Chapter Text
Chapter One – The Prince in Her Song
The bells were tolling again.
The sound shuddered through the stone of the Red Keep, a dull, relentless clamor that made the candle flames shiver and the little sept feel as though it were breathing with the siege. Each peal rolled over Sansa, loosening her knees, her thoughts, her careful composure.
She had not meant to come here.
The small sept was tucked behind a crooked turn of corridor near Maegor’s Holdfast, the kind of place most courtiers forgot existed. It smelled of old incense and damp stone, the air hazed with the ghosts of prayers. Tonight, it smelled of smoke.
Sansa knelt anyway, because she had nowhere else left to go.
The statues were not so grand as those in the Great Sept of Baelor. The Mother here had only the suggestion of a face, her stone cheeks smudged and cracked, her arms chipped where rough hands had hewn them long ago. The Father’s scales hung crooked in his raised fist. The Warrior’s sword was blunted, barely more than a lump.
Someone had tried, once, to make them beautiful. Someone else had tried, recently, to burn them.
Black streaks climbed the walls behind the effigies, soot clawing toward the ceiling. One of the candles at the base of the Warrior’s feet had guttered and gone out, leaving a tongue of greasy smoke. Another had burned down to a molten pool that had run across the stone like a tiny river of light. The air was too warm, heavy with the sharp scent of something singed.
Like me, Sansa thought distantly. Like scorched silk and burnt hair.
The bells boomed again. Somewhere beyond these walls, the Blackwater burned green, or the city burned with it. Ser Ilyn was not here. Joffrey was safely tucked away from the battle. The gold cloaks held the gates—for now.
She could feel the dread behind all those stone layers: smallfolk pressed together in tenements and cellars, soldiers watching the river churn with sick light, women clutching their children and praying to every god they could name.
She closed her eyes.
“Please,” Sansa whispered. Her voice sounded small, lost. There was the drum of bells and the distant roar of wildfire and the cries of dying men. “Please, I beg you. Mother above, Father, Warrior… all of you. Please.”
The words tangled on her tongue. What was she asking for? Safety? Freedom? A miracle?
The little sept flickered around her, candlelight sliding along the soot-scarred faces of the Seven. The Mother’s expressionless stone gaze did not change.
She thought of her father’s head on the spike.
Joffrey’s hand on her arm.
Cersei’s smile.
The bells shook the air. Sansa folded her hands tighter, fingers white at the knuckles. She knew she was about to die, and she didn’t beg for herself.
“Let it be different,” she whispered. For someone else, somewhere else. “Just once. Let there be one story where the prince is as good as the songs. Where the maiden isn’t… isn’t broken for believing in him.”
Her throat closed. Tears stung, hot and unwelcome, at the corners of her eyes. She bowed her head until her brow brushed the cold stone rail before the altar.
As a child, she had loved the old songs. They had been her light in the long northern winters: tales of brave knights and noble princes, of fair ladies and tragic loves. She had learned them as naturally as breathing. They were the foundations of her dreams.
Now they tasted like ash.
Still, there was one she could not quite let go of. One that haunted the edges of her mind, even here.
She heard it sometimes in her sleep, braided with wolves’ howls and the crack of swords. The story of a prince who had loved a maiden of fire at a tourney at Ashford Meadow and died for being a true knight.
It was not a common song in King’s Landing, now. Too Targaryen, she thought, to the tastes of the current court. But Old Nan had known a snatch, and Septa Mordane had frowned and said it was not fit for a young girl, and of course that had made it all the more precious.
Sansa had hummed it to herself in Winterfell’s godswood on late summer evenings, watching the red leaves stir like slow flame. It was home.
Now, without quite meaning to, she heard herself singing it again.
Her voice was soft at first, barely more than breath. She did not know all the words—only fragments, patched from childhood memory and her own imagination. The bells flattened her pitch, made the notes wobble.
“A prince of ash and ember,
A maid of flame and snow…”
The sound shivered in the hot, smoky air and slid along the cracked faces of the statues.
