pining for love of the other is so strange to Rickon that he almost ruins all of Osha’s work craning his head toward the yard to see them again.
Sansa has her back to Jon, her arms crossed over her chest in an unmistakably defensive posture and Rickon does not need to look over at Jon to know that he is looking anywhere but toward Sansa. Rickon has seen it half a hundred times this month already, but he hadn’t known what it meant. Hadn’t known all the things they have kept him from knowing.
Rickon knows injustice when he sees it, and here it is: living in Winterfell, donning the mantle of honor and duty. Jon and Sansa have given their lives to caring for Winterfell in his name, shielding what remained of his boyhood from the Dragon Queen in the South, giving him a chance to be happy here. He cannot think of any reason they must be denied the happiness they crave.
“Well,” decides Rickon aloud, “that’s stupid.”
He isn’t sure what about this is so funny to Osha.
*
Rickon watches them, but neither break. Jon stays in the old steward’s chambers and Sansa keeps to their mother’s tower. They rise, break their fast, and dress alone before meeting to manage disputes for smallfolk in the restored hall. They take their midday meal together, and they do not see each other again until Jon joins the Stark siblings at her fire at night. He never says anything out of place for a dutiful cousin and he rarely stays after Rickon leaves for bed. They look, sometimes catching the other in what they have deemed forbidden, but nothing more than that ever seems to happen.
They must know, Rickon decides. It is not so bad that they are utterly ignorant of the other’s feelings.
But it is not that simple.
Of course.
*
Queen Daenerys sends ravens to Jon so often that it seems as though he has only just sent off his latest answer to her when another lands in the rookery bearing her three-headed dragon seal. Rickon thought before that it is the natural consequence of Jon’s service in Winterfell’s court, that he is not available to advise his aunt on the matters of the kingdom, but he knows now there is more to it than that. Jon shares relevant news of the kingdom with Rickon, but since he shares nothing else, Rickon assumes he keeps his own counsel, never sharing the content of Queen Daenerys’s letters with anyone else.
Rickon has just celebrated his fifteenth nameday not half a moon’s turn before. The celebrations in Winterfell were the greatest he has seen since his homecoming, not least because the bitter chill of winter has begun to give way to the first signs of the spring thaw. It does not escape Rickon that he is now the same age that his brother Robb was when he became King in the North, and the North needs something to celebrate.
So, he begins to wonder: what will happen to his guardians when he is made Lord Stark of Winterfell in more than name?
But since his nameday celebrations, something has changed in his household: a sense of urgency pressed like a veil over everything he does. Rickon is coming nearer to the day he will assume control of Winterfell and Jon and Sansa will no longer be his guardians and stewards. Jon has started taking him afield to visit the liege lords in the farflung areas of the North, and Sansa has begun to instruct him on the finer points of rule. For all he is concerned about what will happen to his sister and Jon, there is no time for him to dwell on a solution for the misery that permeates their stifling routine.
Rickon has finished lessons with Maester Tarly earlier than usual and, though it is another half-hour before he is due to review Winterfell’s accounts with Sansa, he jogs light-footedly up the stairs to her solar.
There is a voice raised in anger behind her door when he is nearly at the top, and Rickon freezes in place, suddenly frightened someone will have heard him. A moment passes when he cannot make out the words, then quiet that he realizes is a second voice, spoken in less agitated tones. Rickon creeps up the last of the stairs and stands outside.
“—is far too young, and I will die before I allow Rickon to be used for her gain.”
“I was no older than he when I was a woman married, Jon. Robb had a wife when he was Rickon’s age.”
There is a long silence where Rickon hears nothing but his own heartbeat hammering in his ears. They are speaking of him. Of marriage. There was another raven from King’s Landing that morning, but Rickon had not seen the message delivered to Jon before he went in for his lessons.
His thoughts are quickly interrupted when he hears Jon speak with a heaviness in his voice that Rickon has not heard from him before.
“If this is my fault for refusing to marry these three years past, Sansa, I swear to you I will ride to Goldengrove and marry the girl myself.”
“Oh, I am sure the Queen will be delighted with that match.” Sansa’s words are sharp beneath a thin veil of humor that Rickon is not sure matches the anxiety in Jon’s. “Be reasonable. Daenerys would sooner marry you to me than throw away her heir on the daughter of some lesser house in the Reach.”
Another, pregnant silence extends between the two of them, but Sansa clears her throat and adds in a sad voice, “I beg your pardon.”
“It will be no time at all before she seeks to marry you off again, too,” Jon counters, though Rickon has the impression this is to cover for something he can only guess at without having seen their expressions. “I will write the queen and—”
“And refuse another of her matches? She will force her hand soon, Jon.” There is the sound of soft, slippered feet rising from the chair by the fire, crossing only a few steps to the center of the room. There is quiet, and then Sansa finishes: “Let me think what could be done first.”
