Chapter Text
Blood has seeped through layers of linen and wool. Sansa winces and pulls her small clothes down, lifting her dress out of harm’s way. Two underskirts, ruined. Blood smears along her thighs and mats down her maidenhair. When she wipes between the lips of her sex, the rag pulls away clots of blood, reddish black and viscous. It’s always more than she expects, not the thin blood of a scratch but a thick gob, like a small organ scraped out from her tender insides.
She scrubs herself as best she can and presses fresh rags between her legs. She secures them with a long length of pink-stained linen, wrapped and pinned in place, and pulls on new underskirts beneath her dress. There’s barely room to turn around in the garderobe, let alone get dressed.
A woman’s life is nine parts mess to one part magic, a cruel voice pierces through memory. She pushes it away. She does not need the ghost of Cersei Lannister haunting her. It’s her mother’s voice she wishes for, but with every year it grows fainter.
The mess is her own fault. Her moonblood has always been predictable, but she’s been distracted and the telltale cramp between her legs was overshadowed by the ache from the crown. It’s a heavy thing, iron and bronze, and leaves angry red marks across her forehead.
It was never supposed to be hers. It was made for Jon, the brother she never loved as she should until it was too late. “Wear it for me,” he had said, during the war when the sun hid from the sky and the dead rose from their crypts, and then he had flown on dragonback into the furthest north, through the curtain of light at the end of the world.
She thinks now that he knew he was never coming back. Maybe he considered it a fair bargain, his life for the end of the long night, but it was never one she made. The first time she had put the crown on she had cried — for Jon, for Robb, for Bran and Rickon, for all the men and boys in her family who had to die for the crown to land on her weary brow.
Done with the garderobe, she returns the crown to her head. Immediately the muscles of her neck and shoulders spasm. They are unused to bearing the weight for such long hours. She only wears the crown during official duties, but lately her life has been nothing but. For two months she has been negotiating with the Dragon Queen. Each day she sits surrounded by her advisors, sitting across from the other queen and the other advisors, and battles. The war that would otherwise be fought with armies takes place over a long oaken table. Both sides have bled too much to sustain another war. Instead they squabble out the minutiae that make a kingdom: tariffs and treaties signed, borders drawn and fortified, noble sons and daughters married off.
A shadow passing the window darkens her rooms and the air shakes. Sansa peers through the glass, worrying her lip. She catches the end of a white tail before it disappears from sight. Viserion, then. Not even the biggest one and he still makes the castle walls feel made of straw. Daenerys keeps her dragons sated but hovering. It is a message without need of translation. Sansa knows the shade of ash that is left when a man attempts to fight a dragon. She knows, too, its texture, lighter than snow, that slips through your fingers until all that is left is a scorched shaft of bone, a blackened hilt of a sword. That the bones and swords had belonged to Lannisters and Boltons had been meager comfort.
There can be no security until the dragons are gone and the North is free. She has it almost in her grasp. The only question is the price.
The expected knock comes on her door and she hurries from the bedroom to the solar, bidding enter. Too late she sees the smudge of red on her finger. She spits on it and wipes it away. Not very queen-like.
Jeyne enters with a small curtsy. “Sandor Clegane, Your Grace.”
Time to be queen again.
Her first thought when he enters the room is that he is too large for it. In Winterfell she has only ever seen him in the courtyards or the Great Hall. He seems out of place here, in a queen’s solar, surrounded by rich tapestries and delicately embroidered pillows. From the way he eyes the room she thinks he would agree.
“Thank you, Jeyne,” she says. “You may leave us.”
Her handmaid chews her lips, looking between the two of them nervously. Sansa smiles at her, more bravely than she feels, and nods encouragingly. Jeyne bobs a curtsy and leaves, frowning.
Sansa can’t remember the last time she exchanged a word with Sandor. Have they spoken more than ten times in these last few years? He had shown up at her camp on the eve of battle, reappeared from the dead. When she had seen him she had had the urge to run up and throw her arms around him. All she had thought was to bury her face in his dirty cloak and cry. But she was not allowed such childish moments anymore. He had knelt before her and laid his sword at her feet, pledging his life to her. She had accepted.
He is one of her soldiers now, one of many. She watches him sometimes, training other men in the courtyard or seated below the salt during a feast. He speaks rarely. He is no more handsome than he ever was, but the fury that used to radiate off him like the smell of strongwine is diluted. He seems if not nice — never nice — a calmer man than the one she used to know.
None of which makes the current conversation any easier.
“Please, have a seat,” she beckons. “Will you have some wine? There is sweet bread, too, or apples, if you prefer.”
He joins her at the table but shakes his head. She sits, delicately shifting so the blooded rags stay in place.
