Chapter Text
- In which it's just another day in Braavos
The message came on a night of wind and rain in Braavos and changed her life forever.
Sansa would remember that day with vivid clarity for the years to come, the pretty woollen dress she had worn, the pea soup they had for dinner, the scent of the peach-flavoured candles and the way the light played on the white walls of their house.
It had started as an ordinary day, in Sansa’s own opinion. Her mother disagreed, as Sansa had her first woman’s blood just the night before, and she had spent the whole morning embracing her daughter tightly and telling tales of her own flowering – as they called it in her sunset kingdoms. Our sunset kingdoms, I suppose.
Sansa had been thoroughly embarrassed after that, quite sick of those womanly mysteries, and she had seized the rare occasion of her mother’s sharing mood to inquire some more on Westeros, and soon Arya and Bran had joined in as well. Soon she had learned more on marriage and children than she had ever wished to – But you needn’t worry, dear, girls do flower much later in Westeros, no one would think you should marry for years yet – some things she had never known – in Dorne they would eat every sort of animals, even snakes – and some other that made Arya laugh in disbelief – the Wall is truly seven hundred feet tall, ask your Father, he has seen it.
The sky was grey outside but there was no rain yet, and Sansa had offered to go to the market to walk some and clear your head.
“Thank you,” her mother had said, “Robb, you go with her as well. A young woman should never be left unattended.”
Sansa heard, A young lady of noble birth, the words her mother had meant and not said hanging in the air between them, but Robb had laughed, and she allowed herself to roll her eyes and smile.
“Isn’t odd, Mother, how you didn’t mind it until yesterday?”
Her mother’s only answer had been to remind her to stop by the sept and light a candle to the Mother, and Robb had laughed once again.
“I think she might have been crying, some.” He told her the moment the door closed behind them, and she shoved him playfully away.
“She was probably thinking she is getting old,” Sansa answered lightly, although she suspected that was only half of it. She is thinking of her own childhood, her marriage, what she has lost. Or perhaps she is thinking of the future, wondering what will be of our family when we are grown?
She understood her parent’s worries and preoccupations, her mother’s concerns more than her father’s, but she did not share them. How could she? Her life was the only one she had ever known and, while she resented her Mother and Father for their unwillingness to speak of their past, she knew it was for the best. You cannot miss a life that you don’t know.
And, besides, she wasn’t sure she would have enjoyed living in the Seven Kingdoms more than she liked the Free Cities. She had been too young to remember Tyrosh as anything more than a floating, colourful dream, and she had fond memories of the short time they had spent in Myr, but Sansa liked Braavos the best of them all.
She liked the channels and the fishmarket and living under the shadow of the Titan, and she loved feeling the pride of living in the greatest city in the world. She liked the climate as well; the crisp winds and fresh rains that so reminded her father of his home in the North. It snowed in Braavos sometimes, and Sansa loved the snow as well. It would snow much more in the winter, she knew, though Essos didn’t feel the turning of the seasons as harshly as Westeros did. There are some places in the North where there is always snow, her father told her once, and Sansa remembered how her eyes had gone wide in wonder.
But Sansa loved wandering around Braavos more than anything, because there was no Titan and no wind in the room she shared with Arya, and the channels and the snow wouldn’t feel the same from inside. If she had been born in Westeros, Sansa knew, she would never have been allowed to go around by herself. A lady should never be left unattended indeed, she had thought, and started walking faster and faster, until she almost stumbled on Lacretia and her tray of trinkets. She had bought the scented candles as an apology, and they had smelled wonderful in the shadows of the sept.
“Do you believe, Robb?” She had moved a lock of hair away from her forehead, willing it to stay put, for once. “In the gods?”
“Which ones?” Her brother had answered back, smirking.
It was true. Sansa’s family had two different faiths, her mother’s seven-but-one, and her father’s faceless northern gods, but it wasn’t unusual, not in Braavos. Her father talked about his gods often, almost as often as he talked about the beauties of the North, and even mentioned them every time he stubbornly refused to talk about anything else from his past, of the war he’d lost and why they’d had to leave. Because the gods willed so, he said, and that was all.
“The Seven, I suppose.” She did not mind not living in Westeros, but a god who willed to make her father unhappy was no god Sansa would respect.
“I don’t know,” Robb’s voice had been slow and soft, and Sansa had closed her eyes, head back, dreaming. She so loved the sept. “There must be gods, somewhere. I don’t think they care about us, though. Why should them?”
Sansa had looked around for the small flint, and thrown it. “Be careful you don’t think too much, Robb. Your brain might get numb.”
