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i.

Even after Ramsay’s gone, his body destroyed by the teeth of his own hungry dogs, Sansa can sense a shadow of danger lurking about Winterfell. Jon, brave, beautiful, and kind to the point of foolishness, cannot. He swears to her that she’s safe; that nobody will ever touch her again, for he won’t allow it. Sansa believes Jon means every one of his words, which is different from her believing him altogether. He dismisses Cersei as a minor threat. Compared to utter annihilation, everything else is minor. The danger, Jon insists, comes from the true North.

She understands his point. But she also knows Cersei, with her bone and marrow, more than she’d like.

She tells Jon he’s as far from Joffrey as anyone she’s ever met; it’s true. Whatever Joffrey was, Jon stands on the opposite end of it, which means he suffered so much more for an equally ugly, traitorous death.

Sansa loves Jon madly, in a way she never had the chance to love Robb; she’d do anything to keep him safe. It’s what they do. They protect each other.

She’d do, really, anything.

ii.

“Let me go in your stead,” she asks, holding her brother’s face between her hands, fixing her blue gaze on his gray one. He is the kindest man she’s ever known, and the only one the North can fully trust. Sansa also had recognized Tyrion’s scribbling on the small parchment cramped between the raven’s claws and had no time to pick apart the myriad of feelings that bloomed from it. He was alive, her Lannister husband. He was Hand. He brought a Targaryen to Westeros. And, allegedly, dragons. “Stay here. Stay in the North, with your people. Get us ready for the War.”

“I won’t let you leave alone,” Jon declares.

“I don’t think Brienne would allow that, either,” Sansa says, letting her hands drop from his face as she thinks it through. “Davos should stay here with you, though.”

Jon takes a hesitant breath, looking through the window of her solar to the snowy courtyard of their home. “Tyrion will be there.”

Sansa clasps her hands together. “Yes,” she says, carefully.

Jon stares. “Do you trust him?”

Trust is a strong word, but, as far as words go, “I do.” She feels the need to clarify: “I can handle him.”

“We need allies for this War,” Jon sighs. “I don’t want to create more enemies than the ones we already have. We need armies and dragonglass.”

“Send me in your name, and I can do it for us,” Sansa pleads, once again. She leans forward, takes Jon’s hands in hers again. “You said we needed to trust each other,” she murmurs, quietly.

“Trust is not the issue,” Jon replies. “I don’t want to send you away from home again. You are the Stark of Winterfell.”

“You are a Stark in all but name, and this crown is yours,” Sansa says, fiercely, and then, “I’ve been in the South before. I know them. I can do this, Jon.”

The look in his eyes is defeated enough. It will take him a few days, but she knows she already won.

iii.

Before she leaves, she goes to Petyr.

“I need you back in the Eyrie,” she says to him, in her solar, in private, when nobody’s watching.

He rests against the closed door with arms crossed over his chest and that smirk on his face, the one that's not quite a smirk, no teeth, just eyes like snakes.

“It’s bold of you to go South like that,” he says. “Alone, in the pit of dragons and the lion’s den again.”

“I won’t go alone,” she says, walking around her table, back turned to him. He knows her better than anyone. He created her. Her hands shake and she folds it away, tangles her fingers together where he can’t see it. “Brienne is going with me.”

“Let me go with you,” he pleads, and his voice is suddenly nearer. She hadn’t listened to his steps approaching. “We can do this together.”

You and me, he’d said, together on the Iron Throne.

There’s no way in hell she’s leaving that man alone in her home with Jon, of all people, and she can’t take him with her, can’t let him anywhere near Tyrion.

She turns around, and looks at him as her mother once looked at her father. “My cousin is the heir of the Vale and we left him alone,” she says. “And there are more men in the Vale that can come to our aid. You’re their Lord Protector; they’ll come, if you order them to.” She smooths her tongue, a trick she learnt from him. “I’ll send you the word when it’s time, but I need your help, my lord.” He gives another step, too close to comfort. She feels his mint-scented breath and closes the distance between them, placing a kiss on his cheek, almost on the left corner of his mouth. “Do it for me,” she says. Like a daughter, now.

It’s not, technically, a lie, any part of it. Sansa is a very bad liar. Her truth spills out when she’s silent. She needs to speak it out, act it out, to hide it.

He chuckles. “Sweetling,” he says, proudly, “you go. You’re ready for the big game.”

iv.

(The hounds that ate Ramsay alive - Sansa ordered them to be sacrificed by the butchers, afterward. Nobody tells that part.

There are names, whispers, for her. The Red Wolf, the kinder tongues call her, but more often than she’d like, the Wolfless One, and once would be too many times already. Nymeria will eventually come home with Arya. Ghost comes and goes, but he’s never too far from Jon, too far from the true North. Rickon died not long after his wolf. Bran became something else, other than a Stark, without Summer.

Winterfell’s daughter, they call her: born of that castle, of its dark walls and cold towers and haunted rooms and bloody history.

Winterfell’s daughter. It’s not said proudly.

Sansa ordered Ramsay’s hounds to be sacrificed. She remembered Lady, and then didn’t.)

v.

Dragonstone is what the name suggests: dragon-shaped dark stones, towering in the horizon beyond the shore as they approach. It smells of sulfur and brimstone, and there’s smoke coming out of one of the towers. It doesn’t feel like a place where life can be nurtured.

Tyrion Lannister is waiting on the shore, and when Sansa comes off of their boat, she almost loses her stance. He’s grown a beard, and is covered in dark clothes (as she is), so different from the golden and crimson Lannister garments she last saw him using. Brienne’s hand is there to keep her from falling, and when they’re asked to be handed their weapons, she puts her hand over the hilt of her sword.

Sansa touches Brienne’s elbow while looking into her once-husband eyes. “It’s fine, Brienne.”

Tyrion nods to her, as if to say yes, it is, and gives a step ahead. “Lady of Winterfell,” he says. She offers him her hand, and he places a kiss over her gloved knuckles, then lets it go, “it has a nice ring to it.”

“So does Hand of the Queen,” she says, and looks around. Daenerys’ men are guiding the northern party that came with her toward a seemingly endless staircase, taking their weapons and their boats. He guides the way and Sansa follows him. “Are we being held hostages?”

“Absolutely not,” he says. “The Queen is merely taking protective measures.”

“The Queen does sound a little paranoid,” Sansa mutters. Tyrion looks at her with a gingerly look, an amused smirk dancing in his lips. “What is it?”

“It’s been quite a while since I last saw you, Lady Stark, and you’re different. That is all.”

“So are you,” she says. She feels more nervous than she shows and tries not to let it overwhelm her. “I like the beard.”

“Hmm, thank you,” he says, absently brushing the hair covering his jaw. “I shall keep it, then, if it pleases my wife,” he completes with a chuckle, and Sansa tenses beside him. He doesn’t even look at the side to notice it. “I’m only jesting, my lady. Rumours say you’ve been since married to another. A northerner?”

“Yes.” She looks down at him, refusing to let her voice waver much. So he doesn’t know. “But I had him executed.”

That makes him stop in his spot, long enough so there’s a considerable distance between them and the last in line ahead. “Oh,” he says, curling one eyebrow. She hasn’t forgotten he always had expressive eyes. “Do I want to know the story?”

“I don’t think so,” Sansa murmurs, and resumes her walking. This time, he follows. “Let’s just say you were a better husband by every standard.”

“I was a less than serviceable husband to you, I believe,” he says, his voice clearly uncomfortable. Sansa likes, not without guilt, that he’s uncomfortable. “So you probably had the right of it.”

“I did,” she confirms, but doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t ask, either.

When the dragons fly right above their heads, Sansa makes sure to hide both her wonder and her fear.

vi.

The throne carved out of stone at the dais is way more impressive than the Iron Throne.

Or so Sansa thinks as the girl, Missandei, declares the longest list of titles she’s ever heard. Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen. Rightful heir to the Iron Throne. Rightful Queen of the Andals and the First Men. Protector of the Seven Kingdoms. The Mother of Dragons, the Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, the Unburnt, the Breaker of Chains. The claimant to the Iron Throne is a beautiful woman, young like her. There’s a certain innocence in her big eyes. It’s not how Sansa had pictured dragons, but she can sense the danger beneath, anyway.

“This is Sansa Stark, the Lady of Winterfell,” Brienne says by her side. “She speaks and acts in the name of her brother, Jon Snow, the King in the North.”

“Thank you for travelling so far, my lady,” the Queen says with a well-rehearsed smile. “I hope the seas weren’t too rough.”

“The winds were kind enough. We thank you for your hospitality,” Sansa replies, folding her hands on her back.

“Now, not that you’re less than welcome,” Daenerys hurries to explain, “but I’ve sent word for your brother, not you, my lady. I’ve beckoned him to bend the knee and surrender his Crown, so we could be allies.”

“I hold no Crown to give you,” Sansa says, “and the King in the North didn’t give me permission to do so.”

The Dragon Queen seems confused, and her smile wavers one inch.

“Forgive me, my lady,” she says. “I never did receive a formal education, but I could have sworn I read that the last King In The North was Torrhen Stark, who bent the knee to my ancestor Aegon Targaryen. In exchange for his life and the lives of the northern men, he swore fealty to House Targaryen in perpetuity. Or do I have my facts wrong?”

“I’m afraid you do, Your Grace,” Sansa replies, as politely as she can. She sees, with the corner of her eye, Tyrion leaning his head down to conceal a smile. “The last King in the North was Robb Stark. My brother Jon Snow was crowned by our people after we defeated the Boltons, who had taken our ancestral home.” She makes a pause, just long enough to let the words settle. “I have not come to give the North away.”

Daenerys never truly stops smiling at her as she proceeds. “Well, that is unfortunate,” she says, sounding too pleased for someone speaking of misfortunes. “You've traveled all this way to break faith with House Targaryen?”

At that, Sansa chuckles, but it’s quiet, under her breath, and humorless. “Break faith?” Sansa asks. “Not at all, Your Grace.” She looks around. An unsullied beside Missandei stares at Sansa with a cold, lifeless gaze; the Dothraki men on the lower steps of the dais are equally disturbing. Sansa assumes they are there to scare her, as if she, a woman stripped of her weapons, is the threat, instead of the team of skilled assassins surrounding the young Targaryen. She looks at the claimant Queen again. “I wonder if it’s too bold of me to ask for a private audience so I can properly present my case?”

“These are men and women of my uttermost trust,” says the white-haired woman. It sounds rehearsed. “I have nothing to hide from them.”

Sansa lets a smile tug at the right corner of her lips just so. If the Queen wants an audience, then Sansa can work with an audience. “I see,” she says, but before she can form another sentence, the Hand interrupts.

“Perhaps the ladies would like a bath and a meal?” Tyrion suggests. “They must certainly be tired.”

Sansa catches his eye. His spine is straight and his eyes are certain, firm. He’s different from what she remembers, yes; she didn’t lie. But he’s always been like this, too much of a Lannister to keep his head down. She remembers him staring at Joffrey, refusing to kneel. He was born to wear that badge, and he wears it better now. Or maybe not, she thinks, forcing herself to keep her eyes away from the imposing Queen on the stony throne and staring into her former husband’s eyes instead. “We’d appreciate that very much, my lord.”

vii.

She and Brienne are given chambers separated by a door. As sunlight leaves them, Sansa stares at her window, at the merciless seas. Somewhere in the horizon, King’s Landing stands beyond Blackwater Bay, and Cersei Lannister reigns over it.

It’s been a long journey South, and she’s bone-tired. Cheese and bread are served in their chambers, before dinner time, but as soon as Sansa eats and baths, she lies on the featherbed and falls asleep immediately.

She dreams of a castle. It looks like Winterfell, though she knows it isn’t, in that way we know when we dream. It’s empty and her feet echo as she runs through the corridors, desperately trying not to make any more noise. Until she takes a turn and bumps against a rotten body, stinking like death and cold as ice. A bony grip closes around her neck, and blue eyes bore into hers, but she can discern the blond hair, the rusty crown upon her brow. Cersei, dead, smiles at her. “I’ve been looking for you, little dove,” she says, but her voice is not like anything Sansa’s ever heard before. Worms spill out from her mouth when she speaks.

Sansa wakes up with a barely contained scream, alone in her bedroom. She goes to the window and cracks it open, lets the wind kiss her face as she breathes in and out the scent of sulfur, brimstone and salt. The Red Keep seems to be staring at her, from the distance, from the dark.

She closes the window, comes back to bed.

viii.

The next morning, after she breaks her fast, Sansa is invited to meet the Queen again.

She suspects there’s a touch of Tyrion on it, because she’s not led to the Throne Room. Instead, a quiet Unsullied guides her to a room that reminds her, vaguely, of her own solar in Winterfell; it seems like a council room, but almost all chairs are empty. There’s a giant wooden table shaped after Westeros, several wooden pieces distributed abroad, most of them around King’s Landing or Dragonstone. The Queen is waiting, standing over the window that opens to the cliff and the sea, below, her back turned to Sansa when she enters; Tyrion is there, too, sitting in front of the map. “My lady,” he greets as the unsullied closes the door behind Sansa, “I hope you’re well rested.”

Sansa nods, her eyes darting to him, to the Queen, to him again. “I am,” she confirms. “Thank you, my lord. I am sorry I missed dinner last night.”

“There’s no need to apologize,” the Queen says, turning around to face Sansa. Against the sunlight coming from the window behind her, she is just a shadow, her small body delineated but the smallest details of her pretty face hidden. Tyrion’s chair stays half in the dark, half in the daylight. His fingers tap over Blackwater Bay. Sansa feels a pang of jealousy looking at the pair of them. A Queen and her Hand: allies, partners. She couldn’t give it to him, before, and she feels a silly regret over it, like she just lost something she never had. “You were tired. But your friend is a delightful company,” Daenerys smiles.

Sansa can’t help but smile, too. “Brienne is wonderful,” she agrees.

Daenerys shares a look with Tyrion before she sits in one of the chairs by his side. She signals for an empty one. “Why don’t you take a seat, Lady Sansa? We have a lot to talk about.”

Sansa does as she’s told. She takes note of pieces of wooden dragons covering Dorne, the Reach, the Iron Islands and Dragonstone.

So, Olenna Tyrell. The Greyjoys, at least one of them. And who is holding Dorne, now?

“I’ve never known Cersei Lannister,” Daenerys says, “but for what I’ve been told, she’s a cruel tyrant that might as well be mad.”

“I’ve known mad men and women enough to confirm that Cersei is one of them,” Sansa agrees.

That seems to please Daenerys.

“It seems dangerous to leave such a woman in charge,” she says. “Even more if she’s an usurper. What could be more urgent than defeating her?”

A kraken, a rose and a snake surround King’s Landing, where a wooden lion stands alone. “You plan to besiege King’s Landing,” Sansa says, eyes on the table-map in front of her.

For a moment, there’s nothing but silence, and when she raises her head, she sees two pairs of surprised eyes studying her. She focuses on Daenerys’, only because Tyrion is more distracting. “What do you think of it?” The Queen asks.

Sansa feels Petyr’s hand resting on her shoulder. She bites her lower lip as she thinks. “I think it’s a good plan,” Sansa replies, honestly. “You could just burn the city with your dragons, but a siege might spare part of the people.”

“A siege can be cruel, too,” Daenerys offers. Sansa feels she’s being tested. “The people of King’s Landing are going to starve, some of them to death, until she surrenders.”

Sansa shakes her head. “Cersei is never going to surrender,” she says. “But a siege will weaken her men. And war is war. People die.” She cocks her head to the side, thinking it through. She raises her eyes to Tyrion, suddenly understanding. “The siege was your idea, wasn’t it?” He shares another look with his Queen, and bites the inner face of his cheek, but doesn’t answer. Sansa’s eyes come back to the map. “What about the royal fleet? Cersei doesn’t strike me as a Queen who would leave Blackwater Bay completely unprotected.”

“I think that, too. There’s something we’re missing,” Tyrion confirms, as if puzzled. His fingers are still over the contour of the same place he once protected the city and gave the victory to Joffrey and his father. Sansa knows the true story, though. “Most of the royal fleet was loyal to Stannis and was decimated during the Wars,” he answers. “The second larger fleet belongs to the Redwynes of Arbor.”

“Olenna is with you,” Sansa notes. “Will the Redwynes betray the Queen in favor of their liege lady?”

“I, for my part, do not trust any Tyrell whatsoever,” Tyrion says, all sour. Sansa holds back a chuckle. She can’t resent Olenna, even knowing the woman framed her and Tyrion for Joffrey’s murder, but Tyrion clearly can. She can’t blame him, either. He was the one who almost died because of the scheme, after all. “But yes, historically, the Redwynes stand with Highgarden.”

“Cersei wouldn’t trust them,” Sansa ponders. She cannot imagine such a paranoid woman putting so much at stake when the Tyrells are involved.

“No, I don’t think so,” Tyrion agrees.

“So she must have a fleet from somewhere else.” Sansa licks her lower lip. “I see you have the Ironborn.”

“Yara and Theon Greyjoy,” Daenerys replies.

Sansa raises her head.

“Theon Greyjoy is here?”

“Yes,” Daenerys answers, absently.

“The uncle,” Tyrion says, turning to his Queen, as if he has been slapped. “He never searched for you. He must have gone to Cersei.”

Daenerys nods, leaning over the table, her arms crossed. “It’s a good thing we delayed our departure, then. Put Varys to work on it,” Daenerys orders. She looks at Sansa with an odd sort of admiration. “Lady Sansa, Lord Tyrion spoke fondly of you, but I didn’t imagine you were such a strategist.”

“I’m no commander, Your Grace,” she says. “I just know my enemies well.” She remembers Rickon’s corpse, fallen and trespassed by an arrow, and forces herself to forget.

“I’m genuinely impressed,” Daenerys says. “If I recall, you wanted a private meeting to present your case. I am willing to listen.”

Over the table, a wooden wolf watches over the North. He seems small in such a broad land, and lonely, too. The lone wolf dies, she remembers. “An army of undead men are coming for us,” Sansa says, trying not to sound too ridiculous or outright mad. Jon is so much better at this. “The Wall is the only thing standing between them and the rest of the realms. If they cross it, they’ll take over the North in a week.” Sansa does a quick math. “I imagine they must take another week to get to the Neck.”

A heavy silence hovers above them. She can feel Tyrion’s gaze, harder than ever, upon her; but Sansa keeps her eyes on the Queen’s. “An army of undead men?” Daenerys echoes.

“We are sitting upon mines of dragonglass,” Sansa says, taking advantage of the moment. “Obsidian can kill the dead. You have three adult dragons. Fire, too, can kill them.” She tries not to despair. This is no time to show any weakness. “Cersei Lannister is an enormous threat, but if the dead come to us, there’ll be no Cersei to defeat, or Iron Throne to take, or realms to rule over.” She puts both of her hands, delicately, over the edge of the table-map. “I find it imperative for us to unite against the common enemy that could annihilate life as we know it.”

“Dead men,” she repeats. “You expect me to believe dead men are coming to kill us all?”

Sansa can’t help it, and sighs. “My lord,” she says, turning toward Tyrion. “Am I a liar?”

“A terrible one,” he replies.

“And my brother, the King? You’ve known him.”

“An even worse liar,” the Hand replies. He seems confused. “My lady, what are you proposing?”

Sansa turns to Daenerys again. “It is of both of our interests to get rid of Cersei Lannister. Allow my men to work on the mines of Dragonstone,” Sansa says. “Gather your armies and your allies and send them North. Prepare for a long winter. When the true danger is dealt with, we shall help you take your crown,” Sansa promises. “We’ll defeat Cersei together.”

“What about your crown?” Daenerys presses in.

Sansa presses her lips hard against each other, her mouth a thin line, and closes her eyes for a second. “As I’ve said, Your Grace,” she says, calmly, “I have no crown to give you. I’m merely Lady of Winterfell.”

Daenerys Targaryen stands up. Her face is hard and unrelenting; she is a reflex of the castle around her, much like Sansa is Winterfell. “You must understand that what you say to us sounds like a child tale. Should I abandon our campaign to retake my birth-right only to fight against an imaginary enemy, worse so when you refuse to bend the knee to me?”

“The undead are not imaginary,” Sansa retorts, trying not to lose her patience. “The North is the only thing standing between the Iron Throne and the Dead, and our defeat only increases their numbers. You may find it is, if not honorable, at least useful to come to our aid.”

The Queen is not as pleased with her tone as she was with Sansa’s previous interventions, but it is Tyrion’s face that she’s watching closely. She can see the glint of curiosity, respect and something else there, that old longing she could notice even in the early days of their marriage. She’s dismissed from the council room, Daenerys’ face cold and calculating, but Sansa is content enough with the morning.

It’s the Hand she needs by her side. The Queen will come after.

ix.

She finds Theon on the shore and calls out his name, the wind carrying on her voice. He looks at her like she’s a ghost, abandoning the company of his men as if she’s the only person alive in the world, walking toward her with incredulous, diffident steps. “Sansa?”

He looks alive, unlike the last time they’ve met. There’s so much Sansa wants to say. That she’s taken Winterfell back. That she killed Ramsay and justice has been done for them both. That the North is free. That there’s an army of corpses coming toward them. But all she can do is open her arms as soon as he’s within her reach.

Sansa throws her arms around his neck, clutching him tight as she allows herself to cry of relief. She can feel he was not waiting for it. “You’re alive,” she murmurs, over and over again.

Only then he returns her embrace. Theon doesn’t say a word. He just holds her, the unfamiliar southern sea breeze kissing his hair.

x.

That night, Tyrion knocks on her door. The whole castle is shadowy and dark and cold; the fire burning in the small hearth is the only source of heat and light. They silently settle in the fireplace, and Sansa’s ladyship takes over. “I am sorry, my lord,” she murmurs. “I’m afraid I have no wine to offer.”

He chuckles. “It’s no matter; you are the guest,” he says, soothingly. “Apparently, Stannis didn’t want his men to be drunk, so he got rid of most of the stocks of wine.”

“Oh,” Sansa says.

“Yes, I know,” he rolls his eyes dramatically.

Sansa chortles, but finds herself at a loss for words. Tyrion studies her face, in a way that reminds her of the night of the Battle of Blackwater. I’ll pray for your safe return, my lord, she’d said, in a prim voice, and that face he made, the same face, now-

will you?

She never fooled him, back then. She was just a scared girl, rooting for Stannis Baratheon to save her.

“You were remarkable this morning,” he begins. “I’ve spent the last weeks feeling like there was a word at the tip of my tongue that I just couldn’t remember, and you just seemed to pull it out for me. I was running out of arguments to give to Daenerys on why we should delay our attack.”

She tries to avoid the flush of pride warming her chest. Fails. “I’m glad to be helpful,” she says. “Though it’s surprising to see you so invested in fighting your own family. The last time we saw, you were bathed in crimson and gold.”

He shrugs, doesn’t say anything. It’s unlike him, all this silence, but she knows he’s being elusive to have a chance to study her. He doesn’t trust her yet, and why should he?, when she refuses to recognize his Queen’s claim, when she left him alone to die, when they’ve never been-

“Well,” at last, he speaks, “the last time we saw, you were just a girl repeating the words you were taught. I guess much is changed.”

On instinct, Sansa raises her chin just a fraction of one inch. “You still see a girl when you look at me.” It’s an accusation.

Something shifts with the light in his eyes. Mistrust. Awe. Wonder. Doubt.

(She remembers Petyr saying-

always assume the worst.)

“I can assure you I do not,” he replies. Another jet of blood runs to her neck and cheeks; this time, Sansa can’t quite understand what it is. “Have you seen them? The dead?”

She’s almost taken aback with the sharpness of the question and the sudden change of subject. “No,” she confesses. “But Jon has.”

Tyrion’s gaze scrutinizes her. “And what do you know about them?”

“They don’t tire and don’t stop,” she says. She’s heard Jon repeat the words so much that now they’re almost like a song, coming easily to her tongue. “There are white walkers and dead men. The white walkers raise the fallen to be their soldiers. That means that when our men die, their army increases.” She closes her eyes. “We know they can’t swim,” she raises one finger. “We know that the dead can be killed by fire or by dragonglass,” she raises two more. “The White Walkers die by dragonglass, but nobody has ever tried fire. The Wall keeps them at bay, but Jon guarantees me that they’ll find a way to break in. Apparently, there’s a magic horn hidden beyond the Wall that will make it crumble and fall once it’s found and blown,” Sansa shakes her head, pinches the bridge of her nose. Tyrion licks his lower lip, apparently, trying not to smirk, and she sighs. “You think I’m mad.”

“As crazy as it may seem, Sansa, I don’t.” He taps his fingers over the arm of the chair. “I’ve granted your men permission to work on the dragonglass of the island.”

She tries not to let her pride and joy show, but it is rather useless; she allows herself a small smile, as an indulgence. “I appreciate your collaboration, my lord.”

“Tyrion, Sansa,” he says. “My name is Tyrion.”

She is hit by a memory-

(He’s playing with you, Petyr says in her ear. He remembers, too.)

“Tyrion,” she says, carefully. Tries not to like too much the way it is easier to speak his name now than it was, before. But she’s not sure Petyr is right, or the part of her that always expects the worst. Because Tyrion keeps staring at her, and his eyes grow tender, in a way almost pained. “What is wrong, Tyrion?”

He hesitates. That, too, is unlike him. “I took the liberty of asking Varys about your late husband.”

Sansa feels her body tensing before she can stop it. All her words and lines just die in her throat as she waits for his next word.

“I am so terribly sorry, Sansa,” he whispers. “I should have-”

“Don’t,” she says, interrupting that sentence before he can go along that path. The imaginary, fantasy world of what ifs that Sansa learned, long ago and with her every fiber, to never visit, not even in dreams. She closes her eyes; this is what hurts the most. “Don’t do that. Please.”

Whatever is in her face, it seems to be enough to convince him. He gets up, and walks the distance between them until he’s standing in front of her chair.

And Sansa holds her breath. His clothes smell clean, like soap, and his skin has the salty scent of the breezes, much like everyone in the castle, but she realizes, then, that this is what she wanted to do since she first saw him. Just have him a little closer. To what end, she’s not quite sure. “May I?” He asks, his palm up as an offering.

Sansa doesn’t utter another word; she just gives him her hand.

He brings her hand to his mouth and places a soft kiss on the back of her fingers. “I’ve often wondered where you’ve been, my lady,” he says, “and all things considered, I’m glad that you’re alive and well.”

She finally breathes out, raggedly, slowly, and nods. This moment doesn’t cover any of it, the infinite silences and apologies and explanations and questions between them. This moment certainly doesn’t fix the situation between her King and his Queen, or the impending death threatening them in all fronts, but for now, it is a step, and even a small step already means leaving something behind. Sansa feels this old, hurting thing letting go of her soul. It’s good to be able to stop pretending he doesn’t matter. It’s tiring to avoid him. “I’m glad you’re alive and well, too,” she murmurs. And means it.

He leaves her, after, but not before they can spend a long moment like that: Sansa refuses to let go of his hand, and he brings their joined fingers to his chest in silence. She feels the steady beat of his heart, accidentally brushing her fingers over the cold metal of his badge, and they share a look, not of love - not yet - but of recognition: just on the brink of being together but not quite there. It is, after all, the place they’ve always called home.

xi.

The morning after brings its own surprises.

And they arrive early; Sansa and Brienne are invited to share the morning meal with the rest of Daenerys’ household, but just as they take their seats across Tyrion and Missandei, before the servants can bring their foods to the table, before they can begin to talk, before even the Queen can join them, one of the Unsullied come and rushes to Missandei, lowering his head and speaking to her in a foreign tongue.

Sansa frowns. Brienne, too. Tyrion looks like a man who has slept approximately one hour. “What is wrong?” He asks.

“A boat arrived at our shore,” Missandei says. The unsullied keeps muttering in her ear. “A sellsword wants to speak with the Queen.”

Tyrion curls one eyebrow. “A sellsword?” He says, with a heavy tone.

The unsullied just keeps whispering. “He says he brought a gift to the Queen,” Missandei translates to Tyrion. “He says he's here with the man who killed her father.”

Chapter Text

i.

After the morning meeting with Sansa and Daenerys, Tyrion finds Varys and Melisandre talking in whispers, standing over one of the many cliffs among the towers of Dragonstone. From this point of view they can see the shore, the endless gray sea. The sky is covered in dense, dark clouds.

There’s a storm coming.

The pair turns toward the dwarf as he approaches. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but, my lord,” Tyrion looks at Varys. “The Queen demands your services.”

“I’m always available,” Varys says, in his oily voice. He shares a look with Melisandre, one of warning and silent goodbye. Tyrion has never seen her wearing anything but red; even her heart-shaped face can’t hide the glint of crimson in her eyes. He is pleased with her departure, though. He feels uneasy around the woman. If because she’s disturbingly beautiful, because she used to believe Stannis - Stannis, of all people - was some kind of mythical hero or because he’s always suspicious of clergy people in general, regardless of the god involved, he can’t know for sure.

“Are you leaving, my lady?” Tyrion asks, feigning a polite disappointment.

It doesn’t work with Melisandre. “For your relief, yes, my lord,” she says, not smiling, and throws the red scarf around her neck. “The Lord of Light still has followers in this weird country. A brotherhood of men, awaiting for his signal. They are ready to fight against the darkness. So we must be, too.” She looks ahead and leaves.

Tyrion can’t help but turn around to watch her go. “What is this woman,” he mutters.

Varys chuckles by his side. “You came to ask me for information about King's Landing.”

“Especifically, I came to ask if you know anything about Euron Greyjoy offering his fleet to my sister,” Tyrion completes. Makes a pause, thinking about the logic behind Sansa’s argument. “Indeed, everything you can offer about Cersei’s allies.” She has the Lannister army with her in the capital, that is sure. Are they enough? The City’s Watch is untrained and doesn’t count as true soldiers.

Varys gives one of his dramatic sighs. “You should know in advance that since Qyburn rose to power by Cersei’s side, it is much harder to get information about King’s Landing than it used to be. He corrupts my little birds to his own games.” That seems to frustrate the Spider immensely, as if his web of secrets were a higher honor than whatever Cersei is playing. “I can give you copious detail about the farthest North if you ask, but King’s Landing might pose a challenge, now. Still, I’ll work on it.”

“Speaking of the North,” the Hand says, clearing his throat. Before he can make another question, Varys sends him a mischievous glance, and a smile pulls the corner of his mouth.

“You want information about your wife.”

“She’s not my wife anymore,” Tyrion says. He’s not sure about the technicalities, but anyway. It doesn’t matter. It never mattered. That ridiculous sham of a marriage. “She told me she had her last husband executed. For that, I imagine he must have been worse than me, though that would take a lot of effort,” he jokes, voice too edgy to comedy. “I should probably watch my back.”

But then Varys looks at him, with a pitiful look. “My lord, do you know who was the lady’s last husband?”

“No.” He fidgets, ashamed of asking, but, “to be honest, I expected you would know.”

“Have you ever heard of Ramsay Snow?”

Tyrion squeezes his eyes. “A bastard?”

“Roose Bolton’s bastard,” Varys says, with a theatrical shudder. “A young man that could make Joffrey look like an amateur. He was known to hold to the old, forbidden practice of the Boltons of flaying his victims and took pleasure in all sorts of cruel games,” the Spider says, and carefully adds, “particularly with women.”

A cold wind plays about them. Tyrion shivers under his clothes. “Why did she-”

Varys shakes his bald head. “The best sources say that your wife arrived in the North in the company of Petyr Baelish. You’re a smart man, my lord. You can figure out the rest.”

Tyrion closes his eyes, tries not to think of- anything. Anything at all. “But she executed him.”

“Fed him to his own hounds after she took Winterfell back. The Knights of the Vale answered her call to battle.”

A part of him, the Hand part, is creating a thread linking the North to the Vale, and both to Sansa Stark, his former wife and current guest.

But the other part of him, a smaller, hidden one, the part he is trying to bury down and deep, but that is stubborn as hell and that is very much still married, imagines Sansa feeding her abuser to his dogs and thinks well. Good for her.

ii.

He thinks about the girl Sansa once was, outliving Joffrey and his father, now commanding armies and speaking in the name of her King and executing her enemies with their own weapons of cruelty. He thinks that her sharp tongue and the fire beneath her icy gaze, now, are echoes of a lifetime ago: I’ll pray for your safe return, my lord, just as I pray for the King’s.

Her face was impassive as she watched the map; she studied it as if it were a board (he knew, because he did the same), he could hear the engineers of her mind running. The colorful dresses of her youth, now, are gone. She was dressed in pitch black that morning, when Daenerys summoned her in private. Her braid fell to the side, over her left shoulder. It made her look like a warrior.

Sansa survived, of course. That is not surprising at all. Tyrion always knew she would.

iii.

Here is what is surprising, above every imaginable scenario: Ser Bronn of Blackwater, bringing Jaime Lannister, widely known as the Kingslayer but who Tyrion just likes to call brother, to the shores of Dragonstone as his captive, in the morning the storm that had been breeding in the skies decides to finally break through.

Tyrion stands on the lowest step of the dais, at the Queen’s right, Missandei and Grey Worm at her left. Varys, Lady Sansa and her sworn-shield Brienne stand at Tyrion’s right, not over the dais but still far away enough from the arriving pair for it to feel like a trial. The other guests and the rest of the household probably haven't woken up yet, since it is an ungodly early hour. They hadn’t had the chance to have a proper breakfast when the boat came to shore. There was a third man on the boat, a merchant from King’s Landing who knew how to sail safely at night, someone who expected to be paid for it.

“I found this fucker headed North, alone atop his horse and disguised,” Bronn explains, when asked. Jaime stands by his side, beard full and dirty, his clothes worn and hair wet, mouth closed but head raised. Kovarro holds his arm, despite the fact Jaime has shackles around his elbows. “He’d promised me a castle and a wife, and I assumed that without his crazy sister he couldn’t grant me either.” Bronn gives Daenerys a smirk. “So I brought him to you for the same price. A wife and a castle.”

“Did you leave Cersei?” Tyrion asks, skeptically. Jaime looks at him with barely contained resentment, as if he had been intentionally avoiding the sight of his little brother, well-dressed, neat and wearing the pin of Hand of a foreign Queen. “Why?”

“She blew the Sept of Baelor,” Jaime says, resolutely, as if it couldn’t be any more obvious. “I don’t know if you remember, but I’ve already killed a king over something similar.”

“I certainly remember, Kingslayer.” Daenerys speaks directly to him, for the first time. “I suppose you didn’t kill your sister, though. That would be too low, even for you,” she laments. Tyrion had never seen so much contempt in her eyes before.

“You’re mistaken, Your Grace. Kinslaying is not below us, Lannisters,” Jaime says. His words are directed to the Queen on the stony throne, but Tyrion feels their blow. “But no. I didn’t kill her.”

“And what exactly were you looking for in the North?” Sansa asks; Tyrion observes her face. She has the smallest crease curling one of her eyebrows, and nothing else reveals her feelings.

Indeed. That was a most excellent question.

What the hell was Jaime looking for in the North?

His older brother changes his weight from one feet to the other. He looks tired and old. Outside, the rain intensifies, the noise against the stones and ceiling echoing through the emptiness of the Throne Room. “I made a vow to your mother to keep you and your sister safe,” Jaime says, though it isn't much of an explanation. Tyrion has the clear, lucid sensation he is avoiding something. Or someone.

“Well, you’ve failed spectacularly,” Sansa snaps.

“He didn’t, my lady,” Brienne intervenes. He had almost forgotten the sound of her voice, had forgotten she was there at all, though she was difficult to ignore. “It was Ser Jaime who armoured me, gave me this sword and sent me to you, because of the vow he made to your lady mother. Without him, I could never have saved you.”

“You probably could,” Jaime mutters.

“He defended me in Harrenhal when Locke’s men tried to force themselves on me,” Brienne continues, her voice crisp and clear. “He lost his hand for it. He jumped in the bear pit to save me, unarmed, for I was given nothing but a wooden sword to fight the beast.”

“In a bear pit?” Sansa repeats, shocked.

When Tyrion spots Jaime, he is failing miserably to hide the respect upon his face as he looks at the giant woman beside Sansa, if he’s trying at all. “He’s a man of honor,” Brienne says, matter-of-factly.

“What kind of honorable man kills his own King, whom he is sworn to defend?” Daenerys says. She sounds not like a Queen but like a daughter, and Tyrion feels each muscle in his body tensing in response. The room certainly feels it, too, the weight of all the tales. Kingslayer. Man without honor. He seated upon the Iron Throne, his King’s body at his feet, his sword dripping fresh blood. He was smirking when they found him, they say.

Brienne doesn’t hesitate. She makes a pause, but even that seems firm, and her eyes never leave Jaime’s. “There’s more to this story, Your Grace.”

“Brienne,” Jaime murmurs, begs, “don’t.”

“I don’t see how there could be more,” Daenerys cuts off. “Ser Bronn, you shall be handsomely rewarded for your gift. Justice has waited too long and it is a shame on the Seven Kingdoms that such a vile crime has been left unpunished so many years.” She stares at the Dothraki holding Jaime captive, “Kovarro, take Ser Jaime outside.”

“Your Grace,” Tyrion turns around, eyes on Daenerys. He can’t help the begging tone of his words. “Do not execute him.”

A thunder resonates through the sky, its vibration felt in the stones around them. Tyrion tries to steady his voice.

He cannot let his brother die.

Daenerys raises one eyebrow. The anger he earlier saw in her eyes directed at Jaime are fully placed upon him, now. Stormborn is her name for a reason. “Give me one single reason not to. I remind you that him being your brother is no reason.”

Tyrion swallows hard, dry. “He just came from King’s Landing,” Tyrion says, “in a moment we need all the information about Cersei we can get.”

“We have Varys,” Daenerys retorts, merciless.

“Varys’ web has been dismantled by Qyburn, and the information we need might take more time than what we have at our disposal,” Tyrion argues. “Jaime has been part of Cersei’s council for months. He will talk.” It takes all Tyrion’s strength not to turn around to look into his brother’s eye, but he prays that Jaime will listen to the plea, to the order beneath the surface of his words. Hate me all you want, but do not die for her. If you won’t live for her, then do not dare to die for her. “I can make him talk.”

“And what if he lies?” She inquires.

Tyrion rolls his eyes, trying to appear more confident than how he feels. “He’s my brother. I know when he’s lying.” And he knows when I am, Tyrion thinks, doesn’t say it.

The hot fury in the eyes of his Queen doesn’t subside, but she makes a pause, thinking, staring at Jaime Lannister, the man who killed her father, standing in front of her. “Missandei, prepare a room for Ser Bronn,” she says, at last. “As for the Kingslayer,” she looks at Grey Worm, almost bored, “take him to the dungeons.”

iv.

Bronn is given a comfortable, spacious room, with a big mattress and fire already burning in the hearth. When Tyrion comes into his chamber, without knocking, he finds the sellsword putting on a tunic, skin still damp from his bath at the corner. Jaime’s golden hand lays over the made featherbed.

“You,” Tyrion walks angrily toward the center of the room, taking his brother’s accessory and pointing a finger to the man, “are the greatest motherfucker I’ve ever known. And you knew my father.”

“Good to see you too,” Bronn says, tying his breeches, his eyes on the golden implement. “I’mma need that.”

“So will Jaime.”

“I need to pay the sailor.”

“Fuck the sailor, and fuck you.” Tyrion sits over the edge of the mercenary’s bed, tiredly, pinching the bridge of his nose, “I ask you to train with him, and you sell him to his enemies.”

Bronn scoffs, rolling his eyes. “I knew you were Hand to the Targaryen girl,” he says. “As if you and your big tongue would ever let your brother die.”

Tyrion narrows his eyes. “I’d rather you didn’t bet with our lives again, at least not when the risks are that big and the odds are not in our favour.”

“Bet with people’s lives is what I do for a living,” Bronn answers, crossing his arms, reaching for the flagon of wine - a true rarity in the castle, “and what good is a bet if the stakes are low?”

Despite himself, Tyrion snorts a laughter through his nose. “You know, I am unreasonably glad to see you alive.”

Bronn smirks, drinks a deep gulp from the wine and walks toward the bed, towering over Tyrion as he stands in front of him. “I’m glad to be alive too, m’lord.” Tyrion just chuckles in response, and accepts the flagon when it’s given to him. “Was that Sansa Stark on the dais? As in your wife Sansa Stark?”

Tyrion drinks. “Yes,” he replies. “Yes, it was.”

v.

The storm is pounding hard and fast at night when Tyrion goes down the helical stairs that lead to the dungeons. For his surprise, the stony walls are warm to the touch, which is a relief, really. There are two Unsullied guarding the first passage, and two more at the next one, the proper door that opens to a corridor with many cells. Only the last one is locked.

It takes only a too-long stare for the Unsullied to clear the way to Tyrion. (He thinks he’ll never get used to how good this feels, the power of opening doors without uttering a single word. Better than wine.) Jaime is sitting on the stony bench against the wall, shackles around his feet and left hand, one bucket at the corner of the stinky cell. There are no windows, but with the fickle glow of the candle in his hand, Tyrion can see dark bags under his eyes, his cheeks hollowed out. Tyrion opens the locker and comes inside, sitting by his side in complete silence. For some reason, Jaime doesn’t flinch away from him.

There’s so much to say and yet, he can’t form a single sentence. I am sorry about the children. I’m so glad you left her. Will you ever forgive me?

Instead, “I didn’t know the walls were warm down here.”

“This is better than Robb’s camp,” Jaime says.

Tyrion grimaces, uncomfortable. Better? He remembers being imprisoned for Joffrey’s murder, Jaime sitting across him on the ground. Are you really asking me if I’d kill your son?, he’d said, and Jaime-

are you really asking me if I’d kill my brother?

Tyrion wants to reach out and hold his left hand. Doesn’t. Instead, he places the golden hand over Jaime’s lap. “I thought you’d want it back.”

When he sighs, he looks older than his years, though he’s not a young knight anymore. Tyrion recognizes frustration, tiredness in the sound. He holds the lump where Jaime’s hand used to be, fastens the golden hand back to his body with a metallic click. “Thank you,” his brother murmurs, shifting his right wrist, and then pauses. “Hand of a Targaryen queen. It suits you.”

“Don’t,” Tyrion asks.

“I’m just saying,” Jaime shrugs.

“I meant what I said upstairs,” Tyrion murmurs. “I intend to keep you alive. If you know something, anything-”

“Leave me out of your schemes, Tyrion,” Jaime snaps. “I didn’t leave Cersei to fall into another game.”

“Well, I can’t do it, can I,” Tyrion replies. “And I won’t let you die to protect her.” They both make another pause, important, long. Jaime breaths in a deep gulf of air. Tyrion asks, voice low, soft, “what happened?”

He hates Jaime’s laughter in response. “What happened is that our sister is not so unlike Aerys Targaryen, after all,” he says. “Do you know how Tommen died?”

Tyrion closes his eyes. The pain is a hollowness. He feels it under his left ribs, feels it in his throat. “No.”

“He jumped from his window,” he answers. Tyrion holds back a sob. For Jaime’s sake, mostly. “Uncle Kevan was in the Sept, did you know that? He confronted Cersei every chance he had in the Council and she decided that was enough to kill him.”

Tyrion shakes his head. “I didn’t know,” he says.

The older lion breathes out, dragged and slow, and rests his head back against the wall. “She blamed me,” he murmurs, eyes closed. “She blamed me for Tommen’s death, blamed me because I was not there to save him. And I was away, because she ordered me to the Riverlands.” He chuckles under his breath, dry and sour. “She said I’m the worst Kingsguard that has ever lived. I think she’s right.”

The pain is hollow; the anger, though. The anger burns with a thousand suns. “She’s mad, Jaime.”

“I know.”

Tyrion looks at him, his knight in shining armor, now dressed in worn-out clothes. “I know you have not forgiven me,” he says, “and I won’t ask it of you now. But if you know what it is like to leave her,” he says, like a man stepping on a mine-field, “then you know what I felt when I went to father that night.”

The first blow. “This is not the same,” Jaime retorts, voice like swords. “I didn’t kill her, Tyrion, even at her worst. You could have escaped to freedom. Damn, I planned your escape.”

They’re never getting over this, Tyrion understands, then. There’s no getting over this.

“Still,” Tyrion urges, “if you know that not everything is about family-”

“- if not then why are you trying to save me-”

“- because I love you,” Tyrion clutches Jaime’s chin, hard, bruising. If Jaime allows him, it is certain out of kindness, too; but Tyrion is so angry. He doesn’t even know at what. “I love you, you stupid fool. You have always been my only family in this miserable world, and I can’t let you die. I don’t care if you hate me, I can’t. So if I have to force those secrets out of you, Jaime, may the gods help me but I’ll do it,” he says, voice trembling with rage. “Don’t make me do it. Please.”

Jaime looks at him through the half-hood of his eyes. His left hand wraps around Tyrion’s wrist, pushing it away with more gentleness than he deserves. “I missed the last Council meeting, but I heard her speaking to Qyburn about an army of mercenaries from Essos. They were discussing the Iron Bank representative that was coming to Westeros. I don’t know if it bore fruit.”

Tyrion breathes out, relieved. He can work with that. He draws away with a nod; his mind already starts to plan, to think, but he forces it to hold back for a moment, just so he can- “thank you,” he murmurs. “Thank you.”

He’s afraid to look Jaime in the eye when he leaves, locking the door of the cell again. His brother is a shadow, an eerie, confusing dream behind bars.

vi.

Lord Tyrion told her it was dark downstairs, so Brienne makes sure to take a candle on her way. The small parchment sealed with wax by the Hand of the Queen is her guarantee, her key.

Lady Sansa told her it was a bad idea when Brienne asked for her permission, but her ladyship didn’t stop her, either. Her voice was cold as she turned away to the open balcony, to the heavy rain. “It is not my sanction you need,” she’d said. “Ask the Queen.” Lady Sansa had hesitated, then, and smoothed her skirts. “Or the Lord Hand.”

Brienne was not stupid. She went to Lord Tyrion, who, surprisingly, didn’t ask many questions. Now, though, taper in hand, sword at her hip, listening to the noise of the rusty door being opened to her, she feels like the biggest of fools. Her stomach drops, cold and heavy, in a way that not even battles can provoke.

Ser Jaime raises his head. He is sitting on the ground, against the Wall. His beard covers half of his face, he looks thin beneath his common clothes and his hair is so dirty that the blond of it has practically vanished; he is the most beautiful man Brienne has ever seen. She has the lucid memory of the Riverlands, weeks on the road. “Brienne,” he says. And then smiles. “I didn’t expect to find you here, so far South.”

(“I found this fucker headed North-”)

“I say the same,” Brienne says. The unsullied remains at the entrance of the door when she steps inside. “Actually, I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

“It’s a good surprise,” he agrees, voice friendly. The silliest part of her thinks him kind. “I wish in better circumstances, of course. This is too familiar.” He cocks his head. “What are you and Lady Stark doing here?”

“Gathering allies and dragonglass for the War against the dead.”

He looks at her for a long moment, and Brienne thinks he will laugh. He doesn’t. “If it weren’t you saying those words,” he mutters to himself, shaking his head, and doesn’t finish the sentence.

Brienne, however, doesn’t want to think of the dead now. “You look thin.”

“My captor was not as kind as you,” he says with a shrug and a smirk. “Really, it’s just the optical illusion. Bronn gave me larger clothes in an attempt to disguise me; I’m not as bad as I look.”

“I know,” she says. She knows. The shape of his body, the size of his true clothes, how they fit upon his muscles; she knows. She thinks that he looks amazing, that leaving Cersei gave him the best of the looks. “You were headed North.”

It is not a question; it’s not what they do. Not like this. Her silence is his freedom. He can talk. And he can not talk. And either will be fine. “I made a vow to keep two Stark girls safe, and only one made it home,” he gives her a mindless shrug. “I had a mind to convince you to go after the other. Or perhaps serve the one we already found.” He sighs. “I didn’t know what I was thinking, I just...”