“I hope you have found Winterfell to be a good home?”
He nods, then clears his throat as if remembering that he has a voice. “Aye, Your Grace.”
“I am glad to hear it. We are better for having you here.”
He nods again. He looks at her as if waiting for her to pull out a knife. She presses her nail hard into the flesh of her palm.
“I’m told you have ordered new quintains for the squires to train on. I’m sure the boys are grateful for your thoughtfulness.”
“Is that what you brought me here to discuss?”
Damn him.
“No,” she confesses. “There is something else.”
Shoulders back, chin high. Queen-like.
“The negotiations with Queen Daenerys are nearing an end. She is ready to acknowledge the sovereignty of the North. There are some conditions on which she has remained quite firm, however. One of them is that I must take a husband. So that’s why I — that is, I thought — I wondered if you would be… amenable, as such, to a proposal.”
She waits for him to react, stomach knotted with dread. Nothing in his expression changes.
“A proposal,” he says flatly.
“Yes.”
“Proposing what?”
Seven save her. “Marriage?”
He narrows his eyes. “To who.”
Her nail presses through her hand to the bone. “Me.”
He stands up abruptly and he is angry, as angry as she has ever seen him. “This is a jape.”
“I promise you it is not.”
“What game are you playing?”
“None, ser.”
“I am not a fucking ser,” he snarls. “And I am not your thing to toy with.”
She rises from her chair and reaches out a beseeching hand. “I would not toy with you. I swear to you that I am sincere. Daenerys is insistent. I must marry.”
“Then marry. You have the offers.”
She does, dozens of them and more arriving each day. Every lord in Westeros has begged for the hand of the Queen in the North. She has accepted none and refused none. From each she extracts every favor possible and assures them of her most genuine interest.
“They will not do. Daenerys is strict in her parameters. It must be someone already sworn to the north, and lowborn.”
“Lowborn?”
“Yes.”
His face contorts. She would call it a smile, if it had any humor in it. “Well finally you make some sense. I’m to be your humiliation.”
She swallows. “Not — not entirely. Her primary desire is to prevent a strategic alliance.”
“Prevent it by marrying you to someone the lords would rather scrape their boots on than swear allegiance.”
“You fought bravely for the north. Even the lords respect you as a soldier.”
“And for that you would make me king?”
“No. A lord and a consort, not a king.”
“You must have lost only half your senses, then.”
She smooths down the folds of her skirt and clasps her hands in front of her. He will not see them shake. “I know this is not something you have aspired to. But your life would not have to change as much as you may imagine. You would still be a warrior, only risen in rank. Our lives need not intersect much. You would have your own quarters. You could have multiple squires, as many horses as you wish…”
He spits at her feet. “And now you think to buy me like some whore.”
Panic has begun to circle her neck, cutting off the air. She did not expect him to be happy, but to refuse completely… Any other man in Westeros would cut off a hand to take what he is being offered. She casts about desperately for an appeal. What does a man like Sandor want?
“Please,” she begs. “If your concern is — whatever you may have heard about Tyrion and Harrold Hardying, I am still a maiden.”
It was the wrong thing to say. He advances on her and she steps back until she is pinned against the wall. His voice is low and dangerous, a dog’s growl before it lunges. “You think I’m refusing because of the state of your cunt?”
She flinches, struck. She cannot meet his eyes; she responds to his jerkin. “I know this is not what you want. It is not what I wanted either. I had hoped to never marry, but this is the price I must pay.”
“Tell me what you get, then.”
“I told you, independence for the north.”
“No. What else. Tell me what else you have sold your maidenhead for.”
She makes herself meet his eyes. “Fifty maesters to start a northern Citadel, a hundred hostages, and a fair price on southron wheat.”
His lips curl. “Wheat.”
“We will starve to death next winter without that wheat.”
He turns away in disgust.
“Please,” she begs his retreating back. He makes for the door.
“Leave me out of this. You want a lowly husband? Find yourself a swineherd to fill your bed.”
The door slams behind him and she slides down the wall until she is collapsed on the floor. The crown slips from her head with a clatter. She buries her face in her skirts and soon they are wet with tears. Her thighs are sticky; blood has soaked through the rags again. She does not feel a queen. She barely feels a woman, just a trembling creature, wet and weak.
She grasps blindly for the crown until she has it in her hand. The markings on the iron band press into her palm. They are runes of the First Men. Jon had had them engraved to match the crown that Robb had died wearing. Robb’s had been made to match the crowns worn by the first Kings in the North. Now it is her turn.
She wipes her face and returns the crown to her head. You are the blood of the First Men, she reminds herself. You are the Queen in the North. And you are done letting men make you cry.