And they had left the Sept-Beyond-the-Sea laughing and joking, never imagining it would be for the last time.
- The one with the tall, dark stranger
The messenger came with the dark, the way most messenger usually do, knocking at their door during dinner. Sansa’s sibling would not get a clear look to his face for three days, and they spent a sleepless night interrogating their sister without mercy on the strange man and the letter he had bought. To her brothers and sister, Sansa described him as tall and raven-haired, with bright blue eyes and leather clothes.
She would never admit how, in first seeing him, she thought he was the most beautiful man she had ever seen.
Sansa went to the door like she usually did, ready to scowl to whomever it was. It might have been her Master Grucco, she thought, here to tell Robb he would need him on the morrow, or one of the seamstresses her mother and Sansa sometimes worked for, asking for a late help. It might even have been Solana asking to borrow some salt, but she never would have expected it to be a man in Westerosi garbs, a sword on his belt.
He was young and handsome and looked somewhat startled to see her as she was to see him. She barely repressed a fit of annoyance at that – it was her house, after all – and waited for him to speak.
When he did, it was in the Common Tongue of the Seven Kingdoms, in a laboured manner she had never heard before.
“Ah – I apologize,” the man began, and she knew he had rehearsed this before. “I am looking for Eddard Stark.”
Sansa nodded. “Stay here,” she said, hating the way the words felt rusted in her tongue. She had known her father’s name was Stark, of course, in some remote corner of her mind, but she had never minded because no one else did, as seldom as they used it. Sansa herself could not remember the last time she had even heard the name spoken aloud before, and wondered if her man knew her father.
“Stark,” she whispered, testing the way the word rolled on her tongue. It does fit Father rather well.
Sansa closed behind her and blinked upon glancing at the corner of the common room where the table was. She made her way to where her father was sitting and no one did notice her at first, not really paying attention, oblivious to the… incredible… something, waiting outside the door. She savoured the sensation of knowing when the others didn’t and smiled through all her nervousness.
“What was it, Sansa?” Her father asked, half distracted. “Does Mistress Solana need something again?”
She moved in closer, half speaking, half whispering. Her father would hear her clearly, and so would everyone else if they were silent, but they weren’t.
“There is a man at the door,” she said. “Westerosi. Asking for Eddard Stark.”
She thought her father might have paled at that, just a little, and she felt even more nervous. He almost looked scared, and Sansa could not remember the last time she had seen her father scared of anything if she ever had.
“Cat,” he called, in the same voice Sansa had used. “Come to the door.”
Then he looked at her and frowned. “Sansa, love,” he added, in a gentler tone. “Don’t say anything to your brothers, for now.”
She didn’t, and when Arya asked who was at the door she said it was just someone looking for Father, and she talked to Bran about the ships she’d seen that day at the harbour and laughed at Robb’s jests the harder she could, the continuous chattering covering any sounds that might have come from outside. She kept it up until her mother came back inside, her face pale and her mouth tight, asking them to go into the bedroom and keep quiet, your father and I have something to discuss, and Sansa ignored Arya’s betrayed look and glared at Bran to keep his mouth shut, carrying baby Rickon into the girls’ bedroom.
Not to be the girl’s room for much longer, Sansa remembered, gloomy. Rickon was getting too big to sleep in their parents’ bed, Mother had deliberated a fortnight prior, and she would have him move into her daughters’ room soon. Sansa was not looking forward to sleeping with her clingy brother, but still she much preferred it to switching places with Bran and Robb, who did not even have a real bedroom.
Her siblings followed her into the room, she and Rickon on a bed, Bran and Arya on the other, and Robb taking care to close the door as quietly as possible before sliding down to the floor.
“Let’s not make a sound,” he said, his voice low. “I want to hear what they’re saying.”
They all wanted to but, despite the thin walls, they could not hear a thing.
“They must be whispering,” Arya complained. “Sansa, who was at the door? Truly.”
“Some man looking for Father.”
Arya threw her a pillow at that, frowning.
“Truly!” Sansa said, making an effort not to make too much noise. “A man from Westeros.”
Her sister’s eyes went as wide as cups at that, and she threw another pillow. “Why, you traitor, you couldn’t say that sooner?”
“Shut up, Arya,” Robb whispered. And then, to Sansa. “She’s right, sister. Why didn’t you?”
“Father told me not to,” she answered, with all the dignity she could muster. “And you can see yourself why. It would have been awful, having Arya shouting all over our common room.”
Robb smiled at her answer, and Arya’s cheeks went red.
“And still you are telling us now.”
