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I loved a maid as fair as summer, with sunlight in her hair.
“I wish Father hadn’t accepted the suit,” Robb says, dutifully watching the slow procession of King Robert’s retinue down the Kingsroad. The wind barely stirs his cloak, and Theon thinks he has never looked more like the solemn heir to Winterfell than at this moment. Grey Wind sits at his side, faithful as any tamed hound. “Father always likened King's Landing to a nest of vipers, and yet he betrothes her to that right little prick.”
“All sisters marry eventually,” Theon reminds him. His childhood memories of Yara are fogged around their edges: a tall, frowning girl composed of Ironborn hardness watching as Ned Stark took him from their greatest humiliation. By his reckoning, she would surely be married by now. “Fewer sisters have the chance to be queen someday.”
Privately, Theon misliked the look of Joffrey. Southern cruelty twisted his handsome features, and no Ironborn father would have stood for such cowardice in their sons as he had displayed. At the slightest leaf-blown threat, the sniveling prince had hid behind the hulking form of his bodyguard.
“Queen,” Robb repeats. “I’ll keep my own counsel on her happiness, as I know it would distress Mother to hear my misgivings.”
No doubt Catelyn Stark will have wished her daughter married to a Riverlands lord, closer to home, but she’d sooner marry Arya off to the Ironborn than deny Sansa something she had begged for from the moment Joffrey set foot in the Northlands mud. Theon hopes they will suit, in the same distant way that he hopes Jon will be happier at the Wall. After all, it isn’t his place to voice his own reservations. For his own efforts, Theon will be the ward of the Starks and Robb’s right-hand man until Ned, too, finds brides suitable for the both of them. All the better, Theon selfishly thinks, if Lord Stark feels overburdened by his duties as Hand and keeps them out of marriage clothes a while longer.
Later, Theon finds Ros, and her laughter rings against the stone like chimes, the weakening sunlight brightening her hair like midsummer. He takes her to bed, and can almost forget that long ago, Balon Greyjoy had dreamt of making him a prince, too.
I loved a maid as red as autumn, with sunset in her hair.
Reek, he reminds himself, I am Reek.
It is hard to remember this around her, this bruised girl who calls him Theon, who looks at him with alternating rage and pity. She knows the truth at last, and Kings Landing broke her enough to not weep for Jack and Billy, but Reek does, and Reek remembers, and Reek and Sansa are two more dangling playthings in the hands of a lord who only speaks to them with pain.
Her wedding dress is white, like a shroud. Red blossoms with her blood, and Reek weeps to see it. Of all the horrors he has endured from Ramsay, her strangled sobs mete out a harsher lash against his fractured soul. He is no man, no lord, only a vile, useless thing. Later, he dreams of dead Starks and their blood dripping onto his skin, although it is only the melting snow and the damp of the kennels.
“You are Theon Greyjoy, son of Balon Greyjoy,” she tells him all childish color drained from her except her Tully hair and those blue eyes fixing him with such intensity. He denies it and betrays the Starks again because for all his old boasts, he, too, is a coward, and he cannot bear to see Sansa flayed and broken as he is. Better for her to hate him than to share his meager existence, too cruel to permit him death under his own name.
Oh, how Robb would weep to know what became of his little sister. There existed husbands far worse than Joffrey, who had merely been cruel without artifice.
I loved a maid as white as winter, with moonglow in her hair.
Theon Greyjoy, not Reek, takes Sansa’s hand and they jump into the snow below and run. They are no wolves, with the Boltons hot on their heels, but frightened rabbits scenting blood. Ill-equipped for grim winter, the river freezes them to the bone. He blindly grabs her arm and guides her to the scant shelter of a fallen log out of instinct far more than strength.
He can’t stop shivering. Is it more from fear than cold? What does it matter, when he will soon be dead, giving the last of his strength to keep her alive a scarce moment longer? Her lips are turning blue, like a wight’s, but her heartbeat thuds in his ears, strong as the steely woman who bears it.
Despite their desperate efforts, the hounds find them again. Escape was but a foolish dream for two half-starved wretches chased by a victorious army.
“I left her to die in the snow,” he lies, surrounded by the specters of the nightmare he has dreamt for what feels like an eternity. If he owes the gods more penance for his wrongdoing, let it be now, and let it be a swifter end than Ramsay would ever allow him.
But in the end, they are saved by Brienne and Pod, and so Sansa finds the protection she truly deserves. She quakes like a leaf in a gale in Theon’s arms as she embraces him, and he does not deserve this kindness, this softness, these tears and thanks for such as him.
Sansa belongs with the Starks, and Theon belongs with no one.
I loved a maid as green as spring, with sunrise in her hair.
He returns to her as an echo of the way he left her, with barely a handful of Ironborn to show for his efforts. That scowl crossing Sansa’s face disappears the moment she sees him, for not even Daenerys can deny that some bonds in the North surmount those of blood fealty.
“I want to fight for Winterfell, Lady Sansa. If you’ll have me,” he says, a part of him wondering if she can even trust him, after all that his colors have changed over the years. Truly more squid than kraken, although sometimes he sees a wolf, too, no matter Jon’s feelings on the matter.
She wraps her arms around him without hesitation, and he resolves to never doubt her again, made breathless by an embrace far warmer than their last. He buries his head in her hair and fixes the moment in time, wishing the Long Night wouldn’t arrive before the morrow.
When the spear bites into his side, Theon screams, but he can bear the pain. (Ramsay was always a worse monster, after all.) Doubled over in the snow with a hand pressed against his side, he blearily watches the shadowy arrival of reinforcements led by Arya Stark until the darkness pulls him under.
Against all odds, they survive again.
He adds another scar to the tapestry of his skin, a permanent ache that steals sleep during the waning winter evenings, but the Drowned God sought to give him more chances than was strictly fair for one man. Sansa visits him in the makeshift infirmary, eyes red-rimmed from smoke and weeping, and he blesses the Old Gods, too.
Theon mourns the Ironborn on their pyres, their ashes intermingling with the countless dead of all kingdoms, from every corner and cranny of Westeros and Essos, all soldiers in arms for the brief yet desperate survival against the Long Winter.
When the remaining armies move south for what maesters will later name the War of the Queens, Theon recovers in Winterfell. Sansa keeps him close, offering her hand to support him as they slowly walk the empty corridors. With their hands entwined, they whisper of the North: a queen of red to rise from the ashes of the queens of white and black, a queen to greet the spring in all her glory, and queen Theon will devotedly serve until death greets him again.
They fit together like pieces of stained glass in a sept—broken, mended, and glowing with the light of the sun.