*
*
*
He wakes up with a dagger through his skull. He has rolled over and vomited on the floor before he recognizes the familiar source of the pain.
Time was he could drink strongwine until he fell asleep in his own piss and wake up no more craving death than he ever did. But it’s been four long years since he touched the stuff. Four years of drinking watered wine like an unblooded boy, until last night, when he had reached for it again, because —
The memory falls into place and he leans over to vomit again.
He’d rather focus on the lance of pain between his eyes than recall what had happened. Might be the whole thing was a dream, some fantasy he concocted around his twelfth cup of strongwine. That’s far more believable than any of it being real. His dreams are often cruel. In his dreams she offers him everything — her cunt; her kiss; cruelest of all, her smile — and he wakes up alone in his narrow bed, a pain in his heart he can’t shake. Never in all these years have his dreams been so cruel as to offer him marriage.
Might as well include all the gold in the Iron Bank and a horse that shits silver.
He lies in his misery for as long as he can before his bladder forces him to stumble for the chamber pot. He leans his forehead against the cool stone of the wall. There’s acid in his throat and bile on his tongue, both friendlier than the memory of what he had said to her.
Seven hells but she makes him angry. Had from the start. He’d watched her all those years ago, in Winterfell and on the kingsroad, simpering and swooning, knowing that one day he would watch her be beaten bloody, and hated her for it.
There hadn’t been much but hatred in him those days. He’d not thought there was any kindness in him until the beatings started and he found himself trying to protect her, for all the good it did. A paltry kindness from a cowed dog was no protection at all. All he could do was fantasize about slitting the little king’s throat. A crimson scarf he should have given him, to go with his crimson cloak. Instead he’d stood silent and callow and felt his anger grow.
The Elder Brother had told him to lay down his anger. It is a poison, he’d said. You have learned to relish the taste but it will kill you as sure as any blade. Sandor had laughed in his face and cursed him to the seven hells, but the old man was a stubborn son of a bitch. He had a way of working on you, like a river on a stone. It was harder than giving up wine, more painful than the feverish weeks he spent encrusted in shit and vomit, but Sandor learned to bleed himself of it slowly, and found to his surprise that without the anger there was something still left of him.
Until the little bird started talking marriage and it all came flooding back.
He groans and gets on his knees to clean the dirty rushes from the floor. When he leaves the keep the sun assaults his eyes. He curses it but doesn’t let himself turn back into the dark. He doesn’t let himself search out any more strongwine, either, though the pull is strong. He makes his way through narrow walkways. Halfway through a courtyard the ground becomes shadowed and wings propel a wave of air. Lords and servants scatter to cling the walls but Sandor stays. Do it, you beastly bitch, he thinks, and pretends his legs do not shake. But the dragon moves on, bored, and the courtyard timidly resumes its activity. Sandor makes his legs move, past the glass gardens and the belltower and the collapsed entrance to the former crypts, until he arrives at an unassuming door in a far corner of Winterfell.
He knocks, then waits, then knocks again. Finally the door swings open.
“Well, look who’s been a stranger.”
Nance is a short, commanding woman with a mass of dark curls and a bosom spoken of worshipfully by the men of Winterfell. She had worked at the whorehouse in winter town until the war, when like many she’d moved into the castle for protection. Sandor sees a small head peek out from behind her skirt and make a frightened squeak. She often has an orphan or two scurrying around her feet.
He frowns. “It’s only been a few days.”
“Aye, and you were supposed to come last night.”
“Something came up.”
“Same thing that left you looking like the Stranger took a shit in your ale?”
He shoots her his foulest look but she just smiles sunnily. She’s the only woman he’s met who was never afraid to look him in the eye. He relents.
“How many?”
Her face softens. “Three. Well — no, two.”
He picks up a shovel and gets to work.
The ground here is rockier than on the Quiet Isle. The spade of the shovel won’t break the earth without a hard stomp of his boot and each shovelful of dirt is laden with rocks the size of his fist. He welcomes it. He can hear the Elder Brother’s voice in his head, as clear as when he stood beside him. Bury it all. Leave your rage in the dirt and see what is left when you are done.
When the second grave is finished his arms burn and his back aches and his mind is left with only one thought. A memory: the first time he had touched her. She had stepped backwards, her child’s body brushing against his belly, and he had grasped her shaking shoulders. He’d asked her if she was afraid of him, knowing it was Payne she feared. But he’d wanted it to be him. He’d wanted it all — her attention, her fear, her awe. Like a little boy throwing pebbles at his crush. Anything he could get from her he would take.
He supposes that’s his answer.
This time when Nance opens the door he follows her in. He takes a jug from her gratefully and guzzles down the water until the taste of bile on his tongue is dulled.