He trails off. We, he says, and Brienne’s heart crushes under the weight of her hope. She tries to remember that Ser Jaime is a man of his word, that he had vows to keep the Stark girls safe, that his duty called him North. “You just...?” She asks. (Gently.)

He looks at her in that way that makes her feel anxious. “Where would I go but to you, Brienne? I had no one else.”

You have me, she thinks. You’ll always have me. Thinks she should just say it.

Instead, “your brother will not let you die here.”

Jaime looks away from her, ahead of him. His smirk festers, like a dirty wound. “Tyrion thinks himself too smart.”

“Lady Sansa says he is.”

“Brains don’t win dragonfire,” he says.

“Ser Jaime,” she scolds, glancing at the soldiers sworn to the Targaryen Queen.

But Jaime only chuckles. “There it is,” he says, voice warm. His eyes, full of mischief, find hers again. “I was starting to think you’d never say my name, Brienne.”

She blushes profusely, thankful for the dim light to hide it. “Your tongue will cost your head one day,” she mutters, displeased. Jaime just laughs again, low, quiet, under his breath.

She sits by his side. There’s a safe distance between them, but for a moment, for now, he’s alive. It’s the happiest she’s been in months. She doesn’t think of Cersei, doesn’t think of the War in the North, doesn’t think of anything but his solid, familiar presence.

“Thank you for coming,” he murmurs. Brienne doesn’t answer. She knows that he knows, already.

vii.

(Yes; Tyrion loves Daenerys, as do most of her followers. His faith is clear on his face and in the way he speaks of her and to her. And yes; there are her dragons. His most forgotten dreams, hopes of his childhood. But the people who think he’s in love with her got it wrong.

He wouldn’t confess it to anyone, hardly can admit it to himself; but a beautiful, fierce, stubborn woman, made to be Queen, prone to madness only because she was made for greater things? It’s Cersei he seeks in Daenerys, like the other side of a coin; a sister that blood could never give him and a worthy, better Queen. It’s the reason he’ll fight by the Dragon Queen’s side until the end, even after his faith has faded-

until she gives in.)

viii.

The storm lasts days on a roll.

Daenerys thinks all their waiting is a waste of time; Ellaria and her Sand Snakes agree, while Yara and Theon Greyjoy show more cautiousness. In Council, Tyrion tries to argue with them that they’re not waiting on nothing; they’re expecting information. Cersei plans to buy an army of mercenaries, but the mines of Casterly Rock have run low. They still don’t know when she is expecting them, or how she is supposed to pay for them. They shouldn’t siege King’s Landing knowing that an army could arrive from Essos at any moment. And they can’t siege King’s Landing without the certainty that Blackwater Bay is free.

The men Sansa has brought with her from the North, though a small party of fifty, work tirelessly on the mines, before the sun rises and after it sets, whether it rains or not. From the highest balconies of Dragonstone, he spots her walking to them in the middle of the morning and the afternoon, giving them clean water and bread and sitting with them while they rest. She reminds him of Daenerys, easily caressing the mane of the horses of her khalasar.

It occurs to Tyrion, as Sansa comes back to the castle and her men, to their task, that no group of people would work so hard, so relentlessly, without a good payment- or a good cause.

Exactly one week after Jaime’s arrival, the last day of the storm, Varys comes to Tyrion with a satisfied grin. “Euron Greyjoy has asked for Cersei’s hand in marriage. He offered his whole fleet as a wedding gift. His ships already occupy the entirety of Blackwater Bay.”

“How many ships?”

“One thousand,” Varys answers. When he sees Tyrion’s face falling, he quickly adds, “an approximate number, my lord.”

Tyrion should be happy to be right, but really. There’s little to celebrate.

ix.

Two weeks after Jaime’s arrival, just as the sun is about to set, Varys receives another raven from his little birds.

Highgarden has been occupied by Lannister men, led by Randyll Tarly, the new Warden of the South. Olenna Tyrell has been captured and is on her way to King’s Landing, where a walk of shame and public execution by beheading await her for her treason.

x.

Daenerys dismisses Varys, and sends word to each of her advisors so they can meet in the early morning, but Tyrion is summoned to the Council room that same night.

She’s impatient. He can sense it in the sound of her steps, pacing around the table as she stares intently at the map. “We should attack King’s Landing as soon as possible,” she says.

“That is precisely what we should not do,” Tyrion retorts. His head aches and his hips hurt more than usual. “My sister is counting on our impulsivity. Rest assured she’s more ready for this battle than we are.”

“How so?” Daenerys says. Her voice is, like her name, a storm. “We have three dragons, armies, the Ironborn fleet,” she takes one of the dragon-shaped pieces on the board, feeling its weight in her small hand. “Your sister is fearless and shameless in her attacks. She’s got one of our allies as her prisoner. We should go to Olenna’s rescue and take the Iron Throne in the process. I don’t understand what we're waiting for.”

Of all the possible courses of action, nothing could excite Tyrion less than to save the life of Olenna Tyrell. She can rot, for all he cares. But he’s acting in Daenerys’ best interest, so: “If I know my sister well enough, Olenna is as good as dead. Cersei didn’t capture her as a bait for us. She captured Olenna because she is a traitor and because she has a mind to exterminate House Tyrell. As for us,” he proceeds, “we’re waiting because we don’t want to kill civilians,” Tyrion reminds her. “We’re waiting because our fleets, however sufficient to carry us through the waters and to attack one or two shores, are not enough to defeat Euron Greyjoy’s fleet.” He analyzes the map before him. The North seems to occupy so much more space since Sansa’s arrival. “And because we are considering the possibility of an army of corpses that might turn all this war into a child play.”

“And what do you suggest we do, then, my lord Hand?” Daenerys asks, with a frustration that borderlines anger.

After a moment of pondering, Tyrion takes the dragon from her hand and places it over Highgarden again. “I suggest we take the Reach back,” he says. “The Dothraki are unmatched on the open field, and the Lannister forces are commanded by a turn-cloak,” he shrugs. “If we assume for a moment that Sansa is correct and we have a terrible, long winter ahead of us, we cannot afford to lose the Reach. They’re responsible for two-thirds of the stock of grains in the country. Even King’s Landing buys from them.” He stares, intently, to his Queen. “If you want to starve Cersei, it’s the first basic step. Besides, we’ve been wondering how my dear sister planned to pay for her army, and her move to Highgarden might be our answer. They are, at the moment, the richest Kingdom of Westeros.”

“So do you suggest we kill your own men?” Daenerys asks, crossing her arms behind her bosom, her pale eyes narrowing. She’s always testing the loyalty of her allies like that, picking at the chords in their limbs and minds and bellies, looking for signs of betrayal at the smallest hesitation.

Targaryens. No wonder his father eventually lost his patience. “Well, a battle is a battle,” he says with a shrug. “But I suggest we focus on killing, or capturing, their commander, Randyll Tarly. I believe we can force them to surrender.” He looks at the irregular stony shore of the West, empty of pieces, and takes a lion forgotten outside the map. “And they are not my men by any practical means. They are Cersei’s.” His gaze finds his Queen’s face again, both defiant and careful. “Or they could be Jaime’s.”

The anger, boiling just underneath her skin, comes to surface. “Please, tell me you’re not saying what I think you’re saying.”

“Let’s be honest, Your Grace,” Tyrion says, shifting the lion in the palm of his hand. “I am a kinslayer and a dwarf. To every man and woman in this country, I live a cursed life, by birth and by my deeds. The West is not going to happily follow me just because I asked nicely.”

“If you take what is rightfully yours,” Daenerys retorts, “they’ll have no choice but to follow.”

Tyrion tries to conceal his worry with that line of reasoning. “Even so,” he offers, cautiously, “we have Jaime in our grasp. He has been stripped from his position as Kingsguard, so he can inherit lands again. He has turned against Cersei, and he’s known and commanded these men for years. They fear Cersei, for sure, because they’re not stupid,” Tyrion puts the lion over the West, “but their loyalty belongs to Jaime.” He stares at Daenerys again and sees the doubt planted in her eyes, decides to nurture it: “you know as well as I do he’s too valuable a captive to be killed. You wouldn’t let him live so long, if you didn’t know.”

“I let him live because I care about what you say,” Daenerys replies. Her words are sharp but her eyes are soft.

“Oh, I’m touched,” Tyrion mockingly puts a hand over his heart. “But it is time to put him to some use. Send me and my brother to the Reach with your Dothraki. If we succeed, we’ll ensure the Reach for you: their food, their gold, their men and the Lannister men who now occupy it.”

“And after that?” Daenerys says, stubbornly. “We take King’s Landing?”

Tyrion rests back against his chair. He looks over the map again.

“Allow me to be frank,” he asks.

“Have you been lying all this time?” Daenerys asks.

Tyrion laughs at her paranoia. But then his laughter slowly dies as he considers her, standing over the table, the fire in the hearth throwing her shadow over Westeros. He crosses his arms over his chest. “I think we should go North.”

“Because Sansa Stark ordered us to?” Daenerys mutters, with a subtle rolling of her eyes. He bites his lower lip so not to smirk. “Even if her fantastic tales are correct, if we follow the northerner’s lead, we’ll turn away from your sister and give her a chance to stab us on our backs. All our efforts will be for naught. There’s no point in fighting for the Reach only to leave it behind.”

“We can work to make sure that will not happen,” Tyrion offers, in his most soothing voice. “But if Sansa is wrong about the threat of the dead, we’ll go North and negotiate their surrender with their King, the man who can effectively bend the knee to you.” He walks around the table until he’s standing over the North and their lonely, quiet wolf. “And if she is right,” his voice grows darker, somber, “well. If she’s right, then we need to go without further questions.”

xi.

Tyrion knows that Daenerys needs an audience because she is laying a trap.

She doesn’t trust his brother, and she doesn’t believe he will hold to his end of the proposal. She is counting him, and therefore the West, as part of her losses, or rather part of unconquered territory, as annexed to King’s Landing. What she really wants is a witness, or many witnesses, that can attest to her vow of faith, so when she burns him alive for treason - for the nature of a Kingslayer is, always, treason - when he breaks another vow, the realms shall know that Targaryen are dragons. And she may be merciful once, but not twice.

She brings him to the Council meeting in the morning, among her allies.

She stands at the head of the table, over the North; Tyrion by her right, Missandei and Grey Worm at her left. Varys, Lady Sansa and Brienne of Tarth sit at the eastern border of the map - King’s Landing and Dragonstone. Theon, Yara and Ellaria contour the South of the map. Jaime comes into the room in chains still, guided by Qhoro to sit alone at the western border of the table.

If he is confused about the reason for his presence in a royal meeting, he doesn’t let it show. He’s thinner than he was when he arrived, a week ago. Tyrion feels the urge to take him to a proper chamber, to feed him, to pour a bucket of hot water over his dirty hair. Lannisters were not made for dungeons. Jaime, golden and beautiful, even less.

But he is no less lion now, even in dirty clothes and with a badly kept beard, so he keeps his head high. Daenerys barely spares him a glance, and starts talking as if he weren’t there at all. “As you know, Olenna has been taken prisoner to King’s Landing and Highgarden is occupied by Lannister forces,” she says. “Our next move is to the Reach. We aim to take it back.”

Ellaria raises one eyebrow. “And why is that a priority now?” She asks.

Jaime does not hide the contempt in his eyes as the woman speaks. Tyrion is not entirely sure he wouldn’t murder her with his own single hand, were him not in shackles.

“Because we have good reason to believe Cersei needs the gold of Highgarden to pay for her army of mercenaries,” Tyrion says. He subtly looks at Sansa, in time to catch her already looking at him. She lowers her gaze as soon as their eyes meet. A lifetime ago, he’d think her shy, or afraid. “And because we have a long winter ahead of us. We need their food.”

Ellaria scoffs, unaccustomed to the very idea of winter to consider it dangerous. “And their men,” Daenerys intervenes, before it can become a discussion. “We’ll march with the Dothraki. You’ll stay here, at Dragonstone. If we succeed, then I’ll send you word,” she says, looking at the Dornish woman. “Yara shall take you back to Dorne, and then you’ll gather the Dornish forces.”

Tyrion finds Sansa’s gaze again. This time, she doesn’t look away.

Daenerys gives the room a second of silence, and then, proceeds. “The Lannister army is numerous and disciplined, but it is now commanded by a turn-cloak and an opportunist, Randyll Tarly,” Daenerys proceeds. “The Tarly-Lannister men are those we’ll face on the battlefield. Should some of them survive, which we expect they do, I plan to offer them my mercy, if they’ll bend the knee to our campaign.” Only then her eyes settle on Jaime. “For the consideration that I have for your brother and the kind words said about you by your friends, I extend my mercy to you, too, Ser Jaime. You’ll be given a second chance. Convince your men to abandon your sister and join me. Give me the West, and I’ll grant you the royal pardon for your vile deeds.”

Jaime is his brother. Tyrion loves him with the softest part of his worn-out heart, a part that neither Cersei nor Tywin could beat down, that neither Shae or Tysha could ever sour. Jaime is no twin to him, but he is blood enough for Tyrion to know when he’s lying.

And in that moment, Jaime stares, face serious, to the Targaryen Queen, emerald eyes solid as Casterly Rock itself, and Tyrion knows he is not lying. In a dreadful, rare moment, Jaime reminds him of Tywin. “I’ll do it,” Jaime says. He raises his chained elbows, the metallic sound making Daenerys flinch. “It’ll be easier without these, though.”

Chapter Text

i.

Jaime is freed from his shackles and led away by Grey Worm; Yara and Ellaria leave, their arms laced, Theon following right behind; Missandei and Varys, too, leave together. Even Brienne of Tarth murmurs in Sansa’s ear and leaves the room. Only then the Lady of Winterfell speaks. “Your Grace,” she asks, voice demure and hands clasped behind her back. Her dress is blue, a dark shade, almost black, but whenever her body shifts minimally, it catches the light in lighter tones; it’s like she wears the night for clothes, right in the middle of the morning. The fabric also brings out the blue of her eyes, her gaze now inscrutable as she stares at the Queen. “I’d like your permission to accompany you and your armies in your endeavor.”

Daenerys frowns one of her eyebrows. “I don’t see why that would be necessary, my lady. Your men are at work here, in Dragonstone.”

“My men know of their duties,” Sansa replies, firm but respectful. “They don’t need me to teach their work to them.”

“Still,” Daenerys insists, “what is there for you on the continent?”

Sansa makes a good impression of being confused with the question. “Your Grace, I am a Stark. The words of my House are the very reason for my mission here, in the South.” She blinks, just once. “Winter is now here. What kind of Stark would I be if I didn’t warn the realms about the danger that comes upon us and threatens us all, northmen and southmen alike?”

Tyrion stares at Sansa in wonder, and almost forgets to pay attention to the inflection of her words. Northerners are known to be direct and objective in their speech, but Sansa spent too many years in King’s Landing; he can see the concession in the eyes of his Queen before she speaks it out loud. “I see,” the Targaryen says. “Very well, Lady Sansa. I won’t keep you from your duty. You’re welcome to join us aboard.”

Sansa smiles, small and pretty. “Thank you, Your Grace.”

After Daenerys dismisses the northern lady, she says to him, her eyes on the open door, “I want you to keep an eye on her.”

Tyrion smirks. “Your Grace,” he answers, “I’ve been doing just that since she first laid her feet on this island.”

“Good,” Daenerys says with a nod. “Then keep doing it. I don’t trust her.”

ii.

She’s beautiful.

Sansa, that is. She’s beautiful and therefore, the mission to keep an eye on her is the easiest he’s ever been tasked with, while in the exercise of the job.

It’s only a two-day trip by waters from Dragonstone to Rook’s Rest, and from there, another two-day trip until the point where the Goldroad meets Blackwater Rush. They’ll be dangerously close to King’s Landing, and so Tyrion can’t find rest the night before they leave the island - or the night after. The swaying of the Ironborn’s ship is nothing like travelling the Narrow Sea inside a box; it’s not the swing of the waters that causes him nausea, but everything else: the tale that brought Sansa so far South. The animosity between Daeneyrs and Sansa, Daenerys and Jaime, Daenerys and everyone else who didn’t enthusiastically defend her birth-right. His mad sister, like a giant, dense cloud above his head standing in the middle of the sunlight. He’s been spending so many hours looking at maps of the Crownlands that the contour of Blackwater Bay, the roads leading to King’s Landing, the main keeps and cities surrounding it, the plains and the mountains and every other geographical feature in between, all are clear in his mind’s eye now, as he lies awake in his bed, planning escape routes, or surprise attacks. For Daenerys and her armies, but also for his brother, if needed. Jaime has been given new clothes, the right to travel without chains, a voice in Daenerys’ council as long as he’s being tested. They haven’t talked since Tyrion visited him in the dungeons.

Deciding that sleeping is most certainly a lost cause, he gets up, putting on his cloak and boots to breathe in pure air, a breeze that doesn't smell of smoke. The wind hits him hard and cold, and he’s just realized he forgot to put on his gloves when he finds Sansa on the decks. It’s when realization dawn on him of how beautiful she is.

The sound of the waves is soothing, up here, and somewhere in the night sky, Drogon, Rhaegal and Viserion are flying, watching over them like guardians or weapons, depending on the side of the observer. Sansa is standing alone on the deck, leaning slightly over the rails, and moonlight kisses her face and paints her silver. Her hair is wild in the wind, and she’s covered in her usual black clothes. She’s made for the night and is used to the darkness, this new Sansa, this stranger. Her cheeks are covered in tears, their wetness catching the pale light and shining, as if she’s crying diamonds. Her lips are pressed against each other and her face is distorted by her effort to keep silent. And even so, she’s gorgeous, a goddess among mortals. They live in a world in which dragons came alive; priestesses can see the future in the flames and conjure shadows to do their killing; allegedly, dead men rose from their graves. He wouldn’t be surprised if he found out, by the end of it all, that Sansa had been a goddess all along. His first idiotic instinct speaks louder and faster than his mind. “My lady?” He calls out.

Sansa is startled by the sound of his voice. She turns around toward it, and as soon as she spots him, she takes a deep, ragged breath, drying her face clumsily with the back of her hand and taking a seat on the nearest bench against the rails. “My lord,” she greets, “I didn’t listen to your arrival; I’m sorry.”

He can’t help but smile sadly. He remembers her like that; apologizing, even though she has not done anything wrong. Some habits die hard. “No, I’m the one who should apologize,” he says, taking careful steps closer to her. “I’m sorry to disturb you. But are you fine? Is there something you need?”

It’s then that Tyrion notices the small parchment cramped between her fingers. “No,” she says, sniffing. And then she smiles. “I’m happy,” she whispers.

Tyrion wrinkles his brow, deep. “I don’t follow, my lady,” he murmurs, confused, taking the last step until he’s standing in front of her.

“A raven came from the North, from Jon,” she says, “Missandei gave me this letter right before we left Dragonstone. But I didn’t want to read it before our departure. I didn’t want to give myself a chance to look back, or give up.” And then she starts chuckling. “And I was right. I think if we weren’t already in this ship, I would have convinced Theon to take me back home right away. My sister is alive, Tyrion,” she mumbles, and her chuckling turns into pure light, pure sunlight. “Arya. Arya is alive and home and safe.”

“My lady,” without thought, he rushes forward and takes both of her hands in his. He is smiling before he realizes it. “Really?”

And her laughter turns into sobs, and her tears come back, too. “Yes, really,” Sansa whispers, “and I spent so many years telling myself that she was dead, because I didn’t want to hope, but I always knew in my heart that she was alive. How could I survive and she not?” She doesn’t mind cleaning her face anymore, letting her tears fall free. “But I didn’t think…” She sighs, biting her trembling lower lip. “Ah, my lord.”

Still so taken by the breathtaking sight of her happiness, Tyrion takes the last step separating them and brings Sansa into his embrace, wrapping his arms around her shoulders. He doesn’t regret it until it’s too late: Sansa hurries to circle her own arms around his body, her small hands clutching his back as she hides her face in the nook of his neck. At first, they tense, as if they’re both surprised with each other’s willingness, but then her body just relaxes as she cries against his shoulder, and Tyrion rests his cheek on her head, soothingly brushing her hair. He doesn’t say anything. Neither does she. He would never hurt her, and she probably knew that, if not anything else. And the bond they shared, though not one of love - not even one of friendship, either - was still a safe place amidst chaos, beyond enemy lines. Nothing is unfamiliar about their situation: Sansa is again far from home and family, and Tyrion still works for the people who threaten the freedom of her homeland. But he’d always be an island, of sorts, a reliable source of rest. It’s just that they were too scared, too bruised, too young before, but now Sansa knows how to recognize an enemy when she sees one. And, loyalties be damned, Tyrion is not her enemy.

He waits until her sobs have subsided and she’s quiet in his arms again. She sniffs one last time, chuckling awkwardly as she draws away. “I ruined your cloak,” she murmurs, apologetically.

“That is no matter,” Tyrion whispers, and moves to clean her wet cheek with the back of his bare hand. She lets him, and he gives her a gentle smile, smoothing the strands of auburn hair that went wild, tucking them behind her ear. “You deserve all the happiness in the world, my lady. I’m glad for good news in the middle of so many misfortunes.”

“I’m glad, too. I had almost forgotten how good news feel like,” she says, and Tyrion’s heart breaks in a thousand pieces. Sansa deserves better than what’s been given to her, but she’s made beautiful things out of her sorrow.

“Soon you’ll be home again,” he says; it sounds like a promise. I promise you one thing, my lady: I’ll never hurt you. I won’t share your bed, not until you want me to. Soon you’ll be home again. It binds him to his word. He feels it weighting in his chest, like he’s got another task in the list of his duties. He needs to take her home.

If Sansa felt the weight of vows, too, she doesn’t let it show. She squeezes his hand one last time and gets up. “I should get back to bed,” she says, crumpling the parchment in her hand. “We have a long day tomorrow.”

Tyrion steps back. “Of course,” he nods. “Have a good night, my lady.”

“Aren’t you coming?” She asks, politely, looking down to him.

“No. I’ll just breathe some fresh air.” Sansa narrows her eyes just so, and in the moonlight, Tyrion sees it again. The tenderness of her care. It’s been years, but he’s not unfamiliar with that look, too: they’ve shared quite a lot of them, over dinners with Joffrey, or his father, or Cersei. Her eyes scream, without a word, are you fine? Should I be worried? “I’m fine,” he guarantees. “Just slepless.”

Sansa breathes out, relaxing her shoulders and nodding to him.

After she leaves, he stays on the deck, watching the sea catch the bright moon, thinking about debts.

iii.

There’s nothing to do but wait.

Once they reach the Goldroad, they settle camp, using the forests as their natural walls, and send Bronn, a man less likely to be spotted than an Unsullied or a Dothraki, to a survey. He comes back in three days. Randyll Tarly, his men and the Lannister men are almost two weeks away from their camp. They bring the gold with them, the food following behind with another smaller troop. Daenerys, always testing her allies, asks Jaime about what he thinks they should do next.

Jaime looks over the map spread across the improvised table. It’s made of leather and considerably smaller than the wooden table in Dragonstone, less detailed as well, but he is confident nevertheless. “Instead of heading to Highgarden, we should wait and attack the troops as they come to Blackwater Rush through the Goldroad,” he says, his finger sliding through the locations as he speaks. “After we’ve assured the troops and the gold, we can seize the food.” He looks all the way to the ancestral seat of the Tyrells, at least three-weeks away from them, using generous math. “And perhaps the Keep, but taking control of the castle itself is not as important as taking their men. Highgarden can wait.”

Daenerys spends a long moment pondering in silence, but she at last agrees with a silent nod. “Very well. Then we’ll battle here,” she says, her eyes on Qhoro, but not on Jaime. “Qhoro, you’ll lead your cavalry against the troops. But first, I’ll fly with Drogon to burn their heading lines. That’ll scare them enough, and then you can attack them, front and flanks.” She clasps her hands in front of her, her dress white, her gloves Targaryen-red. “I imagine it should be a quick battle.”

Tyrion sees the panic filling Jaime’s eyes. “Your Grace, do not breathe fire on them,” he pleads. “This is cheating.”

“And this is War,” the Hand of the Queen retorts. “There’s nothing wrong with a little cheating.”

“Cheating is cowardice,” Jaime snaps. “Can you look your enemies in the eye while you burn them from atop a dragon?” And, as if he remembers in the last seconds, he adds, “Your Grace?”

“I beg your pardon; did you just call me a craven?” Daenerys says, her eyebrows curling angrily. “Did you look my father in the eye when you buried your sword into his back, Kingslayer?”

His brother seems unmoved, keeping the hateful gaze of the Queen. After all these years, the slur almost doesn’t sting. “You aim to gain them for your cause. I can’t speak for Tarly’s men, but I am not so sure the Lannister men will bend the knee to you if you fight like this.”

“Of course they will,” Tyrion mutters. “The only hold Cersei has on them is fear of death.” He suggestively raises his eyes to his brother. “And we have more than fear of death to offer.”

Tyrion catches Jaime’s eye settling on the badge of Hand before he glares at his face. “I thought you wanted to spare people’s lives.”

“King’s Landing is full of innocent civilians. Women, children and men who never chose Cersei as their queen,” Tyrion retorts. “We’re talking about a battlefield, here. You’re letting your emotions get the best of you.”

Jaime’s nostrils flare at the suggestion that he’s being emotional, but instead of replying to his brother, he looks at Daenerys again. “They’re led by a turn-cloak, a man they do not respect, and you have the element of surprise in your favour,” he argues. “You have one of the best armies in an open field that exists in the world. There is no need for your dragonfire. Not here, not like this.”

Despite the remnants of fury and contempt in her eyes, Daenerys cedes. “Very well, Ser Jaime,” she says. “Since this is your test, I’ll listen to your advice. My dragons shall only watch my men fight. I expect that’ll make your job easier, afterward.” She raises one eyebrow. “Anything else?”

He swallows dry and hard, relieved. “No, Your Grace. That would be all.”

iv.

That is all. They feed the horses, train, rest, and wait.

Tyrion tries to reason with Daenerys about every possible next step in their campaign, but the Queen seems distracted, her mind far away, and he eventually gives in to his own distractions. By the end of the afternoon, after he comes back from a walk with Bronn around the perimeter of the forest, he sits down to rest his legs, his back against a giant rock by the river and his eyes fall on Sansa and Brienne of Tarth, in front of their shared tent, talking in whispers. The taller woman listened silently to the Stark lady as Sansa, apparently, explained something to her. At some point, Brienne makes a comment - Tyrion can’t listen to it, or read her lips - but it makes Sansa hold back her laughter and shake her head. The blue armour reflects the colors of the gentle sunset; Sansa’s hair, falling in a single braid across her back, agrees with the red sky. It’s like a painting. Right in the middle of a War.

Tyrion doesn’t notice his brother approaching. “You’re staring,” Jaime says, but his eyes are, too, entranced by the sight of the two women.

“So are you,” Tyrion replies. It’s the first time they talk since their interaction in the dungeons. He notices his brother has shaved and he can recognize his face again as something resembling the man he knows, though his gaze is wary.

“I find Brienne interesting to observe,” Jaime quips, sitting by his side and stretching his very long legs across the grass. “She’s pleasant to look at. Lady Sansa, I mean. She’s always been pretty.”

“No,” Tyrion shakes his head, denying the statement. “She’s not pretty. She’s beautiful.”

Jaime, who’s smarter than Tyrion gives him credit for, tilts his golden head. “Some could argue that there’s nothing wrong with falling in love with your own wife.”

“I disagree, from personal, first-hand experience,” Tyrion says, flatly. “And she’s not my wife anymore.”

“Did you annul it?” Jaime asks.

Tyrion shifts his shoulders, as if they suddenly pain him. “No.”

“Did she?”

“I didn’t ask, Jaime.” The Hand of the Queen sighs, frustrated. “What do you want me to do?”

“Anything,” Jaime retorts. “Stop staring. This swooning is getting on my nerves.”

“It’s easy for you to speak,” Tyrion mutters. “You can effectively have any lady you wish swooning over you.” Jaime chuckles. It’s a wry sound; Tyrion missed it more than he could say. He finally looks Jaime in the eye, turning to the side to face his brother. “Does that mean you have forgiven me?” His voice can’t help but be hopeful. Fool.

“For killing our father? Of course not. I’ll never forgive you for that.” Jaime looks away. “For siding with a lady that does not hesitate in raining fire from the sky? Maybe. I certainly can understand the appeal of victory,” he remarks, sarcastically.

“She’s not Aerys,” Tyrion murmurs. It feels like he’s been saying that to everyone, and to himself, for ages.

“That’s what you say,” Jaime says. A silence falls over them, as quietly as the day turns into night and black paints the doom of the sky. “You’re my little brother, Tyrion. And you saved my life.” Because you saved mine, Tyrion wants to say, doesn’t. This is more than debts. Tyrion knows, then, that they’ll be all right. Not like before. Before is not possible anymore. But fine enough. Jaime gets up, tapping him on the shoulder. “Do something.”

v.

Tyrion decides to do something.

Not to court the lady, of course. He’s still Hand of the Queen, and he’s been given a task that could be accomplished in more or less pleasurable ways. One night, the perfect opportunity presents itself to him; it’s two nights before the expected battle, long after they’ve eaten their watered soup; after Jaime has left to speak with Ser Bronn, and Brienne has retired earlier to the tent she shared with Sansa. He and Sansa stay behind, alone as they never have the chance to, the bonfire between them dissipating the night wind.

He has a flagon of wine in hand, one that he intended to drink alone, but an idea occurs to him. “My lady,” he calls. She seems to be out of a reverie when her gaze finds him. “Would you entertain playing a game?”

Behind the flames, he sees her doubtful blue eyes. “A game?” She frowns, embracing her own body beneath her cloak, as if cold. “At this hour?”

He laughs and gets up, walking toward her. For both his surprise and delight, she slides to the side on the trunk she’s sitting on, making room for him. “It’s quite a simple game,” he says, taking the given seat. “I’ll make a statement. If I’m right, you drink. If I’m wrong, you tell me to drink. And then it’s your turn.” He shrugs. “And we can’t lie.”

She stares at his face, then at the wine in his hand, and gives him a sharp glance. “You just want to get drunk.”

“I do not,” he promises. “You can go first, if you wish.”

She bites her lower lip, and turns to the side, gathering her skirts to sit astride the wooden bole beneath them. “Very well,” she agrees. Tyrion mirrors her position. Their cups are empty, so he fills up both glasses to the rim. “You are here to spy on me.”

After the initial shock, he can’t help but laugh. There it is, her northern roots showing. Straight to the point. “I wouldn’t use the word spy, but…” He takes a sip. Small, to begin with, so he won’t lose himself in the game or in her. It’s a small concession in the name of a fair game, and she probably already knew that Daenerys didn’t like her that much.

Her mouth remains dutifully tight, but her eyes gleam with mirth. “What were the words used?”

“I was asked to keep an eye on you. As if I needed someone else’s order to look at you the whole day through.” He thinks to discern, beneath the orange glow of the fire, a touch of pink to her cheeks. So she noticed all his staring. He seizes the chance of her shyness. “But then, again, if you had guests at Winterfell, wouldn’t you do the same?”

“That is reasonable. Your Queen has no reason to trust me,” she says, after a moment of consideration, and doesn’t sound offended. “But what about you, my lord?” She asks, coyly. “Do you trust me?”

“It’s my turn, not yours,” he says, clicking his tongue. He narrows his eyes, staring at her face thoughtfully. “Warning the Reachmen about the upcoming winter is not the only reason you’re on this expedition.” After a pause, when she examines him just as closely, Sansa finally drinks a shallow sip. He grins. “Care to explain, my lady?”

“Is it part of the rules?” She asks.

He frowns. “No.”

“Then there’s no need to explain,” she retorts, simply.

He feels a jet of blood running right to his crotch. He’s always had an eye for pretty things, but nothing turned him on more than intelligent beautiful women. “Fair enough,” he concedes, voice just slightly strained.

Sansa runs her finger over the rim of her cup. “You don’t really believe Daenerys has a right to the Iron Throne.” Tyrion brings his glass to his mouth, taking a deeper swig. Sansa looks stunned. “Well, I wasn’t really expecting to win that one.”

“I believe that Daenerys would make a terrific Queen,” he explains. “But I also believe that the Iron Throne is won and kept through force, and Daenerys has an immensely powerful army and three adult dragons.” He puts his cup down in front of him, between their bodies. “My sister has already lost her Kingdom.” He leans over, closer, shortening the distance and whispering like a confession, “and I hate to be on the losing side.”

The proximity doesn’t seem to bother Sansa at all. She presses her cup against her cheek, half-hiding her clever smile as she keeps his gaze. “And the right name?” She questions. “Doesn’t it count?”

“It counts. But isn’t your brother a bastard?” Tyrion returns. “Wars win crowns. Which leads us to my turn.” He leans back, widening the distance again and straightening his spine. “In the dead of the night, sometimes, you think the northern crown should be yours.”

That visibly bothers her. “This question is unfair.”

“You just questioned my opinions about my own Queen,” he says, with a purposeful, measured shrug. “I think we’re pretty even.”

Sansa stares at the wine in her cup for a moment so long he thinks she won’t answer, but, at last, “you are right and you are not.”

“How so?”

“Jon was chosen because he was loved and trusted by our people. I was not as loved,” she raises her head. Her face, licked by the fireglow, is set on stone, composed, collected. It does not denounce any particular emotion, not that he can detect. “They think I'm southbound.”

“Well, rumours say that you decided the Battle for Winterfell. That the Vale pledged their forces to you.” A part of him that can’t help but plant seeds of doubt, just in case, adds, “a true-born Stark.”

“The Vale is not part of the North,” Sansa replies, in the same self-possessed voice.

“And you wanted to be loved?” He asks.

She sighs, deeply, and another silence follows. “I’ve always thought it to be a safer route to loyalty than fear,” she finally explains. “Or even birth-right. So, yes, sometimes I wonder...” Her voice trails off as she stares at the distance, and then, with the smallest shake of her head, she comes back, refusing to finish the thought. “But I wouldn’t beg for their love like that.”

Tyrion ponders that. “I think we both should drink,” he says.

She chortles. “Fine.” They drink. He fills up their cups again as Sansa stares at him, her index-finger pointed to his direction over the edge of her glass when he’s done. “You’re in love with Daenerys.”

Slowly, a smirk spreads across his mouth. “Drink,” he says, shocked with the softness in his tone.

“You say we couldn’t lie,” she reminds him.

“Drink, Sansa.”

She does, and then adds, “seriously?”

He is still smirking. “Why the surprise?”

“Well, you’re always by her side,” she reasons. “You spend hours meeting alone with her, every day.”

“I am her Hand,” he is still smirking, because that tone, too placid, too impassive in her voice- is that…? “I’m supposed to.”

“You look at her as if you admire her,” Sansa proceeds. “As if she is beautiful.”

At that he finally laughs, if just a little. “I do admire her, and she is very beautiful. I’m not blind.” Squeezing his eyes, he cocks his head to the side. “Why don’t you ask me what you really want to know?”

“Why don’t you?” the Lady of Winterfell hastily replies. “It is your turn.”

Tyrion bites the inside of his cheek while he thinks it over. It’s not the wine muddling his thoughts, he knows; only the impossibility, the absurdity of what he’s about to ask. It’s a risky move, but in the worst case scenario, he’ll get to drink. “You’re... jealous of me?” Her eyes waver just for a second, and then she raises her glass to drink from it. His eyes get caught on her wine-stained lips. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” she murmurs. Looks away. “We were married, and you and I never truly had the chance to build what you have built with her. Sometimes, I wonder if we could have had it,” and Tyrion, he just feels something pulling at his heartstrings. “And it’s like I’ve lost you without ever having you.”

It’s when Tyrion realizes, then, that this game is far out of his control, and perhaps out of hers, too; that they’ve reached a point of no return. “Now you,” he says, voice thick with something he can’t quite name. Perhaps desire. Perhaps longing. Perhaps hope. Probably all three.

Sansa seems to have come to the same conclusion, because she raises her chin, the same way she did when he first sought her chambers at Dragonstone. Daringly, if just beneath the surface. “You wanted me,” she declares. “Back in King’s Landing.”

“I’m not proud of it, but,” he drinks. She doesn’t look surprised; whatever emotion crosses her face, soon disappears. “You hated me,” he returns, before he can lose his nerve. “Back in King’s Landing.”

“Drink,” Sansa says, smoothly.

“Well,” he obeys, sincerely astonished, “that is something.”

“You missed me while we were apart,” she says. It sounds blurted out and unplanned, so unlike her. The gloss of her eyes accuses the wine that has definitely caught her.

Tyrion can’t help but chuckle against the rim of his cup. He thought of her. A lot more than what he’d like, if he could stop it, but it turns out he couldn’t. He thought of her while he crossed the Narrow Sea imprisoned in a box, wondered where she would be and why she never said goodbye. He thought of her while his skin burned beneath the Essosi sun, asking himself where they would be if Oberyn had won and he had taken her to know Dorne. He thought of her at night, while he ruled in Meeren, remembering the scent she used to leave behind in her pillow; rosemary and sugar and lemons, Sansa has always smelled so sweet. And he missed her, all the while. Damn her; but he did.

“You’re good at this game,” he confesses, darkly, and drinks the rest of the wine in his cup. He cleans his mouth with the back of his hand, head dizzy. “Not that I’m counting, but I’m pretty sure you’re winning.”

“I think we should stop playing now,” she says, suddenly. As the dam around them breaks, Tyrion is suddenly aware of the night; the crickets singing in the forest and the cold wind. She looks- scared. For the first time since she arrived on the shores of Dragonstone, he sees fear in her eyes.

He feels it again, that familiar feeling of heartbreak over Sansa Stark. “I only answered what you asked me.”

“I know. I’m just- I should go. It’s late.” She puts her cup down and gets up in a haste. Before she takes her leave, though, she hesitates. “I missed you, too. While I was-” and Sansa, brave, cunning and beautiful Sansa, swallows down her own words. She lowers her gaze for a moment, and Tyrion closes his right hand in a fist, wishing he could end that pain, wishing she’d never gone north with Petyr and he'd never gone to Essos with Varys, wishing the years away. “I missed you,” she merely repeats, and turns around to get into her tent.

vi.

When the day of battle finally arrives, they’ve been ready, waiting in position, for three entire days.

The Dothraki troops are in line; Missandei retires to her tent after she’s held Grey Worm one last time. This battle, however, is not for the Unsullied. There’s a silence of expectation and tension, so solid that it could be cut in half with a sword. Daenerys nuzzles Drogon’s head before she climbs atop his back.

Then, she takes flight, Rhaegal and Viserion soaring right behind their brother.

It’s early afternoon, and the wings of the dragons send a passing shadow over the land of men, blacking out the sun. At first, Daenerys flies high and fast, and she sees when the enemies’ troops, down below, raise their heads in wonder and terror.

She returns, this time, diving in, Drogon closer to the ground just enough that they’ll feel the rush of the wind as he flies them by, and it’s then that the shock and terror break and she listens to the men, crying out in panic and starting to run at the sight of dragons visiting Westeros for the first time in centuries.

(That was the sign. She spoke with Qhoro, the night before. “I won’t burn them, but I’ll make them scream. When they do, you’ll advance.”

“You’ll do all the work for us, Khaleesi,” he had complained.

Daenerys had laughed.)

Her Dothraki then approach, first silently, just the thunder of their horses denouncing their proximity, and then with screams, arakhs raised as they finally crash smoothly against the Lannister-Tarly forces.

From a small hill, distant enough to be safe, Tyrion watches the battle happening at the plain near the Goldroad, Jaime by his right, Sansa and Brienne by his left. They’re watching out for the white flag that will signal the surrender of the enemies, but none of them were truly prepared to witness the Dothraki in the field, in action, for the first time. Tyrion sees Sansa leaning closer to Brienne, eyes terrified.

They all see when Daenerys, just after the battle has begun, takes her dragons higher and higher, and flies away, eastbound, until she disappears into the horizon.

vii.

“Where did Daenerys go?” the Hand demands.

Qhoro, covered in the blood of his enemies - Tyrion’s own men - only shrugs. He is the only Dothraki that can speak the Common Tongue. He doesn’t respect Tyrion, much as the rest of Daenerys’ khalasar: they can’t respect a man that needs a special saddle to ride a horse, a man who can’t yield a weapon. They respect their Khaleesi, however, enough not to kill him right there and then, even when he makes demands.

If anyone knows where she was headed when she flew away, that would be Qhoro. Or Grey Worm. Both men in front of him don’t look very collaborative. “Khaleesi don’t say,” the Dothraki replies.

The battle was won quickly, even without the dragonfire. The Dothraki were used to keep the losers as their slaves; the situation was not completely unlike it. Since they saw the white flags over the hills across the battlefield, they’ve been separating and chaining every living man, stepping on the dead as if they were already part of the earth. Jaime had gone to the Lannister army, afterward. Tyrion hasn’t see him since.

On the horizon, the sun is about to set again. “And Randyll Tarly?” Tyrion asks, tiredly.

“I executed him,” Grey Worm says. “He didn’t bend the knee to Daenerys Targaryen.”

Tyrion sighs. The field smells of death and war: empty bowels and blood.

“My men will execute son,” Qhoro promises to Grey Worm.

Tyrion’s eyes grow wide. “His son is alive?” The leaders of his Queen’s armies look at him suspiciously. “Do not kill him,” Tyrion orders. “Bring him to my tent.”

As Hand of the Queen, he enjoys the privilege of a tent of his own. There’s an improvised, low table in the center, a map of Westeros sprawled over it and three wooden stools around it. He rolls the leather map unceremoniously when Sansa comes inside his tent, timidly looking around. “My lord?” She asks.

“Come inside, my lady.” It’s not a chamber, after all; it’s not spacious, and perhaps because of that Sansa seems too big in the middle of it. She keeps standing, even though all the three seats are empty. She seems dislocated, too beautiful and too pure in the midst of so much death and blood. Her hair is parted in the center, two strands fastened on the back of her head in a simple twist and the rest falling free beneath in soft curls. Her dress is again a deep shade of blue, though the style is a little different from her usual gowns. It has golden flowers embroidered all over her torso, and instead of protecting her modesty to the neck, the neckline exposes a portion of her creamy skin - it's not really deep or revealing; just enough. The cloak about her shoulders is a light tone of gray, the same shadow seen in banners of House Stark. There’s something ghostly about her, today, as if he’s dreaming and she is signaling to him that he is dreaming, but his mind is too full of ideas for him to put his finger on the reasons why.

“Ser Randyll Tarly?” She asks, folding her hands into each other.

“Dead,” Tyrion finishes tucking the map into its case and takes a seat around the table with a sigh. “His son is alive. Grey Worm is bringing him to me.”

Sansa gives a thoughtful nod. “I’ll help you,” she says, confidently. It’s not like he’s being given a choice. They haven’t been alone since the night of his drinking game, and she apparently is ignoring the very fact that it happened, which he finds, honestly, great. “I don’t know much about him. Is he the oldest?”

“No,” Tyrion says, serving himself a cup of wine. “The oldest is the one who went to the Wall. Wine?”

“No, thank you; Samwell?” Sansa frowns deeply. “Jon told me many stories about him, but not this part. That is odd.”

“Randyll Tarly was a hard man,” Tyrion explains to her, drinking a deep gulp of his cup. Everything about Randyll reminds him of his father, and though his death is a complication, he doesn’t really pity the man. “He didn’t think Samwell was fit to rule Horn Hill, and sent him to the Wall so the youngest could be the heir.”

Her eyes are clear with understanding. “We should expect the younger son to be closer to the father, then.”

“Something of the sorts,” Tyrion mutters, unable to avoid the sourness of his tone, just as Grey Worm comes inside, too, wordlessly taking the captive before Tyrion. He’s young and handsome and his eyes are scared; he’s still in his armor, and covered in blood, but all his limbs seem to be functioning and whole. Tyrion points with his chin to the empty seat across him. “Unchain him, Grey Worm. We are here to talk.”

Grey Worm does as he’s told, and then moves to stand by the entrance of the tent, just as mute as he entered. The son of Randyll Tarly shifts his wrists.

“Ser Dickon Tarly,” Tyrion greets with a smile. “Or should I call you my lord? With your father dead, you’re the Lord of Highgarden now.”

The eyes of the young man switch from Tyrion’s face to Sansa’s a couple of times before he eventually settles them on Tyrion. “I don’t care about titles,” he says, voice firm but hoarse. What do you care about then, boy?, Tyrion can’t help but wonder. “But I’ve never been knighted.”

“Oh, then my lord,” Tyrion says, decidedly. “My name is Tyrion Lannister. I am Hand of the Queen and I watched your battle from the start. You fought bravely today, lord Dickon. You didn’t abandon your men even in face of great challenge, and, above all, you survived.” His fingers tap the surface of the improvised table separating them. “The same cannot be said about many of your soldiers.”

“I’m no knight, but neither am I a coward, my lord,” the new lord of Highgarden says, holding his head high, even though his voice trembles a little. “This is not how we do it in the Reach.”

“How do you do it in the Reach, then? Betraying your liege lady?” Tyrion asks, tilting his head as he examines the boy closely. The words, his tone or his eyes do the work of lowering his head. “Do you know what happened to Olenna Tyrell, just three days ago?

Dickon hesitates. “She was taken captive to King’s Landing. I assigned the men to do the task myself.”

“My sister stripped her of her clothes and made her walk, naked, barefoot, through the streets of King’s Landing. And after that, she was beheaded. While still naked.” Tyrion makes a brief pause, and then adds, “a woman old enough to be your great grandmother.”

“Olenna turned against the Queen first,” says Dickon Tarly, though Tyrion sees the uncertainty lurking in his eyes.

“You turned against her. She turned against the Queen.” Tyrion shrugs, relaxing into his seat. “If only our honor relied on more than loyalties! Loyalties can be fickle, fragile things.” This time, he pauses for a longer moment before he speaks again. “There’s still time to fix the mistakes of your father, my lord. Pledge your men and your loyalty to Daenerys Targaryen, rightful heir to the Iron Throne. Let us be allies again.”

“My father refused to bend, even in face of death,” the young man retorts, with a fresh hurt in his voice. “Why should I?”

“I know your brother, my lord,” Sansa says, out of the sudden. Dickon’s eyes shift to her, and Tyrion sees how he runs his gaze over her form, quickly, before he stares her in the eye. “I’m sorry, I have not introduced myself,” she says in a polite tone. “I’m Sansa Stark. Lady of Winterfell.”

“I’ve heard of you. You’re far from home, my lady,” Lord Tarly says. He frowns one eyebrow. “Where did you meet my brother?”

“Actually, that is not quite right,” she corrects, with an apologetic smile. “I’ve heard about your brother. He’s my brother's best friend, and Jon always tells me of his courage. I feel like I’m almost his friend, too,” she finishes in a warm voice.

“Courage?” Dickon wrinkles his forehead and then, chuckles, despite the circumstances. “I don’t think we’re talking about the same man. My brother is a kind soul, sure, but he’s not particularly known for his courage.”

Sansa wears a mask of perfect, crafted confusion. “Oh, isn’t your brother the one who went to the Wall?” She wonders. “Samwell?”

Dickon nods, his mistrust painted in his face. “Yes…?” It almost sounds like a question, in the end.

“Then it’s him,” Sansa says, almost beams. “Didn’t you know? Your brother was the first person to kill one of the White Walkers beyond the Wall.” She approaches them both, but instead of taking a seat beside Tyrion she stands behind him. “Without him, we’d never know that the Others can be killed with dragonglass.”