“He wore a crown of cinder,
She wore her heart below…”
She saw him as she always had in her mind’s eye: not like Joffrey, all sharp angles and cruel mouth, but as the songs had promised princes once were. Tall, with a fair face and gentle eyes; his shoulders straight despite the weight of duty, his hand steady on his sword.
A prince worthy of a song.
“At Ashford, where the banners fly,
Where dragons dance ’tween earth and sky,
He loved a maid of burning light,
And bled for justice by tourney’s night…”
Her voice steadied as she went on. The bells railed and the floor trembled, but the song wound around her, pulling her away from the smell of smoke and stone and back into the world of story.
She almost saw it. The meadow. The tents. The tilts. The prince riding, lance and shield ready.
She did not sing the last verse. The last verse spoke of his death, and she’d had enough of its taste.
“Let there be one story where the hero doesn’t die,” she whispered instead. “Please. Let there be one good prince who doesn’t die for nothing. One maiden who isn’t… ruined.”
The candles flared.
Sansa flinched from the sudden heat, eyes flying open.
The little sept seemed suddenly smaller, the ceiling lower, the air thicker. Heat pressed in on her from all sides, prickling her skin beneath the stiff brocade of her gown. The soot-stained wall behind the statues gleamed with a strange, oily sheen, and she thought she saw…
“Hello?” She swallowed. Her voice came out hoarse. “Is someone—?”
No answer but the bells and the faint, far-off roar of battle.
The wick at the base of the Warrior’s statue snapped, a tiny, sharp sound like bone breaking. Wax splattered. The candle flame leapt high, green for an instant—green like wildfire—then bled back to ordinary gold as it licked at the dark stain on the stone.
It caught.
Sansa watched, frozen, as the black streak on the wall brightened, orange veins racing through it. The old smoke marks were not marks at all but threads of pitch, old incense, whatever offerings had splashed and hardened over years. Now they were tinder. Fire raced up the wall behind the Warrior, curling around his chipped head.
“The sept is burning,” she whispered.
Of course it was. The whole city was burning. Why should this little refuge be spared?
She pushed herself to her feet, skirts tangling around her knees. The hem of her gown brushed against a puddle of wax, slipped, caught. She staggered, her hand slapping against the railing.
The Mother’s effigy loomed before her. Fire climbed around her too now, licking the stone like eager tongues. The Father’s scales glowed red as if they were forged iron fresh from the smith.
The air grew thick, heavy. Pigment bubbled on the statues, where someone had once tried to give them color. Smoke scratched at Sansa’s throat.
She should run.
If she had any sense at all, she would be out the door and down the corridor, screaming for help. She would find the Hound, or a guard, or anyone who could pull down the burning hangings before the whole Red Keep caught.
But she could not seem to make her legs move.
The bells pounded through her bones. Joffrey’s laughter skittered at the back of her skull like a rat. Her father’s voice—Winter is coming—slid under it all.
“If you hear me,” Sansa said, and she did not know if she spoke to the Seven, or to her father, or to no one at all, “please. Please. I can’t… I can’t do this anymore. Not here. Not with them. Please.”
And the fire answered.
It roared up all at once along the back wall, hungry and bright. For a heartbeat it seemed to shape itself around the statues, cloaking them, making the rough-hewn figures into towering forms of light.
The Mother’s arms spread wide, fingers of flame reaching. The Father’s scales were a burning wheel. The Warrior’s sword became a column of white-hot heat.
Sansa gasped. The heat slammed against her skin with the force of a physical blow. Her eyes watered, tears boiling away almost as fast as they fell.
She took one stumbling step backward and her heel caught on the stone lip of the altar.
The world lurched.
For an instant, she felt as if she were falling—not down, but sideways, the way a ship might tilt in a storm. Her stomach dropped; her head spun. The roar of the fire swallowed the bells, the battle, the world.
And light swallowed her.
***
She hit the ground hard enough to knock the breath from her lungs and all thought from her brain.