There are three bodies laid out on the tables, already in their shrouds. One is so small he could hold it in one hand.
“Someone’s grandfather and a girl with her babe,” Nance says. “That girl wasn’t more than twelve years. Everyone told her husband she was too small for the birthing bed. All he had to do was spill on her belly for a couple of years. But the gods never did make a man with sense.”
He wipes the water from his beard with the back of his hand. Something makes him open his mouth. “Were you ever married?”
“Might be I still am, according to the septons. If there’s still a rat catcher in Mole’s Town with the meanest face you ever saw then I suppose I’m still a wife. They say the vows are ’til death. But there was nothing in the vows that kept him from treating me worse than those rats and nothing that kept me from leaving him when I got sick of it. Whoring was better than marriage. Plenty of the men were no kinder, but only for a few hours, not a whole life.”
A whole life is what he’ll have if he marries Sansa. The small folk might put a marriage aside on occasion, but not the highborn. A whole life as her embarrassment, trussed up like some little lord but still the ugly dog forced on her by the dragon bitch. A whole life spent in a farce of what he wants.
Nance has turned to him and holds him in place with a dissecting look. “Never tell me you’re considering marriage.”
He considers what she’d say if he told her. “Have no taste for it,” he says truthfully.
“You’re wiser for it. There’s no happiness that comes from marriage. You ever known a husband and wife who loved each other the way the septons go on about?”
“No.”
She nods, satisfied. “Well there you have it.”
She’s right, he knows. He also knows he will do it anyway. Because he is a fool but not an idiot, and he knows a farce is better than nothing at all. A dog eats the scraps it can get.
He leaves Nance with an empty jug and a nod of thanks. It’s not until he’s stepped outside that he realizes he’s probably too late. Sansa will have asked someone else by now, or be intending to. He certainly gave her every reason to. By now some hedge knight will be making his way to her chambers, clueless to the extravagance of luck he is about to fall into.
If Sandor has to watch the little bird be kissed under a weirwood tree, knowing the lips on hers could have been his, he’ll put his blade through the man’s neck.
He swears and walks swiftly back to the main castle.
Tilly in the kitchen says the queen broke her fast in her chambers. Willam who tends the fires in the Great Hall says she hasn’t been seen all day. Margrit who tidies the queen’s chambers says she left a while ago. Old Pate in the stables says she hasn’t been in for her horse. Astryd who keeps her wardrobe wants to know why Sandor wants to know.
He’s starting to think longingly of strong wine when little Sam who minds the chickens says he saw the queen go into the godswood.
Near the heart of the woods he finds not Sansa but her little handmaiden. Jeyne kneels near a bush of golddrops, plucking yellow blossoms into a bouquet. When she sees Sandor she straightens.
“Her Grace does not wish to be disturbed.”
“I have business with the queen.“
Jeyne only shakes her head. She is a small, scarred thing, more mouse than woman. But she does not move.
“I only want to talk —“
“You have no right, not after what you —“
“It’s alright, Jeyne. Let him through.” Sansa’s voice lilts through the leaves.
Jeyne wrings her hands but steps aside.
He finds her in front of the heart tree, perched on a stone. Her hands are folded delicately in her lap. She sits on her moss-covered throne and regards him coolly. The apprehension with which she had faced him earlier is gone. A portcullis is lowered, a gate is drawn.
He drops his gaze to the black pool by her feet, but it’s no use. She’s there too, reflected in the cold water.
She has no chirping courtesies for him this time, and he realizes he has no idea what he should say. An apology, certainly, but he never learned those.
“I have only one question, and then I’ll say yes,” he says instead.
If she is relieved at his answer she shows no sign. She only waits expectantly.
“Why me?”
She is unimpressed. “As I said, Queen Daenerys’s terms —“
“Aye, but why me. Why not any other lowborn man?”
She looks at him queerly, as if the answer were obvious. “Because I know you would never beat me.”
Shame chokes him and he has to look down. She has taken the measure of him: a man who will be hard and bitter, who will offer no sweet words or kisses, but who will not take fists to his wife. That is the only qualification, and in that only does he pass.
She rises and stands in front of the strange-faced tree. Her arms wrap around herself and she stares into its red sap eyes. She smiles, a small thing and not meant for him.
“The north will be free for the first time in three hundred years. A marriage is a small price to pay for that.”
She turns to him, her queen’s face slipping back in place. “I thank you for accepting my offer.”
That she would thank him is so objectionable that he opens his mouth to say something but she continues, voice freezingly polite. “You already fought for the north on the battlefield. I hope you will not find this sacrifice as taxing.”
He shuts his mouth and bows instead. He retreats toward the castle, leaving her to her red tree. He does not tell her that he never fought for the north, he only fought for her.