There’s a moment of silence, of course, of incredulity, as there is always whenever Sansa mentions the Dead. Dickon stares at them, as if he’s being fooled. “The Others is just an old tale told to scare children,” he says.

“The Army of the Dead is very much real, lord Dickon,” Sansa says. Her voice slowly grows sharper, as if she’s honing her tongue in front of their eyes. “And I would know, for they come from the North, the place I’ve always called home. Do you think I am a liar?”

“No, my lady!” He hurries to explain. “I’m just saying that they cannot be real.”

“Like dragons?” Tyrion offers.

He sees another wave of doubt flooding the young man’s eyes, and probably so does Sansa, because she smoothly continues her reasoning. “They’re real and they’re coming for us. Your brother is right now at the Citadel, by the orders of my brother, the King in the North, gathering all the information he can find about how to best defeat them.” She gives a step closer and Tyrion can feel the fabric of her dress brushing against his back. “And the realms will always remember his service and courage.”

As soon as Sansa finishes her speech, Jaime enters the tent. He looks surprised with the scene before him. “Brother,” Tyrion greets, before Jaime can utter a word. “How did it go?”

“They’re mine,” Jaime answers. “It was quite easy.” And then, looking at Dickon, “I’m sorry for your loss, my lord.”

Not that Tyrion had any doubt, but he turns to the young Tarly in front of him again with a small smirk. “As you can see, lord Dickon, Cersei’s family has abandoned her. Her own men have turned against her.” He gives another deliberate shrug. “She’s alone, and this War is already won.”

“There’s no honor in dying for a mad Queen, my lord,” Sansa says, seizing the chance of Dickon’s dubiety. “But there’s honor in serving the realms with the best we have at hand.”

“And how could I help the realms?” He asks, daringly. “By bending to another Queen?”

“The Reach is the most fertile of our lands, and we have a long, hard winter ahead of us,” Sansa exposes, patiently. “As for Queen Cersei, she doesn't care about anyone but herself. And because she’s selfish, she is not ready to lead us to face the real threat that comes to our doors.” Tyrion wishes he could see her face at the moment, but while she stands behind him, it’s impossible. He can see, however, every emotion passing through the face of the opponent before him. He can see his suspicion slowly turning into fear. A good kind of fear. A fear they could work with. “We must be united, now,” Sansa finishes.

“And I suppose Daenerys Targaryen cares,” the young Tarly counterpoints.

“Daenerys has dragons and mines of dragonglass, two powerful weapons against the Others,” Tyrion answers. “But weapons are not food. Do not be mistaken, my lord: my sister will starve the Seven Kingdoms if it means she’ll have her belly full.”

Dickon stares at Tyrion, again at Sansa, at Tyrion again. “And if I refuse?” He asks, in a small voice.

“You had a long day, my lord,” Tyrion says, with finality. “You lost a battle, you lost your father, and you’re now the heir to his legacy. There’s much on your shoulders. Why don’t you sleep over it?”

“And we can talk again in the morning,” Sansa agrees, placing her hands on Tyrion’s shoulders with ease. “When you’re rested and your mind is clear.” He can listen to her smile, can picture it, the way it doesn’t reach her eyes and makes her look both angelic and dangerous at once. “I’m sure you’ll see reason and do the honorable thing.”

It catches Dickon’s attention, too. “You said my brother killed one of those dead men?”

“Yes,” Sansa confirms. “I think you’ll be glad to know that your brother is indeed very brave.” She lets a heavy silence fill his tent, and, finally, with just the right amount of longing and disappointment in her voice, “to be honest, I was hoping it to be a family trait.”

It’s like a final blow, and it is so clean, and well-placed, that Tyrion has to make an effort not to make a sound of approval. It’s almost a physical pleasure, like the taste of a good wine.

Dickon looks at him again, eyes uncertain. “You won’t kill me?”

“Absolutely not,” Tyrion assures him, soothingly. “We’ll guard your tent, and no one shall lay a finger on you or your men tonight.” He stares at the Unsullied that spent the whole meeting completely still with intent eyes. That is an order, he wants to say. “Grey Worm?”

As soon as Grey Worm chains his wrists again and takes the boy outside, he and Sansa release a slow breath. “What if he doesn’t?” She asks, walking around the table. He’s so glad to see her face again, but already missing the gentleness of her touch on his back.

“If he doesn’t, then we have the Hightowers,” Tyrion says, massaging both of his temples as he closes his eyes. “Actually, if he does, we still have to handle the Hightowers. I don’t think they’ll be pleased to know that the Tarlys remained in Highgarden after all this mess.”

“That poor lad is completely lost,” Jaime says, sitting by his side.

Tyrion chortles under his breath with a nod of agreement, and opens his eyes again. “My lady,” he says, softly. When she looks at him, he makes sure to look her in the eye. “Tremendous work.” What he wants to say is that it was delicious to see her working first-hand, but Tyrion doesn’t want to jeopardize an otherwise excellent chance at alliance with one of the smartest women in the country, so, “thank you.”

Sansa gives a soft chuckle, getting up and approaching him as he reaches out for her hand. He can see the pride in her face, clear as the day. “Oh, you men,” she says, giving her hand for him to kiss, “are all the same, always trying to prove yourselves.”

“We’re very simple creatures,” he agrees. Self-deprecation had never felt so good before. When he lets her go, Sansa runs the fingers he just kissed through his hair before she leaves.

Jaime observes the interaction with curious eyes. “I see progress has been made,” he comments, casually, when they’re alone.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Tyrion retorts. His head feels the ghost of her touch and he tries to remind himself he just saw with his own eyes what she was capable of doing with a man.

Sansa Stark. Not a little dove anymore. Not at all.

“What do you think?” Jaime asks, after all.

“He’ll bend,” Tyrion says, his voice sure as he finishes the wine in his cup and looks at the opening of his tent, as if Sansa’s absence had left a trail behind her.

To which Queen the Reach will bend- well, he’s not so sure.

viii.

(He was so worried about the battle, and his mind so wrapped around Daenerys leaving and the Tarly boy, that it is only long after Sansa has left that Tyrion recognizes the odd, ghostly feeling about her that day.

It’s Margaery Tyrell. She had dressed like Margaery.)

ix.

They listen to the roar and rustling of dragons’ wings long after the night has fallen.

Daenerys climbs off of Drogon’s back, her face plastered in pain. They’re reunited in front of a fire, and Tyrion gets up at her sight, rushing toward her, both worried and angry. “Where have you been?” He almost screams.

The winds are cold, and her hair dances about when she looks down to him. “I went to King’s Landing,” she says, and starts to walk toward the fire.

Tyrion stands behind, mouth agape, but recovers soon enough to follow. “You went where?”

Everyone gets up reverently when she approaches, but Daenerys waves a hand to dismiss the gesture. She takes a seat in front of the burning fire, removing her gloves and approaching her hands to the heat. Everyone is staring at her, waiting for an explanation and afraid to demand it from a Queen. She spends several minutes just silently staring at the flames until she decides to speak. “The best way to assure our victories was to proceed with the plan to besiege King’s Landing. And we knew that there was no way to besiege King’s Landing while Euron’s fleet occupied Blackwater Bay,” she says, looking at Tyrion. Then, to Jaime, “have you accomplished your goal, Ser?”

“Yes, Your Grace,” he answers, uncomfortably in his worry, arms crossed on his back. “The Lannister men who survived are mine. Lady Sansa and my brother have brought Dickon Tarly to our cause.”

She looks at Tyrion again. “And Randyll?”

“Dead,” Tyrion says. “Executed by Grey Worm.”

Daenerys looks to the Unsullied, who stands by her side. “Well done,” she says to him. Her voice sounds flat, emotionless, when she turns to Jaime again. “Ser Jaime Lannister, in the name of House Targaryen, I forgive you for the crime of treason against your King, and grant you the lordship of Casterly Rock. I thereby name you Warden of the West, and Commander of the western army.” She gives a sigh, and her eyes come back to the flames. “I can do nothing else about your reputation, but I hope you are as good a man as your closest friends make of you.”

Jaime and Brienne share a look. The flames dance, resisting the winter wind that blows on them.

“Your Grace,” Tyrion carefully asks. “What happened in King’s Landing?”

Daenerys rolls her eyes, annoyed. “I didn’t burn your precious city, my lord, if that is what you’re asking.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Tyrion says, defensively, though he’s not quite sure himself. “It’s dangerous for you to fly there, alone, without back-up.”

Her shoulders drop one inch, and she looks- she looks grieving. “I burnt the whole of Euron’s fleet.”

Tyrion raises his eyebrows. He imagines the people of King’s Landing, watching the dragons at distance breathing their fire on Blackwater Bay, both a threat and a promise.

“Cersei has no fleet to bring her mercenaries to Westeros, neither the gold to pay them,” Sansa notes.

“They killed one of my children,” Daenerys says.

It is then that Tyrion, indeed all of them, look behind, to the gigantic creatures resting on the grass. In the dark sky, they listened to, more than saw, the arrival of the dragons. And Drogon, covered in black scales, is almost part of the night around him. When Tyrion looks better, closely, he can see Viserion’s white-scales catching the light, like a particular moon.

But there’s no trace of Rhaegal.

“Daenerys,” he whispers, forgetting himself for a moment, enough to call her by her name.

Sansa looks at the Queen, compassion frowning her brow. “How?” She asks.

“They had weapons...” she says, her gaze distant, as if remembering. She shrinks, hit by the cold, and Missandei sits by her side, covering her shoulders with another layer of furs. “Like a crossbow, but so much bigger, and there were so many of them. I didn’t even know-” She stops, not trailing off but out of the sudden, interrupted by her own sob. But soon she swallows it down, taking a deep breath. “He aimed for Drogon, first, and almost hit me. Then, they aimed at Rhaegal, all at once. Most of the bolts just tickled him. He was so brave, my child… But they were too many, and one of them pierced through his eye... He immediately fell into the sea.” She releases another sigh, slower and longer. “Viserion and Drogon were able to burn their fleet down, in the meantime and afterward.”

“At least you’re alive, Khaleesi,” Missandei says, kindly, placing a gentle hand on Daenerys' shoulder. Missandei and the Hand share a look; Tyrion nods to her. “You came back to us. Now, you must rest.”

Daenerys accepts her friend’s comfort, covering Missandei’s hand with her own. She then fixes her eyes on Sansa as she gets up. “We’ll guarantee King’s Landing is securely sieged, and Cersei properly trapped, and then, my lady,” she says, “we’ll sail North.”

Sansa, at a loss for words as she rarely is, gives the Queen a nod. “Thank you, Your Grace,” she says, sincerely. “And I’m sorry for your loss.”

“I know you are,” Daenerys says, as she turns around to make her way to her royal tent, ostensibly the biggest of all, with Missandei.

They all release their breaths, at once, feeling the costs of victory weighing on their shoulders.

x.

“She looked so very sad,” Brienne murmurs.

Tyrion had already retired to his tent, mourning the dead dragon, and so had Sansa, her smart blue eyes contemplative. Bronn must be snoring in the tent they share; he’s been practicing with Jaime every day, stopping only for the meals.

At every chance they can, and without a word or appointment, Jaime and Brienne stay behind around the nightly bonfire when everyone else has gone to sleep or to walk or to their tasks. Jaime has come to realize that, in their predicament, these small moments are mandatory for his sanity. He needs some time alone with Brienne just as he needs daily meals. She keeps him grounded, lucid. And they’ve spent too much time alone on the road to be used to company and crowds.

If not for her, then he’d slip away into his own mind, far from the crude reality. And since he left Cersei to her own madness, he’s been trying to avoid that particular habit. “Aren’t you relieved those things can be killed, somehow?” He asks.

Jaime had found it odd that the Dragon Queen, the last individual of the house that chose fire for their champion, had so easily accepted his plea not to burn the men on the battlefield. For him, it comes as no surprise that she had plans to make better use of her firepower. It is, however, interesting the way things have developed. He avoids to dwell his thoughts on his twin, open and vulnerable without defenses, without an army, without a fleet, without her allies, alone. Instead, he muses about the fact that dragons are not as indestructible as he had thought when Bronn took him to the shore of Dragonstone and he saw the beasts flying among the clouds.

The eyes, then. That is how you kill a dragon.

“Ser Jaime!” Brienne scolds, her homely face all huffy at his rudeness. He smiles. Lately, he has been thinking that her face is his favorite in the whole world.

“What?” He asks, innocently.

“Don’t be heartless,” she mutters. “Have you never had a pet?”

He laughs, then, because that is so, so Brienne in a very specific, adorable way. “Like lions?” He japes. “Those creatures are not pets, Brienne. They are giant weapons with the potential for massive destruction.”

“Shhh.” She covers his mouth with her hand, looking around. Unsullied round them from afar, but they don’t seem to have listened. Jaime is much more interested in the dauntless palm pressing against his smirk. He absolutely approves of that boldness, and wants her to silence him always and in every way she finds fitting. “Don’t push your luck, Ser. The Queen officially forgave you, today. And gave you Casterly Rock.”

(Jaime can’t help but compare.

With Cersei, he’s always felt merged into one being. They were one and the same. Two halves of a whole. That is why he did everything she asked, because her will was his will, and her wants were his wants, and her dreams were his dreams, and there was no separating them, even her body was his body. They were mirrors of each other, reflecting their own perfection to eternity. When he was inside Cersei, it felt like a dream. Like being numb to the pain of existing, numb to the world, to everything that was not her. He could just slip into her and forget it all.

Brienne is not like that.

Brienne puts up a fight. She dares and she challenges and she wraps a rope around his torso and pulls him into the world. She calls him out and scolds him and fights him. Brienne could never numb his pain. She touches the wound, and forces him to be present. Here and now. In his own crippled, old, tired body.

Brienne always makes Jaime Lannister feel, with precision, every part of his own body.)

He wraps his left hand around her wrist, pushing her away. “Not even in my father’s wildest dreams...” He trails off. Brienne looks embarrassed with her impulsivity, and before she can fall into one of her shy moods, he adds, more quietly for her sake, “you know I’m right.”

She only sighs. “She seems to be a good woman, Jaime.”

“Good women don’t fly around atop dragons, burning things to ashes.”

“She just burnt the fleet of one particularly evil man, allied to your particularly mad sister,” Brienne retorts. She always gets sour when talking about Cersei, but she also always tries to hide the sharpest edges of her words. For his sake, perhaps. She is gentle in ways that the world can’t understand; Jaime thinks that, for that alone, her heart will always break, every single time. “We are at War.”

“For now,” he snaps. “What happens when we’re at peace? How does it look like, a peaceful kingdom with dragons flying overhead?”

Her frown grows deeper. “What makes you think she wants to burn things to ashes? You didn’t take after your father. She doesn’t seem to have taken after hers.”

“Yet,” he murmurs.

Brienne huffs. “You are maddening, and I give up.”

Oh, how Jaime had missed her. He smiles again.

“Have you ever had a pet, my lady?” He asks.

She sends him a hard glance, but the more she lets her eyes linger on him, the more they soften. “I had a cat when I was a young girl,” she finally concedes with a smile.

“Tommen adored cats,” he says, without thinking. And then thinks. And then feels like he should punch himself. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. That burden is not hers to carry.

Her sapphire eyes settle upon him and Jaime is, once again, acutely aware of how undeserving he is of her, how he lacks in honor and there’s no fixing to his broken pieces. Brienne is the closest thing he’s ever known to a whole person. Everything in her falls into its right places, body and soul. She’s well-adjusted and uncut, and he’s what’s left of a man, mourning the child he never raised who was once born from the twin-sister he now despises. Not for the first time, he wonders why, exactly, Brienne insists on staying in his company, or looking at him as if he were her equal, when she’s so blatantly his better in all things that truly matter.

But she reaches out for his left hand. The gesture is easy and feels right. “Don’t apologize,” Brienne whispers. He wraps his fingers around hers, holding them tightly, and she doesn’t move away.

Chapter Text

i.

Sansa awakes when the sun is still cold; the Queen is summoning her allies. The land still smells of death as Sansa walks among the tents, but the morning is quiet. Even birds sing from the top of the trees; the tune is melancholic and leaves Sansa feeling hysterical, as if such a sweet, sad song shouldn’t be sung amidst so much destruction and ugliness, but it doesn’t matter, anyway. Soon they’ll fly further South, as the shadow of winter looms over Westeros.

When she finds the royal tent, the Unsullied at the entrance glaring at her silently as she enters, the Queen’s allies are already in their posts. Daenerys is dressed in black, a clothing fit for her mourning, Sansa suspects. Tyrion is sitting by her side, looking tired, the waves of his blond hair falling over his right eye; Sansa fights a weird urge to reach out and brush it away. Missandei stands faithfully by the Queen’s left, Qhoro by her left and Grey Worm behind her. They’re gathering around a table, the familiar leather map spread over it, and Jaime Lannister stands across the Queen’s team, Dickon sitting in front of him, like Jaime is guarding him. Sansa decides to stand by Jaime and Dickon’s sides, observing as Daenerys bends down and whispers something in Tyrion’s ear, the way his eyes squeeze in response. He shakes his head lightly, shifts to murmur something back to her, to which she nods. Sansa tries to read the Queen’s lips but finds herself distracted by the greater picture, feels the chords of jealousy pulling at her heartstrings again. Daenerys acknowledges Sansa with a quick look and then begins her speech. “We have taken down Euron’s fleet and we have the gold of the Reach,” she sums up. “Ser Jaime Lannister has convinced the Lannister army to join our cause. Cersei is open, without a fleet, without the necessary money to buy her army. We are here to discuss our next steps.”

“I should go West,” Jaime says, voice measured and quiet. Sansa watches his face closely. She knows Brienne trusts this man, and knows Tyrion loves him; that is enough reason to give him the benefit of the doubt, though that is different than trusting. “The mines have gone dry, but we still have grains for winter. I suspect Cersei’s next move would be to take hold of the castle.”

Daenerys drums her fingers absently over the table. “We have the food of the Reach, too, don’t we?”

“A part of the stocks are following right behind,” Tyrion replies. “Another part is in Highgarden. We don’t know how much.”

Daenerys, for the first time, stares at the young son of Randyll Tarly sitting in front of her, already free from his manacles. “Lord Dickon,” she says. “We haven’t been properly introduced, I believe, and I also haven’t been informed of your final decision.”

The boy quickly looks at Tyrion, and then at Sansa, who just gives him the smallest nod. “I’ll pledge my honor and my sword to you, Your Grace, if you’ll spare me, my men and my family,” he says, making a good impression of confidence that soon gets spoiled when he lowers his voice. “But I confess I don’t know the status of the storage in Highgarden.”

Daenerys curls one eyebrow. “I beg your pardon? How not?”

“I was supposed to inherit Horn Hill!” He argues. “I didn’t have the time to- I-I don’t really know how-” Though Sansa is familiar with men’s overall incompetence, she feels genuine compassion for his embarrassment, and eventually, he just gives up on explanations with a sigh. “I’m a warrior, Your Grace, trained to battle, and I shall battle by your side with all my skill, but I’ve never been the one ruling my father’s household.”

Daenerys doesn’t look as sympathetic. “And who would that be?” She inquires.

“My mother,” he answers, as honorably as one could.

Sansa licks her lips to hide a small smile. No one sees but Tyrion, who also looks amused. “Your Grace,” she says, gently. “I’ve been preparing the North for winter for the last year. I could go to Highgarden with lord Dickon to do the same for the Reach,” she offers. “He’s not experienced. It’s a big, important work, and he could use help.”

Daenerys gives a thoughtful nod. “That is very caring of you, my lady,” she says. “Lord Tyrion will join you, then.” Sansa does her best to hide her disappointment. She enjoys Tyrion’s company, but it is another thing entirely to have him follow her like she is a traitor or, worse, not competent enough to do a basic task like that on her own. Daenerys ignores the struggle in her eyes as she turns to her Hand. “You’ll speak with the lords of the Reach and decide who is better suited to rule both Highgarden and Horn Hill. Send letters to them before you leave, warning them about the siege and your arrival.” And then, raising her eyes to Jaime Lannister, “Ser Jaime, you’ll take your men to King’s Landing. We need to take advantage of Cersei’s vulnerability now, before she can bounce back. The Lannister army lived in the capital for most of the last years, so they are better prepared to besiege it.”

He frowns. “But Your Grace, Casterly Rock-”

“Can wait,” she declares. “If Cersei is trapped, she can’t escape, anyway. I’ll send word to Yara and fly to Dorne. The Dornish and the Ironborn fleet will come to your aid, but by the meantime you can start the siege with the men you have. Qhoro, send your men back to Dragonstone and wait for my arrival. We’ll sail North together.” The Dothraki nods dutifully. “Lord Dickon, choose a portion of your men to go with you, Lady Sansa and Lord Tyrion, so you won’t travel alone; the road can be dangerous. The rest of your troops can help Ser Jaime.”

Dickon looks at Sansa one more time before he replies. “Your Grace,” he speaks up. “I beg your pardon, but I thought the true War was to be fought in the North. Lady Sansa told me a great threat was coming from beyond the Wall.”

“The Queen is going North with her dragons and both her armies,” Tyrion explains. “But we cannot let Cersei free while we fight for the country. She doesn’t care about the realms and she will hunt us after our wake.”

“My brother is going to fight in the North,” he insists. “I cannot let him fight alone.” He raises his chin. “Let me and my men follow you, my Queen, northbound.”

Sansa holds her breath in expectation. He’s talking to you, Petyr says in her ear. Listen.

“If we are to fight against the dead, we need all the men we can get in the North,” Tyrion concedes, in a conciliatory, soothing voice, though he doesn’t look particularly pleased.

Daenerys thinks for a moment, but eventually nods. “Your men can go North,” she allows, “but only after the Dornish army arrives to aid Ser Jaime in the siege. Until then, you’ll send them to King’s Landing and they’ll be under Ser Jaime’s command.” She looks at the map again. “You know what to do. Prepare the horses and your men. You’re all dismissed.” The Queen lifts her head, slowly, “except for you, Lady Sansa, if you could.”

Sansa remains on her spot, head down and hands clasped behind her back as everyone leaves the tent, one by one, her eyes scanning the small table between her and Daenerys. Tyrion is the last to leave, and only then Sansa raises her head. She reminds herself that her skin is made of steel, that her spine is winter and her eyes are iron; that she is the daughter of Ned Stark, that Arya is home, that soon this will be over and she’ll be in the arms of her brother again. Looking into the pale, clear eyes of the Targaryen queen, though, it is hard to find any comfort in the thoughts of a better future. A better future, indeed, a future at all - it all relies on the decision of this woman. If she’ll be a friend or a foe. An ally or another enemy.

Sansa tries to picture Daenerys in a crown; can’t. “Your Grace?” She says, primly.

Daenerys smiles in a way that makes Sansa remember Margaery. “Lady Sansa,” she says, soberly. “I was hoping we could speak alone and honestly before our respective departures. We haven’t had the chance, yet.”

Sansa nods. “Yes, Your Grace, I’d appreciate that. You’ve been busy. I understand.”

“But Lord Tyrion is being enough of a serviceable host, I hope?” She offers, walking slowly around the table toward Sansa.

Sansa smiles back, just as sweet. “He’s more than serviceable. We’ve been working together in the realms’ best interest.” She tilts her head slightly to the side, just a fraction of an inch. “But I don’t need a septa, or a maidservant, to watch over me.”

Daenerys finally takes the empty seat by her side. It’s not a proper chair, more of a trunk-stool. “Of course you don’t. I don’t send him with you as your watcher, but as your equal. We are, after all, working together, in the realms’ best interest, aren’t we?” She signals to the similar stool in front of Sansa. She walks around as if every corner of the world is her castle; Sansa can’t help but admire her posture. “Take a seat, my lady.” Sansa obeys, and only when she is looking into the Queen’s eye again, the white-haired woman speaks. “I’d ask you to understand my reticence, though. You came to me looking for aid and yet you refuse to be my ally.”

“We are allies, Your Grace,” Sansa replies, calmly. “North and South can live peacefully together. That is not possible with Cersei on the Throne; I was hoping it could be with you.”

Daenerys proceeds as if she hasn’t heard Sansa at all. “You refuse to recognize my birth-right to the Seven Kingdoms-”

“I refuse to surrender a crown that has never been mine,” Sansa interrupts. She’s being bold, she knows, speaking in the middle of a Queen’s speech. She takes in a deep breath. Daenerys asked for a private audience so they could speak honestly. Sansa remembers she has always been a terrible liar and that truth is all she has as a weapon at her disposal. “Isn’t that the reason you’re going North, after all, Your Grace? To take the crown out of my brother’s head?”

Apparently, this is a woman who appreciates plain, honest words. The corner of her lips tug in a tired smile. “I am going North because you requested my help, and because it’s only fair that I do whatever I can to save the country I intend to rule. Those are not mutually exclusive goals.” She folds her hands, gloved in black, over the small table, and lets out a sigh. “Can I make you a confession, my lady? Of a private matter.”

Sansa pays close attention, all the nerves of her body awake. “Your trust is flattering, Your Grace, and I wouldn’t betray it.”

Daenerys looks away, to the confinement of her tent - it’s still broader than most tents, but it’s nothing compared to a real Keep, the castle at Dragonstone. Sansa suspects it’s nothing compared to the pyramids of Meeren; nothing compared to the skies she claims to herself as she flies atop her dragons. The whole world must feel small, after that. Available for taking, perhaps. “I’ve seen your home in a dream,” she murmurs. “It was promised to me.”

“Winterfell?” Sansa frowns.

Daenerys smiles sadly. “Not exactly,” she says, confused. Sansa understands; it’s hard to explain dreams to anyone who hasn’t been there. She wouldn’t be able to explain her own dreams for the life of her. Or her nightmares. “I didn’t see a castle, but I saw snow.”

Inexplicably, a chill runs through Sansa’s spine. “Snow?”

“Yes,” Daenerys confirms. “My lady, I need you to understand and trust me. My dreams do come true,” she says, fiercely. “And I’ve been given a prophecy. To go north, you must journey south. I suspect the opposite must be true. To go south, I must journey north, too.” She reaches out and holds Sansa’s hands. “When my child died, yesterday, all I wanted to do was to take over King’s Landing and kill Cersei and Euron with my bare hands. I’d watch them burn a thousand times over, if I could. That is what I want to do. And I shall see it done, by the end of this War. But I can’t neglect my own dreams. I am the Dragon’s daughter and I feel that Rhaegal’s death will be vain if I miss the signs. And you are a sign, my lady,” Daenerys looks her in the eye. “I know in my heart that I must go North. The snow calls me.”

Sansa looks at their joined hands. Her light-gray glove against the black leather covering the Queen’s hand. “I had a direwolf, when I was young,” she says. “Her name was Lady.”

Daenerys smiles warmly at her, genuine fondness in her face. “Really?” She asks. “What happened to her?”

“Cersei had her executed,” Sansa shrugs. “I was twelve. She was not my child, not in the way your dragons are, but-” her throat gets tight with an uncomfortable lump, and she takes in a deep breath to dissipate it. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs, feeling foolish, angry at herself for such a silly display of weakness.

But Daenerys grasps her hand tighter. “My lady, we’ll defeat the Army of the Dead together, and then we’ll defeat Cersei together. That I promise you.”

It’s only half a promise, she knows. They don’t speak of freedom, they don’t speak of what comes after, but there’s also no guarantee of an after, of a future. So Sansa only nods. That’ll have to be enough, for now; those are not dim words, and that is no feeble promise. Sansa can only hope it will get them through the worst of winter.

ii.

Sansa is familiar with the rhythms of the road: the tension and the tiredness and the dangers of being in the open; the cold; the odd feeling of freedom and vastness of the world despite the circumstances, how the night sky feels closer; not bathing for days; stopping by the rivers to feed the horses and let them rest, but being unable to rest herself; assembling their belongings each morning, building camp each nightfall, keeping track of the days by the moon.

(She’s fond of mornings, and Tyrion is not; every day she wakes up feeling ready and new, no matter how restless her nights, and she finds him rubbing the tiredness out of his eyes, all grumpy as she mounts on her horse with Brienne’s help, “good morning, Lord Tyrion!”

He looks at her and gives her a small smile, the sweetest. “Morning, my lady,” he says.

His voice is graver by the mornings, she realizes. Deeper, lower, rougher. It makes her feel something weird, a curling, tight feeling, in the pit of her belly. The child she was when they were married didn’t pay much attention to that part, but now- now she knows exactly what it is, and it bothers her greatly.)

One night, Tyrion and Bronn are finishing their soup across her and Brienne, the warmth radiating from the bonfire a pleasant feeling against the night’s chill. Dickon, sitting between them, comments, casually, “I think we’re moving too slow. We didn’t make twenty miles today, did we?”

“Not quite,” Ser Bronn says, a flagon of wine appearing out of nowhere in his hand. “We need to move faster. The cold is not helping the horses.”

“We’re not moving slow. It’s just that the days are getting shorter,” Sansa says. “Winter is here.”

A heavy silence falls over them, and Tyrion stares at her - silently, curiously - through the flames.

She knows that, at the very best, only Tyrion and Brienne believe in her. Dickon probably just wants to woo her; Bronn is in it for the money, and the rest of the men are just following orders. But Sansa never lets herself forget the reason for her mission.

Winter is coming. Winter is here. She chants to herself, a prayer, every night.

iii.

They’ve been on the road for ten days when it happens. She doesn’t listen to the quiet sighing of fire soon enough, nor does she feel the heat of the flames. Her sworn-shield does, though.

“Lady Sansa,” Brienne urges her awake, but doesn’t wait for her to be conscious, instead gathering a still half-asleep Sansa up in her strong arms as if she’s just a small doll.

Sansa opens her eyes to grey smoke. She’s pressed against Brienne’s broad chest as the woman sweeps her out of their shared tent on fire; Brienne carefully but efficiently puts Sansa down, sitting on a polished stone far away enough from the consuming flames. Sansa blinks her eyes awake. “FIRE!” Brienne is screaming; she listens to the noise of hushed feets, of scared voices, yelling, warnings, scared horses, armors clanking; sounds of chaos. The sky is a deep, grayish purple, and the fire shines alive and almost beautiful, providing more light than the sun, still cold behind the dawn.

“Lady Sansa,” another voice approaches, a callous hand upon her shoulder. “Are you well?”

Sansa doesn’t answer. She feels dizzy, coughing, choking on smoke, and it takes her half a minute to understand it’s Ser Bronn speaking to her, but by that time someone else is speaking to her. “Sansa,” now, a more familiar voice is near. He coughs, too, but Sansa leans toward him almost out of instinct; Tyrion reaches out to hold her face, standing in front of her, small hands sliding through her arms, searching, worried, “are you hurt, my lady?”

“No,” she murmurs. She looks ahead, to her tent. Everything burning: her trunk and all her clothes. Brienne’s small case. Brienne’s blue armor? She didn’t feel metal against her cheek, only the rude fabric of Brienne’s clothes; she must have woken from her sleep and didn’t have the time to put her armour on.

“Your fucking mad sister,” Bronn mutters by their side. “Fuck, someone put that fire out NOW!”

“Bronn!” Brienne calls amidst the gray fog, sword in hand, pointing to the dense forest flanking the road and mounting on a horse faster than Sansa ever thought possible. “That way!”

Dickon Tarly approaches them, completely muddled. “What is happening?”

Bronn clutches the boy’s arm. “Watch over them,” he says, like an order, pointing to Tyrion and Sansa and taking his sword out of its sheath. “If we come back and they’re dead, I’ll kill you and keep Horn Hill for myself.”

He leaves without another warning, disappearing amidst the fog as he takes one of the horses for himself.

“What happened?” Dickon repeats, as no one answered him.

Tyrion does. “Apparently, my sister sent a group of men to kill us,” he says, gravely. And then, lower, “when I put my hands on that bitch, I swear by all the gods, I’ll strangle her to death.”

Sansa finds his words comforting.

“Kill us?” Dickon asks.

The fire consumes the wooden sticks keeping her tent upright; they finally break and the whole tent, already on fire, falls down. Sansa watches, wants to never forget that sight. The North remembers.

“Me and Lady Sansa, particularly,” Tyrion clarifies. “She holds us responsible for Joffrey’s death and, I assume, must not be very happy that we sided with her enemies.” He is unconsciously rubbing Sansa’s back as he speaks. “She’s probably trying to terrify you into turning against Daenerys as well.”

“But you said she had no allies or gold,” the young man argues. Sansa finds it worthy of note that he doesn’t ask if they’ve actually done it.

Tyrion is watching her tent falling apart and his voice is all ragged when he speaks. “Not enough to buy a whole army, but certainly sufficient to hire a small group of mercenaries.”

“How many?” Dickon asks.

“I don’t know,” Tyrion replies, impatiently. “I didn’t see them. Bronn slayed one of them before he could kill me in my sleep, and Brienne spotted the movement before the tent caught fire.” Sansa notices that there’s blood staining his tunic. Tyrion looks around, to the group of perplex soldiers gathering around them, and glares at the Tarly boy. “I believe your men are waiting for your orders, my lord.”

To his merit, Tyrion’s words seem to bring Dickon out of his stupor, and he soon starts to give tasks to the Reachmen: some of them are sent to bring water to quench the fire, some of them are ordered to stay on guard around their camp, some follow Brienne and Bronn’s trail into the forest. Tyrion cups her elbow, leading Sansa further away from her burning tent; she follows, too numb to resist. The wind finally intensifies, blowing the smoke away from them, clearing the air. She notices that the hem of her gown is burnt, though her skin was spared; she fell asleep the night before in her regular gown because of the cold, which could only be providential, else she’d spend the rest of their trip in her night clothes. The sun slowly starts to emerge; as she sits by a quiet spot on the field, in the shadow of a tree, Sansa seeks under her gown for the knife tied around her calf, finds it and slides it off.

Then she laughs at herself, at the idea of bringing a dagger to a fight against fire. Against madness.

“My lady,” Tyrion raises his eyebrows, staring intently at her hands. “Where did you get that knife?”

“Lord Baelish gave it to me before I left Winterfell,” she answers. They’re far enough from the noise but close enough to be protected by the soldiers standing guard. “To protect myself.” She can’t help but chuckle bitterly.

“Lord Baelish,” Tyrion nods. “Of course he did.”

She frowns. “Why do you ask?”

Tyrion sits down by her side against the trunk of the tree, and carefully reaches for the dagger. Sansa hands it off to him, watching as he slowly shifts it. The blade catches the rising sunlight. “Because I once faced trial in the Vale for the attempt of murdering your brother Bran,” he explains, “on the grounds that this dagger was mine.”

Sansa is flooded with understanding. She blinks the tears the smoke stung in her eyes. That is too much information for a morning when the sun didn’t even completely rise. She remembers it: her mother. Her mother held him prisoner in the Vale, with her aunt Lysa. Jaime Lannister attacked her father in King’s Landing because of Tyrion’s imprisonment. The dawn of War. It hasn’t stopped, since, and she was just a girl, then. Somehow, she’s not surprised; she saw Petyr killing her aunt, his own wife, coldlessly. He confessed to have planned Joffrey’s murder, he sold her to the Boltons. Of course he could be found at the beginning of it all. “But it wasn’t yours?” She carefully asks, hoping that he’ll understand she’s not asking if he did it.

“No,” he answers, and gives the dagger back to her with a sigh. “My lady, be careful. He’s not to be trusted.”

Sansa stares at the camp ahead of them, at the dying flames and smoke, thinking of Cersei, raging in King’s Landing, trails of body in her wake, and Petyr, smirking coldly, carelessly, moving the strings of his toys over the years. Chaos. Monstrous, beastly chaos. “I’m not that stupid,” she says, resting her head against the tree. “I do not trust him.”

“I know you’re not stupid,” he murmurs.

“When the time comes,” she vows, “he’ll face justice for everything he’s done.”

Tyrion just scoffs. “Justice,” he mutters. “I wouldn’t hold my breath. Ours is not a just world, Sansa.”

She closes her eyes, breathing in fire and death and chaos. “No,” she agrees, “no, it isn’t, unless we make it just.”

iv.

When Brienne and Bronn come back, covered in sweat, blood dripping from their swords, the sun is relentlessly high in the sky. They’re trotting their horses slowly, which seems like a good omen. There’s no more trace of smoke in the air, and Sansa and Tyrion haven’t moved from the shadow of the giant tree along the road, too furious and too scared to lift themselves up, too tired to speak anything at all. They just try to calm down, unable to dissipate the fear that lingers in the air despite the fact no other suspect has been found anywhere in their camp or their surroundings, but also unable to do anything other than wait. The sight of Brienne is enough to give Sansa the strength she needs. She rises to her feet, offering Tyrion a helping hand to do the same. Soon Dickon Tarly joins them, and many of his soldiers too.

“Did you kill them?” Tyrion asks the once sellsword as they approach the exhausted pair.

Ser Bronn climbs off his horse. “Three or four. Brienne chased and killed most of them. Dickon’s men are scanning the area, but I don’t think there’s anyone left.” He looks at her, half awe, half frustration in his clear eyes. “Beast of a woman,” he mutters.

If she’s heard anything, Brienne just ignores him. “Lady Sansa,” she says, climbing off her own horse. “Are you well?”

“I’m well.” Brienne’s hair is damp with sweat, there’s dirt covering each inch of her skin and face, and blood in her hands and clothes. Sansa rushes forward, fumbling through Brienne’s arms. There’s a wince of pain when Sansa touches a blood-soaked part of her tunic, right beneath her ribs. “Are you hurt?”

Brienne shrugs. “It’s nothing,” she murmurs. “I should have slept in armor.”

“That sounds uncomfortable,” Sansa replies, gently, and then cups Brienne’s cheek so the woman will stare her in the eye. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You saved me again.” She curls her lips, her forehead wrinkled with worry. “Let me see the wound.”

“It’s nothing, my lady,” Brienne reiterates as Sansa raises the hem of her tunic.

Sansa examines the wound closely. “It needs cleaning, but it doesn’t look deep.” She raises her eyes to Brienne’s face again. “Does it pain you?”

“Not really,” Brienne answers. Sansa doesn’t know if she can trust her; Brienne has a high level of tolerance to pain, but she would also never worry Sansa over something they couldn’t change. “I should take you back to Dragonstone. We don’t know if Cersei will send more of them.”

“No,” Sansa says, shaking her head. “We’re already halfway there anyway.”

“We’re not halfway,” Bronn cuts off. “We’ve made one third of the way, if we’re being generous. There’s still two weeks ahead, and we already lost half of the sunlight of today.”

“Jaime must be almost finished with the siege on King’s Landing, and the Dornish reinforcement won’t take long,” Sansa insists. “We’ll be safe then. Can someone fetch me a bowl of clean water?”

Dickon glares at one of his soldiers, who leaves right away. Sansa gently guides Brienne to sit on a polished stone. “And while Jaime doesn’t?” Tyrion asks, crossing his arms.

“We move faster, and keep our eyes open,” the Lady of Winterfell declares. “Lord Dickon, I’d also like to request an armor for Brienne. It appears hers melted in the fire of our tent.”

“We don’t have a spare armor,” Dickon says, cautiously.

“Then borrow it from one of your men,” Sansa orders. “I won’t have my sworn-shield walking around unprotected.” When the three men stare at her dubiously, Sansa glares back. Particularly to Tyrion, the Queen’s first representative. “That’s what Cersei wants,” she reminds him. “She wants to scare us into hiding forever.”

“Well, if that was her goal…” Bronn trails off.

“Cersei can’t hurt us more than what we've already been hurt,” Sansa declares, looking keenly at Tyrion.

He keeps her gaze and she sees the plea in his eyes. “She can kill us, Sansa. That is more than what we’ve been hurt.” He licks his lower lip, frowning his brow with concern. “I can’t let you die on the road like this.”

“Going back now will do nothing to protect us. If anything, it will only lead us closer to King’s Landing before we can sail to Dragonstone.” When the soldier comes back with the full bowl, Sansa kneels beside her friend, carefully raising the hem of Brienne’s tunic again and delicately throwing water over the trace of angry red. When the wound is clear and clean, Sansa seems more relaxed. It’s a long wound, but superficial. She raises her head to stare at the men again. “We can’t isolate ourselves forever. We’ll move ahead.”

Her tone leaves no space for questions.

v.

The more they move further South, the more winter feels like a child’s tale, a dream.

The rest of their route is uneventful, but tense. Brienne sleeps in armor, when she gets to sleep; Sansa is worried that her friend will fall from her horse and straight out pass out in their way. Brienne dismisses her concerns, but Sansa has been on the road with her for long enough to know the woman is doing it for her sake. Again.

Bronn is no better, waking up every day before dawn to shake the rest of the men awake and break camp so when the sun is finally visible, they’re already on the move. Dickon says that the Roseroad is unusually empty; Sansa thinks it a good sign. It means that no merchant is heading to King’s Landing, at least, which in turn means that their ravens have arrived in their destinies and people have been warned. But as the days go by, even Tyrion stops making jokes, resigning himself to an uncharacteristic silence. Unlike Sansa, the quietness bothers him; she spots him wincing when they stop to raise their tents and sleep every night, but when she asks if he needs anything, he dismisses her with a grunt that is barely human speech.

Every night, before she falls into a shallow sleep, Sansa repeats to herself that Winter is coming, that winter is here, so the flowers, however sparse, and green fields around them won’t distract her from her duty, but soon the solemn words of House Stark are replaced by other words, kinder, sweeter.

You must see Highgarden, says a sweet voice in her mind. You'd love it there, I know you would. We have a great masquerade the night of the harvest moon. Sansa looks up to the sunset sky, listening to the quiet murmur of the waters of the Mander somewhere not far away. Dickon suggests they stop to make camp and sleep, so they can rise with the dawn, since it will be a new moon night and the road will be barely visible in the dark, but Sansa only asks for them to keep marching. “We’re almost there,” she says.

Dickon frowns at her. “No, my lady. We’re at least four hours away.”

You should see the costumes, people work on them for months, Margaery had said. Sansa pretends there’s a feast waiting for her at her arrival, and also the rose of Highgarden with a mischievous smile and open arms. “No,” she insists. “If we light up torches and ride fast, ahead of the troops, we can get there in three hours.”

Tyrion, who not only cannot bear any day longer on the road but also who just wants to please Sansa most of the time, says, grudging, “let’s just keep going.”

So they keep riding, riding and riding until she sees Highgarden at distance, a small, minuscule point of white stone beneath the starlit sky, imponent over a broad hill but so far that she thinks it a mirage borne of her tiredness at first, Sansa almost cries. Not only because she wants a bath, a bed, a warm meal.

When they reach the gates, they’re well into the evening, and Sansa is shivering with cold beneath her cloak. They’re led to ride through the thorny labirints and the many layers of fortified walls. However, it’s not Margaery Tyrell waiting for her at the Great Hall of Highgarden, but a worried Lady Melessa Tarly, Randyll’s widow. She’s dressed in black, as fit to her mourning, and she’s all over her son as soon as he crosses the door. Dickon Tarly quickly disentangles himself from her grasp, and an irrational, road-tired part of Sansa resents him for it. Fathers go away to Wars; she shouldn’t blame him for taking his mother for granted. But she does, anyway. “Mother,” he says. “This is Lady Sansa Stark of Winterfell, and Lord Tyrion Lannister, Hand of the Queen.”

“Welcome, welcome you all. Bring them salted bread,” says the woman, rushing toward Sansa. For her expression, Sansa knows they were expected beforehand; their letters arrived in time. She puts a hand over Sansa’s cheek. “My child, what happened to you?”

It’s when she remembers that the tips of her dress are still burnt, that she’s the one without a trunk of clothes. She must look horrible. “I am no child, my lady,” she says, but accepts the motherly touch all the same. “Cersei sent her men to hunt me and Lord Tyrion. They had my tent burnt.”

“That terrible woman, mad woman,” Melessa mutters, and then starts to fumble over her dress and arms. Sansa feels, honestly, about to cry. “Are you hurt, my lady?”

“I am well,” she reassures the woman, quietly. Two servants approach them, serving them small pieces of salted bread. Sansa is not so naive as to have faith in the blessing of breaking bread and being a guest. Robb had and it killed him; Sansa is not Robb. She won’t die. But she bites them all the same; she’s still hungry. “I appreciate your care, my lady,” she says. “This is Brienne of Tarth, my sworn-shield and savior,” Sansa points to Brienne by her side. And then, to the sellsword beside Tyrion, “and this is Ser Bronn of Blackwater.”

“You’re all welcome. It’s so late, you must rest. We have rooms prepared for all of you,” the woman says. Sansa barely notes the servants and maids coming in, taking their trunks inside, guiding their group into the Keep. “I’ll have Lady Margaery’s clothes sent to yours and your husband’s chambers, my lady,” Lady Tarly reassures her. “I’ve heard you were friends with her.”

Friends, yes, Sansa feels like nodding, but before she can say anything, Tyrion speaks. For the first time. “Her husband’s chambers?”

Melessa Tarly blinks, confused. “Well,” she says. “When my son sent a raven, telling me he was coming to Highgarden with Tyrion Lannister and Sansa Stark, I assumed-”

“You are married?” Dickon questions. He seems hurt by the fact, or hurt that Sansa never said it to him. She has absolutely no patience and no time to men’s entitled hurt feelings.

“We were,” she answers to his mother, refusing to look at him.

“I am sorry, my lady,” the woman sounds sincere. “I didn’t know it had been annulled.”

“It wasn’t,” Sansa replies. The confusion of her hosts just gets worse, but she can’t blame them; apparently, the rumours of her unconsummated marriage were limited to the Red Keep - and the North, whenever convenient. But she finds herself again with no energy or strength of will to handle these strangers’ opinions about her marital status. “It’s no matter, my lady. Lord Tyrion and I can share a room tonight. We’ve done it before; I thank you again for your hospitality.”

“This cannot be proper,” Dickon murmurs.

“I beg your pardon, my lord, why not?” It’s Tyrion who answers. He’s tired, and in pain, and Sansa knows by now that the combination makes him irritable and at times cruel.

“My lord,” she calls, soothingly, putting a hand on his shoulder and never meeting Dickon’s eye. Only Tyrion’s. “It’s fine.”

It is not fine. Her weariness sweeps into her bones like a vice. They soon find themselves alone in the chamber that’s been prepared for them, one bath ready at the fireplace, the trunk with Margaery’s gowns placed beside her husband’s case; Tyrion stares at the giant bed and then at her, warily. “I’ll share the room with Bronn,” he says, with finality.

But the dirt of the road still clings to her hair and skin, and Sansa is tired. She’s tired of running from death and tired of feeling cold. She’s tired of being motherless, tired of being away from Winterfell; she’s so terribly tired of carrying the weight of men’s guilt or expectations or whatever it is that runs through their minds. “Tyrion,” she says, and perhaps he can hear it all, for he pays attention, even through his own exhaustion. “Please, can we just not do this now? Let’s just go to bed,” she asks, she begs. “Just-”

In a second, he stands before her, taking her hand. “Fine,” he agrees. She takes off her gloves and gives them to him; he seems moved with the gesture, bringing her knuckles to his mouth for a kiss. He’s been doing it often, lately, and she finds out that she likes it. “I’ll give you some privacy.”

When he leaves to the contiguous room, Sansa strips herself from her burnt clothes and sinks into the steaming water, completely, even her hair. The bath smells of roses and there are hard soaps and oils propped at the tub’s thick lip. She reaches out for the folded cloth to start to wash herself, and notices her hand is trembling.

Sansa breathes out, resting against the wall of the tub and closing her eyes for a moment, feeling the fear easing out from her stiff muscles under the hot water. I’ll kill Cersei. I’ll do it for you, she vows to Margaerys’ friendly ghost, lurking over every corner of Highgarden. I’ll do it for us.

vi.