For a long moment she lay there, stunned, listening to the drum of her own pulse. The stone beneath her palms felt different. Not the cool, polished floor of the Red Keep’s little sept but something rougher, pitted. There was grass under her fingers, too, and dirt.
Wait. Grass?
Sansa opened her eyes.
Above her, the sky was a rich, impossible blue, so deep it hurt to look at. White clouds drifted lazily across it like ships with full sails. The light was wrong—too bright, too clean, too utterly untainted by smoke.
She blinked, slowly, as if that might call the soot back into the air.
It did not.
She was lying on her side at the base of a crude outdoor altar. Three figures loomed above her—three effigies, roughly shaped in wood and sun-baked clay. They were taller than a man, their features only hinted at by broad strokes of a carver’s knife. Someone had painted rough symbols on them: a circle of sticks for the Mother’s halo, a set of scales scratched into the Father’s chest, a sword etched into the Warrior’s.
Garlands of wildflowers wrapped around their necks, half-wilted in the sun. Cheap candles and clay bowls of offerings clustered at their feet like a tangle of small devotions.
Smoke hung in the air here too, but thinner, sharper. One of the clay figures—she thought it was meant to be the Warrior—was blackened along one side where the fire had caught. Fire still flickered there, eating away at the dry wood at its core.
Her gown was singed, too.
Sansa pushed herself upright, wincing as her muscles protested. The skirts of her dress were scorched in uneven patches, the embroidered hem charred and curling. The fine blue silk she had worn for dinner in Maegor’s Holdfast was now smeared with soot and dust.
Her hair had come loose from its pins. It fell around her shoulders in a tangle, some strands singed at the ends, smelling of smoke.
She swallowed. Her throat tasted of ash.
This is a dream, she told herself. It must be. The Blackwater burned and I ran to the sept, and I fell asleep praying, and now I’m dreaming.
Dreams did not make her ribs ache like this. Dreams did not sting her eyes with smoke. Dreams did not leave grit between her teeth.
“Hello?” she tried.
Her voice came out thin and odd, snatched away at once by the open air.
She could hear, distantly, the murmur of a crowd. Men shouting, not in terror but excitement. A trumpet blared—high, brassy, triumphant.
She turned.
Beyond the little altar, the land rolled away in a gentle green slope toward a broad, flat meadow. Banners flew from a forest of tall poles—bright splashes of color flapping against the blue sky. Sansa saw a leaping stag on gold, a silver trout on blue-and-red ripples, the green-and-gold roses, orange suns and red spears.
Tents sprawled like a city of silk and canvas, each pavilion in its house’s colors. Streams of people moved between them: knights in armor, squires bearing shields, grooms leading horses with shining coats and braided manes.
At the meadow’s heart rose the lists: two long fences of painted wood, with stands on either side packed with spectators. Trumpets blared again; the crowd roared.
There were banners of white sun on an orange field seen the most. She knew the sigil, as any highborn girl with a strict Maester would.
Ashford, Sansa thought, and the world narrowed around the word.
She had seen it before, in her mind’s eye: the dry lines of an old history text Maester Luwin had sighed over when she was thirteen.
A group of smallfolk women and children hurried past the altar, talking in excited, carrying voices. Sansa shrank back instinctively, trying to make herself small against the base of the clay statues.
“—did you see that last pass? Swore to the Seven he was going to unseat him that time—”
“—never seen such a knight, that tall one, like a bloody tower, he is—”
“—and they say the prince might ride tomorrow, the Hand himself, can you imagine—”
The women veered toward the altar, hands dipping into their aprons for coins and crusts of bread. One of them paused, squinting at the scorched Warrior effigy.
“Looks like some fool got the candles too close,” she clucked, and reached to snuff out the last licking flame with damp fingers. “We’re lucky the whole thing didn’t go up.”
Her gaze slid over Sansa without truly seeing her—just another sooty, kneeling figure in a place of prayer. Sansa ducked her head, letting her hair fall forward to hide her face.