Her brother laughed again, and soon Sansa joined in as well. It was almost uncanny, the ability Arya had to make her lose her patience every time she tried.
“Do you think that man is a friend of Father’s?” Bran spoke up for the first time, his voice almost reverential, sounding as impressed as a boy of six years could be.
“I don’t know,” Robb answered slowly. “He might be.”
All of them knew, of course, that Father was some sort of exiled knight from Westeros. Sansa remembered one day, in Myr, when Mother had said that they’d had to leave after losing a war, and how silly that had sounded to her. Father won a war last year and we left Tyrosh all the same, she had told Robb, complaining about the absurdity of adults. And he lost another war the year before that, but we stayed right there.
And Robb had explained it to her, same as she and Robb had done with Arya later on, same as they all had told Bran when he’d been old enough. There were only nobles and smallfolk in Westeros, and smallfolk couldn’t hold a spear or fight with a sword and did not know letters and sums the way Father did, so he must be a knight. Sansa had not seen the problem until Robb had added, in an oddly adult voice, that knight in Westeros all wore sword and were not supposed to fight with each other, and when someone went to war and lost, they got killed or exiled.
And what if they win? Sansa remembered asking. If they win, Robb had explained, it’s the people fighting for the other side who get sent away.
“Sansa.”
It was Bran calling her, and Sansa realized with a wince that she had been on the verge of falling asleep, her hands grasping the board of the bed, head resting on her arms, Rickon still at her side.
“Sansa, Rickon’s starting to cry!”
“Oh.”
She moved to take her brother in her hands again, moving him some, humming a song she had learnt in the sept. Rickon was two now and seldom cried anymore, when he did it the best way to calm him down was to distract him, spinning him around the room, playing and making faces. She had neither the time nor the will tonight.
“I am going to call Mother,” she announced, moving towards the door and ignoring Arya’s protests. She was curious, as well.
Her mother and father were still with the handsome stranger, sitting by the fireplace and talking quietly about something that had left a strange expression on her father’s face. He looked nervous and… wistful? She quickly cleared her throat, before Father raised his head and saw her standing there.
“Mother,” she began quickly. “Rickon needs you in the other room, please.”
She murmured something to the stranger, likely excusing herself, and exited the room quickly, closing the door behind her before Sansa had even the possibility to move. Standing in the middle of the room, faced with the choice between staying and running after her mother like a chicken with her mother hen, Sansa made her way to the fireplace.
“I do not believe I introduced myself,” the man began, in that affected voice of his. “I am Ser Renly Baratheon, of Storm’s End.”
Sansa tilted her head, trying to remember. She had heard the name Baratheon before, in some of the histories of the Seven Kingdoms her mother and father had wanted her to learn, but she had never heard of Ser Renly before. She idly wondered if she was supposed to know his name, before deciding that she probably was not.
“I am Sansa,” she answered, and the knight chuckled.
“I believe I was told this, yes. And how old are you, Sansa?”
She turned her head to look at her father, trying to determine whether he wanted her to answer and chat with the Westerosi knight or not, but he wasn’t looking at her, his face now carefully blank, and Sansa took it to mean he would not mind her answering.
“I will be eleven soon,” she said, and Ser Renly laughed.
“Are you in such a hurry to grow up, Lady Sansa?” His eyes were full of mirth, and he was looking at her with his full attention, but Sansa faltered. Lady?
“She is simply looking forward to her name day, ser.” Her father spoke for her, perhaps sensing her hesitation, and Sansa was glad. Still, she could not help but notice how her father sounded more like Ser Renly than he ever had, his accent thicker than she’d ever heard it. He was doing it on purpose, she was sure of it. But why?
“But of course,” Ser Renly laughed yet once again, and Sansa decided to speak up before he asked her anything else. She wouldn’t know how to answer, and she so hated not knowing.
“I believe I will be going to bed,” she said, looking at her father. He gave her a subtle nod and smiled. “Good night, Ser Renly.”
And she moved towards her bedroom door, not quite running, but fast enough. Her mother was culling a sleepy Rickon, and both she and her siblings turned towards her, Robb with a finger on his lips. Do not say anything while Mother’s here, he meant, and Sansa almost rolled her eyes. Of course.
“Sansa, there you are,” Mother said. “You all should go to sleep, we will talk in the morning.”
Arya, who had no qualms about rolling her eyes, did just that. “Where, mother? Surely Robb and Bran can’t sleep on the floor?”