Sansa looks better, after the bath. He orders a new one for himself, and when he leaves it, there’s a clean, warm tunic waiting for him. It’s too long on the knees but tight around his chest - he can see it was adapted from a child’s piece of clothes, but he’s touched with the thoughtfulness, nevertheless. When every aspect of their circumstances comes into account, this is relatively more luxury than he ever enjoyed at court.

The tunic clings to his damp skin; their chambers are clean, spacious and neat, and he all but runs to the bed, hiding beneath the covers. He legitimately moans when he feels the featherbed beneath him, closing his eyes. It would be easy to miss the mattress sinking down slightly by his side, if he weren’t hyper-aware of his surroundings. He cracks one eye open, then the other. Sansa had let the flowery robe hang by the post of the bed and was wearing a night-gown that would have been loose in a petite, delicate body like Margaery’s, but in her is just clinging softly to her curves in every right way.

That is going to be a long night. And they were supposed to rest.

“This is awkward,” he declares.

(She smells of rosemary again.)

“It isn’t,” she says, hiding beneath the covers to the chin. Better like that. Easier. The fire in the hearth seems too far away to bring any real comfort; the covers do most of the work. A body, a human body, certainly could do part of the work as well. Sansa glares. “I’m not going to bite you.”

For all her cleverness, her sorrows and her impressive survival skills, Sansa is still very much young. Sometimes he’s aware of that with painful clarity. “You trust me more than you should,” he replies.

“I trust you just the right amount.”

Indeed; the bed is enormous and she’s almost one arm away from him. “We should just annul it already,” he says, out of the sudden.

He observes her eyes, braces himself for relief- can’t find it; but he can’t find offense or sadness, either. She just looks contemplative. “Do you think?”

He has to smirk. “Don’t you?”

For her credit, she gives it an honest thought. “When this is all over, yes,” she finally sentences. “For now, I think it convenient.”

He turns to the side, enjoying the smooth feeling of the bed beneath him and the softness of the white furs. Her hair is still a little wet, darker in the dim light, but it catches the fireglow beautifully. “Convenient? To keep men from asking for your hand?” He props himself on his elbow and rests his head on his hand. “The lady thinks you’re a good match for her son.” Sansa turns to the side as well, resting her cheek against the pillow. A pause, “actually, her son thinks you’re a good match for her son.”

She giggles. The bath really did wonders for her, he thinks. She still looks tired, but her body seems relaxed, at ease. “They’re trying to serve the realms.”

“Serve the realms,” Tyrion mutters.

A glint touches her vivid blue eyes. “Are you jealous, my lord?”

“I’m not. You’re not mine.” He looks away, vaguely waves a hand about. “This whole situation is a mistake, to be fixed in the morning.”

Sansa narrows her eyes. “You’re jealous.” No longer a question.

Tyrion sighs. A strand of hair falls over her face and he refrains himself from tucking it behind her ear. “I certainly envy his ability of running after your foes and slaying them with his sword, if he so wishes.” Which he didn’t, Tyrion wants to add, but he doesn’t. He can still remember the feeling of powerlessness to protect her; he will get swallowed by self-pity and no one will stop him from doing so.

“That sounds like a song, my lord,” she says. He can listen to the mockery, but can’t bring himself to feel offended. “Brienne is my true knight in shining armor. I am not looking for someone else.”

“Hm.” He gives up, reaching out to smooth the wild curl of hair away from her face.

She stares at him intently. “You look tired. How’s your pain?”

He never said to her he was in pain. “Better after the hot bath. All warm things and places make it better.”

“And here I am, taking you to the coldest land of the country,” she says, though she doesn’t sound particularly sorry. He remembers, absently, that the last time he’d been in Winterfell it had been summer. And it was snowing.

He shrugs as well as he’s able. “I’m not worried about that. It’s a long way back to Dragonstone, and Tarly’s men are not going all the way with us; it’s a waste of time.”

“Jaime must already have started the siege on King’s Landing by now and soon the Dornish army will get there too.” He notices, too late, she’s comforting him. “We’ll survive. We always do.”

“Well, we better. I really need to take you home.” She smiles at that, and seems moved, though he didn’t mean to move her. “Remind me again why we’re here.”

She laughs under her breath, letting her lids fall closed. “Because there’s a lack of power here, in the Reach, and Daenerys gave us the task of fixing that,” she brings the covers up, “also, because we’re helping the realms to prepare the stocks for winter.”

“Oh, that.” War. Impending death. The longest winter of the last generations. “Sure.”

“Tyrion,” she calls out, her eyes still closed.

He slides back into his corner of the bed, lying on his back. “Hm?”

“We’ll be alright,” she says, simply.

(With her eyes closed like that, he can stare at her for as long as he’d like.)

“Do you promise?” He asks, jokingly but not really. She smiles all the same, sleepy and perfect.

“I promise,” she says, and he believes in her.

vii.

Sansa wakes up the next day with sunlight filtered by the curtains, the sight of a maid placing a tray over the table in the corner of the room, and an empty bed.

She opens her eyes, and then sinks deeper into the mattress. Gods, she hasn’t slept well like that in months. She stretches her arms, feeling a sweet pain in the muscles in her back. “Good afternoon, my lady,” says the maid with a smile. “Here’s your midday meal.”

She sits up on the bed, alarmed. “Midday meal?”

“Your lord husband asked us not to disturb your sleep,” says the girl, turning to Sansa.

She looks briefly to the side, wondering if it’s possible to see the shape of an emptiness; she can swear that the hollow left in the clean, white sheets kept all the contours of his body. “And where is he?”

“Lord Tyrion has asked us to move his belongings to Ser Bronn’s room, my lady,” the maid replies, in a neutral tone.

Sansa nods. “Of course.”

(She remembers the furious, irrationally possessive inclination toward him every time she saw him and Daenerys side by side: that was jealousy. The warmth in her cheeks whenever she listened to his voice, biding her good morning on the road: that was want. This time, it takes a few days, but Sansa eventually names the feeling: this one is disappointment. All unbidden. She keeps the list of them, and can’t help but probe them at night, when she can’t sleep, like cherry-picking her own heart. Then, she tucks it all inside, safely guarded from daylight.

You’re lonely, she concludes, and that’s frankly pitiful.

For the rest of their stay in Highgarden, they do not share a bed again.)

viii.

The lords of the Reach received their ravens; every morning in Highgarden a different party arrives under a different banner. Tyrion spends his days talking to them in the name of the Queen - the Hightowers and the last lord Florent, the Fossoways and lord Oakheart and the Beesburys and the tradesmen with no great name and too much gold in their pockets, from Ashford and even Tumbleton, a town that borders the Crownlands and had many reasons to stand by King’s Landing. He finds out that it isn’t hard to convince them to follow the lead of Highgarden, wherever it is. They’re a united front - for economical reasons more than their praised loyalty or honor. To the richest, most populous and most fertile of the kingdoms, a land that counted with an abundance of towns, where merchants had as much power as lords, it is bad business to be divided. No wonder they barely seem to mourn Randyll Tarly: it is most certainly bad business to be on the losing side of the War, and Tyrion doesn’t have any difficulty in convincing them about the obvious victory of the Dragon Queen.

They’re not unlike the Tyrells, shifting their loyalties at their own convenience, and Tyrion is not at all surprised. Let it never be said, however, that the Reachmen are stupid. That they are not.

The problem is who, after all, is going to hold Highgarden in Daenerys’ name. Each one of them, in private meetings with Tyrion, are interested, of course. Powerful lord Leyton Hightower argues that he is responsible for one of the greatest city of the Seven Kingdoms, quiet Ser Florent remembers Tyrion that his sister was once Queen (Tyrion tries to keep a straight face at that; the idea that Stannis had been, at any given point of the War, celebrated as King is laughable, but he’s not so stupid as to laugh in the face of Daenerys’ allies), Lord Paxter Redwyne, lady Mina Tyrell’s widower - a man who lives in an island, for the gods’ sake - argues that he has much to offer, a whole new fleet and wine in abundance and trades all across Westeros and beyond, and if only he could be properly rewarded for years of loyalty to Highgarden, and even Hobber, a tradesmen from Tumbleton, a man with no last name and a successful web of business across small towns in the Reach and King’s Landing itself, offers himself to the post - on the grounds simply that each one of the other men already have their castles to hold and care for, even Ashford had a lord and its holdfast, and the realms needed new perspectives.

They’re all very polite with each other, though, and no one would dare to know or speak about the thin layer of competition in the air. In the following days, Tyrion soon realizes that his challenge is not who he is going to choose, but who he is going to decline, and whose ego could be broken without breaking the peace with it.

Of course he finds little sleep, even on a very serviceable couch by the fireplace, fit enough for an Imp like him. Ser Bronn’s loud snoring is not what keeps Tyrion awake at night. He’s not one to believe in haunted castles - Highgarden least of all, made of white polished marble stones and decorated in flowers, golden fountains in every corner and beautiful paintings hanging on the walls and broad windows making the best out of the slowly decreasing daylight and grapevines and thorny roses snaking the imponent towers; fuck, the cushions smell of roses - but sometimes he remembers Margaery, pretty and cunning and dead before her time, and it’s like the ghosts of Tyrells can smell Lannister blood. In those nights he misses Sansa more than usual, like a personal token who could protect him from his own sins. He kept himself from her chambers and, for the peace’s sake, from her company. She spends her days with Lady Melessa Tarly, planning stocks and grain stores, and charming each lord and lady of the Reach into believing the threat of the Others - together they lay plans for escape routes, the best places of hiding, and she gathers more men to join Dickon Tarly’s army to the North. Everyday he gets to see her working and walking around and overall breathing in those tempting colorful dresses that embraced her waist tightly and exposed the soft skin of her chest and delineated her long legs and sometimes, may the gods help him, sometimes graciously lifted her bosom to admiration. She keeps combing her hair after Margaery’s style, all gentle auburn curls falling over her shoulders and simple braids around her head like a crown, and for fuck’s sake; no woman should be allowed to be that beautiful. He refuses to believe he is the only person distracted by her beauty.

If people know or not of the fact that they’re still legally married, Tyrion is happy to be ignorant about it. It is already too much of a fight to convince his own twisted, lustful mind that the woman is not his for claiming.

Bronn openly laughs at him. “You’re horny,” the sellsword declares. “Get a whore, m’lord. You’ll feel better.”

Tyrion does not get a whore, and (maybe because of that) he does not feel better.

ix.

Highgarden is the castle of her dreams, the dreams she had when she was a girl.

Sansa doesn’t dream anymore, though. She sets goals and makes plans, and plan she does every day during her stay - it is easy to let herself be swayed by the relatively milder weather, by the false sensation of safeness when she gets to fall asleep in a locked chamber instead of beneath the night sky on the road, fearing Cersei will get to her this time, by the strolling in the gardens with Brienne in the mornings when she’s not working with adorable Lady Melessa on the accounts of the castle and of the other castles of the Reach. She doesn’t get used to sleeping alone and eventually moves to Brienne’s chambers; she thinks of Margaery every day, Brienne tells her of Renly, and they accept the sadness that comes along with the peace of just being in that castle, for it’s a single package.

And though there’s certain comfort in that - in slipping into Marge’s skin, wearing her dresses and fashioning her hair every morning and putting on golden earrings - Sansa feels the visceral need to remember she is herself. A Stark of Winterfell, still, if wolfless. Her home grows in the snow and winter is breed in her bones. Of all the people who can make her remember, no one does it as Tyrion. Tyrion, of all people, who calls her Lady Stark, all heavy, in public, and Sansa, all kindness, in private.

He’s Hand of the Queen and a Lannister; it is crucial to have him by her side. If he’s charmed by her, well, all the better. But he’s more than a piece on the board. Sansa can’t lie to herself.

She finds him in one of the solars ceded for them. The night is again falling, painting dark-purple brushes patterns in the clouds against the orange sky. He’s staring at the garden outside the window, lost in thought, cup in hand, and Sansa stops by the door, just staring at him. Thinking is what he does best, after all; it is not unlike watching Brienne sparring.

She chides herself for the fooliness of her thoughts and then knocks on the open door. “My lord,” she calls out, softly.

He bends his neck back to look at her, and then smiles. “Lady Stark,” he says. “Come in.”

She does, and sits in the armchair across him. Surprisingly, he doesn’t say a thing, at first. They just watch the sunset together. The winter breeze and the early hour cannot let them be mistaken that winter is here, but they can still see the green carpet stretching for miles ahead, and some flowers still refuse to die, patches of deep purple and royal blue. “It’s beautiful in here,” she says, after a while.

“Yes, and the wine is so good,” he agrees, quietly, taking a small sip from his cup. After a moment just long enough, “to think you could have had it, had your betrothal with Ser Loras bore fruit.”

Oh, so he’s been thinking of her. Sansa scoffs deep in her breath. The woman she is now wouldn’t switch Tyrion for Highgarden, but the girl she used to be certainly would. “You moved out of our chambers,” she states. It’s a fact. It’s been eight days.

He shrugs. “I assumed you’d prefer it like that, once we were settled. The couch in Ser Bronn’s rooms is serving me just fine.”

Sansa frowns. After weeks on the road, he deserves more than a couch. “But a bed is more comfortable.”

He laughs, eyes on the green fields, “Sansa, I’ve already slept inside a box, inside a boat. Believe me when I say a couch is like a royal chamber.”

“You’ve been avoiding me, my lord,” she says.

He looks at her, at last. Doesn’t deny it. “You’ve been busy,” he explains.

“And so have you.” She turns her body towards him. His sharp gaze studies her face closely. “How is your progress?”

Tyrion chuckles, humorlessly, and rests his head back against his chair, closing his eyes as if he’s accessing a mental list and lifting a finger for each candidate: “Ser Inry Florent can hold a grudge, but cannot, for the life of him, act on it, and has absolutely no sense of humor,” he starts.

Sansa smiles. “You can’t choose the Lord of Highgarden based on them laughing at your jokes or not, Tyrion.”

“Watch me, then,” he smirks, lifts another finger as he goes on, “Lord Leyton Hightower is smart and can befriend anyone, but I think it unwise to leave both Highgarden and Oldtown at the mercy of the same person, however pleasant is said person.”

Sansa ponders that. It does make sense. “And the merchant?”

Tyrion scoffs. “We’re not giving Highgarden to a tradesman,” he dismisses, and Sansa rolls her eyes. He is such a Lannister. “I like Lord Paxter. He had a Tyrell wife, at some point, and… Well, he’s easy to work and easy to know,” Tyrion shrugs; Sansa understands he is easy to guide. She had the same impression of the man. “His children can keep the Arbor.”

Sansa narrows her eyelids. “It has nothing to do with the fact he is responsible for the best wine of the country?”

Tyrion opens his eyes and stares at her innocently. “Why would you ever think that, my lady,” he says, feigning offense. Sansa laughs; he seems to bask in the sound. “Unless lord Dickon has changed his mind and decided to leave Horn Hill for his sister and assume some responsibility for his father’s stained legacy-”

“He has not,” Sansa informs.

“- then it’s a pity,” Tyrion says. “It could be your chance to be lady of Highgarden, after all. I’m stunned that he hasn’t realized that.”

Sansa rolls her eyes, annoyed. “I don’t want to be the Lady of Highgarden.” She doesn’t want to dwell on the topic, not with him; she’s not sure she’ll keep her tongue quiet this time, and Tyrion can make her speak against her own sense and better judgment. “Did the Queen send any word?”

Tyrion shifts, uncomfortably, in his armchair, and drinks more of his Arbor Red. “The last I knew, she safely arrived in Dorne, and Ellaria summoned the Dornish forces. At this point, they must have already left for King’s Landing.” Sansa nods, taking an empty, idle cup. She fills it for herself and fills Tyrion’s cup, too. He stares at her as she does so, mistrust clouding his beautiful green eyes. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, she’s the Queen you’re working for,” Sansa answers.

“The Queen we are working for.”

Sansa holds the urge to roll her eyes again. “Semantics.” She left Daenerys on good terms, which is very different from surrender. Again: semantics. “We know the North, the Riverlands, the West and the Reach have enough supplies. The Reach can provide for themselves and two or even three kingdoms for at least three years.” She’d never seen such abundance of resources in one single country; the North was prepared for three years on their own, the Riverlands for one, the West for two. If Petyr has done anything useful in the Vale she will hear of him soon, but, “I have no word from Dorne. We don’t know if they’ll need our aid.”

Tyrion sighs. “If Daenerys checked their storage, she didn’t let me know.”

Sansa drums her fingers, absently, on the wooden oval table. “My lord,” she asks, carefully, “truly, how is Dorne?”

He stares at her with a heavy brow. “What do you mean?” He questions, like someone who absolutely knows what she means.

Sansa curls her lips, a habit she learned from her mother and never got rid of. “Ellaria is a bastard,” she begins, cautiously. “As are her daughters.”

“As is your King. And bastards are not frowned upon in Dorne.”

“Bastards who kill their liege House and their heirs and stage a coup?” Sansa raises one eyebrow and she sees, in his eyes, that he knows it. “Are you certain there’s no Martell left?”

“Ellaria has hold of their men,” Tyrion argues. “It’s what we need now. Men to battle.”

“When this War is over we’ll need more than muscles,” Sansa says, trying to keep the edge out of her voice. “Once, a bastard took hold of the North, and killed his liege lord, and his end was horrific.”

“You made sure of it, I’m sure,” Tyrion says, almost respectfully.

“I did, and if there’s a single Martell left somewhere, I’m sure they’re waiting for their chance.”

Tyrion rubs his own face wearily. “I don’t like Ellaria either,” he confesses. “She killed my niece and she should be punished, but-”

He doesn’t finish, and Sansa waits, and waits. “But?”

“But we have to work with the people we have,” he finishes, tiredly.

“Daenerys might have conquered Essos through loyalty, but she is building her alliances in Westeros based on vengeance,” Sansa says. “Have you never wondered what will happen once her allies get it?”

He scoffs dryly. “You are really lecturing me on vengeance?” He stares intently at her hair, at her dress. Margaery’s dress. “Whatever the game you’re playing, Sansa, stop.”

“I’m not playing-”

“Yes, you are. I don’t know what it is, but you are.” And there it is. The pleading in his eyes. The silent please. “Daenerys is our only chance against Cersei.”

Just as she’s about to take a breath, someone knocks on the still open door.

They both stare at one another for a single second, both knowing that conversation is not over yet, and turn their heads toward the door, almost in momentary surrender. “Yes?” Tyrion says, frustratedly.

It’s a maid, and she looks apprehensively between the both of them. “My lady,” she says, “Lady Melessa’s son just arrived, and he’d like to speak with you. He didn’t know you would be here.”

Sansa and Tyrion share a confused look. “Dickon?” Tyrion asks.

“No, my lord,” answers the maid. “The oldest. Samwell.”

Chapter Text

i.

Samwell Tarly is not at all what Sansa was expecting, not what she had in mind for a brother of the Night’s Watch. For instance, he arrives in Highgarden in the company of a woman with a babe in her arms.

There are other details, too. He has gentle eyes and a sweet smile. He’s not muscular beneath his black clothes and, unlike his brother Dickon, Samwell accepts the tight hug of his mother just fine. Lady Melessa also seems to be acquainted with the woman - Gilly, Sansa learns. She fusses over the babe, guiding both mother and son and the battered sandy-haired man to their rooms while Samwell and Sansa find their way to one of the dozens of solars in the castle.

They sit together across the fire, Samwell with a cup of ale in his hand.

“Lady Sansa,” he begins, “Jon spoke very fondly of you. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

“He spoke of you, too,” Sansa says with a genuine smile. It’s hard to imagine Jon would remember her at all before their meeting at Castle Black, but her brother is like that, full of surprises and mysteries, “He told me you were very smart and brave. It’s because of your letter that I am here.”

Samwell laughs. It’s both childish and wary, somehow, “Oh, that sounds very much like something Jon would say, even if it’s not true.”

His eyes study her, intently. He seems to study everything around them.

Smart and brave, Jon had said to Sansa, more than people give him credit for.

Jon gave him credit. Sansa decides she’ll not mistrust him, though that’s different from trusting him fully.

“But, I beg your pardon, my lady; how could my letter have you here, so far from home?”

Sansa sighs, “Jon sent me to negotiate the mining of dragonglass with Daenerys Targaryen,” she explains, “and also an alliance, since she has dragons.”

Samwell blinks twice, “So they’re real. The rumours are true.”

“They’re real,” she confirms, “I saw them,” and, with a subtle tilt of her head, “What else do the rumors say?”

Samwell chuckles and takes a deep swig of ale, “Well, Oldtown received a letter about the siege in King’s Landing,” he explains, “The last Targaryen is alive, after all, to take back what has been taken from her.”

“I suppose she is,” Sansa says, carefully.

“I assume the North is part of the things she counts as being hers by right?” Samwell asks, as neutral as any man of the Night’s Watch would.

The fact that Jon trusts this man does not mean she can trust him, too. He’s trusted people before, and it got him killed.

But Samwell has gentle eyes, however sharp, and Sansa takes a leap of faith. “Yes,” she concedes, “but she’s agreed to head North to our aid, so I’m leaving the matter in Jon’s hands. The crown is his, not mine.”

(Sansa is, most definitely, not leaving the matter in Jon’s hands.)

Samwell nods, “Good. I think we might need her.”

We, he says, mindlessly, as if they’re on the same side.

And we are, Sansa realizes. We are by Jon’s side.

“I couldn’t find out if we can burn the Night King or not. No one’s ever tried. But we’ll need fire to keep his army of undead at bay while we seek to kill him. The undead can only move and fight because their source comes from the White Walkers who raised them. They have nothing in themselves, they’re just empty corpses. So if one of the White Walker falls, then their soldiers fall too,” he explains, “And the Night King is the first one. Their creator and their god.”

Sansa’s mouth falls agape while she tries to understand the implications of that discovery, “So if we kill the Night King—”

“We have good reason to believe that every other White Walker shall fall with him, and therefore, every undead man and woman and occasional beast with them.”

She puts her glass of wine down. Perhaps we’ll survive this after all, she ponders.

“But what does it want?” she inquires.

How could they fight an enemy if they didn’t know what the thing wanted from them? Petyr might not be a fighter but he taught her as much.

Apparently, Samwell was not exactly a fighter, too, for all his courage.

“That I don’t know,” he says with a frustrated sigh, “What we’re facing is an unprecedented attack. There are many conflicting tales about the Others. How they came to be and what they did and how they did it, but none about what exactly they wanted.”

Sansa licks her lower lip. She is no battle strategist and no soldier, but her brother is, “Jon must know about what you’ve told me.”

“I already sent him a raven, and I’m headed North to tell him everything else,” Samwell says, “But first, I must deliver something to the Targaryen Queen. I promised Ser Jorah I’d take him to her. It’s not safe to travel alone. The roads are so empty.”

Sansa must have revealed something in her eyes, because Samwell gives her a hearty laugh, “Do not worry, my lady. The Night’s Watch takes no side in the quarrels of the realms. She cannot ask me to bend the knee to her; I am merely a man of my word,” he elucidates, “I’ve healed Ser Jorah Mormont from grayscale and I gave him my word I would take him to Dragonstone.”

“Grayscale can’t be cured,” Sansa interjects.

“Can’t it?” he shrugs with a smirk.

Smarter than people give him credit for, indeed, Sansa thinks.

“Anyway. I’ll sail North from Dragonstone, with Gilly and Little Sam. And I confess, I couldn’t help myself; when I knew my mother was here, I decided to stop by for a night.”

“If you can stay for more than one night, you could join us,” Sansa says. “It’s safer for all of us if we travel together to Dragonstone, and our departure won’t take long.”

“I believe we can afford two or three days longer,” he says, looking at her intently, “but since you are here, I also would like to have a word with you. It’s about your aunt Lyanna.”

Sansa frowns, “Aunt Lyanna?”

Samwell seems to tread through it carefully, putting his cup down as well and folding his big hands together, “Yes, in the Citadel, I’ve found - actually, Gilly found - a register of an official wedding ceremony between Lyanna Stark and Prince Rhaegar Targaryen in Dorne, along with an annulment of the marriage between him and Princess Elia Martell. Did you know that?”

Sansa blinks once, twice.

“My aunt was raped,” Sansa says. She’s heard the tale her whole life. The tragedy of Lyanna Stark. Her father avoided even speaking her name at all costs, “She was kidnaped and taken.”

Samwell smiles gently at her, “Really? Who can attest to that?”

Robert Baratheon, Sansa answers in her head.

She stares, baffled, dumbfounded, at the fire burning in the hearth in front of them. Stubborn and willful Aunt Lyanna, she thinks, the one with the wolf-blood—

“Robert’s Rebellion—” she murmurs, grandfather and uncle Brandon being burned alive, father leaving to the South, war and death and the end of the dragons, Jaime killing his own King, everything—

“I don’t think it would be the first time a man raises armies because of a broken heart,” Samwell says, in an easy but respectful tone.

Sansa feels an uncomfortable lump around her throat.

“Why are you telling me that?” she asks, avoiding staring him in the eye.

He’s far too clever, for all that he looks harmless and child-like, and Sansa carefully pulls the flood of her emotions inside.

“Because if it were my family,” Samwell says, simply, “I’d like to know.”

ii.

The dead need no dresses, Lady Melessa told her, sprinkling lavender oil over Margaery’s gowns. Take them with you. Something tells me the Queen wouldn’t have minded.

Sansa does not refuse because thanks to Cersei, she’s not in a position to refuse clothes, and all of her dresses are back in Winterfell. She keeps wearing Margaery like a second skin until each piece of cloth becomes too heavy with memories and want and loss. Margaery is gone and Sansa is not going to marry a Tyrell because the Tyrells are no more. They won’t be sisters, or whatever they were, or planned to be. And she can’t become Margaery. She doesn’t know how to wrap men around her finger and she doesn’t know how to lie. She can’t be the Rose of Highgarden. Sansa only blooms in Winter.

So she starts to change Marg’s gowns. She loosens the fabric so it will adapt to her bigger, fuller bosom. She fixes patches of lace to cover the deep, bold necklines that fit Marg so well. She chooses the darker gowns, in deep green and night-blue and purple, instead of the bright ones, and embroiders small pieces of the North in them in threads of silver and gray. Wolves. Leaves of the heart-tree in red. Even snow-flakes, though she feels silly for doing so.

It’s exactly what she’s working on when Tyrion finds her in the solar they’ve implicitly claimed for themselves in the past weeks. He enters the way he always enters every room, like it belongs to him.

“All right, listen,” he says, and takes the empty seat next to her, “Paxter Redwyne.”

Sansa chuckles, humorlessly; doesn’t let go of her needle and thread, “Because he makes good wine?”

“That is a reason as good as any other,” Tyrion says with a smirk.

This is the last of their--Tyrion’s-- tasks. They need a new lord of the Reach.

“Oh gods,” Sansa mutters, pulling the needle with too much strength before she dives it in again.

“I have a feeling,” Tyrion explains.

Sansa has to stop her embroidery, then, to glare at him.

“A feeling,” she echoes.

“Yes,” he confirms.

Outside, it’s already dark.

She resumes her work under the flickering candlelight, trying to distract herself from his face.

“We’ll need him more than we’ll need the others. He’s resourceful. And he had a Tyrell wife, after all. It’s only fair.”

She can’t help her frustration; she wishes he could show a little bit of doubt sometimes. It’s arrogant and stupid to be so confident.

“How do you know that?”

“I just know it,” Tyrion answers, as if she were supposed to trust his guts, “He has hold of a fleet—”

“We already have a fleet,” she answers, her voice harder than intended. “And the undead can’t swim.”

“I know, but still, Lord Paxter it will be,” he leans comfortably in his chair, tilting his head as he scrutinizes her, trying to understand her sour mood, he tries to jape, “Why? Do you know something that I don’t?”

“Are we deciding the future of a crucial realm,” Sansa says, one more time forcefully pulling the thread, thinking of a register of an official wedding ceremony between Lyanna Stark and Prince Rhaegar Targaryen in Dorne, along with an annulment of the marriage between him and Princess Elia Martell, and presses the needle in again, “based on them laughing at your jokes, making wine for you, and your feelings?”

When she pulls the thread back to her again, the needle pierces the tip of her finger, hard enough to bleed. “Fuck!” She mutters, letting go of the dress so it won’t be stained in crimson.

Tyrion is on his feet before she can blink.

“Here,” he says, and suddenly he’s there, standing by her side, cupping her hand, “Let me see.”

He puts her finger into his mouth, and for just a second, her boiling frustration feels starkly like something else. But the moment passes; his mouth lets go of her finger too soon. He keeps holding her hand, though. Their eyes meet and, in candlelight, something in the way he looks at her makes Sansa apprehensive and nervous.

“Are you alright?” He asks, in that tone of voice he uses when he’s trying to feign his condescension as kindness. It reminds Sansa that she’s angry.

“Of course I am,” she replies, and though her voice is harsh, she doesn’t have it in her to take her hand back, “Are you surprised that I can curse when I didn’t even know the right word for shit the last time you met me?”

“I didn’t expect a child to know how to curse. But you’re no child anymore.”

Sansa exhales a tired breath (she’s always so tired, these days), and it makes the intertwining of their fingers easier.

“What’s wrong?” Tyrion asks.

“Nothing,” she replies, now truly feeling childish.

He smirks, “Liar.”

“So what?” she snaps back, but not at him; just at the world, in a vague manner, aimless. She sighs again and softens her gaze as she looks him in the eye. “I’m homesick and exhausted. I’m sorry for being rude to you.”

He kisses the back of her hand, “It’s all right.”

He shrugs and smiles at her again. There’s mischief in it and Sansa adores it. It makes her smile, too, despite herself.

“And I like that you know how to properly curse now. You just keep getting better.”

“Did you come here to flatter and seduce me?” she asks, and her voice sounds a little more wistful and a little less amused than she planned; Sansa reminds herself of who they are, and where they are. But when every other man does that, Sansa can only see a threat, a danger. And Tyrion is not like that.

She can indulge in it. Just a little.

“Yes, I did,” he replies, shamelessly.

It makes her laugh.

“But also. Jaime and Ellaria have finished sieging King’s Landing; so unless they kill each other at the gates, which is a very serious possibility knowing my brother, we’re safe to leave.”

Sansa nods, closes her eyes. Home. Finally, finally, they’ll go home.

“We leave tomorrow, then,” she says. She doesn’t want to wait another day.

“Sansa,” Tyrion murmurs.

Sansa opens her eyes. “Yes?”

(She realizes they never let go of each other’s hand. She doesn’t want him to let go.)

“I’m sure you don’t need anyone telling you that, let alone me, but what you’ve been doing since you first landed your feet on the shores of Dragonstone is nothing short of a miracle, and I am in awe of you.”

Sansa slips her hand out of his only to touch his bearded cheek. His face is so familiar.

“I cannot fail at this,” she says, and wonders if he’s heard what she can’t bring herself to confess: I’m afraid of failing.

He shakes his head, presses his hand against her face, “I know.”

And she’s so glad that, for once, he’s not trying to advise her or play a game. She’s so glad that he is just here. He stares at her for a long time before he finally says, “What do you need? Tell me what you need.”

I think my aunt Lyanna might have started a war, she thinks, I think her love for Rhaegar and Robert’s love for her, and Robb’s love for his wife, messed everything up. And I am not going to die. I am not going to start a war for love. I am going to protect the North, and save us from Cersei, because this is what I must do. But you’re here, and you—

“Stay here with me a while,” she whispers, a secret meant for his ears alone. He kisses her hand again, nodding, and stays.

iii.

Tyrion is falling in love with Sansa Stark. He’s considering he might have been for a while.

He knows it every morning, as they rise before the dawn to go back to the road. He knows it as he watches her giving orders to keep riding after the night has already fallen as if she was born to rule. He knows it while he stares at her from the distance talking with Samwell while they drink their watered-down soup.

She’s growing thinner and maybe because of that, all the dresses that once belonged to Margaery Tyrell are fitting her well, and that does not really help Tyrion. Bronn gets progressively more annoyed at his pining over the young lady, “Old gods and new, Tyrion, just tell her already.”

“Why would I do that?” Tyrion says at night, sleeplessly turning around, lying on his belly and pushing the furs up to his chin. It’s colder with each passing night; he never thought he’d crave to be in Dragonstone again, but anywhere would be better than the open road now. Anywhere.

“I can’t make this kind of decision without speaking to Daenerys first.” And the gods only know when he’ll see Dany again.

“I’m not telling you to marry her!” Bronn argues, “I’m telling you to fuck her and give her some good time, as people do! Gods above.”

“Bronn,” Tyrion warns. “She’s a high-born lady, and already suffered enough.”

“I wasn’t implying you’d make her suffer. Unless she likes—”

“Bronn,” he repeats, “Why don’t you just go to sleep?”

Bronn curses under his breath but eventually falls asleep, unlike Tyrion.

They eventually arrive at Dragonstone; Tyrion immediately goes to Missandei, the castellan in their absence, but Sansa doesn’t wait a minute until she goes to the northmen, who had spent all those weeks working on the mines of dragonglass. Samwell and Jorah are given a meal, chambers, and a bath.

After the night has fallen over the isle, Tyrion and Missandei go to the Council Room, staring at the table map of Westeros and planning the next steps. They’re supposed to wait for news of their Queen and wait for her arrival so they would sail together for the North. At the very least meet her at the Neck and go on together from there. But she has not sent any word, and the more they wait, the shorter the days grow. Tyrion shares his concern that something must have gone wrong in Dorne; he doesn’t mention that his worry was prompted by Sansa though.

But whatever they were to decide, if to keep waiting or to take sail, the decision is eventually made for him when the Lady of Winterfell receives a raven and seeks for him in the next morning. She asks for a private meeting and he takes her to the cliffs looming over the gray seas; the cold wind makes him shudder, but it isolates their voices, carries them far away from the castle. Sansa hands him the small parchment, wrapping herself tighter in her own cloak.

To Lady Sansa Stark of Winterfell,

The mockingbird has poisoned the small falcon. The falcon might survive, but my lady is urgently summoned to preside over the upcoming trial.

Come to us as soon as possible.

Lord Yohn Royce

Tyrion looks at the small parchment and hands it back to her. “Does that mean what I think it means?”

“That Baelish tried to poison my cousin Robyn?” She says. “Yes, it does.”

“What do you think?”

She’s staring at the sea below them.

“You should come with me,” she says, “This is no ordinary trial, and it could be good for Daenerys’ campaign to be represented by her Hand. Petyr didn’t talk about it much, but I am certain he had some sort of agreement with Cersei, if not an alliance. It’s a good opportunity to present your Queen as a viable alternative to the Realms and to root out an enemy to the Vale who is also Cersei’s ally.”

He frowns at her. “Do you plan to condemn him?”

Without knowing the facts and evidence beforehand, it could easily turn into a trick; he’s suffered enough in Petyr’s hand to know better than to act impulsively. Besides, he’s wary of leaving without his Targaryen Queen.

Sansa blinks once, twice. “Absolutely. We can’t let him escape.”

Tyrion licks his lower lip. “I thought you and him—”

He finds out he can’t quite finish that sentence, I thought you were allies, not with the hard stare upon him from the Lady of Winterfell, so he gives it up, “We don’t know what happened yet.”

“I don’t particularly care,” Sansa says, unrelenting; her coldness scares and arouses him, at once, “He’s guilty.”

“As charged?”

“It appears we’ll have to verify with our own eyes, after all; why are you defending him?”

Sansa narrows her eyes, just a half-inch, and it’s enough to almost drive him into the place of a green boy being chastised by a Maester, except that he’s never had such a strikingly beautiful Maester in his life.

“I’d be the last person in Westeros to defend Littlefinger,” Tyrion hurries to explain., “It would give me great pleasure to see him dead. I’m trying to be cautious, because I don’t understand the tone of this letter. Is there any chance that we’re being trapped?”

“I don’t think so,” Sansa frowns her lips, as her mother used to. “Lord Royce is—” she tilts her head. “—very protective of me.”

Tyrion ponders that sentence carefully.

“You mean loyal to you,” he returns, thinking of a web of loyalties spread through the realms, all tied to this woman in front of him, everyone slowly being wrapped about her like a cloak of protection. The North, the Vale, Highgarden—

Sansa rolls her eyes, “You always get caught in semantics, but yes. We could phrase it like that.”

He’s the Hand of the Queen, can’t just shut this part of him out, and as if she’s reading his mind: “By taking you with me, I’m trying to build bridges, Tyrion. I’m not your enemy here.”

He bites his own cheek. “I don’t think you are. Is this handwriting truly from Lord Royce?”

“From the best of my memory, yes.” Sansa sighs deeply. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

Tyrion narrows his eyes, “I thought it was a short note, with barely any information about the current situation of the Vale, and it makes me think he’s hiding something. If the Protector of the Vale is to face an upcoming trial, that means he's under arrest. If little Lord Robyn might survive, it means he’s still in fragile health and unlikely to hold his seat. If the Protector is under arrest, and the actual heir to the Vale is ill, who is in charge? And why was this note sent to you as a personal exchange between you and a counselor and not an official summoning in the name of… whoever is ruling at the moment?”

“I’d say because Lord Royce knows that, among the lords and ladies and kin presiding over the Vale, he is the only man I trust. But again, it appears we’ll have to go and assess the situation by ourselves.” She takes a step closer to him. “Why are you being so paranoid?”

He points to the parchment in her hand, “The heir to the Vale was poisoned. If that’s false, we are most certainly falling into a trap. And if that’s true I think we should be a little paranoid; we don’t truly know who did it or why, and the answer to these questions could tell us something about us being in danger of going there,” he changes his weight from one foot to the other. “Particularly you being in danger.”

“The letter already says who did it,” Sansa emphasizes, as if she’s out of patience with his excess of caution.

“Even if we assume that’s correct, we don’t know why,” Tyrion retorts.

“Because that’s his method!” Sansa’s voice raises an octave. “He thrives on chaos.”

“Chaos is not a method, my lady.”

“Oh, but it is. You wouldn’t believe it,” Sansa sighs, but her eyes grow softer. “I understand the logic behind assuming the worst and going from there, but you need to stop trying to protect me.”

“I can’t,” he says, simply, because it’s true.

Sansa places a hand on his shoulder. “I’m going,” she says. It’s an announcement, and not a request. “And if you’re so invested in protecting me, perhaps you should follow me.”

iv.

(Naturally, Tyrion follows her.)

v.

Tyrion writes a letter to Daenerys and leaves it in Missandei’s hand before he departs with Lady Sansa Stark of Winterfell, Brienne of Tarth, Bronn and a crew of Ironborn, Theon Greyjoy in command. If his Queen is to meet them in the Vale or at the Neck, that’s her decision, he just asks for her to let him know. Their ship leaves Dragonstone, heading to dock on Gulltown, where the Ironborn are supposed to wait as he and Sansa travel to the Eyrie by land. Sansa has a mind to be quick about it. She wants to depart to White Harbor as soon as Petyr is… Handled.

It’s a quick trip to Gulltown. And Tyrion Lannister, Hand of the Queen, is watching Sansa Stark talking to Theon Greyjoy, their captain, as the night falls over the quiet sea. He’s watching the way she laughs easily around the Greyjoy boy, how she comfortably settles her palm over his hand. Theon, too, looks a little more like the boy Tyrion met years ago at Winterfell. Moonkissed, they look like something out of a song. And the Hand convinces himself that the reason he’s watching is because he’s measuring how much of that closeness is a threat to Daenerys. Asha is the head of their House; but Theon is still a man. If Theon had to choose between Asha and Sansa, between Stark and Greyjoy, between Winterfell and Pyke, who would he pick? Tyrion imagines a silver thread coming out of Sansa’s pale hands, circling, too, the Iron Islands.

He’s not jealous, though. He really is not.

It’s only after Theon leaves to do whatever captains do that he approaches Sansa as she lingers over the rails, wrapped in three layers of cloaks. It’s dreadfully cold here, and the world feels open and vast and dark, but the seas are calm and the wavering of the waters is a lulling sound.

He can’t help himself. “That boy is in love with you,” Tyrion says, as he rests against the rails, his back to the sea, facing Sansa.

She’s not surprised to see him, as if she’d sensed his presence in the darkness. “Like Dickon Tarly was?” She asks, mockingly.

“Exactly,” he confirms, and when she laughs, he reiterates: “Sansa? Exactly.”

“You think everyone is in love with me? That’s ridiculous.”

He frowns. “No, it isn’t.”

Her gaze upon him softens.

“That’s sweet,” she says. “Theon and I share history. We’re not in love. He is the only piece of family I’ve got in this ship.”

“Of course,” Tyrion says, not convinced, with a nod. When Sansa narrows her eyes, he feels compelled to add: “it’s none of my concern! Of course.”

“There’s nothing flattering about your jealousy, my lord,” she comments with a smile.

“No?” He wonders. “Why are you smiling, then?”

Sansa chuckles again. In the moonlight, she’s a pale statue and he is a shadow. She takes off her gloves, and then reaches out to hold his hand, removing his gloves too. Her fingers slip into his, then, and Tyrion can’t help but sigh. They had a little more privacy in Highgarden; since they’ve left, through all the days on the road and in Dragonstone, the closeness between them had diminished, somewhat. They were a Hand and a Lady, but not much more than that. Which makes Tyrion wonder about what, exactly, were they now.

“If we’re going to play a game, let me know,” he says, with a strain to his voice that he didn’t really plan. But he doesn’t let go of her bare hand because it feels warm and the wind is unkind. “I’ll fetch that wine.”

“No games,” Sansa says, tenderly. When he glares at her, she widens her eyes innocently. “What? Why can you flirt with me all the time and I can’t flirt with you?”

“Because I’m me,” he answers, matter-of-factly. “That’s what I do.” That’s not what Sansa does. At this point, if she really wanted to seduce people, Daenerys wouldn’t stand a chance.

“You flirt with pretty women,” Sansa says, as if it’s a very solemn statement.

He feels some specification is in order. “I flirt with strong, clever, lonely, beautiful women, working to patch up a broken country.”

“And yet you’re not in love with your Queen,” Sansa adds, quickly.

“And yet you say there's no game being played here,” he retorts.

Her face falls for a second. “I’m not-” a sigh; a gentle squeeze around his fingers. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

It’s like she can’t help but push. She reminds him of Dany in that regard. And that’s not a compliment to her at all. “What do you want me to do?” He asks, too tired to keep going with this… not-game. “To... choose?”

“I’m not asking for you to do anything for me,” Sansa says, emphatically.

“Then what are you doing?” He asks, frustration taking the best off of him.

“I’m trying to talk.”

“That is not what you’re trying to do,” he says, too aware of the smooth texture of her hand, still tangled in his this whole time. “You’re either trying to kiss me or fight me.”

She raises her chin. “Which one would you prefer?”

“Both,” he answers, without hesitation. “Go ahead.”

“Neither. I really want to talk.” Her body leans closer, and Tyrion turns to his side, so they’re facing each other. He doubts that, from an outside observer, the pair of them could be described as something out of a song; in the songs the ladies didn’t choose the monsters. Except for that one with the Bear, which is weird and a satire. “I care about you,” Sansa says, bringing him back from his reverie. “I do.”

That sounds incomplete, not enough somehow, so he provides: “But?”

Sansa lets out a sigh.

“But you are not the only one who has choices to make,” she explains, tiredly. “We are on opposite sides of a War that is far from over.”

He bitterly smirks. “Doesn’t that sound familiar, Lady Stark?”

“We can’t,” she says; then, after a moment of consideration, “we shouldn’t. Not now. Not until the War is over.”

“We’re not on opposite sides,” he argues, and doesn’t stop to think what, exactly, he is arguing for. “We’re going North together. We’ll face whatever waits for us beyond the Wall together.”

“And then?” She pushes.

“Then?” He mocks. “You’re that optimistic?”

“I’m preparing for every possible outcome to better advise my King, and our survival is one of them,” she replies, sharply. “You’re doing the same for Daenerys. Don’t act like it’s not true.”

Well. She’s right. And he has to stop underestimating her.

“Then we’ll defeat my sister together,” he says, smoothly. “Isn’t that the plan?”

“And then?” She insists.

There she is. Pushing again, harder and harder until he bends or breaks.

Tyrion exhales, letting his head fall back, the muscles of his neck suddenly tense.

“Then, you’ll advise your brother to keep his crown and not bend the knee,” he says, straight to the point.

“I will,” Sansa confirms. He thinks it would be smarter of her to lie about this, but she is really the worst liar. “Does that bother you?” She asks.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m tired of War.”

“If a free North equals War for your Queen then perhaps she’s not the leader you think she is.”

Oh, that enrages him. He’s so tired of being in this place. It’s not that he’s tired of defending Dany - he’s not sure she will need it, if she wins the Throne for right of conquest - but he is tired of justifying himself for choosing her.

And yet here he is. About to explain himself.

“Sansa,” Tyrion begins. “She has dragons. She has the name, the blood, the armies, and she’s a just woman who cares about her people and who cares about the North. She’s not going to destroy your people.”

“She won’t, not unless…” Sansa trails off.

Her hand slips off of his, and that is, perhaps, the most upsetting of all.

“You’re being unreasonably stubborn about this,” he says, not quite managing to keep his voice steady. “Do you understand our choices are Daenerys or Cersei?”

Rage has touched her eyes, too. “I can see why you would think my stance is unreasonable but not yours. By Cersei’s side or Daenerys’, you’re still a Lannister, after all.”

That hits him harder than a slap. “Hey.”

“I'm as invested in putting Daenerys on the Iron Throne as you are. We can be an ally to the southern crown if Daenerys is the one ruling. We cannot be an ally to Cersei. It is that simple, Tyrion, but my people will be servant to none of them, never again. Your Queen could choose to be a friend, and not another foe to us. I carry the scars of the freedom of the North in my body,” she says through clenched teeth. For a moment, under the moon, he is distracted by how absolutely divine she looks while furious; her anger is such a pure, unadulterated feeling. “I carry them in Robb’s name, for every battle he’s lost, for those who betrayed him. You do not get to tell me I’m unreasonable.”

Tyrion keeps his silence for a moment, letting her words settle.

“I just want to keep you alive and safe,” he murmurs, when the silence has stretched long enough. “How can’t you see that?”

“I don’t want to be alive or safe! That’s mere survival, and I’m tired of surviving! I want to be free. But that’s something you can’t even begin to fathom.” She throws her hands in the air, exasperated. “See? This is why this is never going to work,” she says, pointing to the space between them as if it were a real, distinct thing.

Despite everything, he smiles.

“That’s why this wouldn’t work?”

She sighs. “Yes, Tyrion.”

“Not because, let’s say, you would rather be with Dickon Tarly, for instance?”

She rolls her eyes. “What is your problem with Dickon Tarly?”

Tyrion rests his back against the rails again, crossing his arms over his chest. “I think he had every chance to woo you and he wasted every single one of them,” he says. “So, so stupid. Unbelievable.”

“He’s not really the brightest,” she admits, twisting her nose a little.

“If I could have his height and his looks but could keep my brain, you and I would already be happily married and settled in Highgarden by now,” he tells her, sincerely. “I wouldn’t waste a single day.”

Sansa crosses her arms, too. “You’re so confident,” she mutters. “I don’t know if I love or hate that.”

“Confident?” He laughs. “I’m confessing I’d like to switch my whole body with another man just to have a chance with you.”

“The fact that you can’t see that I’d choose you any day over him, regardless of your height or his, makes me really question your allegedly cleverness, my lord,” she quips. “You don’t need another body.” Her head tilts one inch, “perhaps you do need another brain.”

“You keep saying that I’m stupid and I keep finding it adorable,” he comments casually.

Her voice suddenly gets shy, a rare event. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs. “You’re not stupid. I could never fall in love with a stupid man.”

Oh, Tyrion thinks. He’s not getting more than that, he knows he’s not. He reaches out, taking her hand again.

“Ask me to wait for you and I’ll wait,” he says, earnestly. “Until we get North and my Queen speaks to your King. Until we defeat the Army of the Dead. Until Cersei is gone. Until we find a solution.” He looks her in the eye as best as he can in the dark, “ask me to wait, Sansa.”