Rickon is barely fast enough to scramble back to the top of the stairs when Jon opens the door and finds him looking as though he has just finished coming up the stairs. His face is red enough that it might pass for exertion.
“Rickon!” Sansa’s cry might be mistaken for genuine delight if not for Jon’s stricken expression. Jon excuses himself quickly and leaves them with a polite bow to Sansa and a gentle ruffle of Rickon’s hair as he passes.
Sansa leads Rickon to her desk by the window and asks, warmly, “Are you finished with Sam already?”
He nods mutely and tries to think what he would say to her if he had not just overheard their conversation.
Sansa does not appear to be at all flustered by a marriage scheme by the queen. In fact, if anything preoccupies her, she gives no hint of it. Rickon tries to mimic this nonchalant attitude for the whole of their session, but he makes many small mistakes in his figures. After the sun sinks low enough to light the far wall of the room and he has accomplished very little, Sansa cheerfully tells him that they’ve done enough, though he is sure she is lying to make him feel better. But Rickon is permitted to escape the room, if not the oppressive whirl of forbidden knowledge building in his chest, and he counts himself grateful for her kindness.
*
Jon stays later in Sansa’s solar these days, as Rickon makes a point of leaving Sansa’s fire before the moon has risen in the sky. Every night in Winterfell, Ghost takes his place beside Sansa’s chair and allows her to scratch between his ears, leaving Jon to sit languidly in the chair opposite her and watch. They talk of Winterfell, of old memories long past, of the uncertainty of the future, and more besides, but they never do more than that. They have their easy manner, the comfort of long-established trust and affection, and it would serve them well if they would only see how easy it could be for them.
What they don’t speak of is the persistent whispering that reaches Rickon through Osha of the queen’s frustrated wish to have Sansa married off as quickly as possible. They do not speak of what they want. What they have decided they cannot have.
When he is only five months shy of his birthday, Jon takes him for a long trip to the Gift, where some of the freefolk have settled. Rickon has been looking forward to this trip for some time, not least because these are the people he understands the best, but by the brooding heaviness of Jon’s brow, Rickon guesses that there is more bothering him than his impending departure for Dragonstone in only a few moons’ time.
So, he waits until they are riding side by side nearly three days out of Winterfell and he clears his throat meaningfully. “Why won’t you and Sansa marry?”
Jon’s stunned expression betrays him instantly.
“I see it, you know,” Rickon presses before Jon can think of something suitably diverting to say. “Don’t tell me otherwise unless you have a reason no one hasn’t told me before.”
Jon scoffs and looks determinedly at the road before them. “Aye, the matrimonial schemes for his cousin is a fine thing for the Lord of Winterfell to be concerning himself with.”
“What of his sister’s happiness?” The acerbic retort makes Jon’s eyebrows lift with surprise, but the stony quality of Rickon’s forehead only makes Jon smile wistfully.
“You’ve Robb’s look about you now, when he took some fresh idea into his head,” he explains apologetically, because Rickon has heard this from every one of his bannermen since coming home. That Rickon is nearly older than Robb had ever the chance to be does not escape him, either. Jon shrugs and rearranges the reins in his hands, but he has the decency to look Rickon in the face when he points out, “You’d have every right to be worried for Sansa if she weren’t able to look after herself.”
The strength of Sansa’s will is familiar to Rickon, who cannot argue with that point. Still, he presses Jon: “Tell me the truth: will the queen force Sansa to marry?”
“No,” Jon answers immediately. There is truth in his voice, and not a small edge of steel that belies a greater conflict Rickon has not been privy to. Rickon waits for him to continue. Eventually, Jon repeats the word, gentler this time. “Sansa will be free to marry whomever she chooses — or not, if she should wish that.”
“But not you.” At the warning look Jon spares in his direction, Rickon makes a noise of disapproval deep in his throat; a wildling habit he has not unlearned in his few years home. Jon will not lie to him, but he is hesitant to tell him the whole of it.
“What have you done, Jon?” Rickon demands instead, sitting up in his saddle, though Jon will forever be taller than him.
“Nothing I wouldn’t do again in a blink if it kept Daenerys out of the North’s business,” Jon explains fiercely.
Rickon thinks back to the day on the stair, tries to recall what he can of their conversation. It brings Rickon’s heart into his stomach to think what Jon must have traded for so great a boon as near-autonomy in the North.
“You can’t marry Sansa because you’ll be married,” he realizes aloud. “To the girl the queen intended me to marry?”
To his enormous credit, Jon does not look even the smallest bit surprised by Rickon’s perceptive abilities.