Robb and Bran slept on a mattress in a secluded corner of the common room, and Sansa had noticed how Ser Renly had been seated as so to turn his back to the thick woollen curtains that separated the bedding from the main part of the room. Her parents were proud people, and Father would never want a foreign to mind their business.
Mother took a breath. “You girls and Rickon will go to sleep in mine and your father’s room tonight. I promise you, we will talk tomorrow.”
The room had not yet closed behind her shoulders when Arya and Bran started whispering furiously. Sansa shared a smile with her older brother and prepared herself for a long night of speculations.
III. In which a past is revealed
The truth was even more unbelievable than her wildest dreams.
Father had come into the room with the lights of the dawn, to find none of his children sleeping in bed, but rather dozing off in different parts of the room. Sansa vaguely remembered Robb jumping to his feet at the sound of the door opening, asking muffled questions, and Father shaking his head. I will only explain this once, she thought he had said, and then she fell asleep once again.
She woke to the feel of sunshine beating on her face and the smell of apples in the air.
“Well, you took your time.”
It was Arya, standing next to her bed, looking rested and fresh. Sansa closed her eyes again.
“Sansa. You slept through the midday meal.”
That was her father’s voice, and she sat down on the bed, blinking. “Father… why are you here?”
He frowned, then laughed, and Sansa felt herself blush. She usually tried hard not to be rude – she was no match for Arya, and she knew it – but having her father home in the middle of the day was a rather unusual occurrence.
Then she remembered. The knight from Westeros, Ser Renly, who had been so good-looking and laughed so much, and had made her father’s face go pale. The night she and Arya and Robb and Bran had spent exchanging murmured conjectures until they’d fallen asleep. And Mother, who said, we will talk on the morrow.
Curiosity went through her body like a bolt, and suddenly she wasn’t tired anymore.
Mother and Father waited with the others at the table, weary and uneasy, both looking as though they had aged five years in one night.
“Ser Renly was so kind as to bring me a personal message,” Father began, his eyes fixed on Mother’s. “It seems as though my brother, Benjen Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North, died a fortnight ago in a riding incident.” He took a deep breath. “And now I am being recalled home.”
It took a while for Sansa to make sense of what Father had said, and she could see that it was the same for the others, as well. She had known that the rulers of the North were called Stark – she was well versed in the history of the Seven Kingdoms, it was recent facts she knew nothing about – but she had never given it much weight. People often had the same name, like old Jenna Verlas and the old Sealord Tebano, and her father used his name so rarely that she often forgot about. She surely had never connected the two and, it seemed, neither had Robb.
Father explained it all, talking about his childhood in Winterfell, his father and brothers and sister, telling things he never had said before.
They could ask questions and, for the first time, they would get an answer.
Robb made Father smile. “I thought you were a knight,” he said. “Is a lord different than a knight?”
Even Mother had laughed at that, and she suddenly was young and beautiful again. “You can only be born a lord, but everyone can be a knight. Some are one, some the other, and some are both.”
Then Robb had looked at Father with widened eyes and asked if he would become a lord, too, and Father was serious again.
“Yes,” he said, slowly, as if he never had truly considered the idea before.
Father spoke some more, about Robert’s Rebellion and how they had fought and lost, and how Mother and Father had been married in wartime and how Robb had been born in a castle on the waters. Sansa had almost wanted to ask how could men be so stupid, waging a war because of a woman, but she knew she would have saddened her father, and kept it to herself instead.
It was only later that he talked about the Mad King and what he did to Father’s family, and Sansa felt so ashamed of herself for having even thought of the question and so glad she hadn’t asked.
“If the Prince was so in love with your sister, how come she couldn’t convince him not to exile you?” That was Arya, of course, as bold and blatant as ever. “It was his family’s fault anyway.”
But Father had not liked that. “When you get to Westeros, Arya, you must never speak of the Prince this way. It’s treason.”
The king had wanted him dead, Father said, and the Prince was the one who made him change his mind to exile. Father’s sister had died in childbirth before the end of the war, and it had been Arya’s turn to feel bad for asking a question after that.
There was, however, something in Father’s words that nagged Sansa, an indefinite something she could not quite point out. It was only when it was Mother who started to speak, about the Mad King and the Prince Regent and the current situation in the Seven Kingdoms, about marriages and allies and foes, that Sansa finally realized what the problem was.
“Father,” she said, ignoring the way her head was spinning, and how she had likely just interrupted her mother but couldn’t be sure because all she could hear was the rush of her own blood. “Are we all going to Westeros?”
And as he opened her mouth to answer Sansa spoke again, feeling that perhaps she had not been clear enough.
“Father. Do we have to?”