She lets go of his hand to place her warm palm on his cheek.

“I can’t do that,” she murmurs. “We don’t have any idea what victory or peace or survival is going to cost us. We’re going to hurt each other.”

“We’re hurt either way. What is the worst that could happen?” He is almost begging now. “I can’t… I can’t avoid hoping, Sansa.” He can’t, not when she’s confessed what she just confessed. Those words were a feast to a starving man.

“Don’t wait for me,” she says, also begging. “Don’t get your hopes up. There’s time for dreaming, just not now. This is going to get in the way.” Her eyes wander away. “If you’re going to think in Daenerys’ best interest, then you need a clear head. If I’m going to protect the North, I need- I can’t-” She sighs. “This is bigger than us, Tyrion. We're not like that. We're not lovers starting a War. That's not who we are. We do... We do as we must, and not as we'd like to.”

Tyrion nods, closing his eyes for a moment, trying not to lean his cheek into her touch.

“No hope, no dreams,” he agrees, voice toneless, dead. “I promise.”

She chuckles under her breath, but it’s a joyless sound. “Do you think I’m horrible?”

“I think you’re wonderful,” he confesses. “If I am not to wait for you and if I’m not to hope or dream, what is left for us?”

Her hand drops from his face to his shoulders. “We are friends, and still partially allies,” she says. “We’re still here. We’ve got today.”

Today. Not tomorrows or futures. Not dreams or hopes. Just right now.

“If I kiss you today, does that break the rules?” Tyrion wonders.

“It does,” Sansa chortles. “A kiss is a sort of promise.”

Oh, she’s so young. Sometimes he forgets.

He wraps both his arms around her waist, raising his head to face her. “And this?”

She smiles down at him, pulling him a little closer and resting her chin over his head as she closes her arms around his shoulders. “I think I can handle this,” she murmurs, and so he rests in her embrace. Just today. Just for now.

vi.

It’s a two-day trip from Gulltown to the Eyrie, but the climbing is the worst part. It leaves Tyrion in the sourest of the moods, and the sight of the castle does nothing to sweeten it. The Eyrie is high enough that it’s snowing when they get there; his limbs ache like he’s just been beaten bloody. As they cross the narrow causeway in a single line and take sight of the holdseat of House Arryn, Tyrion bristles, and when they finally reach the gates and are able to dismount from their horses and stand side by side, Bronn gets almost excited at Tyrion’s left. “I have fond memories of this place.”

“I have not,” Tyrion replies, darkly. The weather is too cold for his tastes. He remembers the sky cells and trembles all over; he has nightmares about them to this day, “Gods, coming here was a mistake.”

Sansa chuckles at his left and reaches out for his shoulder, squeezing it friendly. “You’ll be fine.”

“No one ever tried to throw you through the Moon Door, I see,” he mutters.

“My aunt tried, actually,” Sansa replies, as if it weren’t a big deal, “But Lord Baelish stopped her.”

Bronn and Tyrion stare at her, but Sansa is just staring up at the castle, the hood of her cloak falling against her back and exposing her red hair, bright beneath the high morning sun and now braided in northern fashion again. Brienne just tries to hide her smile. Apparently, she was acquainted with the tale.

“What is it with everyone, even your families, trying to have you murdered repeatedly?” Bronn asks.

Sansa looks at Tyrion, then. There’s a terrible and deep sympathy in her eyes, and Tyrion thinks that this is the source of all their bond, the mere fact that they bleed the same. They only look at Bronn and shrug.

Then the gates open before them.

vii.

The man sitting on the weirwood throne of the High Hall is not Lord Robyn Arryn.

He reminds Tyrion, in a vague way, of Dickon Tarly: tall, handsome, sandy hair and eyes almost as blue as Sansa’s. He’s strong, muscles hard beneath his fine clothes, probably a knight if Tyrion would guess. He’s not dressed in armor, though; his clothes are white and celeste-blue, a silver, shining falcon pinning his cloak together in front of his neck. By his side, Tyrion sees an old man in similarly fine clothes. Lord Yohn Royce, he thinks.

In front of them, at the foot of the high dais, stand two knights in armor so polished Tyrion can see their own distorted reflection. The High Hall feels small, like the blue-veined marble walls are closing around them.

“Lady Sansa Stark of Winterfell,” the young one rises, and there are dimples in his cheeks when he smiles. He looks at the party joining the lady, “The Eyrie welcomes you. And your friends?”

Tyrion subtly looks at Sansa and sees suspicion in her eyes, but her voice does not denounce her mistrust.

She dutifully bows down her head.

“I don’t think we’ve met before, my lord,” she says, “This is Lord Tyrion Lannister, Hand of Daenerys Targaryen, rightful heir to the Iron Throne,” she points to her right, “That is Ser Bronn of Blackwater and this is Brienne of Tarth, my sworn-shield and friend. The rest of our men are waiting at the Gates of the Moon.”

“It’s good to see you again, my lady,” Lord Royce says, rising to his feet and climbing down the dais.

Sansa smiles at him, lifting her head as she gives him her hand. He kisses it reverently, “That is Ser Harrold Hardyng—”

“—Heir to the Vale,” the young man says, still smiling, climbing down the steps of the dais and circling the closed Moon Door until he’s standing in front of them. He doesn’t wait for Sansa to give him her hand; he just takes it, kissing her gloved knuckles, “Call me Harry, my lady.”

Sansa’s gaze snaps to Lord Royce, almost in panic, “Is my cousin dead?”

“No,” he says, soothingly. “But he’s gravely ill, my lady, and stuck to his bed. The Maesters are taking care of him. Ser Harry is Jon Arryn’s heir in the case lord Robyn dies, and with Baelish imprisoned—”

Harrold Hardying’s handsome face twists in a grimace, but even that can’t make him ugly.

“That is a most unpleasant conversation,” Harry says, “But since it must happen, the Crescent Chamber is a fitter place. You must be tired and cold,” he says, regarding Tyrion with rehearsed concern, then Brienne, then Bronn.

Who died and made this man our host?

“Let me provide you some warmth and wine. Follow me.”

viii.

The Crescent Chamber is, indeed, a fitter place. There are armchairs and settees for all of them, and only one hearth, but the room is so small that the heat easily spreads through it. They are served wine and cheese, and Tyrion sits on the settee close to the fire. Sansa chooses to sit by his side. Her nearness is a comfort in a place that feels hostile to him, despite their host’s pleasing welcoming, and he doesn’t know if she’s trying to calm him or herself. Brienne stands behind them; Bronn sits in one of the armchairs, Lord Royce occupies the other one, across them. Ser Harry chooses to remain standing close to the hearth, his elbow bracing on the mantel shelf. He wears a mask of worry as easily as he did one of ease.

After the door is closed, Sansa considers Lord Royce first. “You tell me Lord Baelish is still in the sky cells. He hasn’t been executed yet?” she looks at Harry, then. “Why not?”

The men, young and old, share a queer look. Harry is the one who answers the lady. “He has requested your presence, my lady. He told us he came to the Vale in your service, that you are lord Robyn’s closest relative, and that this misunderstanding would be fixed upon your arrival.”

“This misunderstanding?” She inquires, gazing at both men. Her eyes eventually settle on Lord Royce, apparently her preferred source of information at the moment, “What happened, exactly?”

“Lord Robyn fell ill, two weeks ago. His stomach and bowels were assaulted by a disease that the Maesters identified as the effects of a poison called Tears of Lys,” Lord Yohn says, “They gave him an expungement, trying to spare his life. We searched in the castle and found a small vial of the poison in the possession of the cook that served his food every night. But she claims that she didn’t know the substance was, indeed, Tears of Lys. She thought it was Sweetsleep, to help Lord Robyn fall asleep, and claims that the vial was given to her by Lord Petyr Baelish, as were the instructions to pour it onto his food.”

“A most absurd accusation, of course,” Harry interjects, “Many other cooks and maids witnessed the same cook speaking nasty words about Lord Robyn when he was a child, calling him an aberration and wishing his death behind his back. The woman hates our Lord since he was only an innocent boy.”

Well, so has Tyrion, but he keeps the thought to himself.

“Lord Royce thought it safer to have Lord Baelish arrested, too, until we decided what to do; I respected his advice, so I had it done. But to imprison the Lord Protector of the Vale upon the word of a mere cook is outrageous. Lord Baelish would never poison Lord Robyn.”

“He absolutely would poison Lord Robyn,” Tyrion says, without thinking.

He knows this is Sansa’s arena, and not his, but he’s trying to decide if the man before him is naive, stupid, or outright an assassin siding with Lord Baelish wishing the death of Robyn Arryn, “Littlefinger would poison the whole world to get what he wants.”

Harry stares at him, his mask of gentleness slowly slipping away. His deep blue eyes catch the badge of Hand over Tyrion’s chest, and then he looks the dwarf in the eye, “And who are you to say that?”

“Someone who clearly knows him better than you,” Tyrion puts his cup down, “Where did you meet Lord Baelish, exactly, my lord?”

Harry shifts, uncomfortable, crossing his very big, muscled arms over his chest, “Lord Baelish has found me, remembered Jon Arryn’s vows to me and my family. I owe him at least my loyalty.”

“Lord Royce has always been fiercely loyal to House Arryn,” Tyrion opposes, “He wouldn’t forget Jon Arryn’s own inheritance. He would have found you anyway. What did Petyr promise you?”

“Your hand in marriage, Lady Sansa,” Lord Royce answers. His brown eyes are hard upon Harry. “Petyr had a mind to marry you two, to strengthen the alliance between the North and the Vale.”

Sansa’s gaze is pure fire while she looks at Ser Harry, but her voice remains calm, “Tully blood runs through both my veins and Robyn’s,” she says, “Blood is the strongest of the alliances. We have no need for another.”

Not exactly the strongest, Tyrion thinks, but it’s really not the moment.

Anyway, Ser Bronn makes sure to leave the situation as clear as possible, “If the boy is dead, then yes, you need another.”

A silence too long falls over the chamber, but Harry eventually shakes his head, almost in disbelief. So, Tyrion thinks, a convenient blend of naivety, stupidity and a will to see Robyn dead.

“Ser Harry,” Sansa’s voice is still very calm, very cold, and it makes a chill run through Tyrion’s arms, “I was not aware of that betrothal and I do not concur with it. You must know that the last time Lord Baelish arranged a marriage for me, I fed the husband he gave me to his own hounds.”

A rush of blood, singing with pride and desire, hums beneath Tyrion’s skin at the sheer terror in Harrold’s eyes. “I’ve heard, my lady,” he says, suddenly very sweet. “Believe me, I’d never dare to assume the alliance was sealed without your full consent. And I’d never hurt you like the Bolton bastard did,” he completes in the smallest of the voices. “But Lord Baelish meant well for both our Kingdoms. He thought—”

“My cousin still lives. The Vale is not yours to claim yet.”

She rises to her feet and walks to the window. Outside, the snow falls upon the white towers claustrophobically surrounding the main Keep of the Eyrie. If she would open the windows and reach out, Tyrion feels her fingers would touch the clouds.

“I agree with Lord Royce. It is conspicuous to me that Lord Baelish has cause to wish Robyn dead. Besides, he is familiar with Tears of Lys,” She turns around, her form in the shadows as she faces them, “He gave it to my aunt Lysa so she would poison Jon Arryn, at his orders.”

Tyrion is caught by a stunned horror, and so is everyone else at the weight of the confession.

No one dares to speak. Sansa breathes in, and clasps her hands together in a way Tyrion has come to recognize as nervousness, “He also threw her through the Moon Door. She never jumped. He killed her. I saw with my own eyes,” she continues, looking directly into Lord Royce’s eyes. “I lied to you. I shouldn’t have, and I am sorry,” she raises her chin, just one inch, “I believe Lord Baelish is counting on the fact I am complicit in his crimes to have me standing by his side, freeing him from his sentence, but I can’t let my own guilt get in the way of justice.”

“My lady,” Lord Yohn Royce gets up, walking toward Sansa in careful steps and grabbing her hands. “You are not complicit in any crime. You were his victim, like Lady Lysa was,” he says, “You were just a scared child.”

Sansa looks at him with immense relief, but Harry shakes his head, still in denial, “There’s no proof he did any of that. We can’t submit him to a trial without evidence.”

Sansa glares at him, and Tyrion cannot believe the man’s stupidity, “He confessed these crimes to me. I was witness to one of them,” she says, “Is the word of a Stark worth nothing?”

“Fear not, my lady; your word is more than enough,” Lord Royce says, “He will face trial for his deeds. Ser Harry himself will hold it, in Robyn’s name,” he completes. It sounds more like an order than anything else.

Sansa shakes her head, “Absolutely not. Lord Robyn is my own kin. Petyr is mine; I insist.” When Lord Royce lets go of her hands, she walks to the settee again, and Tyrion hands her the cup of wine she’d been drinking. She takes a small sip, “We have much to discuss yet, about the Winter and Cersei, but first, let’s just handle him.”

“And the cook?” Lord Royce asks.

“Honestly, she’s just a maidservant, and not even one of the good ones,” Harry mutters, “We should have executed her already.”

“No,” Lord Royce says, already past the limits of his patience, “If Lord Baelish is waiting for a trial, she deserves one, too.”

“She’s a nobody,” Harry replies, “I’ve never seen a maidservant be submitted to a trial. Kill her or let her go; can she even speak? I don’t understand a word of what she says.”

“You did well, Lord Royce,” Sansa says over the rim of her cup. “I’d like to speak with her.”

ix.

The cook is a simple, young woman with blond hair and brown eyes named Edda. She must be no older than Margaery was when she died, Sansa thinks, which means she must have been no older than Sansa was when her father died at the time she said the nasty comments about Robyn. Sansa had her share of nasty comments during her youth herself.

Edda’s wearing nothing but a gown and a dirty cloak covering her body when she is brought to Sansa’s solar by two guards, chains around her wrists and feet. Tyrion had opposed her decision of talking to the woman in the sky cells, saying it was dangerous, that the floor ended abruptly where the sky began and that there was a slope to the floor and she would fall and die. His eyes had been almost mad while he contended with her, and it broke Sansa’s heart that he had to spend even one single night in such a terrible place. She kindly requested of Lord Royce to bring the accused woman to her instead.

The same madness she saw earlier in Tyrion’s eyes was fuller in hers. The woman stands in the middle of her solar, at the center of the round carpet covering the ground, and Sansa stands just outside the carpet. Somehow it already feels like a trial.

“Edda,” Sansa says, “Do you know who I am?”

Her body trembles all over. She looks so scared that Sansa pities her, “Sansa Stark of Winterfell.”

Sansa smiles, trying to be soothing, “Very good. You see, Edda, word was sent to me about what happened with my cousin Robyn,” she begins, tilting her head as she examines the woman, head to toes, and crosses her arms. “And it upset me very, very much. Lord Royce thought I should see that the situation is appropriately handled.”

It is enough for the woman to start speaking, babbling actually, the words all over each other in a furious flow of desperate pleading, “M’lady, you must believe me. He told me it was only Sweetsleep. To help Lord Robyn sleep without pain. He always feels pain at night. I didn’t know it was poison. I thought it was just medicine. I swear on mine life.”

“For how long have you poisoned his food?” Sansa asks.

“Lord Petyr told me to put only three drops in his plate every night,” she says. “I did for one week and then he got sick.”

“Even it if were only Sweetsleep,” Sansa says, “the substance does not leave the body and it can accumulate overtime. Three drops every night would eventually kill him, too,” Sansa says, though it would take much longer. Petyr was in a hurry. “Besides, as the name suggests, Sweetsleep leaves a honeyed taste in the food, while Tears of Lys does not. Has my cousin made any complaint about it?”

The distant madness in Edda’s eyes is replaced by a very solid misery.

“No. I didn’t know that,” she mumbles. “I don’t know anything about poisons, milady. Please, please, believe in me,” she whines.

She’s going to start crying soon, Sansa thinks.

“There are rumors you said you could kill Lord Robyn yourself,” Sansa says delicately, “That he was an aberration. A freak.”

Panic in her gaze, again, this time wild with guilt.

“No,” Edda shakes her head, her whole body shakes, making the chains clash against each other, “No, I didn’t—”

“You never said those words?” Sansa curls her right eyebrow. “Do not lie to me, Edda.”

The girl starts crying, at last. Sansa lets her.

“He was a hard boy to look after... Always hurt us, maids and cooks, and always said mean words. But I never planned to kill him, milady,” she sobs, “have mercy, milady, I beg of you. I just thought it was Sweetsleep. I swear. I swear by the blood of mine mother. I swear by the old gods and new. I am no killer.”

Sansa sighs.

She knows a liar when she sees one.

That cook is no liar.

She’s a pawn, as Sansa had once been, but much more defenseless.

“I know,” she says to the hopeless woman before her. “I actually hit him on the face when we were children. Robyn, I mean. He was truly a terrible boy.”

Edda looks at Sansa in complete shock and disbelief, taking both of her chained hands to her face, to clean the tears away, confused.

“I believe you,” Sansa says, for clarity’s sake.

“Do you?” Edda rushes forward and falls to her knees before Sansa, trying to embrace her feet. The chains don’t let her, so she only buries her face on the ground, her hair falling all around her, hiding her from sight and making the words hard to listen to, “Oh, milady, may the gods bless your womb. You’re good and kind. You’re not hard as they say.”

“Do they say that?” Sansa has to chuckle; she gently touches the girl’s shoulders, “Rise, Edda.”

The cook does, and once she’s standing, Sansa makes sure to look her in the eye. She remembers how her father used to speak with people, with a grave voice, but soothing, too, and always staring them in the eye, “Lord Baelish makes us feel guilty about things we never did. I’ll ask you one more thing. Has Ser Harry ever touched you?”

The easiness that had just settled on the woman’s face soon disappears, though she tries her best to keep her smile dutifully in place.

“Milady,” she says, demurely, her voice shaking, “I am not supposed to speak of such things.”

“You’re safe here,” Sansa says with a convincing nod. “It’s just you and me.”

“He’s the Heir, milady,” she casts down her pretty brown eyes. “Any woman would be lucky to have him. I should consider myself fortunate that he has noticed me. I am just a servant.”

“Was that what he told you?” Sansa asks, feeling sad, and angry, and sad once more. Her silence lasts two seconds too long as she searches for more explanations.

“I understand,” Sansa says, trying to smile, failing, “Say no more.”

She walks to the door, unboltening it. A guard stands dutifully outside, in the empty corridor.

“Release her from her chains,” Sansa says, “She’ll also need a bath and proper clothes before she can come back to the kitchens.”

“My lady,” the man frowns, “Lord Royce—”

“— gave me leave to handle her case,” Sansa replies, “Release her.”

x.

When they bring Petyr from the sky cells, the sun is almost setting outside; the days are, indeed, getting shorter astonishingly fast.

Sansa sits at the white throne carved from weirwood, at the highest place of the dais of the High Hall. Even the light-blue of Margaery’s dress is not enough to make her look anything other than her mother, Catelyn Stark, years ago standing almost at the same spot and accusing Tyrion of murdering Bran.

Sansa adapted the fine gown to a modest cut that covered her body to the neck and wrists, her auburn hair falls in a single braid across her back, and her dark Stark cloak about her shoulders protects her more than any marriage cloak has ever done.

As the heir to the Vale, Harrold Hardyng stands at her right; as Hand of the Queen, Tyrion stands at her left. Lord Royce stands by Harry’s side. The rest of the lords and ladies of the Vale, with Bronn and Brienne, stand against the walls of the Hall, cramped and curious, grousing and murmuring. The Moon Door is open at their feet, and the furious winter winds are loud in their ears. Petyr is brought in manacles around his wrists, but not his feet, and so he walks elegantly into the High Hall. His spine is erect and he is scowling as he looks at the hands grabbing both of his arms at each side.

He stares at Sansa, then.

“My lady,” he says, smoothly, sparing Tyrion the quickest of glances, “I’m glad you’re here, so we can elucidate this whole confusion. Could you be so kind as to, please release me?”

Sansa looks at the two guards and nods. They take a key out of their breast pocket, releasing Petyr from the iron grip of his shackles, and the man shifts his wrists with a satisfied sigh.

“At last,” he says, and just as he’s starting to smirk, “now, my lady, if—”

Sansa raises her hand. “Lord Baelish,” she says. “This is your trial. I hold this court in the name of Robyn Arryn, rightful heir to the Eyrie and the Vale. You stand accused of the attempt to murder him.”

Petyr looks at her, then at Harry, then at her again. His mask is perfectly, distinctively confused, “Robyn Arryn is, and has always been, a boy of poor health. I have no part in his current sickness, just as I have no control over the previous ones that plagued him during the entirety of the short years of his life.”

“My cousin has been poisoned with Tears of Lys,” Sansa proceeds, as if she hasn’t heard a single word of what he’s saying. Tyrion listens to the brittleness in her voice, the barely contained edge of anger. But Sansa is a daughter of winter, and the burn in her voice is one of ice, “It’s a poison you would know well, my lord, for you instructed my aunt, Lysa Arryn, to pour it onto her husband’s drink, by her own confession to me. Therefore, you also stand accused of the murder of Jon Arryn.”

“Sansa,” he says, trying to take a step ahead. The guards by his sides advance to catch his arms and he freezes in his spot, raising his hands conciliatorily, “Your aunt was troubled and disturbed in the last years of her life. It’s a pity. She wasn’t always like that, but I fear her testimony cannot be fully trusted.”

“The years of my aunt’s life have been shortened by no one’s hand but yours, my lord, for I saw with my own eyes when you threw her through the Moon Door,” Sansa says.

There are twin points of red in her cheeks, and she’s clutching the arm of the white throne she sits upon.

Her voice barely raises, “You also stand accused of the murder of Lysa Tully Arryn.”

A lightning of surprise flashes across his gaze; his mouth twitches; just a little.

“She would have you killed,” Petyr mutters. “I was trying to protect you from her madness.”

“I begged for my father’s life,” Sansa proceeds, and now her voice is fully furious, and she’s not trying to hide it, “I begged on my knees before Joffrey. He promised me mercy, and then he ordered his death sentence. Cersei objected. Each of his advisors objected. But you- where were you? What made Joffrey change his mind?” Sansa inquires, “I also accuse you of betraying my father, Ned Stark.”

“That’s completely insane,” Petyr declares, raising his voice to match hers, “You have no way to prove that. I’m worried that madness runs in your blood, Sansa, for you speak like your aunt, seeing enemies where they don’t exist.”

For a moment, Tyrion thinks she’ll lose her temper, but after a deep breath, Sansa bends down and slides a Valyrian dagger from beneath her skirts, untying it from her calf. She puts it on her lap. “I’ve been given this by you, Lord Baelish, for my own protection, in your words. Lord Tyrion, do you recognize this blade?”

“I do,” he answers, staring satisfiedly at Petyr starting to get truly worried.

“How so, my lord?”

“Right here in this High Hall, I was accused of being its owner,” Tyrion says, very much pleased, “and of sending a murderer to kill Bran Stark in his sleep with it.”

“Lord Tyrion,” Sansa asks, her voice shaky beneath the composure of her words, “Is this dagger yours?”

“It isn’t, my lady,” he says, and smirks, “and the gods saw to justice when I’ve been found innocent on my trial.”

“You were Master of Coin after Lord Baelish left the post,” Sansa inquires, her words still directed to Tyrion but her eyes never leaving the man in trial before her. “Could you summarize to this court the state in which you found the finances of the Crown, my Lord Hand?”

“Absolutely chaotic,” Tyrion replies, “sunk in debt to both the Iron Bank and my father, and with no clear track to where all the borrowed gold had been invested.”

Tyrion leans his head to the side, his eyes, too, boring into Petyr. But he’s more successful in hiding his hate than Sansa. He lacks that particular extravagance. There’s no reason why she must hide her fury. So she doesn’t.

He proceeds, “King Robert had to consistently rely not only on borrowed gold, but on Lord Baelish’s own contributions, which enriched his business in the capital.”

“Will you believe in the words of a Lannister over mine?” Petyr protests, “The Imp has no place on this dais. Indeed, no Lannister should have any hold or power over the Vale.”

“Was that your plan when you told my aunt to write to my mother, saying the Lannisters killed Jon Arryn, when it had been you?” Sansa inquires. “To bring my father to court? To turn Lannisters and Starks against each other? I accuse you of starting a War that decimated my family.”

“Your accusations are delirious, Lady Stark. I deserve the chance to defend myself.”

He turns his back on them, and speaks directly with the crowd of lords and ladies watching the trial, “First and foremost: where is the cook? The woman who resented our Lord, who admitted to poisoning his food, and who was found in possession of the vial. Where is she?”

He crosses his arms, “I cannot be blamed for King Robert’s ineptitude at ruling,” he points out, and then, with a hearty laughter, “and why on earth am I being judged by Tyrion Lannister? The gods have found him guilty of kingslaying Joffrey, the Illborn; the history is witness to his kinslaying, at birth and then by choice. A cursed man who killed his own father! Pray tell me, who is he to be my judge?”

He opens his arms, turns to glare at the watching crowd again, the whispers rising, chatting, Tyrion sees frowns and scowls and pondering eyes, “Let's be honest, my lords, my ladies. This is a mummer's farce. This trial cannot deliver justice. And you, Lady Stark?”

He raises a hand toward Sansa, not pointing a finger exactly, just vaguely signaling in her direction, “Why are you on the dais, and not here, with me, answering to these charges? For you were there by my side to at least half of them. You lied to the same ladies and lords who now are forced to bear witness to this farce of a trial, because you knew I only had the Vale’s best interest at heart. I beg you all, present, to ask yourselves: why does Sansa spill the truth now, when she can so conveniently sit upon Robyn's throne? What is she trying to accomplish? She may be his kin, but she has no right to inherit the Vale.”

“You’ll shut your mouth now, your rat,” Lord Royce growls, “Have the courage to die with some decency. What kind of honourable man dares to blame and accuse a lady that was only a scared child at the time of these events for all his murdering and plotting? Even a liar like you cannot deny any of these charges,” his voice thunders around the quiet High Hall, “Justice will be delivered by the strength of the Law, not the strength of men. We may be weak and fallen, but we are merely its loyal executioners, for the blood you spilled cries out for it, and none of our misdeeds can diminish yours.”

“But why would I do that?” Petyr throws his hands in the air, as if frustrated, “Why would I do any of that?”

He looks Sansa in the eye, “Work for the Lannisters, then betray the Lannisters, then side with the Arryns, then kill them, start a War out of the sudden without cause. What is the point, what am I trying to accomplish, after all, in this inane, deranged story of yours? There’s no common cause to any of these events, no thread to give meaning to your accusations. I might as well be randomly killing nobles and kings in my spare time. This is ridiculous.”

“There’s you,” Sansa says, and her voice finally catches fire, “There’s always you, benefiting from all the chaos.”

She makes a small pause, raises her chin, her eyes sweeping across each man and woman in the room, “Lord Robyn Arryn is now in his bed, hanging between life and death. I am the oldest among his closest living relatives. Lord Tyrion is Hand to the rightful heir to the Iron Throne, Daenerys Targaryen. Ser Harrold is Robyn’s heir, and Lord Yohn Royce a most loyal and trusted advisor,” she says, folding her hands behind her back. “So I ask for their valuable opinion. Lord Royce, what is your verdict?”

“Guilty,” the man answers, without blinking.

“Lord Tyrion, tell us your sentence,” Sansa asks.

“Guilty,” Tyrion says.

“Ser Harry,” Sansa asks.

Tyrion tenses. And there’s a silence before the answer resonates through the Hall, in a voice not so sure as the others, but still, “Guilty.”

Sansa stares at Petyr, then, in complete silence.

“On behalf of Lord Robyn Arryn, heir to the Vale,” she says finally, her voice crisp and clear, “and in the name of Daenerys Targaryen, rightful heir to the Iron Throne,” she gets up, “I, Sansa Stark, Lady of Winterfell, find you, Petyr Baelish, guilty of treason and murder, and sentence you to die.”

At the implicit command in her words, the two strong, young knights with eagles in their cloaks hold each of Littlefinger’s arms, carrying him to the border of the Moon Door, putting him on his knees and bending him forward, their hands pressed against Petyr’s back, between his shoulder blades, as the man resists and commands them to let him go.

But his orders are like punches in the air; there’s no one to feel their blow, no one to obey his word. A silence, solid and dense, falls over the Hall, so when Sansa walks toward her once captor, once mentor, her steps echo loudly. She towers over him as he faces the open air.

“Sweetling,” he says, breathless. “What are you doing? Are you out of your mind? You need me,” he promises, voice thick, eyes wide at the clouds below, “We can accomplish everything together. No one knows you like I do. We can fix this, Sansa.”

Sansa puts a hand on his back, like a benevolent goddess, releasing her blessing.

“Look at me, Lord Baelish,” she asks.

He shifts his head back, enough to raise it, and their eyes lock.

“You once told me there’s no justice in the world, not unless we make it, and that is a lesson I will take to my grave. I am of the North, and the North remembers.”

She stares at the mockingbird pin, holding his cloak together, and takes it off. “I’ll keep that, if you won’t mind.”

His cloak falls through the Moon Door first. It flies away like a dark leaf in the violent wind. For some reason it looks as if she’s stripped him naked, as if he’s bare, now. He fights against the grasp of the guards holding him down. “Let me go,” he commands; but there’s no one to obey. Unable to look away from the sky below him, Petyr seems almost entranced by the fate that awaits him, and Tyrion can’t know, for sure, if he’s already realized that his fall is inevitable, because the expression in his eyes is one of madness and not despair. He keeps fighting, keeps writhing like a skittish cat until one of the guards gets bored and steps on his legs. He lets out a scream of pain, immobilized.

After a pause that feels like eternity, when he’s finally still and panting, Sansa says, simply, “It was you who needed me, and you don’t know me at all.”

It is the first time in Tyrion’s life that he sees something akin to panic filling Littlefinger’s gaze, as if she had just unveiled something to him. Then, Sansa looks at the guards, who let go of their hold on him, and Tyrion sees when Petyr opens his mouth to utter some word.

But there’s no time left; Sansa pushes him forward, to the sky below.

He slides down through the open Moon Door with a desperate scream, his weight is a stone as he stumbles over the edge. Sansa stands there, watching his fall. That’s a sight Tyrion will never, ever be able to forget: the howling winter winds, Petyr’s screams echoing, and Sansa, standing on the border of the Moon Door, looking down, impassive and unnervingly calm.

But it’s a quick death, of sorts, as far as deaths go. Petyr’s crying out gets lower and lower as the distance between him and the stony ground shortens, and then, faster than Tyrion can register, they listen to the unmistakable sound of crashing. After, there’s just silence.

Only then Sansa steps back. Her face reminds Tyrion again of her mother. She’s stern, and hard as winter: older than her years, every inch Catelyn Tully Stark, and more of a Queen than anyone Tyrion has ever met. When he finds the will in him to divert his gaze from her regal form, he looks at the crowd and they are silent as stones. There’s awe in their eyes.

“Find his corpse,” Sansa orders the guard at her right, “and burn the pieces. Winter is coming.”

xi.

After having the same nightmare for the third time, Tyrion decides sleep is a lost cause.

It’s impossible to find any rest in this castle.

The snow is falling outside; it’s actually a beautiful sight, but the window in his chambers is too high for him to enjoy it, so he gathers a flask filled with spiced wine and walks out.

The Eyrie is full of hallways with long windows that were almost balconies, and there’s one such corridor just along the wing where their small party had been accommodated. It’s a small castle, so he was given a chamber to share with Bronn - with two separate beds, at Sansa’s request - and the Lady of Winterfell shared a chamber with Brienne. After the trial, she’d gone to her ill cousin and then spent the rest of the night in council with Lord Royce and Harry Hardying. Tyrion knew better than to disturb her work. He’d already spoken too much that day; Sansa was surrounded by people who were clearly protective and devoted to her. More of his presence would be nothing but a hindrance. For Daenerys’ sake and Sansa’s own, it would be better if he stepped back for the rest of the day, and so he did.

He wraps himself tighter into his night robe, choosing to stand instead of sitting in one of the benches against the wall, between the long arch-windows. The winds are rough outside, and he drinks a sip of the wine to warm the cold away from his body. He can actually look down at the top of the mountains surrounding the castle; he hates how high this place is. A shudder, of chill and fear, crosses his spine.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been drinking and staring at the moonlit towers, kissed by snow, beyond the glass, when Sansa approaches him, he does not listen to her steps.

“My lord,” she says, and he almost jumps startled, both at her sudden voice and her pale sight.

After three seconds, he can see her better, a taper lit in her hand, wearing a night-robe, and her cloak besides. Her face shifts in shadows and orange glows in turns.

She chuckles, “I am sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

His heart beats loud and hard inside his ribcage. He sighs in relief.

“It’s fine,” he mutters, still somewhat embarrassed, “Have I ever told you I hate this place?”

Sansa walks until she’s standing by his side, both of them facing the window and staring at the Vale below.

“Repeatedly,” she replies, amused. “Is that the reason you can’t sleep?”

“I keep having the same nightmare,” Tyrion grumbles.

“Me too,” she says. He looks at her, and keeps doing so until she eventually looks at him, too. It’s hard to say in the dim light, but he thinks she blushes.

“You first,” she goes.

He chuckles, and drinks a little more of his wine.

“It’s almost a memory, actually,” he answers. “I’m sleeping in the sky cells. Then I roll over toward the edge in my sleep. I wake up just at the last second before I fall in the open sky. End of dream.”

He shrugs.

She stares at him longly, compassionately.

“You?”

“I push Petyr toward the Moon Door and he falls. He wraps his fingers around Aunt Lysa’s ankle and she falls with him,” she says, “Then Aunt Lysa accidentally grasps my mother’s skirts. So Mother falls, too, but not before Robb tries to hold her. But Robb has claws of a wolf instead of a hand; he hurts my mother, letting her go, and the winter winds push him, and he eventually falls, too. Then my father appears. He tries to catch Robb, but a wolf is heavier than a human, and Father starts to slide down toward the Moon Door with Robb,” she murmurs.

The most dreadful feeling settles on the pit of his stomach.

“My father is holding onto the border. He is screaming my name and reaching out. I hold his hand. But my own hands are full of blood and I can’t save him,” she whispers, “So his hand slides off of mine, and he falls. I don’t, though. I stand over the edge, watching them hit the Vale below, one by one. I can’t look away, never. And then I wake up.” She is frowning, in that discreet way of hers that only shifts one inch of her eyebrows. “Every time I have this dream I wait for the time I’ll finally fall. But I never do.”

“Thank the gods,” Tyrion murmurs, without thinking.

Sansa looks at him, her brow softening.

“It was you who told me we would survive every time. I’m counting on it,” he tries to jape.

She smiles sadly at him.

“I think you’re right,” she whispers.

They stay a while enjoying the silence and the snow. The fear starts to dissipate from him, one ounce at a time.

“A lot happened today,” he says.

Gods, it doesn’t even feel like they arrived in the Eyrie just that morning.

“Are you fine?”

“Yes,” she says coldly.

Tyrion bites back a smirk, turning to face her and crossing his arms, “We’ve already settled that you’re a terrible liar,” he hands her the flask, “Talk to me, Sansa.”

She looks at the offer, then at his face. Accepts it, eventually, and drinks a deep swig. She puts the candle down, over the thick window sill.

“What is there for me to say?” she complains, “Justice doesn’t happen naturally, like the weather. It takes a willing person. You heard Lord Royce.”

She looks apprehensive when she stares at him. She’s so young, he thinks, and there’s so much on her shoulders already. “Are you afraid of me?”

“Afraid?” Tyrion chuckles, “If anything, I’m proud.”

If anything, he wants her more now than he did that morning. But, well. He’s not a true model for appropriate behaviour, or for how to better react to other people’s behaviour.

Sansa flushes, exasperated at his words, as if she thinks herself unsuitable of his praise.

“I think I’m afraid of me,” she confesses.

She lets the silence linger on, fidgeting with the ribbon wrapped around her waist.

“He betrayed me,” she murmurs, “I trusted him, and he sold me to my enemies. He made me believe I was in control, for once in my life, and then-” she swallows down, hard, hurting, “He shouldn’t have done that.”

Tyrion nods. Because she never mentioned that part during the trial, earlier that day. And in a glimpse of clarity, he wonders if that’s the reason for Petyr’s despair in his last seconds of life, after all. Wonders if he understood it at the final moment, if he died knowing that what killed him in the end was not the chaos and the War and the treachery, but the fact he broke this girl’s heart. And the more broken-hearted Sansa is the clearer she sees.

Tyrion reaches out, holds her hand.

“He shouldn’t have,” he agrees.

Sansa’s fingers slip between his. She sits down on the window board, so they’re almost level, and puts the flask beside as well.

“I looked into his eyes when I passed the sentence,” she says; if to him or to herself, he can’t tell, “I saw justice done.”

“You did,” Tyrion concurs, quietly.

Fuck; he’d say anything so she could sleep peacefully again.

“Among men, no one deserved to die more than him, and no one has earned the right to say the words more than you.”

She nods, but she looks so sad, so troubled, still.

He sighs, “Come here.”

Sansa is not a pliant woman, by any definition of the word. However, when he pulls her into his arms again, he feels no resistance, no will to fight. Instead, she buries her face in the crook of his neck. He keeps quiet, trying to listen, but she’s not crying. She’s just trying to breathe evenly, calmly. Tyrion waits until she’s succeeded. A question occurs to him. “How did you know Petyr would try to poison the boy?”

She lets out a scoff.

“I didn’t,” she says, not moving away, “I just sent him away from Winterfell because I didn’t want him anywhere near Jon without me around. But I can always count on Petyr to bring chaos about.” After an unbidden pause, she corrects herself, “Could.”

(I’m no commander, Your Grace, he remembers her saying. I just happen to know my enemies well.)

“We couldn’t face the undead and Cersei with this kind of... liability.”

“You did it in Daenerys’ name,” he notes.

Sansa chuckles against his neck, and the heat of her breath warms him more than wine. She is comfortable in his embrace, shifting so her cheek rests on his shoulder and he can listen to her voice in his ear.

“The Vale is impregnable to any attack, except one from dragons,” she argues, “Ser Harrold is no stupid man, neither are the lords of the Vale. I’ll talk to them in the morning. Better Daenerys than Cersei.”

(But what if— he thinks, dares not to let the thought finish itself in his mind. He remembers the accusations Petyr cowardly made about her.

Retrospectively, after his death, he can think about it more clearly. He’d said Daenerys was their only chance against Cersei. What if she was not?

Would Sansa try to claim the Vale to the North? Or something else? Something bigger?

She looked so very much like a Queen on that weirwood throne.)

“I’ll tell her I was the one who conquered the Vale to her cause,” he tries to joke. Sansa pinches his arm.

“Ouch,” he laughs it off.

“You will not,” Sansa orders, lifting her head from his shoulder until she’s facing him.

She presses one finger against his chest, but her free arm remains loosely wrapped around his waist and he dreads the moment she’ll be out of his arms. He wants to indulge in this truce they’ve built for each other, this nameless island free of burdens or expectations or futures, these moments when the comfort of nearess is all they need. He craves it.

“I still need to conquer her trust. Don’t take my victories away from me.”

“Fine,” he says, feigning disappointment.

She laughs, and he wants to hear it again. He keeps the light tone of the joke in his voice, “Or we can always share the merits.”

She tiredly rests her head against his shoulder once more.

“I’m not against that,” she murmurs, “We’re partners.”

(She’s playing you, he says to himself, fool, fool, a thousand times—)

“Yes, we are,” he whispers against her hair, “What are our next steps?”

“The Maester said that my cousin still has a chance to live,” she begins. “And I hope he does. I don’t like Harrold Hardyng. If Robyn dies, well, there’s nothing to do but to pass the lordship of the Vale to Ser Harrold, but Lord Royce will stay here and I trust him. We’ve agreed that at this point, there’s no time to gather everyone and flee further South, so the women and children will come to the Gates of the Moon.”

“It’s a small castle,” Tyrion points out, “And not as safe as the Eyrie.”

Sansa sighs, “I know, but the Eyrie is uninhabitable during the worst of winter. We can still ship the small folk from Gulltown to the Three Sisters.”

The Three Sisters had a very tenuous allegiance to House Arryn, but perhaps in extreme circumstances they’d be willing to collaborate, “Harry and the rest of the Knights of the Vale, just as the other men of the remaining houses, are going North with us.”

“That’s very good news,” he says soothingly.

Harry Hardying looks like Dickon Tarly in that he is most surely seeking Sansa's hand in marriage after the worst of the War is over. But if her beauty inspires young men to prove their honor and bravery, all the better for the realm. He can’t blame them; she has a similar effect on him.

“Good work, my lady, as always,” he grasps his lower lip between his teeth as if he’s trying to keep his mouth shut--

(I think you’re wonderful, and I’m in love with you, and I think I’ve never been truly out of it.)

-- but he’s promised her today only, and not a day longer; a friend and an ally while they can. So instead, he just combs his fingers through her hair, and they stay like that for a long time.

Outside, the snow has stopped falling.

“And when we’re done here?” he asks, at last.

“Then we sail North,” she answers, “We head home.”

Chapter Text

i.

Jon is watching the snow covering the North, going on and on, miles away from the walls of Winterfell, acutely conscious of the crown upon his head — it’s something he always feels like he has stolen: from Robb; from Sansa; from Bran, if he were even alive — and Jon is thinking: My very bones are made of snow.

It’s in their names: a bastard belongs to the land, but the land does not belong to them in return. They don’t belong to a House, either. Or to a family. They’re not entitled to a future, or to dreams, or to inheritances.

But Jon Snow loves the North. Truly. You don’t have to possess things in order to love them; bastards know it since their birth.

ii.

At night, Jon Snow dreams of fire.

iii.

There are letters piling atop Jon’s table, and he misses Sansa. She was better at that part than he is, and he would delegate the work to Davos, but his Hand still reads slowly and time is something they cannot afford to lose. He wakes up earlier than the rest of the castle — a Night’s Watch old habit that didn’t die with him — and sets to his solar, before he can go to the Great Hall to listen to the people that he can’t quite call his. With each passing day, Winter Town grows crowded with peasants and merchants looking for the protection of the shadow of Winterfell, and high lords, along with their families and armies, pass through its mighty gates. Jon welcomes them, settles them in their rooms, but his talents as a host are limited. Bastards are not raised to rule a household. Bastards, indeed, are not raised to rule anything at all. Jon has learned how to lead, but this is not the same as ruling.

Because he knows how to lead, Jon knows when he needs help. Because he doesn’t know how to rule, he tells Lord Manderly one morning that if the Dragon girl demands the North’s allegiance to her cause, he’ll bend. Freedom means little if they’re all dead, he explains, and if it’s true that she has dragons, she might be their only chance to hold back the shadow of perpetual winter.

The old man is livid.

“After all we fought,” he says. “After all we’ve been through. You would give the North away to a foreign woman?”

Death’s inevitable corollary: Jon lost a good deal of his already lacking patience.

“After all we fought? You didn’t fight at all, Lord Manderly,” he says on the spot.

Wyman narrows his already small eyes. “I’ve said my apologies to you, Your Grace,” he says, “but I fought by your brother’s side. I was there until his bitter end. You weren’t there. We gave our all.”

Manderly’s son died that night; Jon knows this. His cold insides coil, as they often do at the mention of Robb, but a bastard learns soon how to hide every emotion safely inside, so the pain never shows on his face. “I’m sorry for your son, Lord Manderly. You know I am. But Robb would save the North, no matter the cost,” he tells Lord Manderly. “That’s what I’m trying to do. That’s what you chose me for. We are the first in line against the Night’s King,” he continues, “We are the first to go, the first to join the army of the dead if he wins.” It’s so, so hard to convince people to take seriously something they didn’t see. “Do you understand this?”

He wants to add more. He wants to say that he almost left Castle Black; that he, too, wanted to be by Robb’s side until his end.

But that honor, the gift of fighting with Robb, dying for him if needed, was not a bastard’s life. A bastard dies for other causes. This is my life, he wants to scream all the time. This is all I can give to you. I’m trying to save you. I need to save you.

“We still don’t know what happened at the Twins,” Manderly says. “Walder Frey had many enemies. Perhaps we could join forces. Perhaps we won’t need the Targaryen girl at all.”

Manderly is not referring to the Red Wedding, of course. He’s talking about rumors of a massacre at the Twins that left a single survivor, a servant girl: every male of house Frey killed. Some say with poison, some say killed by a pack of wolves, some say murdered by a ghost. Jon didn’t mourn them. Jon didn’t send any of his men to investigate further. On the night the news reached Winterfell, Manderly raised a toast to the memory of Robb Stark. Everyone cheered.

“Walder’s enemies are not necessarily our friends,” Jon returns. “I find shared hate a poor reason to unite armies. It’s much better to share a mission, a purpose. Don’t you think so?”

After a moment of consideration, Lord Manderly puts his big hand on Jon’s shoulder. “Of course. You’re a good man, Your Grace,” he says, simply. “You sound like your lord father.”

It doesn’t sound like much of a compliment. Jon catches his eye during dinner that night, and the memory of a dagger through his heart is still fresh, hard to forget. He tries to push the thought aside.

iv.

(This is how Jon Snow and Sansa Stark came back home:

With an army.

Jon wonders what that means, at times. He wonders if it’s a sign. He remembers words uttered to him at the death’s door: you, Lord Snow, will be fighting their battles forever.

But here’s the thing. More than a bastard and more than a King and more than a man of the Night’s Watch and, perhaps, even more than Ned Stark’s own blood: Jon Snow is a soldier.

He doesn’t know how to stop fighting. All the ground he steps on is a battlefield.)

v.

Winterfell is a castle with many rooms. But King Jon forbids anyone to occupy Sansa’s rooms.

Or Arya’s. Or Bran’s, the one he shared with Rickon.

If the King is waiting, he doesn’t talk about it. And if you’re bold enough to ask him about his lost half-siblings, he’ll not look you in the eye. He’ll say, We must not get our hopes too high, as if hope is a threat, It’s been too long, they are probably dead. If you pay attention, you’ll notice he learned that from Sansa, he shapes the words the way she does: carefully trying not to break his own heart.

But even when Winterfell gets crowded with guests, those rooms remain vacant.

vi.

Tormund enters his solar without knocking. How he got past the guards at the door, Jon has no idea and does not dare to ask, but truth be told: the King’s been staring at the map of the North for a good couple of hours by now and nothing new will suddenly come out of it, so the wildling is not really bothering him and he doesn’t have it in him to play the offended royal. Too much time with Mance Rayder, he can’t help but think, can do that to a man.

“We didn’t find it,” the red-headed man says, falling unceremoniously in Jon’s chair. Jon is standing by his side, fists against the table. Ghost trots to his side, and Jon absently pats him between his ears. “We risked our lives to get that thing, and we couldn’t find it.”

“I hate to be the one who says—”

“Don’t fucking tell me you told me so,” Tormund grunts. But Jon told him so indeed. “We were close, little crow. I know we were. Just next to Craster’s Keep—”

“You went that far?” Jon says, trying to hide his surprise, afraid it will be taken as a slight. “Do you really think it’s there?”

“In the Keep of the father to generations of White Walkers? Yes, I think it’s there, Jon.”

Jon gives up on the map for a second to turn around and face his ally. “Did the dead appear?”

“Of course they did,” the wildling shrugs. “Why do you think we had to come back? We ended them, and none of ours fell. But we couldn’t take any more risks after that.”

Jon raises his eyebrows. “Any of the White Walkers?”

He shakes his head, crossing his giant arms. “No,” he answers. “Only dead men.”

“Cravens,” Jon murmurs.