“You knew about that? No, I’ve agreed to marry Arianne Martell.” He looks away at this, a tight, mirthless smile twisted on his mouth. “Daenerys refused the hand of a Prince of Dorne years ago, but I understand Prince Doran finds this arrangement suitably appropriate, given the circumstances of my birth.”
Rickon curses so bitterly that Jon laughs.
“It isn’t funny!” he insists, reaching out to shove Jon’s shoulder. “This political nonsense gives me the headache. If I am to be lord, let me bear my duty myself. Let me do what pleases the queen and gives Sansa what she desires. What you desire, Jon, too. Don’t you dare deny it, or I will throw you from your horse, prince of the realm or no!”
Jon manages to control his laughter in time to catch Rickon’s hand and set it back on the horn of his saddle. “The queen mistrusts the North because its loyalties are to the Starks. No — let me speak, you beastly boy! — Sansa and I are agreed on this.
“You will bend the knee to her when you travel to King’s Landing after your nameday. She knows that the North bends its knee to you and no other. It is for this reason that she wishes to marry Sansa to a southron lord, and why she would marry you to a southron lady.” Jon gives Rickon’s hand a warm squeeze. “Winterfell is yours, Rickon. I would not see you gamble it away so easily.”
It is Jon’s earnesty and not the logic of his argument that convinces Rickon to let the subject drop, but he does not stop turning it over in his head. He digs his heels into his horse and canters ahead of Jon. It is simpler than he thought. Simpler than Sansa and Jon believe it to be, tied up with kneeler politics.
*
The last time a Stark petitioned a Targaryen monarch in the throne room of the Red Keep, it ended in fire and blood, decades of wasted deaths and needless suffering. This is what Rickon thinks when he strides grimly through the doors of the hall where his grandfather and uncle perished, passing the dragon skulls that line his walk to the great, ugly, dragonbone throne. The Iron Throne itself was destroyed in the wars, passing away into history as all things do.
The court — those few who have gathered for something so mundane as a lord’s oath of fealty to the queen — watch him with interest. The queen brought with her the fashions of the many lands she conquered across the sea, with light, airy silks, narrow skirts, and loose linen tunics for men. These are what the court wears, what each of the lords of the Seven Kingdoms wore when they swore fealty to Daenerys Targaryen. Yet Rickon is dressed as a Stark ought: somber and gray, a wolf pelt around his shoulders despite the spring warmth, and his Tully-red curls braided around the crown of his head.
Rickon knows he is gambling with more than his own life — more even than his grandfather gambled. It is why he told no one of this gambit; why he ignored Sansa’s gentle chiding for his choice in garb.
The past months have been fraught, watching her and Jon in what they think are their last months together. Sansa has consigned some three dozen proposals of marriage to her fire and Jon has put off his departure at least three times before he agreed to escort Rickon to the queen. So, it is up to Rickon to do what they will not. What they cannot, though he cannot think why it should be so hard for them.
Daenerys Targaryen sits straight-backed and serious as Rickon approaches the dais. She tilts her head to the side with a curious smile floating above her lips when his heavy footfalls fall silent. “Lord Stark,” she greets cooly. “Son of Eddard. Lord of Winterfell, Warden in the North. Do you swear yourself to protect the realm, defend its rulers, and serve the throne?”
“I will swear,” Rickon answers easily, feels a bubble of tension break like a storm over the throne room. They are not used to peace, these summer lords. Good, thinks Rickon, straightening his back. They ought to remember that winter still comes again in its course.
“Then swear,” says the queen in a breathy sigh, the tips of her fingers tracing circles on her throne.
“I have a petition for Your Grace, first.” Jon’s shoulders pull high and tight where he stands at Daenerys’s right hand. Sansa’s lips part and her hands bury themselves in her skirts, but she remains silent.
If it is as simple as this — that Jon and Sansa are bound up in things that Rickon does not understand — then Rickon will do what they cannot. If they do not speak because they cannot, because they think it better not to or because they think they will protect him with their silence — well, that is no matter.
Rickon sets his feet as wide as his shoulders, tips his chin upward, and says what they cannot.
*
It isn’t quite as simple as Rickon thought it would be.
He has little patience for the slow-moving way that politics unfurl, long negotiations and hours locked in some horribly stuffy room in the Red Keep. Jon and Sansa will be married, and so will he in due time, but the details are what take so long.
Rickon tells himself it’s worth it to see two of the people he cares for most so incandescently happy despite themselves. Jon’s stare lingers on Sansa’s, as always, but they permit themselves the sort of barely-noticeable public intimacies that Rickon has become accustomed to noticing in private; a kiss left to linger too long on an offered hand, a shared whisper followed by a smile that Sansa tries to conceal and Jon cannot.
They are happy, or they will be. And that’s simple enough.