Did they see? she wondered wildly. Did anyone see how I got there?
Had she appeared? Or had she simply… been here, always? Her body felt as though it had traveled. Her heart felt as though it had been flung.
The women dropped their offerings, murmured quick prayers, and moved on, their voices vanishing into the greater hum of the camp.
No one cried out about a woman stepping from… the flames?
But the clay statue’s side was black and cracked where something—someone—had pressed through.
Sansa’s knees shook. She pressed her hands against them until the tremor subsided.
As she sat, another pair passed behind her, a man and a girl with a basket between them.
“—Mira swears she saw a lady in blue come walking straight out of the Warrior’s fire,” the man was saying, half amused, half afraid. “Hair all aflame and not a scorch on her skin.”
“Old Mira sees omens in her porridge,” the girl sniffed, but she cast the altar a wary look, and her gaze widened when she saw Sansa.
She made a sound that might have been a squeak and hurried away.
Oh, wonderful.
The bells were gone. There were no bells here, only trumpets and the occasional creak of a cart. The air smelled of trampled grass, horse, roasting meat, and the faint, sharp tang of oiled metal.
Above the blur of movement and color on the field, a banner snapped in the wind: red, with a three-headed dragon black as shadow.
The sight punched the breath out of her more surely than any fall.
She had never seen a Targaryen banner flying in the wind in her lifetime.
It flew bold and bright from the highest pole above the royal box. Even at this distance, she could make out the gleam of gold and deep red cushions, the flicker of movement as lords and ladies shifted in their seats.
Her head spun. Sansa pressed her palm to the base of the makeshift altar, feeling the rough clay grind into her skin.
“Mother,” she whispered, voice shaking. “Father. Warrior. What have you done?”
The effigies did not answer. The Father’s clay scales were cracked with heat; the Mother’s painted halo had flaked away in places. The Warrior’s blackened side crumbled a little under her hand.
Somewhere down on the lists, a trumpet sounded a long, ringing note. The crowd hushed. A herald’s voice rolled out, too far for her to catch every word, but names carried: Ashford, Baratheon, Tully.
And, unmistakably, “…Baelor, Prince of Dragonstone, Hand of the King.”
The prince in her song.
Sansa closed her eyes. For an instant, the world tilted again—the meadow smearing into green and gold, the sky flaring white. She saw him as she had seen him in her imagination all these years: tall and grave, dark hair, a kind mouth.
She had prayed for one story where the prince was as good as the songs promised, and here she was: the Red Keep was far away. A hundred years away.
Sansa was at the notorious Ashford Meadow tourney. She remembered, for how could she ever forget the scene of her favorite song? In the reign of Daeron the Good. When House Targaryen still ruled from the Iron Throne. In between the Blackfyre Rebellions and all the rest.
When Baelor Breakspear, good and just and brave…
Her stomach dropped.
…when Baelor Breakspear died in a trial of seven.
She stared at the riot of banners, the bright lists, the glitter of steel under the sun. It did not look like the scene of a tragedy. It looked like a painting brought to life: the very picture of the old songs she had once loved so much.
Now, with her gown scorched and her hair tangled with ash, with the ghost of wildfire still stinging her nose and a Targaryen banner snapping overhead, Sansa Stark knelt at a rough altar on Ashford Meadow and realized the gods had answered.
They had not freed her.
They had given her another heartbreak to walk into. Because somewhere out there, riding beneath that dragon banner, was the prince who would die in a fatal accident, standing up for the innocent.
Sansa opened her eyes and stood, one hand braced against the Mother’s clay skirts until her balance returned.
“I will not let you,” she whispered, and she did not yet know whether she spoke to the prince, the gods, or her younger self humming a tragedy in a godswood at Winterfell. “Not this time.”
The trumpets blared again. The crowd roared. The world moved on.
Sansa gathered the torn edges of her singed skirt in both hands, took a breath, and stepped away from the altar and into the song.