Tormund laughs, standing up on his feet to approach Jon’s side. “Oh, Jon. What good is honor for the dead?” He asks.

Jon wasn’t the one to send the wildlings to the task. He’d told Tormund, repeatedly, it was too risky to cross north of the Wall again. If the Night King finds the Horn of Winter first, Tormund had argued, he will blow it and bring the Wall down and then all our efforts will be for naught. We can’t let him have it.

I forbid you, he pleaded. As your King.

They didn’t even know if the myth of the Horn of Winter was true. At least Jon didn’t know. The wildlings were convinced beyond a doubt that it was.

Tormund had laughed at his face. You kneelers, he mocked, coming closer until Jon could feel his breath on his face. What are we supposed to do, stay here in Winterfell and wait?

Yes, Jon had said. Yes, we wait.

What are we waiting for, Jon Snow? He’d asked him.

And so Tormund left with a group of wildlings, against the King’s orders, armored with Jon’s Valyrian sword and the few dragonglass daggers Jon could find. You can’t really bend a wildling, that’s what he’s learned. He didn’t want them to go, but that didn’t mean he would let them go unprepared.

Ygritte was the first person to tell Jon about the Horn of Winter.

“Tormund,” he murmurs, now, “It’s probably just a myth.”

Tormund stares at him wide-eyed and upset, the red on his cheeks contrasting with the blue of his eyes. “You know nothing, Jon. The Horn is real, and it’s a danger that we didn’t get it. When will you learn to trust my people?”

Jon sighs. “I cannot keep you here, as much as I’d like,” the King says. “Still, I advise you against trying again. I appreciate your efforts, but I wouldn’t risk giving up one of my best warriors to fight on the enemy’s side.”

Tormund scoffs under his breath. “Look at you, little crow. All flattery and lies, like a true southern king.”

Jon laughs a little. But then, “I don’t want you to die. This is no lie.” He tilts his head. “I would also hate to face you on the battlefield.”

Tormund twists his nose. “Yeah, boy. I would hate to be the one to kill you again.”

vii.

Tormund is not the first person to ask him that question, though. What are we waiting for?

He tells them they’re waiting to be ready. They’re welcoming new Houses, new lords pledging their allegiance every week, from the North, some from the Riverlands even. They’re training every day. They’re gathering supplies. They are preparing Winterfell, a Keep surrounded by plane lands, with no geographic barrier until the walls of the castle, surely a terrible location to fight an army who does not tire. They’re waiting for Sansa to come back home, too, because she’s promised to bring more men, and more dragonglass.

But the truth, the raw truth of it, what Jon is truly waiting for, the thing he cannot tell anyone:

I dream of fire every night, he wants to say. I’m waiting for the Targaryen girl. We need her. We cannot win without her.

viii.

Davos finds Jon amidst letters and a line of servants at his door, and with a fatherly tone — firm, gentle — he dismisses everyone. When they are all gone, and just the two of them stand on Jon’s solar, the King falls upon a chair with a deep sigh as if someone had knocked him behind the knees.

Davos approaches him. Puts a warm hand on his shoulder. “Your Grace,” he says, “you need to eat something.”

But Jon is not hungry.

“I can’t do this alone,” he murmurs. Those are not words he would utter to anyone else but Davos. He cannot train men to fight, and rule a household, and be a pleasant host, and answer letters, and prepare supplies, and do battle plans, he can’t, can’t do this alone. Where is Sansa? He mourns, but he knows the answer to that: she sent a letter that morning; she and Brienne just arrived at Dragonstone. I shouldn’t have sent her away.

“You are not alone,” Davos reminds me. “You have the entire North at your disposal. Delegate, Your Grace.”

Jon laughs bitterly. He misses Castle Black. He misses the easy feeling of trusting people to do their jobs. He misses the innocence of never fearing betrayal. “I can’t,” he says, “I need—”

He needs Sansa, the only person he could trust with the North. He needs his family.

“You have me,” Davos reminds him. “I’m here following you like a shadow with no real job.”

“You are my most trusted advisor,” Jon tells him.

“I appreciate that, but I believe I’m good for something more than wise words,” Davos says, making a mockery out of himself. “I know I have my limitations—”

“Don’t say that,” Jon says, offended on his Hand’s behalf.

“— but limited is not useless,” Davos says. “Let me meet with the merchants and handle the grain supplies. This I know, at least.”

“No. You’re a knight, you’ve been in battles before,” Jon says. “I need your mind on the battlefield for me.” The King gets up and stares out of his window. Beyond the dark walls of the Keep, the North spreads, miles of blank white snow without an obstacle. Even Winter Town, at the castle’s gates, seems small in comparison. “You shall meet with the merchants, but I need you to think of a way to set traps all around us.”

“Traps?” Davos asks, and comes to stand by the King’s side.

Jon tiredly braces himself against the windowsill. “I hope it won’t come to that,” he tells Davos. “But if the Dead cross the Wall…” Jon does not like to think of it too long, but he needs to, he must: “Those walls of ours, those gates,” he points outside, “They will be nothing to them. They do not think and they do not tire, they only advance. Planning ahead is our only advantage. We need to slow them down.”

Time. All he needs, all he needs is to buy time, until he can find that dead monster and bury a sword in its frozen chest. Then, this will all be over. Then he’ll be able to rest and eat and live his life.

ix.

Sansa hasn’t been gone for a fortnight when Jon and Davos are surprised by two guards at the royal solar. Jon recognizes them, though he can’t quite remember their names; all he knows is that they are responsible for the morning shifts. They stutter before him, trying to speak and curtsy at once, and then giving up the curtsies. Rumor has it that King Jon Snow doesn’t really notice these formalities. “Your Grace, we—” one of them looks at the other, then at Jon, then at his feet. “There’s a situation. At the gates.”

Jon shares a look with Davos. “A situation,” his Hand echoes.

The second one takes the lead. “Yesterday there was a girl,” he explains. “You know. Like every day. Saying she was Arya Stark and asking to come in.”

Jon keeps listening. The amount of Arya Starks and Bran Starks at Winterfell’s doors every day could initiate an entire House by themselves. After dozens of times, it became standard procedure for the guards to dismiss these claimants; they didn’t bother Jon or Sansa with them anymore. Jon knew this, and to be fair, didn’t have enough faith in the survival of his siblings to ask to be informed every time. It’s better, he always thinks, if he doesn’t hope at all.

“Very well,” Jon says, then.

“But she came back today, and I think—” the first guard finally raises his eyes from his own feet again. “It might be her, your Grace.”

Nymeria, Jon thinks, and immediately, Ghost stands on his four paws.

“How does she look?” Davos asks.

“Gray eyes, black hair, about this size?” He points somewhere lower than his own shoulder. She didn’t grow up that much, then, Jon thinks. “She was carrying a sword, too, very long.”

Jon’s heart swells with hope.

“Did she have a wolf with her?” He asks.

The guards share a fearful look. “You should come and see for yourself.”

x.

(This is how Arya Stark comes back home:

With a pack of wolves.)

xi.

Jon walks down to the courtyard of Winterfell, almost stumbling in his hurry.

There are a dozen of guards in line at the gateway, swords raised in hand, wide stance, ready to battle, but still as statues, afraid to move, eyes full of terror. Beyond them, between their shoulders, he can see, at a distance, a girl, a tiny girl with black hair, whispering something in the ear of a giant, a giant gray direwolf, just outside the open gates. Behind her, there’s a pack of at least another fifty direwolves, their ears raised, their eyes sharp and smart toward the castle; the quiet rumbling of their growls fills in the anticipating silence.

At his side, Ghost barks.

Jon raises his right hand, Lower your damn weapons, now, get the fuck out of my way. He barely realizes it’s his voice giving the command as the men part to let him pass, but the next word is unmistakably his, undeniably him; his voice, right out of his chest:

“Arya?”

A girl raises her eyes. And smiles.

“Can I come in now?” She asks, and before he can even think about it, before he can think this is not a thing a King does, Jon is running.

He runs, and runs, and runs, and crosses the seemingly infinite length of the courtyard until he gets to the gates, and he’s only distantly aware Arya is laughing and he is crying when he takes his sister up in his arms.

xii.

I can’t let your pack of wolves in, Jon told her. They’ll terrify our guests.

Nymeria comes with me, Arya demanded, and Jon could not deny her.

Now, as he puts a cup with hot tea between her hands and covers her shoulders with a blanket and sets her before a fire, Nymeria and Ghost cuddle with each other at the corner, and Jon stares at her as if he is hallucinating.

Behind the rim of her cup, Arya smiles. “King in the North? How did that happen?”

He laughs under his breath. His chest is wide as the free lands beyond the Wall, that infinite, borderless expanse of earth that met no end in the horizon. He tries to raise out of his mind any memory of the last time he felt so happy and cannot, for the life or death of him, remember.

“It’s a long story,” he says.

“Make it short,” Arya asks. There’s not a single drop of bitterness or envy in her, only curiosity.

“Long story short, Sansa was betrayed and forced into a marriage with the Bolton bastard. She escaped and came to me in Castle Black. We led the Knights of the Vale and some northern houses to defeat the Boltons and take Winterfell back,” he says. “Sansa made me do it, actually,” he adds, with loving irritation. “She was unyielding.”

Arya puts the cup down.

“Sansa?” She says, and covers her mouth with her palm. “Is Sansa here? Is she alive?” She looks around, as if she expects to find her sister hidden beneath the bed. “Where?”

“She’s not here,” he says, calmingly. “I sent her South to deal with Daenerys Targaryen but, yes, she’s alive. The Lady of Winterfell. In truth, Sansa deserved this crown more than I did. But the North chose—”

“— Chose you?” She smiles fondly. “I can see why.”

A silence falls upon them, filled with their dead. It’s obvious that they’ve grown into their own lives in a way childhood simply didn’t allow; and it’s also obvious that the shape of Jon’s life looked a lot like Ned’s.

Arya gets on her feet, approaching him again. “Any reason why you dismissed our sister on a mission to the south just as she came back home?”

Jon tilts his head and draws in a deep breath. “I didn’t want to send her. I wanted to go myself, but she—”

“—she made you?” Arya guesses.

“Sansa can be very persuasive,” Jon argues.

Arya smiles fondly, sadness touching her gray eyes. “That she is indeed.”

“We need dragonglass,” Jon explains. “And we need more men, and we need fire.” He runs his hand over his beard, and confronted by Arya’s confused stare, he takes her hand and guides her back to the couch. “Sit down, Arya. We must talk. We are not safe yet. There’s another War coming.”

“I know that,” Arya says, turning toward him as he takes the place by her side. “Cersei still sits on the Iron Throne. I thought about going to King’s Landing to kill her after I stopped at the Twins to finish the Freys, but—”

Jon frowns. “—you did what with the Freys?”

Arya puffs, exasperated. “Do you think I just stroll around with a pack of wolves for no reason?”

Jon closes his eyes, shut them tight, remembering the rumors — of course; of course — and thinking about his little sister exterminating an entire House in order for her wolves to eat them alive.

“Arya,” he says, cautiously, “you’ll need to tell me this story later, but I’m not talking about Cersei or the Iron Throne,” he says. “The real threat comes from the North.”

xiii.

Most northerners are raised to be fighters, the men and the women, but not against an enemy whose main strength was to be literally tireless; they must learn to save their strength and energy, how to make every blow count, how to use the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses in their favors. Jon practices with all of them — every knight and lord, every boy old enough to hold a sword. It’s the best use he can make of his time. The White Walkers can fight, but the Dead Men are brainless. To win, the living had to fight with their heads.

After Jon explains everything that he knows through all the years about the Army of the Dead, Arya begins to train their people, too, in a style Jon can’t quite recognize; she teaches young men and women, small in stature like her, how to use their ears, how to listen to the silence, how to breathe without making any noise, and how to move their feet lightly. It’s a dance, she tells them. Imagine you’re dancing.

One day, they’re both coming back to the Keep, tired and breathless, and Arya looks up at the sky, sheathing Needle at her hip. “Did you notice the days are getting shorter?” she asks Jon.

Above them, the sunset-purple sky is clean; birds sing their farewells to another day.

“Yes,” Jon answers, absent-minded. It’s winter. The days usually are shorter in winter.

Arya makes a pause. “We should practice at night,” she tells him.

Jon frowns. “I’m sorry?”

Arya looks at him, then, and her eyes look wise and old. It’s an odd, disturbing look for his little sister. “We should teach our people to fight in the dark,” she elaborates. “After daylight is gone.”

Jon blinks once, twice.

“Oh,” he says.

xiv.

She’s a little like a ghost, Arya — but, truth be told, so are all the people Jon has ever loved.

In any case, the girl that came home is a real girl, tender flesh and sturdy bones. He can finally delegate the daily tasks of the household: Arya is better at figures and numbers than he is, better than Sansa, even, so she handles the book of accounts, counts up the stocks of grains, helps Ser Davos with the merchants; she has an eye for predicting necessity before it arrives in a crisis; unlike Sansa, her style of negotiation is more blunt, less subtle.

It’s not too long until everyone has got to her liking.

But she’s changed, and Jon can smell the death in her — the familiar, nauseating sweetness of death: Jon would know. Arya’s childish excitement and tantrums are gone. Now, when she takes her seat by his side at the Great Hall, she looks lords and ladies in the eye, disturbing them with her cold patience. She curls one eyebrow and they spill their secrets like stones at their feet. She will disappear in the middle of the day and never tell him where she’s been for hours. She will eat the food on her plate as if it’s her last meal, and Jon cannot help but wonder if that was a real possibility at some point in the last years. Jon will be walking alone in a hallway in one second, and suddenly flanked by her in the next, without ever listening to her steps.

One afternoon, he opens the door to his royal solar only to find her already there, reading letters:

“I wanted quiet,” she’ll explain, but Jon will be holding the keys in his hand. He never asked how she got in. This girl is a shadow, his little sister, death-bound, haunted and haunting. Jon wants to ask where she’s been, what happened, what have they done to her, and where did she learn to fight in the dark.

But there’s not enough words to fill the void of the years, and he finds himself stalling, reaching out to hold a girl who’s already gone. He had avoided the hope of her return; he thought he couldn’t lose something he never had, and it’s horrible to lose hope. But not a single day went by that Jon didn’t think of Arya since the last time he saw her, when they were still children and he gave her a sword.

Until one night, he’s in his chambers — Robb’s old chambers, since he refused Ned’s — just out of a bath, and Arya comes in without knocking.

“Jon, I’ve been thinking about—” she turns around to shut the door behind her; turning again, to face him, still shirtless, her eyes grow wide and scared. “Jon? What is that?”

He grabs his tunic over the bed and puts it on, tucking the hem into his breeches. “Nothing.”

Arya takes the braver step closer. “Jon,” she says, cautiously. “You had—” She frowns. “Let me see that.”

Jon’s hand is trembling with fear, and he doesn’t know why. Lately he hasn’t been feeling afraid of anything. It’s hard to, when you’ve seen the other side. But now, he's shaking with it. He doesn’t really want to be seen. “It’s nothing, Arya,” he insists.

She stops, mid-way, gray eyes hurt boring into his. Another step closer and another one, until she’s standing in front of him, the pain of his rejection turning into a familiar challenging stare. Stop me if you can, her eyes seem to dare.

Jon cannot move. Arya grabs the fabric of his night-tunic and pulls it out of his breeches. She raises the hem again, all the way up to his chest, and he’s forced to raise his arms and so, she just takes it all off again, tossing it aside, somewhere.

Cold fingertips find his scars and Jon closes his eyes, like a child who believes that if they cannot see, they cannot be seen either. “How did you survive this?” She murmurs, sliding her fingers over the biggest one in his heart.

He opens his eyes, and, looking at her face — he sees a real girl, not a ghost and not death. He sees Arya, whom, for the longest time in his life, he thought to be the only person in the whole world to care about him without reserve, without condition, without second-intentions. He sees Arya seeing him, pulling him in with ropes of love, and truth spills out of his tongue like stones off his chest: “I didn’t,” he says.

It’s confusion on her face, first; then understanding, and then more confusion. “You died?” She asks.

“I did,” Jon says, hissing in a sharp breath, like her touch is burning him. “There was a mutiny at the Night’s Watch, and my brothers betrayed me. They were the ones who—” Jon pauses; there’s no point in finishing that sentence. It’s a typical northern winter night, and the hearth seems to be so far away from them; he’s so cold. “I’m one of them, Arya. One of those dead things we’re trying to exterminate.”

Arya’s eyebrows curl and she bites her lower lip. She did that a lot when she was a child, he remembers well. Her eyes are settled on his chest, as if she’s avoiding his gaze. “I know how to wear people’s faces,” she says.

Jon’s brow wrinkles. “What?”

“I served in a temple called House of Black and White, in Braavos. It was dedicated to Death,” she tells him. She swallows hard for a moment, still refusing to look him in the eye. “They called it the Many-Faced God, but it was just Death in the end. Their service to the Many Faced-God was to kill people. And in order to complete their tasks, you had to learn how to wear another face. But to wear another face right, you have to become nothing. Or no one.” She closes her eyes. “They tried to make me forget my name. They told me I was no one. And they blinded me and that’s how I learned to fight in the dark. And they—”

“Arya,” Jon holds her face between his hands, forcing her gaze on him. “You are not no one. You are the daughter of Ned Stark and Catelyn Tully. You’re a Stark of Winterfell.”

Arya’s eyes are hard and unrelenting. “Then you’re not a dead man either,” she says, decidedly. “We’re not what death made out of us. And you’re—” she clutches his shoulders, “You’re my brother, Jon.”

“I thought of you,” he tells her. “When they buried their swords in my heart. You were my last thought. You are— you are my heart, Arya.”

Arya nods, then, and wraps her arms around his waist, resting her head on his shoulder. Jon holds her, hiding her tiny body in his arms. He’s only half alive and she might be a ghost, but here, as winter blooms, they are Jon and Arya, brother and sister, wolves tangled in each other in the dead of the night. For a long time — Jon can’t tell how long — they don’t let go.

When they do, it is to go to bed, as they so often did when they were younger. She has her palm over his once-stabbed, now healed heart. “Tell me, Arya,” he asks her. “Tell me what happened.”

Arya tells him everything. About Jaqar Hagar and Harrenhal. About her way to the Red Wedding with a certain Hound and about a list of names. About a coin, a trip to Braavos, about a person called Waif, her visit to the Twins on her way back home. She speaks until her tongue is heavy with tiredness and the story, already fantastic and absurd, is making even less sense.

Jon falls asleep to the sound of his little sister’s breathing.

xv.

“We don’t have time to rebuild a road,” Jon declares, with finality.

Arya sighs.

“We need the road, Jon,” she reminds him. Maps of the North are spread on the table in front of her. “Every week, Sansa sends another load of dragonglass to White Harbor. If our survival depends on appropriate weapons, we have to find a way to bring the dragonglass here, so our blacksmiths can work on it as soon as possible.”

Jon had sent Lord Manderly back to White Harbor, deciding that he needed a man of his trust there, managing one of the most crucial escape routes out of the North, should the battle ever come to that point.

“Send the dragonglass in ships by the White Knife,” Jon says. “That’s what it’s for.”

“Upstream?” Arya argues. “Against the flow, every week? You know that will take longer,” she says. “And they can’t travel all the way through. We’ll need the road either way, even if it’s just from the rapids up.”

Jon runs a hand through his face. He hasn’t shaved in two weeks. He’s never looked so much like their father before.

“We need our men focused on preparing the ground around Winterfell,” he says.

Arya looks at him almost pitifully. “The Wall is still standing, Jon. We do have time and the War is not coming to our gates.” Her voice lowers, grows quieter. “You told me the Horn of Winter was just a myth.”

“What if it isn’t?” He questions. “What if they breach the Wall and come to us? Do you think there’s any chance we can win them here?” He points toward the open window of Arya’s solar, to the vast expanse of plain land that surrounds them.

An open field. That’s all he sees, an open field full of dead men who don’t stop. They won’t stand a chance.

“I think we can’t win without proper weapons, here or at the Wall,” Arya says.

Jon knows she’s right. She’s been working so hard lately. They have enough food for the North for three years. She’s been as relentless as he in training their men and women every night in the dark. She’s the one helping Ser Davos in dealing with Lord Manderly and other merchants to buy wax, wool, and oil for lamps. Winter provisions. His life got considerably easier since she came back home.

But Arya doesn’t bear the weight of remembering the Night King, his cold smile, his frozen, dead eyes.

The King in the North sighs, frustrated.

“That’s Tywin Lannister’s fault,” he mutters.

Arya chortles, confused. “What are you talking about?”

“He was the one who put the Boltons here. If the right people had been ruling in Winterfell while it was summer,” he explains, “we wouldn’t be worrying about a goddamned road in a time like this. The North would be ready.”

Winter is always coming. A Stark would have known.

But you’re not a Stark, says the familiar voice in Jon’s head, the same since his childhood. He shuts it down.

Arya covers her hand with his. “I see little use in blaming a dead man now.” Jon laughs with the irony of it all, and Arya rolls her eyes. “Oh, don’t start, Jon. I need twenty men for two weeks,” she says. “They’ll work day and night. Only from the rapids up. I promise it will be better like this.”

There’s a knock on the door.

“Come in,” Arya yells.

It’s Master Wolkan, with empty hands.

“Your Grace,” he bows toward Jon, and then, toward Arya, “Princess.”

“Just say it,” Jon murmurs, so very tired.

“There’s a group of four men at the gates saying they are here to present themselves to serve in the War,” Wolkan says, without delay or hesitation. “They call themselves the Brotherhood Without Banners.” There, he makes a small, almost imperceptible pause. “I’m afraid Ser Davos might kill their leader. It’s a woman in red.”

xvi.

Jon has to take Melisandre to another room, because he can’t safely guarantee that Davos is not going to kill her with his bare hands, so he closes the door of his royal solar. She always looks so out of place and time, this woman in red. He imagines that even the wealth and bounty of King’s Landing would feel small around her, not enough to put up with her presence. He takes a step toward her. “You better have a good explanation.”

Her gaze wanders through his solar. Her palm touches his desk, slides over its edge. She walks to the map and touches it too. Jon imagines everything she touches catching fire or coming alive. “How have you been sleeping, Your Grace?”

“Poorly,” he replies.

“Tell me, Jon Snow,” her red eyes find his gray ones. “The fire in your dreams. Does it burn you?”

Gods damn her, but he finds his tongue lost in his mouth like a child’s, unable to answer. How do you do that? he wants to ask, how do you know this, but he can’t bring himself to utter a single word.

Melisandre smiles. “Oh, Jon,” she says his name like a lament’s hymn. “Don’t worry. The girl dreams of snow, too. And you know better than I do: cold can burn just as bad.”

“What are you doing here?” He says through the hardness of his jaw.

“What am I doing? What have I always been doing, Jon?” She says, and it sounds earnest, sincere even. “Everything I do, I do to stop the world from succumbing to darkness.”

“I meant here in Winterfell,” he clarifies.

Melisandre sighs. She goes to his window, sitting on its sill bench. Jon imagines the glass of the window melting beneath her fire. “Well, I had to bring them here, for one. These men are faithful servants of the Lord of Light, and they were waiting for his guidance.”

“And you were their guide,” Jon says, and he can’t help the mockness of his tone.

She’s unaffected by it. “Yes,” she replies, innocently. “The Lord of Light can use anyone, Jon. Even those who are haunted by their own failures. I would say even those unwilling to serve him.”

He feels that tension beneath his skin, the nerves igniting. That happens often in Melisandre’s presence, this pressure behind his eyes.

“Even innocent children?” He asks.

Melisandre retreats like a bruised animal. She looks at the snow outside as if it could never, ever touch her.

“I made mistakes, Jon,” she says. “I thought I could make a song out of Stannis Baratheon. I thought it all depended on me; if I could repeat the story exactly the same, the result would be the same as well. But the story never happens exactly the same way, twice. I thought that I had to forge Lightbringer, I had to create Azor Ahai.” She moves her eyes to him. “But Azor Ahai is not my creation,” she looks at him, from head to toes, getting onto her feet. “And sometimes, salvation comes from the oddest places.”

“I’m not your savior,” he announces. It sounds final in his voice, but they’ve had this conversation before. “You were wrong once. You can be wrong again.”

Melisandre walks her way toward him, until she’s standing in front of him, inches away, and confronts him firmly, surely. “I don’t think I’m wrong this time. It’s true that the flames never show me every detail, but it’s not every day I get to raise dead men.”

“Isn’t your Azor Ahai supposed to have a wife?” Jon mocks.

She smiles again, just a little. “No,” she gets up. “Azor Ahai is not supposed to have a wife, Jon Snow. He is supposed to have a heart outside himself.” She places her hand over his heart, where a scar marks him. “That’s what Nissa Nissa means. She and the sword are one and the same. Lightbringer absorbs her blood, her soul, her courage, her sacrifice. And the story says she’s happier for it. Her cries of ecstasy cracked the moon.”

He looks Melisandre in the eye, thoughts of Arya alone and lost in the world filling his mind, and his blood runs cold. He pushes her hand away. “I’m not going to kill my sister.”

“We all have to make sacrifices to end the Long Night. You can’t escape your destiny, Jon Snow. The Lord of Light brought you back for a reason.”

“In that case, I hate to disappoint your god, but this is a price I’m not willing to pay,” he shakes his head. “Gods, Melisandre. When will you learn?”

“You know why I’m not afraid?” She murmurs. “Because when the time comes, Jon, you’ll do what you must. I know this, and you know it, too.”

“You’re not welcome in Winterfell, but you can find yourself a place in Winter Town,” he says, ending the conversation. Her shoulders drop beneath the layers of her red cloak. “Ask for your god to protect you from Davos. If he wants to kill you, I’m not going to stop him. And Melisandre?”

“Yes, Your Grace,” she asks, reverently.

The King in the North looks at the Red Priestess in her bloody, fiery eyes.

“I don’t want you anywhere near Arya,” he commands. “If I see you speaking to her, if I see you looking at her in a way that displeases me, I’ll have your head. This is the last time you’ll ever know my patience or my mercy.”

Melisandre only bows down her head. But servitude never suited her, and Jon is not convinced when she murmurs, under her breath, “As you wish, Your Grace. In that case, it’s better if we don’t see each other again at all.”

xvii.

Arya, the Wolf Princess, is the one who welcomes the Brotherhood Without Banners.

She doesn’t say a word during the turmoil: she watches the group of men with weary, dead eyes, and while her brother tries to keep Davos from committing a murder in their Great Hall and disappears with Melisandre into his royal solar. Arya is left with them.

That bunch of misfits in her home.

Gendry with them. The Hound with them.

“Arya,” Gendry says, but Arya will not hear it. Not from him, who chose to leave her.

She grabs a tray with bread that never leaves the main table in the Great Hall, spreads salt over it, and hands it to them. They stare at it.

“Eat,” she instructs.

They grab a bite, each, and after they’ve eaten, she nods.

“You are our guests, protected by our hospitality. I expect you to hold to your part of this oath.” A maid comes to her side and Arya hands her the tray. “Welcome to Winterfell.”

Then, without another word, she turns around and leaves.

As the de facto lady of the house, Arya gathers her servants and gives them orders. She’s been doing this since she came back home, to help Jon. In her mind, she pretends they’re guests like any other.

She chooses a chamber for them, orders someone to clean it and bring more mattresses. She sends word to the kitchen to serve them a proper meal and wine, and asks Maester Wolkan to pay them a visit. She sends another maid to guide them to the bath house afterwards in the hot springs under the ground, being the easiest, quickest way for four men to clean themselves.

She goes to her own chambers and waits, feeling her heart in her throat. Nymeria comes and rests her giant head on Arya’s lap, feeling her mistress’ agony. Arya absently fondles her between her ears.

The Hound was alive. Not only that, but following the Lord of Light. How could he be alive? She left him to die, didn’t she, she wanted him to—

She doesn’t know how long she waits in the dark and in the silence, until a knock on the door wakes her up. “Come in,” she says, calmly.

A maid opens the door. “They’re ready, Your Grace.”

Arya Stark goes to their chambers, Nymeria following her. The door is closed. She cracks it open without knocking. The four men instantly turn toward her, clean and smelling marginally better than when they arrived.

“Princess Arya,” says the one who keeps on dying, looking at her with his single uncovered eye. “We are glad to serve under your protection. The Lord of Li—”

“Spare me,” Arya says.

He shuts his mouth; the Hound smirks. Arya raises her head to stare him in the eye, crossing her hands behind her back. She walks toward Sandor Clegane. Her steps don’t make a sound.

Gods, he looks the same. Almost. His hair is even longer, though.

“I thought I had left you for dead,” she says, flatly.

The Hound sneers. “You wish, girl.”

“Yes, I wish,” she murmurs.

You’re lying, says no one’s voice in her heart of hearts.

The sneer turns into an ugly grin. “Is that a threat?”

Beside her, Nymeria growls, low and deep in her chest. Arya only smiles. “Of course not. You’re my guest. I’m a Stark of Winterfell, not a Frey.”

“A Stark of Winterfell you are,” he grins. Arya wants to slash that grin off his face with Needle. Arya wants to hug him and curse him and ask him what happened. “What am I supposed to call you now? Princess? Your Grace?”

“You should simply not call me at all,” Arya suggests.

She turns to Gendry.

“Are you still a blacksmith?”

Gendry studies her as if he thinks she is a ghost, and he opens his mouth but no sound leaves it, as if that is a very complicated subject. It doesn’t help that Nymeria is staring at him, too, and he’s staring at the wolf back, eyes wide with fear.

Who are you now? Arya wonders. What is your face?

She decides to have mercy on him and proceeds with a more practical question.

“Have you ever worked with dragonglass?” She asks.

“Yes,” he answers, “but that was a long time ago. No one uses it anymore.”

“Well, we use it here. You’ll start working in the Smithy tomorrow. I’ll spare you the salient details of why. I’m sure your god will show you,” she smiles.

Looking at each of their faces, she goes on.

Calm as still water, she chants to herself.

“The house is full and it’s going to get fuller. I hope you won’t mind sharing this chamber,” she says, unapologetically, “but after so much time on the road together, I’m positive that will not be a problem.”

She looks at Gendry while she says it, but it’s impossible not to feel the weight of the Hound’s gaze on her.

“It’s more than enough, Arya Stark,” Beric says. “We thank you for your hospitality.”

She ignores his flatteries.

“We train every night. It’s important that you all learn how to fight in the dark. The more experienced ones teach the younger ones. We try not to rely on resurrections here, as a rule. I’m teaching my people to fight for their lives.” She takes three steps back, toward the door. “You must be tired. I’ll leave you to rest. I’ve ordered a meal to be sent to these chambers, but you are welcome to join our table at dinner time, if you wish. Do you have any other questions?”

“Where is Melisandre?” Beric asks.

Arya turns toward him, and her nostrils flare with rage. “In an audience with the King in the North, who will decide her fate. But you’ve heard Ser Davos, Hand of the King. She’s not welcome here.”

“Are we welcome?” Thoros of Myr asks, speaking for the first time.

His eyes on her face are unsettling.

Fear, she remembers, cuts deeper than swords.

“I gave you bread and a warm room under my roof,” Arya says. “What else do you want? A hug?”

Thoros smiles. It looks like a shadow of a smile. “We are here for you, Arya Stark,” he says. “When Melisandre looks at the flames she only sees snow, but all I can see is you.”

“We serve the old gods here in the North,” Arya answers him on the spot. “They dwell in trees, not in the fire. They’re much quieter than yours, I’m afraid. And I lack the imagination to see anything in flames. I won’t ask thrice: do you have,” she speaks every word slowly, pausing, “any other questions?”

“No, girl,” the Hound murmurs, almost kindly. “You can leave us alone now.”

So she does.

xviii.

Jon goes to Arya’s chambers, afterwards, Ghost trotting behind him. Arya is cuddling Nymeria, wrapping herself in the wolf’s warm fur before the hearth, covered by a blanket. Jon sits by her side on the carpet, puts a hand on his sister’s head, gently looking upon her. Nymeria unwinds herself from Arya to make Ghost company closer to the fire, leaving Arya suddenly cold.

“Where is the witch?” Arya asks.

“She won’t be staying with us,” Jon answers, softly.

“Good,” Arya mutters.

Jon waits. She told him about the Brotherhood Without Banners, about the time she met them on the road, and the name and face she wore back then.

“I don’t like the way they look at me, Jon,” Arya confesses in the dark.

Jon grabs her chin and turns her face to him. “No one will hurt you,” he says. It’s a promise and a threat at once. “I will kill anyone who tries to hurt you. Do you understand me?”

“I can protect myself,” she mumbles.

He can feel Needle against his thigh, under the blanket, and Jon wonders if the sword he gave her would be enough to protect her from him.

“We are a pack. We protect each other,” Jon whispers quietly. “You’re not alone in the world anymore.”

“A pack of two,” she chuckles, teary-eyed.

Jon smiles. He gathers Arya in his arms, rests her head on his chest, and they both stare at the flames.

“Wait until Sansa arrives,” he whispers in her ear. “Then it will be the three of us. We’ll keep each other safe.” He kisses the top of her head. “You’re home. You have nothing to fear.”

xix.

But their pack grows before that.

They are indoors; practice is impossible with the heavy snowstorm howling outside; it’s been getting more frequent, the snowstorms, as winter advances and the days grow shorter. On those nights, instead of taking up swords, northmen and wildlings linger in the Great Hall, warming themselves inside the heated walls of the castle with stories and laughter and beer.

Their festive mood is broken by the single, long blow of horns from their guards on shift upon the ramparts. Jon promptly gets up from his throne, grabbing Longclaw as he strides toward the inner gates of the Keep; but his men are opening the doors at Winterfell’s outer walls, across the courtyard.

It’s impossible to see anything in the storm. He lifts his arm to protect his face. Arya is soon by his side, Needle in hand, and then the wildlings, all with their swords, ready for an attack of enemies, dead or alive: the Others are known to bring the storm as their herald.

Instead, Jon, Arya, and the entirety of the North behold, bewildered, as Bran Stark is wheeled into the warm Great Hall by Lord Howland Reed, his daughter Meera at his right side, the three of them covered in snow.

xx.

(This is how Bran Stark comes back home:

With a little help from friends.)

xxi.

Meera and Lord Reed are accommodated; Arya orders whatever was left of the dinner to be delivered in their rooms while Jon guides them through the castle, and then, they both head to Jon’s royal solar, where Bran is waiting.

Their little brother looks solemn, sitting before the hearth that Jon ordered to be lit in the room. A dark cloak covers his legs. He looks pensive to the flames, as if he is waiting for the Lord of Light to speak to him through them. But when his siblings enter the room and close the door behind them, Bran raises his head, unsurprised, unsettled.

For a moment, Bran just locks his eyes into Jon’s. Then, with measured steps, the King in the North crosses the distance of his own solar. He kneels before Bran and takes his crown off of his head, placing it at Bran’s feet.

“What are you doing, Jon,” Bran says, and his voice is so different from what Arya remembers. He sounds grave, old, serious. Bran used to be such a cheerful boy.

“Winterfell is yours,” Jon says, bending his head down, as one is supposed to before a King. “As is the North.”

“Take that back,” Bran says. “I don’t want your crown.”

“Then let me name you my heir. It’s your birth-right,” Jon says. His voice trembles. “I usurped it from you.”

“You usurped no one,” Bran replies. He speaks like a Maester, like someone wiser than his years could possibly render him. “You won it through the right of conquest and you were chosen by the people. You cannot simply give it away.” He cocks his head, fixing his bird-like eyes on the northern crown. “Also, I thought you planned to give this to Daenerys Targaryen.”

“What?” Arya yells. She finally breaks out of her frozen state and steps forward, approaching her brothers. “Jon? What does that mean?”

Jon is not looking at her, though. He raises his head and keeps his gaze on Bran, even on his knees.

“How do you know this?” Jon asks.

“Answer me,” Arya demands. “Are you going to bend the knee? You can’t do that.”

“I can,” Jon says, turning to his little sister. “And if she demands it to aid us, I will, even if it’s the last thing I do as King in the North. We need her.” He tilts his head to the side. “Unless, of course, Bran accepts the crown. In that case, he can do as he wishes.”

“I don’t want the crown,” Bran repeats. “But I would do the same in your place.”

“Bran!” Arya throws her hands in the air, exasperated. “Are you both mad? Do you want to crush the North under the Iron Throne again?”

“Nothing is more important now than to defeat the Army of the Dead,” Bran says, turning to look his older sister in the eye for the first time. “I thought we all agreed on that.”

“We agreed on nothing! How do you even know about the Dead?” Arya questions. “Where in the seven hells have you been?”

Bran breathes in a deep gulp of air. “Beyond the Wall,” he says. “Learning. Suffice it to say, for now, that I think Jon has the right priorities in mind. We can handle the complications later.” He turns to his older brother again. “Besides, I think there’s no better way to get acquainted with the last of Jon’s family than showing her a sign of good-faith. He unites us all. It’s important that he’s the one with the crown on his head when she arrives.”

Jon rises to his feet, as if suddenly awakened from a stupor.

“We are the last of Jon’s family,” Arya reminds him. She blinks once, twice: “Jon is one of us. Do you mean Sansa?”

“No,” Bran says, calmly. “Jon is only half a Stark. His aunt is coming to our gates soon.”

Arya looks at Jon’s face — the dear face of her favorite brother, her favorite person in the world — and she can see when it starts to crumble.

She steps forward again, standing between Jon and Bran— to shield Jon from Bran’s words, from whatever he’s saying.

“Bran,” she says, voice low, “you’re making it so difficult for me to be glad that you’re home. Stop being mysterious and just tell Jon what you know about—” she stops her speech on its tracks. About what? About his parents? About his family? She is his family. No one is going to take Jon away from her.

She palms his chest behind her, as if to keep him away, as if enough distance from that foreign brother, that stranger in a wheel-chair, would be enough to protect them both.

“I mean Daenerys Targaryen, of course,” Bran says. “Who else?”

Arya is slow to understand, because it sounds absurd, unreal.

She turns to Jon and, in his face, kissed by the flames in the hearth, she can see he understands it before she does. And it’s only then that she gathers the pieces together—

Lyanna. Aunt Lyanna and Rhaegar—

“What are you talking about, Bran?” Jon asks; though he only murmurs, his voice is a sword, his voice is a threat, his voice is a child crying for his mother all at once.

“I am talking about your parents, Jon,” Bran says. “Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark. You’re the heir to the Iron Throne.”

“No, I’m not,” Jon says, frowning deeply. “That’s completely— that’s madness. That does not make any sense.”

“Yes? What makes sense, then? Ned Stark fathering a bastard after being recently married? Or Ned Stark protecting his nephew from Robert Baratheon’s wrath?”

Jon is shaking his head. He steps back.

Arya covers her mouth to keep a sob from spilling out. Her gaze is misty with tears.

“Jon,” she whispers.

But Jon cannot hear her.

“How could you possibly know that?” Jon asks. “This is a foolish tale. Someone lied to you.”

“No one told me that,” Bran says, and it sounds a little like he’s grieving, too, like he’s trying to do this smoothly. “I saw it with my own eyes.”

Jon barks out a bitter laugh. “That does not help you sound any more reliable, brother,” he says, and then gasps at that word: brother.

As if that’s a lie, just like their lives.

“I can explain it later to you how I see things. But you don’t have to believe me,” Bran says, earnestly. “Here’s what you’ll do: you will summon Howland Reed to your presence. You’ll ask him why he was the only northern lord who never answered your call, why he hasn’t left the Neck since Robert’s Rebellion. You’ll demand him to tell you what happened at the Tower of Joy. And he’ll tell you about the day your mother died. The day you were born.”

“I’m not going to ask anything to anybody,” Jon decides.

“And then you’re going to wait for your dear friend Samwell Tarly, who’s right now headed North,” Bran goes on, ignoring the King’s pleas, “and after he summarizes everything he discovered about the Others, you’ll ask him about the curious facts he found out about Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen. He’ll tell you that Rhaegar annulled his marriage to Elia and married aunt Lyanna, before gods and men. You’re not a bastard. And you were born out of love.”

“Bran, shut your mouth,” Jon says through his clenched jaw, holding his temples as if he’s trying to crush his own head. “I don’t want to hear your lies.”

“If you could go beyond the Wall now, perhaps you’d find Uncle Benjen, half-alive and half-dead like you,” Bran continues, urgently. “And you could ask him why he decided to take the Black and leave Winterfell behind as soon as father came back home with you, why he would renounce wife and children after so many Starks died. If you asked him what he knows, he wouldn’t be able to say much, but if you asked what he suspects—” Bran tilts his head in a measured movement. “He knew Aunt Lyanna better than anyone. He knew our father well enough. And if you ask Coldhands today what he was running away from, he’d tell you, Jon.”

“Bran,” Arya asks, “Stop that. You’re being mean.”

“Only from me you’d be able to know that your true name is Aegon Targaryen. From me and from my father. But if you don’t believe me, even yet,” Bran whispers, “then look inside you, Jon. And tell me I’m not making sense. Tell me I’m lying.”

Jon glares at his youngest brother — his cousin, his cousin — for one last second before rushing out of the room, leaving the crown at Bran’s feet.

Arya tries to grab his arm. “Wait, Jon,” she says, urgently, “that doesn’t change anything. We’re still— you’re still part of our pack. You’re our Jon. We’re—”

“That changes everything,” he says, shaking his arm. It hurts Arya more than a slap. “Let me go, Arya.”

She cannot hold him back, no more than she can contain her own tears. Arya watches as Jon leaves, and she stands looking dumbly at the open door until Bran speaks again.

“He needs time,” he says. “Give him time.”

She turns around, glaring furiously at him. “Did you have to do that?”

“Of course I had,” Bran says. “He deserved to know.”

She cleans her tears with the back of her hand. She looks at the crown Jon left behind, picking it up from the floor. “He’s never going to forgive Father. He’s never going to look at me the same way again.”

“Yes, he will,” her brother assures her. “Jon looks like aunt Lyanna, but there’s too much of Rhaegar in him. Let him with his sadness for a while. He needs to grieve.”

“How did you learn all of that?” Arya asks, more confused than exasperated, now. “How can you see things?”

Bran sighs. “You might want to sit down,” he suggests, almost kindly.

Arya, for once, decides to comply.

xxii.

For the following days and weeks, Arya almost never sees Jon. The King settles to training like a mad man every night with the northmen, until sunlight comes. During the day he rests, and spends most of his waking hours in his solar, reading and answering letters, or in the crypts of the family. The only person he allows marginally close to him is Tormund, the wildling. Arya follows Jon in the shadows, at times with other people’s faces, to make sure he is all right. He barely speaks to her.

In addition to anything that would demand leaving the castle — handling merchants, gathering more supplies for winter, all that she was already doing before the reveal of Jon’s parentage — it falls on Arya the daily tasks of the household, being host to their guests, and planning escape routes and battle plans with Jon’s council. She doesn’t have experience in that, though, only in one-on-one combat; so she grows closer to Ser Davos.

Soon, the northern lords fall into the habit of searching for her first, as King Jon retreats deeper and deeper into his brooding. Bran spends a lot of the time in the godswood, with his visions of the past and the present, but after the initial quarrel, the shock of how their paths have changed them both, she was able to finally recognize her little brother beneath all those layers of magic warging and green sight. Meera Reed is a pleasurable company, also.

It’s Meera’s father who disturbs Arya the most. Once, wearing the face of a cook, Arya saw when Jon entered his own solar with Howland Reed. Jon closed and bolted the door behind him, and Howland left many hours later. After that, her brother grew even more sullen for a while, until his sadness shifted into a sort of calm, a distance from everything and everyone that was even more alarming than his rage.

It is then that Arya decides he already had enough time. At the sunset, she follows him into the crypts. She waits in a shadowy corner for hours until she gathers the courage to step out of it, into the hallway, before the statue of Aunt Lyanna.

It’s the only tomb he ever visits.

Her feet are light on the dust, and Jon doesn’t listen to her. She feels like speaking would cut the silence and the air would bleed. It would create a wound. She’s so good at opening wounds.

“Jon,” she says, whispering, aiming for a clean cut, at least.

He turns around, toward her, surprised. Upon seeing her, his eyes relax, only to grow weary again one second later.

“Don’t,” she commands. Takes one step ahead, carefully, toward him. “Do not send me away or run away from me. You cannot go on like this.”

“I come here to be alone,” he informs her, coldly.

“You are King in the North still,” Arya reminds him, fighting stubborn tears away. She doesn’t even know why she wants to cry. “Your people need you now more than ever.”

“My reign is based on a lie. I’m not the person they think I am. I cannot carry on Ned’s legacy,” he bows down his head. “Or Robb’s.”

“Your reign never relied on your name. Your reign is based on your victory,” Arya says. Her voice grows more enraged, larger. “Your reign is based on your sacrifice, on your courage to fight for Winterfell when no one else did. None of this is a lie. And you—” she swallows down another sob. She won’t cry again for this stupidity. She’s done with her crying. “Even if you don’t want your crown anymore, you cannot deny me. You cannot abandon me. You promised—”

“I promised you’d be safe,” Jon says, repeating his past words as if they weren’t also declarations of love, as if they weren’t vows for life, as if they both were anything but a pack. “I plan to hold onto that.”

It makes her furious.

“You are my family! I will not watch you walk away from me and do nothing!” She says. Her screams echo all over the hallways of their dead. “Do you think I care for any of this? I never did! I didn’t care you were a bastard and I don’t care that you’re the heir to the bloody Iron Throne! I don’t care about who your parents were, or the name they chose for you. You were raised with me by Ned Stark, right here in this castle. You are my brother—”

“Arya,” Jon whispers, quietly, sadly.

“So you’re going to stop pushing me and Bran and everyone away,” she points a finger to him. “We are a pack. There’s still Stark blood in you, and you don’t have to do this alone. The lone wolf dies but the pack—”

“The pack survives,” he finishes the sentence, as her father taught them; as he always did when they were children. “I remember.”

He gives her a hand; Arya takes it. Jon pulls her closer, into his embrace, and holds her tight, squeezing all the air out of her lungs, but Arya hasn’t breathed so freely in weeks. She holds him back, hiding her face in his chest and smiling into the leather of his clothes.

“You are so damn stupid,” she declares.

Jon doesn’t quite laugh, but his voice carries on his smile, and it’s enough. “I’m sorry,” he asks. “I’m so sorry. You are right, Arya. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“It’s not just you. I can’t do this alone, too,” she murmurs. “I need my brother by my side. Your people miss you.”

“I think the North can follow you just fine,” she can still listen to his smile. “But you’re burdened. That’s unfair. I’ll be better.”

Arya does not dare to lift her head to ask it: “And when the Dragon Queen arrives?”

The silence that follows is so dense that Arya is able to feel the presence of the dead with them. She keeps her eyes on Aunt Lyanna; everyone says they’re alike. Was that the reason why she and Jon had always been so close?

“I’ll tell her about my parents,” Jon says, “and I’ll pledge the North to her cause, if that’s what it takes to convince her to aid us. I’ll renounce the Iron Throne, too. I do not want it. I should not be Lord of Winterfell, also. You are here, as is Bran. Sansa is coming home. I will not steal what has always been your inheritance. I would only ask of you to allow me to live here, to serve you, after we defeat the dead.”

Arya draws away to look him in the eye, at last. She disagrees with him on so many levels that she doesn’t even know where to start arguing, so she settles for: “Jon, please. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’ve made my decision,” Jon says. He looks older, and speaks with finality, as if he’s been thinking of nothing but this. “It’s the right thing to do. I do not need your permission, but I would appreciate your support.”

Arya wants to tell him they still don’t know this Targaryen girl, and wants to remind him that many bled and died for their freedom. But she just got back her brother; she doesn’t want to fight any more. Perhaps she’s being selfish, but in the moment, she chooses to stay silent and resigned in his embrace, settling her face on his chest again.

They stay in each other’s arms for a very long time.

“I thought I had lost you,” Arya murmurs. “I thought you’d never come back to me.”

“You’re never going to lose me, Arya Stark,” he tells her, kissing the top of her head. “You’re the only heart I have left.”

xxiii.

It’s dark in the godswood of Winterfell, but Beric’s sword is alive, painting the night in golden flames as he practices with his men. It was Arya’s idea, Sandor’s been told: they are to rest during daylight and practice after the sunset. They call her Wolf Princess now, but the Red Priest says he saw Arya’s face in the flames, and this is not her true name. When Sandor asks what her true name is, Thoros keeps silent.

To be fair, Sandor prefers when he’s silent.

That night, right after Beric has beaten Gendry to the ground, Thoros stands up.

“The Lord of Light plans to save the world from the darkness,” Thoros of Myr says, out of nowhere. He’s been resting between the roots of a heart-tree, and the branches are like arms in the dark around him. “And we are his servants until death. Every piece must fall into place, when the time comes. Every person matters.” Thoros shares a look with Beric, and then stares at each of their faces. “Our duty to R'hllor is to protect Arya Stark of Winterfell.”

“If we must kill a thousand dead men to keep her alive, then we’ll do it,” Beric adds. “If we must die for her, so we’ll do it. Our lives are not our own. Is that understood?”

They all nod, and come back to practice.

It’s only after all of the other men are gone that Sandor grabs Beric’s arm. He waits until, in the morning that arrives, the steps are far away ahead of them that they won’t be heard. The undead man looks at him with surprise, but before he can utter a word, the Hound says, “I’ve heard the stories.”

Beric Dondarrion feigns ignorance. “I’m sorry?”

“Melisandre couldn’t fucking shut up about it on our way here, so I remember,” Sandor growls. “Azor Ahai and Nissa Nissa and all that horseshit.”

“I hear ya,” Beric says with a nod.

“And I’m not fucking stupid,” Sandor adds. “I’m not keeping Arya Stark alive just to prepare her for slaughter like a pig.”

“We are but the Lord of Light serv—”

“Well, fuck you and your fucking god. I don’t fucking care.” He hasn’t let go of Beric’s arm yet. “If someone tries to hurt that girl, I don’t care if it’s a dead man or a king or both at once. I’ll kill him myself.”

“Clegane,” Beric murmurs, as if he’s speaking to a spoiled child. It angers Sandor even more. “It’s not up to us to decide her destiny.”

“So what?” the Hound mutters. “Am I supposed to obey that bastard boy knowing he will kill her?”

“You’re supposed to obey the Lord of Light alone,” Beric says, and shakes his arm free.

Sandor Clegane crosses his arms, annoyed.

“And I assume the Lord of Light speaks through you, and therefore I must obey you alone,” he mocks. “How convenient.”

Beric gives a step toward him, closer to his scarred, burnt face than ever before.

“You’re always barking. Like a dog,” he says, placidly. “But dogs are loyal creatures. That’s why I trust you, and that’s why the Lord has brought you to us.”

xxiv.

The next time someone blows a horn announcing the arrival of guests at the gates, both Jon and Arya are in the middle of sword practice. Jon is up against Beric, Arya is trying to defeat the Hound as he swears under his breath, and then the night is fractured by the familiar warning. Jon and Arya, immediately, stop; they share a worried look while they cross the courtyard, toward the gates. They weren’t expecting Sansa and Daenerys for at least another fortnight; they also weren’t expecting anyone else.

At the open gates, they listen to the sound of garrison.

Without Jon ever assembling, all the northerns in the courtyard, already with weapons in hand, ready their stances to battle. The air stills, the wind is quiet as the tension grows: they are waiting for the orders of their Commander.

They see a white flag first, peeking out of the horizon along with the first line of the army. And second, a banner of a striding huntsman, red on green.

Jon frowns, feeling the rumbling of the earth beneath the cavalry.

“Do you know that one?” Arya asks. It’s not northern, she’s sure.

“It’s the Tarly banner,” Jon says, even more confused. He doesn’t know much about southern sigils, but he knows that one because of Samwell. Leading the soldiers, he sees two men upon their horses, illuminated by the full moon: at distance, he can’t quite figure out their faces, but as they approach, one of them—

“Please tell me that’s not who I think,” Arya mutters.

One of the riders has a golden right hand. It reflects the moonlight, shining bright in the night.

xxv.

Jaime Lannister is sitting before the Starks in a plain chair, wondering if that’s the day he’ll die, after all.

Arya is standing by Jon’s right, Bran by his left. Two giant direwolves flank the three of them, standing on their four paws, ready. Jon has chosen not to chain him, but the King casually holds Longclaw at his hip. Arya has her hand upon Needle’s hilt. The small Tarly army settled in Winter Town. She’d quickly ordered the head of the maids to guide Dickon Tarly to a bath and a meal, before she joined Jon and Bran in Jon’s solar.

She is also the first to speak.

“I would give you bread and salt,” Arya says, “but I have no reason to believe you would respect the sacred oath of guest rights.”

Jaime Lannister looks at her impassively. “And I have no reason to believe you honorable folks would disrespect it,” he says with a small smirk. “That’s why I’m not afraid.”

“Why are you here?” Jon asks, as straight as possible.

Jaime turns his gaze to the King in the North. “I came for your sister.”

“For me?” Arya frowns.

Jaime rolls his eyes. “The other sister.”

He settles his eyes on Bran, who remains silently watching him with disturbing familiarity.

“As you can see, Lady Sansa is not home yet,” Jon tells him. “She’s in the Vale.”

“But she’s been gathering armies and supplies all through the Seven Kingdoms for your fight against the dead,” Jaime says. “Dickon Tarly is here for her, as I am.”

Jon and Arya share a quick look.

“Why didn’t you come sooner?”

Jaime shifts, uncomfortable, in his seat. “The Targaryen girl tasked me to besiege King’s Landing in order to keep Cersei trapped so she could come safely to your aid,” Jaime Lannister explains. “The Lannister, Dornish and Tarly forces were to remain in the South.”

“Why not only sack the city?” Arya questions, crossing her arms and letting go of Needle for the first time.

Jaime cocks his head. “Tyrion seems to have convinced his Queen that shedding innocent blood was not worth it. Their plan was to weaken her by besieging the city and cutting out all her supplies.”

“That still doesn’t explain why you’re here,” Jon points out.

Jaime takes a deep breath. “The siege fell,” he says.

Arya and Jon wait. Bran stares at Jaime, and in the dim light of the chamber, he almost looks like he’s smiling. It’s sinister; Jaime looks away.

“What do you mean it fell?” Arya asks, at last.

“The Dornish led by Ellaria didn’t want to wait. They simply wanted to kill Cersei and be done with it, and didn’t particularly care for the life of the civilians,” Jaime explains, barely hiding his disgust. “They also didn't understand the concept of collaboration or hierarchy,” he shrugs. “So she ordered them to invade the city, there was a battle, they were imprisoned or killed. After losing one third of our forces, we had to break the siege and retreat to Harrenhal.”

“Why didn’t you just invade the city, if the siege was broken, anyway?” Arya exclaims. “You could have her dead by now!”

“Because Cersei spread wildfire all over King’s Landing,” Jaime says, his voice raising. “She hid it in the docks, in civilian houses, in public squares, in temples, below the streets. Every corner of King’s Landing between the gates and the Red Keep is a minefield. There was no way of fighting without her blowing the city up. She would do it. I know her.” Jaime looks at his own golden hand. “To save her own skin she would burn us and sacrifice her people with us. She wouldn’t even think twice.” He looks Jon in the eye intently. “We had to retreat.”

There’s a long silence. Jon taps his fingers over the hilt of his longsword.

“How did you know?” He asks.

Jaime can only see Ned Stark in him, serious, dark, quiet.

“I beg your pardon?” Jaime asks.

“If it was hidden, how did you know she spread wildfire in the city?” Jon repeats, patiently. “You retreated to preserve the life of the people, so I’m assuming King’s Landing is still standing.”

“One or two spots blew accidently during the attempt of sacking,” Jaime murmurs.

“But how did you know that was not incidental?” Jon questions. “How did you figure out the other spots?”

The Kingslayer smirks, as if giving up. He throws his single hand in the air. “A little bird told me.”

“Do you have no sense of self-preservation whatsoever?” Arya asks, irritated. “We are not joking.”

“Neither am I,” Jaime answers. “I literally received a raven with a letter warning me that King’s Landing was in danger of exploding in the air and that Cersei planned to put to use the last of the wildfire she had. The letter was not signed. I didn’t recognize the handwriting. Two days later, the Dornish went mad and tried to sack the city. When I saw some spots blowing up I knew the letter was right and I called my men back,” Jaime says. “I assume it was someone from her Council, or from the city itself, who didn’t want to die.”

Arya turns to Bran Stark, who had been quiet all along. “Was it you?” She asks. “Did you warn him?”

Jaime frowns. Bran is still studying him, with unnerving gray eyes.

“I’ve been keeping an eye on you, Ser Jaime,” he says, simply, and then smiles.

Jaime feels a cold drop of fear in his stomach.

“What do you mean?” he murmurs.

“Is he lying?” Jon asks Bran, ignoring Jaime’s confusion entirely.

“No,” Bran answers. “He’s telling the truth. Bring him the bread and salt, sister,” he says. “We don’t want to be rude.”

Arya furiously stares at her little brother; Bran holds her gaze.

“This man is not only a Lannister but the Kingslayer,” Arya says.

“I think they noticed,” Jaime murmurs.

“Ser Jaime,” Bran Stark warns, “Keep quiet.” He turns to Arya again. “He answered our call to battle,” the boy says, as if that’s enough.

“He was working for the Dragon Queen.”

He needs to bite his lower lip hard not to comment on that.

“Yes, because he turned against Cersei,” Bran retorts.

“And we could use a seasoned Commander,” Jon says, quietly, voice so low that Jaime has to strain to hear it.

Arya turns to her older brother. “You are a Commander.”

“I’m half his age. We need his experience.”

“Experience in losing? Robb easily defeated him, as far as I remember.”

“Not easily,” Jaime says, out of instinct.

The three pairs of gray eyes on him — one angry, one annoyed, and the other just surprised that he’s still talking — are enough to shut his mouth again.

“Sansa trusts him,” Bran adds.

Jaime's not so sure about that. If Sansa Stark trusts him, it is only because Brienne does, but really, this is one of those moments in which his life is hanging on his silence. So Jaime keeps it.

“He hurt our father in King’s Landing,” she reminds Bran. Jaime also wants to comment on that, wants to say he only had to do it because their crazy mother imprisoned his little brother with no evidence or reason at all and accused him of not only attempted murder but worst, of betting against Jaime. But he bites his lower lip again and manages to keep silent. “You can see the facts but you cannot know the plans in his heart. I do not trust him. He has no honor.”

“Oh, I think you’re wrong. He has the honor of a Lannister,” Bran tells her. “Which means we can count on him to pay his debts. Isn’t that so, Ser Jaime?”

Jaime feels a squeeze in his throat, rendered unable to answer. He looks at Jon and Arya, who seem confused by Bran’s phrasing. They all look like a single unit, a well-adjusted team, the gravitational center shifting between the three of them in turns; but only one of them Jaime truly fears.

The knight looks the boy in the eye again, and their eyes catch, green in gray, something falling into place. That’s when Jaime realizes that, for some unfathomable reason, Bran didn’t tell his siblings. They don’t know what he did.

You owe me, Bran’s eyes say.

Jon is the one who eventually takes the bowl with salted bread, handing it to Jaime. The Lannister eats it slowly, swallowing it dry.

“Does that mean I’m your hostage now?” He asks, trying to sound confident. He says it looking at Jon, but the words are meant for the other son of Ned Stark.

In any case, it’s the King in the North who answers.

“I understand why the concept of hospitality might be foreign to you, but no, Ser Jaime. That means you are our guest,” Jon says, with a sharp wit that Jaime was not expecting to bite him. “Welcome to Winterfell.”

xxvi.

Arya Stark is not even sweating.

“You need to loosen that grip,” she says, lightly tapping Needle’s tip against his left wrist, and then sliding the tip up to his upper arm. “And put your strength here.” It doesn’t pierce the leather of his clothes, but Jaime draws away from her all the same.

He has Valyrian steel, so it was accorded he needed to practice with the best. He alternates between Jon and Arya. The Hound is around, but he reminds Jaime too much of Joffrey and Jaime is not particularly looking forward to fighting him.

Jon is a fine swordsman, and can almost beat Jaime on his best nights. Arya is something else entirely. She’s too tiny and too fast and completely silent, moving like the wind, completely weightless. She never wears armor, preferring layers of leather and wool instead. It’s a new moon night, the godswood illuminated by abundant starlight; a gentle snow falls on them, the air still and crisp and cold. Jaime can barely see her.

“I can’t allow myself a loose grip when I can’t see where you’re coming from,” Jaime mutters. He can mostly see the white smoke of her heavy breathing. But he supposes the dead won’t breathe at all.

“You don’t have to see me,” Arya reminds him. She says the same thing to everyone: “You must hear me.”

Listening to all things without being heard. Seeing all things without being seen. Arya is teaching the entirety of the armies in Winterfell how to be winter ghosts, how to merge with the darkness, how to be one with the night, how to be swords with water bodies. It makes Jaime feel even clumsier than he’s already been feeling since he lost his dominant hand: too heavy, too noisy, too much. He needs to be less.

But it works, the knight is not going to lie. He’s improving, little by little. Dangerously slow.

“I also can’t hear you with the way you’re moving your feet,” he retorts. “By the way, what are you doing with your feet?”

For the first time in their night training, Arya almost smiles. Almost.

“I forget that you’re an old man, sometimes,” Arya says, merrily. “And it’s called water dancing. It’s Braavosi.”

“That doesn’t work for people one inch taller or one pound bigger than you,” Jaime complains.

“That works for anyone who’s willing to practice it,” Arya says. In her defense, she doesn’t seem to think the fact he has only one hand is a problem at all. Lifting Needle in the air — a gracious move; it really looks like she’s dancing — the Wolf Princess raises her chin. “Again.”

And so they go again.

And again, and again, until Jaime’s body is sore, feeling its years. More than that; his mind is tired and dizzy from trying to follow a shadow in the dark. He throws his sword in the snow-covered grass and lifts his hands. The sky is gray before pre-dawn. “I surrender.”

At least now she has the decency to sweat. She reappears before him, the crown of her dark hair is damp. “You surrender? What do you think the Others will think of that when they come to you?”

“I’ll simply stand behind you and let you do the fighting for me,” Jaime declares, annoyed.

“Let him rest, sister,” says a voice by their right, from the dense forest surrounding them. “I think he’s improving greatly.”

Jaime is startled to see Bran Stark in the shadows, sitting comfortably in his wheel-chair among the heart-trees, watching them. He almost jumps away from the boy.

Arya turns to her little brother, almost bored. “We can’t waste Valyrian steel. Dragonglass can stop the dead but only Valyrian steel can kill the Great Other. Ser Jaime needs to be better than everyone.”

Oh, those days are gone, Jaime thinks, but he’s still too alarmed with Bran’s presence in their midst to make a joke out of it. “Did you know he was there?” Jaime asks Arya.

“Didn’t you?” Arya asks back, widening her eyes in surprise and then disappointment. She turns toward Bran again. “That’s what I’m talking about. His ears are weak! You made so much noise when you arrived!”

“No, he didn’t,” Jaime answers, offended.

“Yes, he did!” Arya says, fuming. “As did Meera when she left!”

“Meera Reed was here, too?” Jaime asks, dumbfounded.

How did he miss all those people around them?

“Meera has light feet,” Bran says, as if he means to comfort the Lannister. “She is a hunter. And he was concentrating, Arya. That is good, isn’t it?”

Jaime doesn’t miss when Arya comes to him, though, pointing Needle to the bare point of his throat. He can’t grab Widow’s Wail in time, but he can step back in reflex, raising his golden hand to stop the blade. She smiles.

“Very good,” she praises him. “You know, I think the golden hand is a great asset.”

“Oh, please,” Jaime rolls his eyes.

“You’re with me again tomorrow night,” she says, turning around and heading to the narrow trail cutting through the forest that leads to the main Keep of Winterfell.

“Where are you going?” He asks, a little louder so she can hear him. It’s unnecessary; the godswood is frighteningly silent. The trees, the snow, seem to absorb every noise. He’s sure there are many groups like theirs, spread around the sacred garden, practicing in this heavy silence through the night well into the sunrise, but he can’t hear a thing outside of the glade they’re in.

In the distance, he can see her white breath when she puffs in irritation. “Why do you think he came?” she asks, and doesn’t wait for him to answer as she turns her back to him. “He wants to talk to you.”

She leaves him alone with Bran Stark, then.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” Bran declares.

“I haven’t,” Jaime lies. He feels a sudden need to have his sword in hand; and then he feels the worst human being for the urge to defend himself from a boy he crippled with his own hands, when he had both. What kind of monster—

“You can pick up your sword, if you’d like,” Bran says, simply.

Jaime glares at him furiously, but grabs Widow’s Wail from the ground. “Get out of my head, boy.”

“I’m not in your head,” Bran says, wickedly amused. “You’d know if I were.” Again, Jaime has no idea of what he means, but Bran proceeds before he can question it. “I’m just following your gaze. And I don’t blame you for wanting your sword… Available. You’re a knight, after all.”

Interesting choice of words, Jaime thinks. “Are you confirming that I am right to fear you?”

“Absolutely not. Were we planning to kill you, it would be idiotic of us to put you under the tutelate of our better swordsmen,” Bran points out.

Jaime cocks his head; that is true. He sheaths his sword into its scabbard at his hip.

“And, besides,” Bran smiles a little. Jaime hates when he does that. It looks sinister, inhuman. “How could I defeat you, Ser? I’m just a boy in a wheel-chair. If anything, I should be afraid of you.”

Jaime steps closer to him. More than anything, that pains him with the characteristic sting of truth: the suggestion that he’s hurt Bran before, and he could do it again.

“Why didn’t you tell them?”

“Why didn’t I tell what? And to whom?” Bran asks innocently.

“Stop playing games with me,” Jaime murmurs. He lives, day and night, terrified of the moment Arya Stark or Jon Snow will reveal those nightly practices are just a sham, a trap to finally kill him and avenge their little brother. And yet he comes back to his rooms alive at dawn, almost wishing he wasn’t, wishing someone could do justice and force these debts out of his bloodied hands so he could be free from it. From the worst thing he’s ever done in his life. And he’s done plenty of terrible things. “I know what you’re doing.”

“Then tell me what I’m doing, Ser.”

“You want to bribe me with the truth,” Jaime says. “Tell me what you want for me and be done with it.”

Bran scoffs.

“Ser Jaime, there’s a chance I might need you before this War ends, and rest assured I plan to collect this particular debt of yours,” he says, “but as for our little secret, I’ll let you decide what we should do with it. Should I tell my siblings about it? Or should we keep it between us?”

Jaime squeezes his eyes, wishing desperately that Tyrion were here. His little brother was always better at understanding people’s malice, their hidden intentions. What is Bran planning?

But the more he looks at the boy, the less it looks like he has any ill feelings toward Jaime, which, all things considered, is the most absurd thing in the world.

“Why would you keep it between us?” He asks, doubtfully.

“What good would come out of telling it?” Bran asks. “To be of use, you need to be alive first.”

Jaime feels the same old dread that has been creeping up his spine since he arrived North. “And when the War ends?”

Bran shrugs. “We can have this conversation again when the War ends. If it ends.”

Jaime chuckles under his breath. “So I am a hostage, after a fashion.”

“Only to your own conscience,” Bran says. “I, for my part, mean you no harm.”

Jaime settles with that for a while. It feels like unspoken forgiveness, but it doesn’t sound like it.

It reminds him of—

“How could you possibly know of the wildfire?” Jaime asks.

“You’ll realize I know a lot of things about a lot of people,” Bran says.

The knight frowns. “Do you always have to be so obscure? It’s a fairly simple question.”

“If you think about it, it’s not simple at all,” Bran replies.

Jaime sighs; Bran is right. It isn’t simple.

“I suppose you keeping an eye on me is just as complex,” he guesses.

“Yes,” Bran says with a nod.

“So,” Jaime opens his arms, again in surrender. “Where does that leave us?”

Bran takes his time to answer that one.

“Working together against a common enemy,” the boy says, at last, “and willing to leave the past behind us. Can we agree on that?”

Jaime nods. He runs his hand through his beard. “We can,” he murmurs.

It would be better, he thinks, to just be punished. This senseless, mysterious mercy is confusing. But he’s alive, and that’s something he can’t quite take for granted. He looks at Bran again. The boy looks comfortable there, among his precious heart-trees.

“Do you need help getting back to the castle?” Jaime asks.

“Thank you, Ser, but I’ll stay a while longer,” Bran answers. “I need the trees to see, and I haven’t done all my seeing yet.”

Jaime blinks once, twice. He twists his mouth. “I don’t have any idea of what you mean,” he declares.

Bran laughs. This time it sounds young, childish. It suddenly hits Jaime that he’s the same age Tommen is. Was.

“I’m sorry. I can’t help it,” Bran says, truly apologizing. “You can have your rest now, Ser.”

The sun touches the top of the leafless trees. Sunlight is filtered by the trunks and branches. The sky is golden and pink, and beneath it, Bran Stark looks softer and more human. It’s the darkness that makes him creepy, Jaime decides, while he comes back to his chambers in the castle. He sleeps better than he had in ages.

xxvii.

Finally, one morning, after breakfast, the rushing winds come in through the windows of the dining hall like a long sigh of an annoyed god, followed by stunned silence that seems to cut the whole of Winterfell in two; the air seems to bristle like bones, filled with anticipation. Jaime Lannister seems to be sharpening his ear, tilting his head slightly toward the window, as Bran Stark looks him silently in the eye. Arya and Jon share a look.

It’s Arya who, at last, stands, walking to the exit door, toward the battlements. Jon follows.

It was never the wind; above them, against the white-bone winter sky, far up the clouds, two dragons fly in circles, one black, the other white. They’re distant enough to look small, and yet they’re not small enough. Their wings are the ones moving the air, the noise loud enough to muffle the sound of astonishingly synchronized troops of men and their cavalry.

Jon looks at the horizon and he sees what seems like endless lines of armies, an entire ocean of them.

“What in the seventh hell?” he mutters.

Arya squeezes her eyes. “How many—?”

Jon cannot tell how many. He can only see, leading the multitude of soldiers behind them on the Kingsroad, side by side and mounting their respective horses, two women coming ahead: one with hair as white as snow, draped in light-gray furs, over a silver mare; the other familiarly kissed by fire, dressed in a black winter gown and riding a chestnut horse.

They both listen to steps approaching, and then, Jaime Lannister comes to watch the procession with them, Arya standing between the two men.

“Oh, finally,” the Kingslayer says, bracing himself on the walls of the battlements.

“Why are you relieved?” Arya asks, trying to see the end of the sea of armies. It stretches toward the horizon and beyond it. “You know the Dragon Queen is probably going to ask for your head.”

“But you won’t give it to her. I’m under your protection,” Jaime quips with his infamous smirk. “You won’t let any tragedy fall upon me.”

Arya rolls her eyes. “If you keep being annoying like that I might give her your head only for you to shut your mouth.”

“You are not the first person threatening to behead me in order to silence me, Princess, and I am unafraid.”

“You’re still talking!” Arya exclaims. She narrows her eyes, recognizing the banner of House Arryn; the three-headed dragon of House Targaryen; the Stark wolf. “Why are you still talking?”

“Both of you, shut up,” Jon mutters. “Let’s go down to the courtyard. And Ser Jaime,” the King turns to stare the knight in the eye. “Stand behind me and try to keep quiet.”

Chapter Text

i.

There’s a tension challenging to snap the air open as they approach Winterfell.

The two dragons are flying high above the clouds over them in gracious circles: who needs heralds? Neither of their parties had to cross the Neck: Daenerys flew to Dragonstone, and from there, sailed with her Khalasar and her Unsullied to White Harbor. Part of the Ironborn ships had gone with Theon to Gulltown in Sansa’s service, to accommodate the Knights of the Vale, and yet another part had been in the service of the northmen who worked on the dragonglass mines until the last day they could, taking obsidian shipments from Dragonstone to White Harbor and then back to another load; Daenerys had to order part of the ships occupying Blackwater Bay to take her armies North, the fastest way to travel.

Tyrion wonders if that’s the reason why Daenerys has been in a rather irritable mood since they all met on White Harbor, where he and Sansa had been waiting for the Queen after they arrived from Gulltown.

They were to depart together, as one, by Daenerys’ own decision. Sansa had not questioned it.

But his Queen doesn’t lack reasons to be bothered. Maybe it’s the fact the siege of King’s Landing had been shattered, or that her Dornish allies had been imprisoned, or that apparently one third of her ships had been seized by Sansa Stark because Theon Greyjoy commanded them to, or that Tyrion had left Dragonstone to follow the Stark girl into the Vale, to witness her slaying her enemies.

“She did it in your name,” Tyrion told her.

It did not pacify his Queen much, and it didn’t help Tyrion to be in the best of moods either.

For the way Daenerys avoided him through their trip, he suspects something happened in Dorne; she kept Jorah’s company since the old knight was returned to her, and insisted they would not talk of it as a council, would not discuss anything at all until they could enjoy appropriate privacy in Winterfell.

So they marched on, as the silence between Queen and Hand only grew deeper, larger.

Castle Cerwin stood between the Kingsroad and the headwaters of the White Knife, just half a day from Winterfell for a small party. But for so many men and horses and with the dwindling sunlight, they would certainly need more than that, maybe even two days.

Lady Jonelle Cerwin, lady of the House in her brother’s absence, a woman with wild curly black hair framing her long face and grayish blue eyes, was pleased to welcome Lady Sansa and her friends for the night. The lady’s brother had pledged loyalty to Roose Bolton after their father and older siblings were flayed alive in front of them for refusing to pay their tolls when they openly declared their loyalty to House Stark.

A pledge born out of fear, she promised, serving bread and wine herself to her guests: Sansa first, Daenerys second. And that bastard never trusted us, even after we paid our taxes.

“I’m sorry about your father and brothers, my lady,” Sansa said, somberly, looking at their hostess with a guarded, shared grief. “I never doubted your loyalty. I tried to convince Jon to summon you to battle, but we were running out of time.”

“We would have served you then,” Jonelle answered. “At least this time, when the King called, we had the chance. Send my love to my brother when you arrive home, my lady.”

“I shall,” Sansa promised with a nod.

Tyrion watched his Queen silently, but Daenerys’ expression had betrayed none of her thoughts.

They left the castle before sunrise, and the morning had greeted them with snow; it was snowing everyday and everywhere above the Neck. Sansa didn’t seem bothered by it; she mounted her horse and trotted to ride by Daenerys’ side instead of behind her.

And after all that, after so many foreign castles and inns on their way, after days on the road sleeping on uncomfortable tents, stopping to rest and feed the horses and watching the sunlight vanishing like a dream, after enduring snow and cold and winter winds, finally, one morning, they see it rising on the horizon: the dark, tall gates of Winterfell, standing like a giant in the snow over Winter Town.

Tyrion looks at Sansa. Her eyes are full of longing. She pulls the hood of her black furs down and lifts her face to the northern skies, her braided auburn hair shining brighter than ever in the white sun and the snowflakes kissing her lips.

As they ride through the Kingsroad cutting Winter Town in half, the people gather on the streets, heads poking from windows and doors, curious gray eyes watching their procession, children pointing at the skies or hiding behind their mother’s skirts at the sight of the dragons. Sansa waves her hand when she recognizes some of their faces, but otherwise her eyes are persistent on the path ahead of them.

The gates of Winterfell open and, before they can enter, Sansa halts her horse, dismounts it and walks on her two feet into the home of her childhood, her black cloak flying on the winter wind behind her, speckled by dots of white.

The last time he entered the courtyard of Winterfell accompanied by a royal party, a lifetime ago, Tyrion had been too busy with the brothels in winter town to pay any attention to the castle. Unlike Casterly Rock, where all the space consisted of the Keep itself, Winterfell is like a little town inside its own walls: it has many buildings and towers, open spaces and roads between the buildings, bridges and ramparts connecting them.

This time, a crowned man not unlike Ned Stark stands in front of the line to welcome the guests: Tyrion is stunned with how much Jon has grown, how much he resembles his father. As the King in the North opens his arms with a smile on his face to hold Sansa in a long, Daenerys and her party form a line in front of the northerners. Tyrion falls into his place by Daenerys’ side as the rest of her advisors get in position; he watches Sansa hugging her little sister tighter and for an even longer time that she did Jon, and then, the lady kneels down on the snow to whisper to the boy in a wheel-chair, holding him afterwards.

Bran Stark. They hadn’t received word of him. The heir, Tyrion thinks, absently. There’s no Queen by Jon’s side, after all.

But Sansa is her mother’s daughter, and soon she stands on her feet, between the two groups.

“Your Grace, this is Jon Snow, the King in the North,” she says, in the prime of her courtesy.

It’s like a play, a stage they’ve rehearsed before, and Missandei is ready to say her line.

“This is Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen,” she says, “Rightful heir to the Iron Throne, rightful Queen of the Andals and the First Men, protector of the Seven Kingdoms—”

The King listens patiently, hands clasped behind his back. Tyrion takes note of the people surrounding Jon: Arya by his right, Bran by his left; Ser Davos, by Arya’s side; a giant man with unruly red hair flanking Ser Davos. And behind Bran’s wheel-chair, beside a young woman with curly dark hair and sharp small eyes, stands Jaime Lannister, Tyrion’s very own big brother, too tall, too golden to be ignored.

Around them, there are people carrying sacks of food, wheelbarrows of dragonglass and wood timbers, and wagons in every direction. They can listen to the distant sound of swords clashing against each other in practice.

In the back of his mind Missandei is still talking. “—the Mother of Dragons, the Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, the Unburnt, the Breaker of Chains.”

Unlike the first time Tyrion came to Winterfell, now no one falls on their knees, no one bow their heads. In all fairness, none of theirs bent to the King welcoming them in his castle, either.

Jon doesn’t smile, but he looks amiable. “Welcome to Winterfell, Daenerys Targaryen. This is Princess Arya Stark,” he says, pointing to his siblings, “and Prince Bran Stark.” He looks at Davos. “And Ser Davos, my Hand.”

Jon’s eyes meet Tyrion’s, and though he doesn’t smile, his gaze does. Tyrion quietly nods back, studying the King carefully.

Look at you, boy, he thinks.

“Should we make our acquaintance indoors?” Jon invites, before Daenerys can speak. “I hear Essos is a sunny country. You must be cold.”

Daenerys smiles. “I am not,” she says. “But I accept your offer, Jon Snow. Thank you.”

ii.

The Great Hall feels smaller after seeing the rest of the world.

Or perhaps it’s just the added guests crowding her home.

Ser Davos leads Daenerys’ armies to their tents and installments, but the Queen's advisors still follow her into the castle. Once inside, Sansa crosses the imaginary line between the parties and stands between Jon and Arya; Brienne follows her.

Jaime Lannnister doesn’t leave Jon’s side, though, which intrigues her; he was named Lord of Casterly Rock by Daenerys, was meant to hold the West and its armies for her in exchange for his life. Sansa can see Tyrion’s eyes switching between his older brother and the Dragon Queen; there are many tensions waiting to break through the surface of courtesy, it’s only a matter of which one will come up for air first.

And, unsurprisingly, it is Daenerys who decides it.

“Ser Jaime,” she says, once they are safe inside the walls of the castle. Tyrion sighs, apparently in anticipation of the argument. “I was not expecting to find you here.”

“Well, I can’t understand why, Your Grace,” Jaime answers, “since you’ve been warned of our retreat to Harrenhal.”

“Sieges don’t simply fall,” Daenerys replies. “I gave you one simple task.”

“Simple?” Jaime chuckles, sourly. “You gave me an impossible task. Besieging King’s Landing was the least of my problems, the hardest part was to convince your mad allies to be minimally reasonable.”

Daenerys squeezes her eyes, her nostrils flaring with rage, and Sansa suddenly understands why the Targaryens fancied themselves dragons even after the beasts died.

“Ellaria was not mad,” she says, as if her word was enough to create the truth or kill it.

“Ellaria was impulsive, irresponsible, and had no sense of cooperation, but we already knew all of that,” Jaime retorts. “She didn’t listen to me, to Dickon Tarly, to anyone. I told her she’d be caught. What did you want me to do? To chain her?”

“And then you just left her? You didn’t think you should rescue your fellow companions, your brothers in arms?” Daenerys asks, giving a step ahead to stare into Jaime’s eyes more closely.

Jaime doesn’t step away. Instead, he leans in, as if daring her to come closer still.

“You are completely delusional if you think I would waste one single Lannister man to save the woman who killed my daughter,” Jaime seethes through his teeth. In the winter light, and possessed by that fury, he looks like the dangerous man Sansa always heard tales about. “Ellaria and Cersei can rot together for all I care.”

“Jaime,” Tyrion murmurs under his breath, and then the Great Hall is filled with a sepulchral silence; everyone holds their breaths. Tyrion had confided to Sansa he thought it a mistake to put his brother and the Sand Snakes to work together; apparently his Queen didn’t hear him, or maybe she did it on purpose, maybe she just wanted the Kingslayer to commit a lethal mistake. Sansa cannot know.

The pressure in the room is almost solid. Since Stannis initiated his campaign, years ago, the rumors about the relationship between the Lannister twins have spread throughout every corner of Westeros, just as the bastard status of Cersei’s heirs, but that was different from listening to a confession directly from either of their mouths. That Jaime was careless enough to do so revealed more than Sansa could analyze in the moment; all she can feel is the tension.

Daenerys cuts through it anyway, her tongue a knife. “And why didn’t you kill your sister, then?” She asks, not softening her words but lowering her voice as if the sudden silence demanded it. “If the siege broke, why didn’t you sack the city? Perhaps your loyalties are still fragile, Ser Jaime.”

Sansa thinks that hint is what will prompt Jaime to do or say something even more reckless, but to her surprise, Bran intervenes.

“Cersei spread wildfire all over the city, Your Grace,” her brother says; listening to a voice that is not bristling with wrath seems to blow a cool wind over the Great Hall. “There was no way to attack without endangering the people of King’s Landing.”

The momentary peace doesn’t last long; Daenerys snaps her eyes toward Jaime again.

“You left the people of King’s Landing behind in her hands,” Daenerys foams. “As her hostages.”

Sansa sees the tragedy announced on Tyrion’s face before Jaime can even speak.

“I left the people of King’s Landing because I had no way to save them without killing them in the process. When you want to save people you don’t burn them to ashes,” the knight says, his voice suddenly too controlled, too calm. He narrows his eyes. “But I can understand why this would be a difficult premise for you to grasp.”

It all happens in a second. Daenerys, considerably smaller than Jaime, rushes forward on a whim. Jaime just stands on his feet, hands clasped on his back, unmoving. The Queen doesn’t scream, but her whisper feels as loud as a yell in the tight quietness of the Great Hall. “I will have your tongue if you don’t apologize now—”

Grey Worm moves, uncertain if he should separate his Queen or attack the Lannister on her behalf, but Jon is even faster than the Unsullied, sneaking between Targaryen and Lannister, boldly holding her by the shoulders and pushing her away, gentle but firm.

“Very well, very well, let’s all calm down,” he says, soothingly, in the voice he uses when he is being a King. “No one is cutting off tongues in my Great Hall.” He turns his head to glare at Jaime, the familiarity in his tone surprising Sansa, “Ser, haven’t we spoken of this?”

Daenerys is still looking over Jon’s shoulders. Jaime hasn’t moved an inch, coldly holding her gaze. Grey Worm has his weapon in hand, now uncertain if he should aim for the man who insulted his Queen or the one so inappropriately touching her. Sansa notices, with the corner of her eye, Arya subtly reaching for the hilt of Needle, carefully putting one foot in front of the other, eyes fixed on the Unsullied as well.

Jon meets Grey Worm’s unrelenting gaze, and then stares at Daenerys. “Your Grace,” he whispers, smoothly, “would you please tell your guard to lower his weapon? We don’t want anyone to get inadvertently hurt.”

It’s only then that Daenerys looks at Jon, and he seems to bring her back to her senses with a small curl of his brow. Sansa feels almost like she’s invading an intimate moment by staring, so she looks away, catching Tyrion’s worried gaze. He’s fisting his hands at his sides, his lips pressed in a thin line, no doubt as divided as his allegiances.

Daenerys lets out a breath and steps back as Jon lets go of her; a single look at Grey Worm, and the soldier loosens his stance, though he keeps his hand on the hilt of his sword.

The Queen takes another breath to steady her voice. “Where are we now?”

Jaime is every inch a Commander when he speaks again. “Ellaria is imprisoned, as are her daughters and many of the Dornish. I don’t know if she’s dead. Knowing Cersei, probably not, and that is not good news. The Lannister army retreated to Harrenhal under Ser Addam Marbrand command. Yara retreated part of her ships back to Dragonstone, but there are still Iroborn occupying Blackwater Bay.” He gives the room a second to breathe, to catch up to his report, before he can continue. “If for some idiotic reason Cersei decides to come North by land, Harrenhal is close enough to the road that we can stop her, or at the very least hunt her before she gets to the Neck.” He tilts his head toward Jon while he speaks, and then, looks at Daenerys again. “If Cersei decides to go by sea, she’ll have to find a breach in Yara’s ships. Her only hope would be to evade South, toward Dorne. But I know of no kingdom who hates her more.”

“I know at least one,” Sansa can’t help but remark candidly.

Jaime looks at her, as if noticing the Lady of Winterfell was there all along. He loses the thread of his thoughts in the loathing of Sansa’s blue gaze, but then returns his attention to the Queen.

“What I mean is Cersei is still sort of trapped. She’s still counting with a small army and no fleet, relying on a very limited supply of food,” he summarizes. “She’s mad but she’s not that stupid. The best she can do now is wait until we win this War for her.”

Daenerys has been silently pondering his words all along.

“And why didn’t you stay with your men?” She asks. Her furor is gone, replaced by a cool scrutiny.

Jaime seems to stumble on it, for the first time since Sansa and the Queen arrived North.

“I beg your pardon?” He asks.

“Lord Dickon Tarly had already planned to come North to fight. He brought his army with him,” Daenerys explains. “But I left you in charge of the Western army. They were your men, after all. Your brother told me they were very loyal to you.”

“Ser Addam is a competent strategist,” Jaime responds. “I trust him fully.”

Daenerys smiles, with no teeth or joy. “You didn’t answer my question.”

Jaime straightens his shoulders. It makes him look even taller. “I made a vow, once, that brought me here.”

Sansa doesn’t miss when Brienne’s eyes find Jaime’s. It’s a fast exchange, but her sworn-shield tilts her head with a confused wrinkle between her eyebrows. Jaime is the first to look away, to stare at the Queen again, who is still smiling mirthlessly.

“So eager to fulfill your vows, all of a sudden,” she mocks. “Where did this change of heart come from?”

As if anticipating another quarrel, Tyrion intervenes before his brother can say a word. “Your Grace, my brother is a skilled warrior and a seasoned commander. He’s wasted in a siege and even more waiting at Harrenhal.”

“Well, everyone keeps telling me that, and yet I know of nothing but his failures,” Daenerys says.

“He won you the Reach,” Tyrion reminds her.

“But he lost me King’s Landing.”

“As we’ve just discussed, by no fault of his own,” the Hand continues patiently. “And provided to control the damage as well as he was able.”

Jaime looks unaffected by her words. Indeed, he looks almost amused, as if he is about to challenge her. To what exactly, Sansa is not sure. Doesn’t he know that fire is the champion of House Targaryen? Wasn’t he there to witness when the Mad King used it against her kin?

“I would like to keep him close, if you won’t,” Jon says, noticing the disposition building on his guest again. “He’s been valuable to me.”

Daenerys looks at Jon, almost intrigued. “And you trust him.”

It’s not a proper question. Jon nods. “We do.”

Tyrion speaks directly to his brother. “Jaime, do your men have enough supplies?”

“Lord Dickon sent word to Highgarden before we left,” Jaime nods. “They are provided for.”

“Excellent,” Jon says, in tones of finality. He directs all his attention to the Queen again. “I understand many things are not happening as planned, but if I could have a word with you, Your Grace?”

Daenerys narrows her eyes again, as if remembering his hold on her shoulders just minutes ago. “You can speak, Jon Snow. I am listening.”

“In private?” He suggests, calmly. Daenerys keeps her silence, and Jon takes advantage of her half-heartedness. He points toward one of the many hallways, one Sansa knew led to his solar, his hand extended in invitation. “Please. Come with me.”

Just as the Queen agrees with a reluctant nod to follow her brother, Sansa feels Arya’s voice in her ear, her sister’s hand on her small back. “And you with me,” Arya murmurs, pulling Sansa away towards another hallway.

iii.

Sansa’s chamber is just as she remembers it: there’s nothing out of place. But when she sits on her own bed and palms the sheets covering it, they are warm and smell of soap. She frowns her brow, puzzled.

“I ordered them to be cleaned and changed,” Arya murmurs, pacing around her bedroom.

Sansa’s eyes grow wider in surprise. The fire in the hearth is alive, but the room is still warmed only by the hot water in the walls; it was recently lit. Arya must have ordered someone to do it when Daenerys’ party appeared on the horizon.

“So you’re the lady of the house now?” Sansa asks, half amused.

“Someone had to be,” Arya shrugs. “Jon is…” She sighs, and pauses a moment to think. “Occupied with other pressing matters.”

Sansa tries to slowly absorb that revealing piece of information. She hadn’t wanted Jon to leave to Dragonstone, because she wanted, most of all, to protect him, and the North with him. It didn’t occur to her that her absence would leave a void not only of function, but of power in Winterfell. Of course, no one expected Arya or Bran to be alive; Sansa had carefully constructed her own hopelessness to keep from waiting for siblings who were, by all evidence and reason, dead. But Arya, once wild, now moves around with her head held high and with sure steps.

What is her game? Petyr asks in her ear. Her intentions? This girl is a stranger. You don’t know her. You were a child when you last saw her.

Sansa politely tells him, in the back of her mind, to shut the fuck up.

“You’ve grown,” she says, simply.

Arya stops walking in circles to stare at her. To study her. “So have you,” she says. “By the old gods, you’re even taller.”

Sansa chuckles, and then, there’s nothing left to say after that.

Except for—

“I knew you had to be alive,” she murmurs. “How couldn’t you be when I, against all odds, was? It didn’t make sense. I tried not to hope, but—”

Arya looks at her in silence. Her gray eyes are empty of any recognizable feeling. Sansa suddenly feels a flood of words, a cascade of apologies coming up her tongue.

“I was horrible to you,” she murmurs. “I was the worst older sister in the world to you.”

A trace of sadness, then, a small speck of sorrow, brings her sister alive.

“We were children,” Arya murmurs.

It’s a bitter form of absolution. They didn’t have the chance to be children for long, to be excellent or horrible or just too young to know better. How would their lives have changed, if they had had a normal childhood? Would Sansa just keep on being unkind to her little sister, to her bastard brother?

There’s nothing to forgive, Jon had said, because in the face of everything else, her pettiness was such an innocent sin. It was almost harmless.

Almost.

“Jon told me about Ramsay,” Arya adds.

Sansa’s face immediately grows hard. “I need not your pity, sister.”

“Who said anything about pity?” Arya curls one eyebrow. “He told me you fed him to his own hounds.”

Sansa gives her a mindless shrug, smoothing invisible wrinkles on her skirts. “The beasts were hungry.”

Arya smiles, then, just with the corner of her mouth, and that is when Sansa understands, without ever being told to, that death touched her little sister, too, that it molded her as it did them all.

“What happened to you?” Sansa asks, wistfully. “Where have you been? And Bran? Why is he so—”

Arya sighs. “That’s a long story,” she says, coming to sit on Sansa’s bed by her side. “I can tell you later. And Bran is changed, sister, more than any of us. But there’s no time for this now.” Arya’s gray eyes are intense as they bore into Sansa’s blue ones. “You spent the last months with Daenerys Targaryen. Tell me about her.”

It’s Sansa’s turn to sigh and stand up, hands on her waist. “She has a mind to rule Seven kingdoms and she has dragons.”

“But what is she like?” Arya insists. “Is she mad like her father, is she dangerous, is she cruel—”

“No, she is not cruel,” Sansa ponders, twisting her hands together to warm them. “Maybe she is dangerous, though. She was cordial to me, but she is clearly adamant about including the North in her reign, and I don’t know the means she plans to use to see it done.”

“What do you mean?” Arya stubbornly presses further.

Sansa inhales a measured deep breath. “She wanted to invade King’s Landing with her dragons, but Tyrion advised her against it. And later, she wanted to take Highgarden with her dragons, but it was, in theory, a test of Jaime’s loyalty and skill as a Commander. He practically refused to go to battle if she used dragonfire,” Sansa explains. “So she didn’t breathe fire on the armies. She just flew overhead with them.”

Arya nods. No additional explanation was needed; no army can keep their position in the shadow of three dragons.

“So she hasn’t fully used their power yet,” Arya begins.

“But nothing can assure us that she won’t,” Sansa finishes. “They’re not exactly ornamental or symbolic only.”

“Well, good for Jon, I guess,” Arya says. “If we are to defeat the dead we’ll need them not to be symbolic only.”

“But afterwards?” Sansa inquires.

Arya soundlessly taps her fingers on the edge of Sansa’s mattress. “Perhaps Jon has the right of it and the safest option is to simply bend the knee to her,” Arya murmurs. “Cersei is doomed anyway. Someone will have to sit on that goddamned chair...”

Sansa glares. “What?”

Arya looks at her with a cautious expression. “I don’t like the idea more than you do, sister, but I am not the King in the North, and Jon means to protect us on all fronts.”

“Jon wants to surrender?” Sansa asks, and starts to mentally list excuses to break in and interrupt the private audience between the Mother of Dragons and her brother.

For the first time, Arya’s resolve wavers. The younger Stark looks away.

“There’s something about Jon,” Arya says, “Well. You’ll know sooner or later.”

“Something worse than giving the North away?” She exclaims.

Arya bites her lower lip. Sansa had forgotten she did that a lot when she was a child, and in the moment, she does look younger.

“He is not our brother,” Arya says.

Sansa frowns. That is odd. Arya has always been the only sibling to see Jon as her brother, not her bastard brother, not her half brother. Even Robb made the distinction clear. But for Arya, Jon has always been a Stark.

“Of course he is,” she says, resolutely.

“No,” Arya answers, slowly. “He is our cousin.”

Sansa doesn’t comprehend the words. She can hear them well, and she knows what they mean, and yet something slips out of her fingers.

Because that, of course, would mean her father was a liar, and that—

“What,” Sansa whispers, her voice just a breath.

“The son of Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen,” Arya continues, still speaking carefully as if her voice itself could create a rift in the world.

It might, Sansa thinks. It might open an insurmountable fracture in the skeleton of things. My father—

Sweetling, not now, Petyr admonishes in her head. Think. Think of what Samwell told you.

“He is the heir,” Sansa utters. “He is the heir to the Iron Throne.”

Arya nods, looking down, her feet crossed at the ankles.

Sansa covers her own mouth. She starts to pace around, her mind creating a thousand different paths on its own accord.

“Does he plan to tell her?” Sansa asks.

“Yes,” Arya answers. “He might be doing it now, for all we know.”

Stupid mistake, Petyr grumbles, shaking his head. So much for honor.

“Why?!” Sansa exclaims, exasperated, trying not to throw her hands in the air. She folds them together instead. “Why would he do that?”

“Perhaps he thinks that will make her sympathetic to him,” Arya shrugs. “She’s his aunt.”

“Perhaps that’ll make her see him for what he is now!” Sansa counters. She’s not screaming, but she’s whispering loud enough to let out her frustration. “A threat bigger than Cersei!”

“He also has a mind to tell everyone,” Arya continues. “When he bends the knee to her, that is.”

“Oh, for the Seven,” Sansa moans in despair. She stops pacing. “Maybe we can arrange a marriage between them.”

“What?” Arya almost yells. And then, lowering her voice down to a whisper. “No! No, we can’t! You just said she might be dangerous!”

“Do you see any other way to keep Jon alive and the North free?” Sansa asks. “Because I don’t.” She does, actually; the alternative would be to get rid of Daenerys Targaryen so Jon can occupy the Iron Throne all by himself. But that is a last desperate resource, and she doesn’t want her little sister to think badly of her. Yet. “If he holds the Iron Throne he wouldn’t force us to bend. We would have some leverage to negotiate.”

Someone knocks on the door, then, startling Sansa.

“Come in!” She asks, raising one finger to Arya to wait.

It’s Maester Wolkan, who stands on the open door with a letter in his hand.

“Lady Sansa,” he smiles. “Welcome home.” Then the old man turns to look at her sister. “The glass panels you were waiting for, Princess,” he informs her. “They just arrived.”

Arya nods. “Do you know if Manderly bought them from Essos or Dorne?”

“Essos, apparently,” he answers. Arya twists her nose. “Lord Manderly sent a letter with the shipment. May I?”

Arya shakes her head, getting up to walk to the door and take the parchment herself. “Thank you, Maester,” she says distractedly as she opens the seal and reads its content. “Send the shipments to Gendry. I’ll be there in a moment.”

The Maester shuts the door again behind him, and as Arya walks back to Sansa’s bed, still concentrated in the letter, Sansa tries to understand how much Winterfell changed in her absence.

“Glass panels?” she asks, politely. “I thought the glass gardens were already rebuilt.”

“They are,” Arya confirms. “We’re just expanding. Dornish glass panels are cheaper and faster to get here, naturally. But they’re not as good as Essosi ones,” she shrugs. “In any case, Manderly tells me Dornish harbors are closed to business,” she throws the letter on Sansa’s bed with a huff. “So we don’t really have a choice.”

Sansa nods silently, feeling like she has just lost something— what, exactly, she’s not sure.

Someone had to be the lady of the house, she thinks to herself.

“We were talking about sending Jon away to the South,” Arya says. “Unpleasant plan, if you ask me. And who would inherit his crown?”

“We can decide that latter,” Sansa says, dismissively. She pauses. “Bran is here.”

“Bran doesn’t want to rule anything. I don’t even know if he counts as a member of the human community anymore.”

“Why wouldn’t he?” Sansa questions.

“He has visions,” Arya says, as if the fact confuses her. “He can see the past and the present everywhere.”

Sansa doesn't have time to process that, to blend this story, with the sweetest boy she’s ever known. She inhales, deeply and intentionally.

“Jon came back from the dead, Bran has visions, there’s a woman who birthed literal dragons under our roof. Is there any other magic being here?”

Arya bites her lower lip again. “I learned how to wear people’s faces?” Arya says. “In Braavos? But I don’t think that makes me a magical being.”

Sansa hides her face in her hands. So she’s rather alone here, as far as non-magical beings go. She’s just a normal human, with no other ability or power other than—

Other than your mind, Petyr finishes it for her. So think, Sansa.

“I don’t know what you mean, but we need to concentrate now,” Sansa says, calmly. “If Bran is… Unavailable, then the North falls on me, or on you,” Sansa says, pointing vaguely at them both.

Arya angrily crosses her arms. “I don’t want him to go. And Jon doesn’t want the Iron Throne anyway,” she says. “He is going to renounce it.”

“Jon is a big boy, Arya,” Sansa rolls her eyes, crossing her arms beneath her bosom. She starts pacing again. “He can take care of himself.”

And we all have to do our part, Sansa thinks, but doesn’t say it out loud.

iv.

Brienne has just removed her armor and is about to fetch a wooden tub to take a bath when she hears the knock on her door.

Her chambers share a wall and a door with Sansa’s; it is indeed almost an appendix to the Lady’s chambers. She has a bed and a hearth and a desk, and wants nothing else.

Before they left, it was Brienne who heard Sansa screaming at night, who often barged in, Oathkeeper in hand, to see the oldest Stark, pale like a ghost in the moonlight, sitting up with sweat on her brow, clutching her sheets. Brienne offered comfort, company; sometimes Sansa accepted, sometimes she didn’t. More than once they shared tea in the middle of the night before the perishing embers of the fireplace. Brienne would stir it up to flames once again, speaking of amenities until Sansa fell asleep and Brienne carried her to her bed, coming back to a couple of hours of sleep in her own rooms before the day began. In the morning, Sansa was as poised and beautiful as ever. If someone else heard her crying, they didn’t show or speak of it.

She’s shared a bed or a chamber or a door with Sansa since she came North, all the days of their traveling, and perhaps it is this unconscious familiarity that informs her it is not her ladyship standing at the other side. Beside, the knocking came from the door that opens to the hallway. She opens it all the same.

If it’s another corner of her heart, equally unconsciously familiar with Jaime Lannister, that leaves her unsurprised to see him, Brienne does not know, and does not dwell on it.

“Ser,” she says, courteously. He is not in armor, but brings Widow’s Wail at his hip.

“My lady,” he nods. Jaime does not invite himself in, but suggestively stares past her shoulder at her chamber.

Brienne opens the door enough for him to step in, closing the door behind her. Were it anyone else, she’d keep it open, but their shared history has repeatedly proven to her that whatever Jaime has to say, it is best to keep it between them.

He studies her chambers, though there’s little to study. Following his gaze, she notices as it settles on the bed for a second too long. She blushes. Her bed is perfectly clean, covered in plain, white sheets, right next to the small hearth that warms her bedroom. He comfortably sits on the trunk at the foot of the bed, as if he owned the room.

He had that quality in him, Jaime, of owning the places he steps into. It’s a Lannister thing, she’d found out: his little brother was the same. And of course Cersei already thought the entire world belonged to her.

It unnerves her and, at the moment, in her private chambers, also annoys her. Brienne crosses her arms over her chest. “What are you doing here?”

He looks at her face, as if remembering she’s there. “You heard me out there.”

“I heard you saying you left your men behind—”

“—in the hands of a competent, experienced Commander in whom they trust—” Jaime interjects.

“You left your men behind,” she repeats. “To… Follow the Starks?”

It sounds so ludicrous, so inane. Why would he do that?

“Lovely hosts, the Starks,” Jaime quips. “I cannot complain.”

Brienne puffs under her breath, irritated in a way that only Jaime knows how to make her. What she means, maybe, is stop haunting me. But how could she say that without revealing too much?

“And Bran Stark?” She asks, protectively.

“The kindest among them.” When Brienne just stares, he shrugs. “I don’t know why. He’s changed, and might be a spy, but he’s forgiven me. I had a hard time accepting it too.”

He notices her overall vexation, and smirks: half amused, half hurt. It’s a very familiar grin. Self-mockery will follow it, she’s sure, to hide something. (Brienne has all of his smiles categorized and analyzed to exhaustion.)

As expected:

“I confess, my pride is a little bit wounded,” Jaime says. “I thought you would be happier to see me.”

Happy is an understatement of what Brienne felt when she saw him by Jon Snow’s side. She safely hides the feeling in order to stare hardly at him. “What are you doing here?” She repeats. “Do not lie to me.”

He sighs. The grin is gone. “I’m not Daenerys’ puppet, to do all of her bidding. That’s what my brother is for.” He looks away. “I came to fight by your side.”

That is a reasonable answer. They have twin swords, to protect the daughters of Catelyn Stark, and better two at the task than one. They made a vow, and they’re keeping it.

But the hope twists her insides. One day Brienne is sure it will eat her alive.

“I have no need of your protection,” Brienne says, not unkind.

“You have not,” Jaime agrees. “If anything, I need yours.” He does not stare at his golden hand as he speaks, but the thing seems to shine brighter than ever. “I recognize I’m a liability.”

Brienne rolls her eyes. “Ser Jaime, stop it. Humility does not become you.”

He raises his head, then, locking their eyes, and smiles. A genuine smile, small and ever amused at her expenses but undoubtedly happy, with no deception or mockery beneath it. “There you go,” he calls out, smoothly.

“What?” She asks, almost desolated.

“My name again,” he explains. With a quiet chuckle under his breath, he goes on. “For two weeks I have heard people uttering my name like a curse. Only you say it like—” he tilts his head just a little, stops to ponder on the next words, “—like that.”

She flushes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says.

The corner of his pretty mouth twitches as he tries not to smile anymore. “Are you happy to see me or not?” He jokes.

“Don’t be stupid, Jaime. Of course I’m happy to see you.” She walks toward him, sitting by his side. The trunk is not particularly large, and their shoulders brush against each other. She reaches out for his right arm, carefully removing the golden hand. He hisses while she does so. The skin is swollen and red around the grip of the asset.

“Don’t fret,” he murmurs quietly. “It’s just the cold.”

“An ointment will help,” Brienne promises, avoiding touching the tender flesh. “I’ll ask Master Wolkan. You should keep it free for a while.”

“I don’t want people staring,” he murmurs, annoyed.

“The Jaime Lannister I knew couldn’t care less about people staring or talking about him,” Brienne replies, resting his right hand on his lap again. “Where is he?”

He licks his dry lower lip. “Hiding from the cold, I guess,” he answers.

They both chuckle a little, and Brienne gets distracted by the crow’s feet around his eyes, betraying his age and yet making him look younger.

(Brienne would like to drag him to her bed, to cover him with a blanket, to bring him into her arms and tell him to rest. Brienne would like to run her fingers through his dirty hair and kiss his mouth and tell him, I am in love with you, and no one will look at your stump while you’re walking around carrying that face.)

“You are going to get yourself killed if you keep talking like that to the Queen,” Brienne says, softly.

“If I told you I tried to be quiet,” he asks, wickedly pleased, “Would you believe me?”

“No,” she answers, plainly, and he quietly laughs again.

“I have been around enough monarchs with an inclination for seeing things burn. I’m wary, that is all.”

“Or maybe you’re just being cynical,” Brienne suggests.

He shrugs. “Maybe.”

Which reminds Brienne of something that hasn’t left her mind since she knew about what happened in King’s Landing.

“So. Wildfire?” She asks, looking down at where their hands are almost touching. Jaime just nods, lowering his head as well. “I thought she had used all that was left at the Sept of Baelor.”

“Not all of it, apparently,” he comments acidly.

“How are you?” She asks, worried.

“I’m fine,” he says, too fast. Brienne looks upon him skeptically, curls her eyebrows. “I am,” he reaches out to hold her hand, to reassure her. The touch is almost startling.

Brienne tries to find the will to let go of his hand. Can’t.

“So we’re between wildfire and dragons, now,” she evaluates.

“No.” He squeezes her fingers lightly. “We’re between the dead and the living, and we’re going to keep the Stark girls safe through it. We can figure the rest out later.”

v.

Daenerys Targaryen is warm to the touch.

There’s little of her skin exposed. She removes her outer white furs: she’s wearing trousers, and a jerkin and a doublet with long sleeves — like him, that is, like a King. Her cloak has a pattern of flames in crimson sewn into the black fabric. When the Queen enters his solar, still distressed, she walks straight to the hearth, as if involuntarily drawn to the fire for comfort, bracing her arm against the mantle. The flames in her cloak reflect the golden firelight; it looks like she is catching fire without being consumed. Jon remembers her many titles — the Unburnt — and feels a chill on his spine.

He pours wine into a cup and walks toward her carefully, offering it to her. “Here,” he says, and when she nods her acceptance and reaches out to grab the cup, their fingers brush against each other. She is not wearing gloves. She wasn’t wearing them outside, even beneath the snow. Jon is, but still he can feel her heat through the leather.

He looks at her face while she drinks a small sip, her full lips wine-stained where they touched the rim of the cup. Her hands still shake from her rage. He doesn’t know what did it, the anger, the wine or the warmth of the fire, but there are twin points of red in her cheeks now.

Gods, she is very, very beautiful.

“Thank you,” she says, looking at the wine. Her long white hair has many braids that sing with bells when she bends her neck to drink a deeper sip of the wine. “I am sorry. He gets on my nerves.”

Jon remembers she is angry with Jaime, then, the Kingslayer who killed her father and who all but called her mad in front of everyone.

Jaime, who killed his grandfather.

“I’ve found Ser Jaime has that effect on many people,” he comments, somewhat amused. He feels no connection to Aerys Targaryen, and does not have it in him to mourn a man who burned alive the people he’s always thought of as his true family. “I thought he was in your service.”

“He is; a courtesy for my Hand. That does not mean I trust him. And I don’t see the humor in it,” Daenerys says, still staring at the flames. She rests the cup on the mantle of the hearth. “A man who murders the King he’s sworn to protect, a man who breaks a sacred oath, is capable of anything.”

The King in the North would laugh at the irony of that, but it’s not the moment. She is not completely wrong. Since he broke his vows, Jon feels he is capable of almost anything.

“Tying one’s honor to oaths can be slippery, Your Grace,” he only says. “But that’s just my particular experience.”

She turns to look at him, then, and her beautiful pale eyes are filled with remorse. She must have heard the tales; once a brother of the Night’s Watch, now King, a path that cannot be walked without breaking one or two sacred oaths.

“I did not mean—” she begins, pauses to take a breath. “I did not mean you are like him or that you lack honor.” Eyeing his crown just for a second, she continues. “Though I cannot help but wonder about your journey. Lord Tyrion tells me only death can release a man of the Night’s Watch from his vows, and that you are a man of your word.”

Jon smiles at the memory of Tyrion. “It is true,” he confirms. “The part about death.”

Daenerys Targaryen waits, and when he adds nothing else, she unites her perfect eyebrows in confusion. “And the part about you being a man of your word?” She inquires, politely.

Perhaps Jon shouldn’t find all of this incredibly funny, perhaps that’s not very kingly of his part, but he does. He shrugs. “I always try.”

Her confusion is followed by an amusement that mirrors his own.

“So?” She presses further, and now she’s smiling.

She is one of those people who smiles with eyes, who does everything with eyes. It’s hard to miss, and hard not to stare. Despite himself, Jon smiles, too. For a woman with the reputation of a warrior who can inspire the fear of the gods in her enemies with her fire-breathing dragons, she is kind of adorable.

That doesn’t really help him.

“I can tell you that tale another time, if you’d like,” Jon points to a chair just behind her, and then crosses his hands behind his back. “We have more urgent matters to discuss.”

“I think we do,” Daenerys agrees, accepting the invitation and sitting down in the chair like it’s a throne, head held high to keep looking him in the eye. Her smile slowly disappears, though her tone is still friendly. “It was clever to send your sister. She refused to give me the North on the grounds the North was not hers to give away.”

Oh, so they’re skipping the amenities. Jon likes that; he never had the patience for courtly small talk. Sansa always did that part.

“The North can’t be owned, Your Grace,” he replies, keeping her gaze, and deciding to stand on his feet. It doesn’t make him feel any taller in front of her, but still. “It’s a wild land.”

“But it can be ruled,” Daenerys retorts, “or you wouldn’t walk around with that crown upon your head.”

Jon twists his mouth. Fair’s fair. In any case, that was not the urgent matter he had in mind.

“Lady Sansa certainly told you of the danger that threatens us?” He questions.

“She did,” the Dragon Queen tilts her head half an inch. “And though I initially found it hard to believe, my Hand tells me both of you are bad liars.”

Jon chuckles. “Lord Tyrion would know, I think,” he says, though time eventually rendered the Lannister wrong and Jon, at the very least, a decent liar.

“He speaks highly of you,” Daenerys says. “A rare thing. I was surprised to find out you were close.”

Jon ponders that phrasing. “I don’t know if we’re close. It’s been years.” He walks to the window, looking at the snow falling gently over the courtyard. It’s a comforting, familiar sight. “But I count him among my friends. He was kind enough to tell me the truth when no one else did.”

Never forget what you are, Tyrion had said. Wear it like armor. That, at least, Jon tried to listen to.

“He has that habit,” the Queen points out. Jon chuckles under his breath. “So it’s true. An army of dead men?”

Jon turns around, facing the Targaryen again; he shouldn’t turn his back on the Queen. He stands by the window, in the shadow of his solar.

“Why would I attract into my courtyard a woman with dragons who wants my crown? Why would I lie?” He considers. “Either I am telling the truth or I am mad. I’ll let you decide which.”

Daenerys gauges his face, his words, his standing form before her. The moment stretches for a long time. Beneath her gaze, Jon feels bare— but not uncomfortable, for some reason; just curious. He’s spent his life being judged by people who thought themselves bigger, higher. What is she going to say?

“I count the people of the North as mine to protect and care for,” Daenerys says, at last. “Of course I am willing to help you. All I have is at your disposal. My dragons, my armies and my council.”

Jon smiles, joyless. So that’s her verdict. Not mad, and not a liar; but what lies beneath her words cannot remain unsaid.

“Only if we surrender, I assume,” Jon says.

“If you don’t, then you’re not my people at all, are you? If you don’t surrender, then you are not under my protection and I have no duty toward you,” she says, suggestively raising her eyebrows. “I’m afraid you can’t have it both ways, Jon Snow.”

Jon nods. That was not unexpected. “That’s a hard bargain.”

“Well, there’s a lot at stake for me too,” she tells him. “I didn’t come to Westeros sooner because the people of Meereen needed me there. Now, I delay my way to the Iron Throne because you need me here. I want to be what my people need, where and when they need me.”

“Why?” He asks. Her voice is something out of a song, something distant and eerie. In his dreams, the fire has no face; then why does she feel so familiar? “Why would you come to us? You couldn’t know for sure what was happening.”

The wood crackles beneath the fire.

“I trust in my dreams,” Daenerys says, at last. Her voice is guarded, reticent; Jon pays attention. He’s never mentioned his own dreams to anyone, not even Arya. “And I saw—”

She halts her speech when he stares at her; Jon waits.

“You saw…?” He offers.

“Snow,” she finishes, simply. “I saw snow.”

Jon tries to reason with himself, tries to battle his own useless hopes down. Maybe that doesn’t mean what he thinks; maybe that means she thinks the North was given to her in a dream.

And yet—

“There’s something I think you should know,” he says, gravely; a tension builds upon the muscles around his neck.

Daenerys blinks. “Yes?”

How to speak the unspeakable? Jon twists one of his hands into the other behind his back; it’s a habit he learned from Sansa.

The Queen waits patiently.

“I do not know how to say it,” he finally explains.

Daenerys frowns her perfect eyebrows. “What is wrong?” She asks, almost worried.

Jon decides simply not to think:

“My true name is Aegon Targaryen,” he says.

Daenerys’ body recoils. She brings her hands, that had been resting on the armchairs, to cover her chest, as if he’s buried a dagger there.

“I beg your pardon?” She asks, dazed.

Do not think, Jon thinks. Just say it.

“I am the son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark,” he continues. His own mouth, his own voice, feel far away, like in a dream. “They secretly married during Robert’s Rebellion. After their deaths, Ned Stark adopted me as his bastard son to protect me from the new King’s ire.”

Daenerys is bewildered as she looks at him, as if he’s speaking in another language.

“I’ve known for only a moon-turn,” he finishes, in a quiet voice. “Maybe less than that.”

“Oh,” she finally says, but it’s more a gasp than a word. Jon watches her closely: she gets on her feet and heads to the hearth again, holding the mantle with both of her hands as she stares at the flames once more. In the space of three breathings, she wraps one of her hands around her own frame, as if she’s trying to keep herself from falling apart. “Oh. I see.” Her voice is thick and unreadable.

“I do not want your throne,” he says.

Daenerys turns to him and Jon notices for the first time the tears welling up in her eyes.

That was unexpected.

“What?” She asks, even more perplexed.

“The Iron Throne,” he repeats. He knows that shock, and he can wait for it to subside, but Bran did the right thing, just throwing all the important information at his face at once. He fists his hands at his sides. “And the Seven Kingdoms. I do not want them.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. A solitary tear falls; she doesn’t clean it, and Jon needs to fight the urge to reach out and do it, because for a second she looks like a girl, like a young girl, and not like the Dragon Queen he was supposed to fear and who’s trying to take over his homeland. “I— since my brother died, I thought I was the last one,” the Queen explains, not looking him in the eye. “It was a very lonely feeling.”

Loneliness is something Jon knows. He gives her a nod. “I can imagine, Your Grace.”

She shakes her head as if to clear it. It works; clarity touches her eyes, and when she looks at him again, her tone is firmer, though her voice still trembles a little.

“Who else knows?” Daenerys asks, trying to sound like a Queen again. But she crosses her arms over her chest as if she wants to be held.

“My— cousins,” he says. He’s not yet in the habit of thinking about them as cousins, no more than he can think of Rhaegar and Lyanna as his parents. They’re distant figures, names in history books, a statue among the dead. “Arya and Bran Stark. Lord Howland Reed is the one who can confirm the facts first-hand, if that’s what you want. And I believe my friend Samwell has evidence of the legitimacy of Rhaegar and Lyanna’s marriage.”

Jon observes her cautiously as he speaks, searching for any sign, any indication of truth, but Daenerys has finally recovered and she looks impassive now. “Lady Sansa?” She wonders.

“It’s safe to assume that Arya must be telling her while we speak,” Jon says. He presses his lips together and makes an intentional pause. “The North doesn’t know. They have chosen me to be the heir to a legacy that is not mine. But all I’ve ever wanted was for them to be safe.” Jon lets go of his own hands, and he cedes to the impulse of giving a step closer. They are alone, and yet he feels he must speak lower, slower. “I don’t see how we can win this War without firepower or dragonglass, and you are ready to give us both. So I will give you the North, Your Grace,” he says. “But my people deserve to know why.”

It’s Daenerys’ turn to study his face while he speaks, and it doesn’t take her much time to understand his meaning.

“You’ll tell them who you are,” she says. It’s not a question.

“I’ve already done all my hiding,” Jon murmurs. “I’ve had enough of it for a lifetime.”

She looks at his mouth, at his face, and seems to see through him, somehow. “They are not entitled to you,” she says in a whisper.

“I think you know very well that they are. If our lives belonged to ourselves, you’d hardly be here,” he smiles sadly. “I only ask you to keep the Starks in Winterfell. Bran is the heir, Arya and Sansa are capable enough. It’s their inheritance and their birth-right.”

She sighs. “And what do you plan to do?”

“I plan to win the War against the dead and kill the Night King,” Jon answers, as honestly as he is able. “No matter the cost.”

“And then?”

“Then I’ll serve my family, if and how they’ll allow me.”

“I am your family,” she says. In the moment, her eyes seem to take the fire as their hostage, burning hotter and brighter than a thousand suns. “Aegon—”

Jon suddenly cannot stand the heat. He takes a step back.

“Call me Jon,” he says. His hands feel idle; he crosses them on his back again.

Daenerys’ eyes on him grow hard, like amethysts stones.

“You might not think yourself worthy of the northern crown anymore,” she says, firmly, “but you’re a Targaryen, Jon. You still have a legacy to carry on, and you have a duty to our House. Do not forget that.”

“And what legacy would that be?” Jon wonders. He doesn’t know why, but there’s something about her confidence that feels almost petulant and that challenges him to stand his ground against her.

“Fire and blood,” Daenerys answers, without thinking twice.

Jon shivers under his many layers of clothes, but doesn’t let it show. He keeps his eyes fixed on hers.

“Those are my terms,” he says, with finality. “Fight for the living and help me defeat the Night King. Then, and only then, the North will be yours.”

After a tense second, Daenerys sighs at her defeat.

“Is that all?” She asks.

“That is all,” Jon confirms. “You must be tired. I’ll let you rest for today. I have assigned a maidservant to you, and she’ll see to your every need.” He walks to the exit of his solar, standing before the still closed door, waiting, until she eventually follows him. “Tomorrow we shall meet after we break our fast to discuss the best strategy to battle. I’ll see you then.”

Jon opens the door, stepping back to let her pass before him out of the solar. She turns around, opening her mouth as if she means to say something, but then their eyes lock, and whatever she meant to tell him dies under her tongue.

It seems to frustrate her a bit; Jon smiles, pleased he is not the only one struggling with words.

“Make yourself at home, Your Grace,” he says, smoothly, and shows her the way to her rooms.

Chapter Text

i.

“I told you to keep an eye on the Stark girl,” Daenerys berates, pushing the door closed behind her while she storms inside the chamber. “Not to fall in love with her.”

Tyrion, who was following her wake, stops the door before it can crash against his face, and then carefully bolts it closed, without a sound, behind him.

The poor man. He is suffering collateral damage from her tiredness and her confusion.

It’s the road, she thinks, doing that to them, getting them off their feet. Tyrion has gone to the Reach and back to Dragonstone and to the Vale — with Sansa Stark — and then to White Harbor and all the way here, to the North. Her Hand is tired, too; he wants to settle. In King’s Landing, with Daenerys on the Throne, if possible.

As for Dany, the road and exile are all she’s ever known. She hasn’t found a home yet. But she’s been missing Essos, lately; misses her people calling her mother, and the sun, and—

She is thinking about Jon Snow, and trying to give a name to the hollowness under her ribs when she conjures his memory in her mind’s eye. She cannot miss someone she just met.

It was a kindness from their ladyship to be given not only chambers to sleep and rest, but a solar to meet in private, as a proper royal council. Daenerys thought it a sign of good-faith that the northmen considered them a council royal enough to have a solar, that perhaps Sansa didn’t mind her taking the Iron Throne so much. Dany told Tyrion so, and her Hand had only snorted, telling her she’s too familiar with crumbs and that was the bare minimum of decency and hospitality. But Tyrion is a Lannister, through and through, and thinks he’s entitled to comfort, so she ignores him.

The solar reminds her of Dragonstone; it’s just as dark and grim and depressing, but the walls are also warm to the touch. Dany presses her back against one of them to relish on its heat through her clothes, closing her eyes to dissipate some of her anger. She never feels cold, not really; her skin is just dragon scales, her blood, dragonfire. But it’s nice to be close to warm things.

And while the solar is meant for council meetings, right now it’s just them, a Queen and her Hand and their shared tiredness from months on the road, with all their pointy edges breaking each other’s skin open. They haven’t had a chance to meet with some privacy since she left Dragonstone, not even after they met on the Neck, and now, the weeks weigh on them like stones.

“I told you to assess Dorne,” Tyrion retorts, not as nearly reverent as one should talk to a Queen. “Not to spend a vacation there. What the fuck happened? And why are you dressing like this?”

He is too familiar now, Daenerys thinks, sitting on the nearest chair. Something has shifted since they arrived on the shores of Westeros: they’ve lost something, and gained something else. The closer they get to the Iron Throne, the better he knows her and she, him. But in Essos, Dany was a Queen and he only had her; here, she is not quite a Queen yet, only the promise of one, the dream of one, and Tyrion holds his head higher, his feet are surer, and the ground Dany steps on is just the familiar land of his childhood, not something to be praised.

Sometimes, in the right light, Tyrion reminds her of Viserys. Not the brother consumed by madness and cruelty, but the Viserys from before, the Viserys of her childhood whom she always thought would be her King one day, who would tell her stories of their family, who could make her laugh when she was homesick for a nameless home, Viserys who was ambitious and beautiful and had plans for them. Tyrion is like that, telling her tales of Westeros, informing her about things her tutors never spoke about, brothel songs and exotic food, court gossip, unspoken bad blood, skeletons in the closet: this is your people, this is your home; taking her from one place to another, go to Dorne, your Grace; go North, Your Grace; keeping her running toward something, except that Tyrion wants it for her, and not for himself.

Is that why he hurts her so easily? Because she expected him to be better than this, better than everyone?

Silly girl, she murmurs to herself. You have no family left.

(Except for Jon Snow, that is.)

Daenerys is dressing a little more like a Khaleesi again, but with added layers to protect from the winds, though the cold does not bother her so much. Actually, she supposes the whole adaptation renders her more like a King. She had it made while in Dorne: black leather trousers and a crimson jerkin, fitting her body to the waist, leaving her legs free from constraint. The doublet beneath the jerkin is also black. High, comfortable leather dark boots cover her feet, and a black cloak with elaborate flames in crimson thread is wrapped around her shoulders. A ruby pin with the three-headed dragon of House Targaryen just between her collar-bones keeps the cloak in place.

“It’s easier to ride horses and dragons like this,” she mutters, massaging both her temples. She doesn’t say she likes being a Khaleesi, likes that her khalasar has followed her all over the poisoned water to the other side of the world, she doesn’t say that she doesn’t want to lose herself in this foreign land that is actually her home and her birth-right. Because Tyrion would roll his eyes and tell her to concentrate.

He looks at her with that amalgam of exasperation and awe that she secretly likes. “You’re not a wildling,” he reminds her. His voice has grown a little kinder, less like daggers. “And you’re not a man.”

“No,” she agrees. “I’m a Khaleesi.” A pause. “Arya Stark wears trousers.”

Arya Stark called her Your Grace, but barely bent her head when she curtsied.

“Arya Stark is not contesting to overthrow Cersei Lannister and take the Iron Throne,” he mutters under his breath. “She can dress as she likes. You’re not any lady.”

Tyrion is in a terrible mood. She wonders if the lack of wine in his hand has anything to do with it. Or the cold. Or both.

“This is who I am,” Daenerys says, standing on her feet and putting her hands on her hips. “I do not plan to deceive them. They need to know who their Queen is. Would you rather I dressed like your sister?”

His gaze is hurt. “No, I wouldn’t,” he says, simply. The fact he says nothing else but this is terribly worrying. He sits in the chair she just left unoccupied, his weary eyes distant. If she didn’t know him better she’d think he was distracted. “So. Dorne?”

Daenerys looks away from him.

“Complications arose in Dorne,” she begins, hating how her voice is like a child waiting to be chastened. She hardens it before she proceeds: “There are Martells alive.”

Her Hand snaps his eyes toward her. “Martells,” he echoes. “As in more than one.”

“I met two,” she answers, keeping her head high. “Arianne, the heiress, and Quentyn, her brother.”

Tyrion sighs. “Fuck,” he mutters under his breath. “Sansa warned this could be the case,” he says, more to himself than to her.

He calls her Sansa now. Just Sansa. Not Lady Stark, not even Sansa Stark. He is in love with her, and Daenerys knows it because Tyrion is surprisingly easy to read once you know him.

“Sansa just keeps surprising us, doesn’t she?” Dany says with a bitter edge. “She is a very resourceful woman. We’re very lucky to have her by our side.”

He looks at her annoyed, and she braces herself for his sharp tongue, but for some reason he decides to let this one go.

“How did it go?” He asks, simply.

“They’re not happy that we are associated with Ellaria and the Sand Snakes,” Daenerys says. “While Ellaria has her followers still in Sunspear, the Martells have been secretly gathering their supporters, who hid them when Ellaria assassinated Doran. There are many who are loyal to Arianne.” She tilts her head. “More than what I expected, to be fair.”

“Well, that problem is solved,” Tyrion shrugs. “The Dornish rebels are dead or imprisoned, Ellaria is imprisoned. She’ll die some sort of horrible death at the hands of my sister after she is done with her and her daughters. At least for that Cersei will be of use to us.”

“It isn’t solved,” Daenerys frowns. “As far as we know, Ellaria and her daughters are still alive.”

Tyrion looks at her, completely dumbfounded, and then blinks twice. “What do you mean it isn’t solved,” he asks.

“I mean Arianne will not bend the knee unless we break our alliance with the Sand Snakes, and they are right now in the hands of your mad sister because of me,” Daenerys says. Her voice is rising again.

“You’re a fool if you think that Ellaria did anything for you,” Tyrion says. He’s still sounding more incredulous than anything else. “She only thinks about vengeance. To her, you and your dragons are just weapons.”

There he is, Viserys again, piercing her where he knows the skin is soft and it hurts.

“What do you want me to do?” Daenerys asks. “To abandon them?”

“That’s exactly what you should do,” Tyrion answers, as if it was so obvious, so clear, so unquestionable a course of action as to render Daenerys stupid not to do it. Right now he looks sharp and dangerous as any soldier in the battlefield. “Abandon Ellaria to Cersei. Support Arianne Martell. There is no other solution. Who cares about Ellaria?”

“I care,” Dany answers, with finality. “This is not my Hand speaking. This is a grieving uncle speaking. I need my Hand now.”

“I am speaking as your advisor,” he replies. “Please don’t make me explain the glaring advantage of having a rightful heir by your side rather than a bunch of murderous, vengeful, literal bastards,” he says. His voice dissolves into a whisper, exasperated and condescending. “You’re a smart girl, Daenerys. Come on.”

She’s found it, the dragon within, the thing that rises with fire when provoked. “I am your Queen,” she says through her teeth, giving one step to stand tall before where he’s sitting. “You’ll speak to me as such. Don’t treat me like I’m a little girl.”

Tyrion just raises his head to meet her eyes. “Then don’t act like one,” he retaliates, his jaw clenched.

They hold each other’s gaze. Sometimes she thinks he could be a true dragon himself, more than Viserys was. The fire in his eyes is a true, blazing thing. This is why she chose him. This is why she loves him. Because when she forgets that dragons don’t plant trees, he is ruthless. And when she forgets her kindness, he speaks of diplomacy and peace.

But then she remembers that lions, too, are blood-soaked and always hungry for more.

“I already gave up on Olenna on your advice,” she murmurs.

“And it worked!” Tyrion exclaims. “We have Highgarden and the Reach now, their food supplies, their gold.”

“Do we?” Daenerys wonders. “Because Dickon Tarly seems incapable of giving a single step without Sansa Stark’s permission.”

Tyrion rolls his eyes. She knows where he hurts, too.

“Dickon Tarly is not Lord of Highgarden. He is a boy enamored with a beautiful lady and willing to fight for her,” he says, in that mocking tone he uses when he’s jealous. “Perhaps he’ll die in this War against the dead and render this whole argument of ours useless.”

His jealousy easily turns into cruelty. Daenerys had witnessed it before, and it does not escandalize her. He’s seen her darkness too, after all, and stayed.

“What message would that send to Yara?” Daenerys questions. “The last of our partners keeping Cersei trapped? What kind of Queen abandons all her allies when it’s convenient?”

“A smart one!” Tyrion responds, running his hand through his curls, irked. “A Queen who chooses better allies along the way!”

Daenerys narrows her eyes. “Do you have no loyalty?” She asks.

Tyrion rises to his feet, too, reaching out his palms toward her as if he means to embrace her, but standing too far away to do so. “I am loyal to you,” he says. “To your plans. To your reign. This is why you named me your Hand. To make you Queen.” His eyes are blazing against hers, the green in them shining like she imagines wildfire would. “We are at War. There’s no victory without a little cheating.”

Daenerys shakes her head, the bells in her hair ringing when she does so, and presses her lips together.

“I know why you didn’t care about Olenna. I know why you don’t care about Ellaria.” She cannot blame him. But she cannot allow his pain to guide her path to the Throne. “But I will not turn my back on the people who risked their lives for me. Not again.”

His shoulders drop. His disappointment hurts more than his anger, but at the end of the day, he is an obedient servant, albeit an incredibly insolent one.

“This is a mistake,” he says, tone restrained.

“You made your opinion clear,” Daenerys says. “It’s noted, but Ellaria is on our side, so we’ll fight for her life. We’ll negotiate her release or send men to free her.”

“And Arianne Martell?” He asks.

“You’ll find a way to appease her,” Daenerys says, heading to the door. “You’re a clever man, aren’t you?”

“I’m not a magician,” he says, in tones of complaining.

“No. I didn’t think you were.” She raises the bolt on the door, and then looks at her feet for a moment. “We also need to talk about Jon Snow.”

“Then where are you going?” He asks.

“I’m going to find someone who can prepare me a bath and a meal,” she says. “I’m exhausted. We’ll discuss the North tomorrow, after the battle plans.” A pause while she thinks: “With the rest of the council.”

Tyrion nods, perhaps too tired to ask more questions. “Go to your chambers, Your Grace,” he says, following her out of the solar. “Let me take care of that meal for you.”

ii.

Jon is trying to find his courage to go down to the courtyard, to practice, when Sansa comes to him.

She doesn’t knock — before she left to Dragonstone, she rarely did; his door was always open to her. He hasn’t spoken to her in private since she arrived. She slips silently into the dim light of his room, finding him sitting by the edge of his bed, completely still, Longclaw unsheathed laying across his lap.

She crosses her arms behind her back by his door, and Jon smiles. “Come here,” he murmurs.

Sansa walks the distance of his chamber — Robb’s, Robb’s chamber — and kneels before him, looking up to keep looking him in the eye. Jon frowns. “Get up,” he says.

Sansa ignores him, reaching out to palm his face. “Nothing has changed,” she says. “You’re still my family.”

Jon smiles, grabbing her hand to kiss her knuckles, as one should do with a lady. “I missed you. We all did.”

“I see Arya did a great job in my place,” she says, keeping their hands joined. Then, with a small, delicate frown, “I thought I would find you in the courtyard. She told me you’re practicing at night now?”

“To grow used to the dark,” he explains. “But we’ll meet early tomorrow morning. I was thinking perhaps I should just rest.”

Her face, faint in the vague light of the room, is ghostly, a solid memory of a dead woman. She still has her hair braided like her mother did. Sansa has the Tully cheek-bones, too, not only the striking winter eyes. To make it worse, she inherited not only her mother’s looks but her small tricks and traits: the delicate, demure folding of her hands, the curl of her lips when she’s upset or worried. But Catelyn’s eyes were never this affectionate. His cousin studies him worriedly. “Nobody is going to think less of you if you skip it tonight,” she says, kindly.

He chortles. It didn’t cross his mind to worry about what people were going to think. Perhaps, as a King, he should worry about that. Sansa always does, can always predict how things are going to look like and the inevitable, insidious outcomes. It’s like she’s always playing cyvasse in her mind. He always wonders how it must have been like to live there, in King’s Landing, a hostage in all but name, measuring every step, every word, until her escape. But she doesn’t talk about it much, and he never asks. “You did a better job than I ever could. I wasn’t expecting the Tarlys. Or the Knights of the Vale again.”

Sansa teasingly narrows her pretty blue eyes. “Is that supposed to be flattering? So much for trusting me, Jon.”

He really should stop underestimating her. “It’s a compliment,” he says, with a sort of apologetic chuckle. “Dickon Tarly and Harrold Hardyng stare at you a lot,” he says.

Sansa frowns. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” he shrugs. “Just let me know if there’s any trouble. Should they ask me for your hand—”

“I’m unavailable,” Sansa says, clearly, decidedly. “You know that.”

Jon nods; he knows. He still remembers how he found her after Ramsay. It’s not advantageous, from a King;s standpoint, to keep Sansa unmarried, but there’s no way in the world he is forcing his sister — his cousin, his cousin — into a marriage she wouldn’t choose herself.

“Very well.” Jon hesitates, then. “And Tyrion?”

Sansa rolls her eyes. It’s hard to say in the half-light if she’s blushing or not. “Tyrion is not asking for my hand.”

“Well, I think you’re both past that phase; aren’t you married?” He knows for a fact she never annulled it.

“We are,” she agrees, “and it might be useful to keep it like that for a while.” She makes space for a silence that is almost shy. “He won’t force me to do anything.”

“He also stares a lot,” Jon mutters.

She chuckles. “That's all he ever does. Don’t worry about him,” she squeezes his fingers comfortingly. “I told you. He is the one I can handle.”

“And Littlefinger?”

She tries to let go of his hand, but he grabs it before her fingers can slip out of his. A tired sigh escapes her. “He had it coming.”

“I wasn’t accusing you,” Jon says, softly.

She stares at him for the time of two heartbeats, and her shoulders drop, relaxed. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs. “I know you weren’t.” She gets up, at last, to sit by his side on the bed. Jon carefully moves Longclaw away from her. “I had been waiting for the right moment and I couldn’t let it pass by me.”

Jon nods. “I trust your judgment,” he says.

Sansa fidgets with her fingers, which means she is nervous, which means she is going to talk about—

“Arya told me about your plan,” she says, her voice uncharacteristically frail. “To bend the knee to her.”

He stares at her face. “You don’t agree?”

“Of course I don’t,” she says, her tone growing tighter, harder. There she is; this is the only Sansa Jon knows. “And after all we fought, I would expect you to consult me about it.”

“Because I’m not enough of a Stark to decide on my own?” Jon asks.

“Oh, please, Jon. No one is talking about your last name here.”

He scoffs. It’s an ugly sound. Jon loves his sister dearly, loves her more than he ever imagined he could love the contemptuous daughter of Catelyn Tully one day, but she is obnoxiously self-righteous and stubborn when she sets her mind to something, and this part of her is all, all Ned. For some reason, regardless of how much they care for each other, they always end up fighting. He wonders if Ned and Catelyn fought behind closed doors, too.

“You think I don’t have the right to do it,” he says, and this time it’s not a question.

“No,” she confirms, nettled. Her voice holds no warmth or comfort, but Jon has already reconciled with the fact he needs her not to be pliable, he needs her to be challenging and difficult and unbearably obstinate. It has proven to be good for the North. “And that has nothing to do with whoever is your mother.”

“Sansa, can’t you trust me?” He asks, with an edge of annoyance in his tone. “For once?”

“This has nothing to do with trust either,” Sansa answers.

“It has,” Jon replies. He stares at her longly, intently. “Please, trust me when I say we need her and our survival is more important than—”

“Than our freedom?”

“Than anything,” Jon finishes. “The woman has dragons.”

“You are the heir—”

“Don’t do this.”

“—to the Iron Throne, it’s your birth-right. And I know you can’t see that, but the North needs you to be the son of Rhaegar and Lyanna now more than ever.”

He rests his head on his hand, exasperated. “Do you want me to take the Iron Throne from her? How can I fight against two dragons? The beasts obey her.”

“You’re also the blood of the dragon,” Sansa argues. “Tame them if you must. But perhaps it would be more effective to tame their mother.”

Jon blinks incredulously. “I’m not sure I even want to know what you’re implying.”

Sansa grabs his face, forcing him to look her in the eye. “Consider, for once, that survival doesn’t last long without freedom,” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “Please, listen to me. Believe me. I would know.” She curls her mouth, the same way her mother used to do, and lets go of his face. Getting up on her feet, his cousin walks to the door. She holds it half-open, stands there in the shadow of the exit. “You said you would keep us safe.”

“How am I supposed to do this from another country?” Jon asks, sadly.

“Perhaps it’s the only way to do it,” she murmurs, and leaves him to figure that out.

iii.

In the morning, Jaime feels a good kind of sore.

After days under the tutelage of either Arya or Jon, he finally had the chance of training with Brienne again the previous night. All of the Starks were absent, retiring earlier after supper, certainly reunited into a secret chamber plotting how to best handle the Targaryen girl. His brother, too, had disappeared into his Queen’s solar; it was Brienne who grabbed Oathkeeper, heading to the courtyard to join the other men and women out in the nightly snow.

She had turned back, eyed him from head to toes.

“Are you coming or not?” She asked.

Brienne knows him better than Jon and Arya, knows enough to explore his weaker points, to take advantage of them. For didactical purposes. Unlike Arya, she doesn’t lecture him, and unlike Jon, she doesn’t take pity on him, is not intimidated or embarrassed by the golden hand covering the stump on his right arm. She believes him to be better than he truly is; good enough to deserve the best she has to offer, and good enough to have something to teach her back.

Soon, they fell into a rhythm, few words shared, just the song of their swords clashing in the night as they danced around each other until they were sweating and panting. Jaime had breathed in the cold, clean air of the North. He hadn’t felt that alive in months, and afterwards, he slept like a child.

Now, though, the morning after, he stands by Jon’s left side around the desk of his solar, a detailed vellum map of Westeros spread in front of them, and Brienne looks like the morning star of her House, or the sun and moon of her sigil, like the luminaries in all their magnificence while he probably looks like the old man he is.

Arya stands by Jon’s right side. Davos and Tormund are also surrounding them. Bran Stark is sitting across them, on the other head of the table, flanked by Meera, Sansa, and Brienne. The Dragon Queen and her advisors were occupying one side of the desk; Jaime watches his little brother, studying the map as if it were a board, while Jorah Mormont, Missandei, Grey Worm and Qhoro are also waiting. Dickon Tarly and Harrold Hardyng closed the circle on the other side of the table.

Jon is not the type of man to waste any time, and though there’s still tension in the air from the day before, he breaks through it by taking a small wooden toy of a soldier and putting it right over Castle Black.

“This is the Wall,” he begins.

Some people are looking at Jon’s face — Dickon, Harry, Sansa, Jorah. Some are looking at the map — Tyrion, Daenerys, Brienne, Jaime.

Bran is looking at nothing in particular, and Meera is staring at him.

“The dead cannot cross it,” Jon says. “So this is where the fight must happen.”

“I don’t understand,” Dickon murmurs. “If they can’t cross the Wall, why do we have to go there and fight them? Can’t we just… Stay here?”

“Good question,” Jon praises, and looks at the boy’s face when he answers. “The White Walkers are the winter, with a body, with a will. The longer we wait, the harsher winter gets. The last winter brought upon Westeros by the Others lasted an entire generation.”

Dickon blinks. “As in… years?”

“As in decades,” Bran answers. “This winter will not go away until we defeat them.”

Jaime sees Tyrion chewing over that information.

They cannot afford decades of winter.

“Perhaps even more importantly,” Jon says, flatly, “there’s a chance they can bring the Wall down.”

“How?” Daenerys asks, narrowing her eyes. “I thought it was hundreds of feet tall.”

“It is,” Jon confirms. He licks his lower lip. “There are legends among the free folk about a Horn,” he explains. “The Horn of Winter. It could bring the Wall down, if blown.”

“That can’t possibly be true,” Dickon says, shaking his head.

“Of course it can’t,” Tyrion mutters. He is sitting on a chair, his legs crossed. He looks comfortable but the expression on his face betrays his distress; Jaime hasn’t had the chance to talk with his brother in private, but he seems to be in a foul temper. “Everything else about our predicament is entirely plausible, but a magical Horn? Too much.”

“What Lord Dickon must be wondering, as am I, is,” Daenerys says, tactfully, touching Tyrion’s shoulder, as if to soothe a beast. “Do we know for certain if this Horn exists at all?” She looks around the table. “Has anyone ever seen it? And where is it?”

There’s a silence for the space of three heartbeats.

“We don’t know where it is,” Tormund finally answers. “But it is real. And it is somewhere beyond the Wall. It belongs to the free folk, and not to the dead.”

“If the dead had it, they would probably have blown it by now, so it’s most certainly missing,” Jon says. “But we have to prepare for the worst. If, by whatever means, they bring the Wall down, they will spread all over Westeros.”

“And part of our mission efforts should be to find it before he does,” Tormund says.

Jon exhales harshly, glaring at the wildling. “You know I don’t like this plan. What are you going to do, just get farther beyond the Wall while the battle happens all around you searching for a Horn that has been lost for centuries?”

“That is exactly what I plan to do,” Tormund declares.

Jon closes his eyes, exasperated. “That’s a terrible idea, and you know it.”

“It really is,” Jaime agrees.

“You just said we should prepare for the worst,” Tormund argues. “What is worse than letting them have it, little crow?”

Jaime tilts his head. The wildling has a point.

“Where are you going to start looking?” Jon inquires. “It’s a waste of time, and time is all we don’t have.”

“The bird boy will help us!” Tormund says.

It’s only after they look across the table as if they’re waiting for an opinion that Jaime realizes they’re talking about Bran Stark, that he is, for some reason, a bird boy.

“I don’t know where it is,” Bran says, mournfully. “I do agree with Tormund that we should find it first, but it’s been lost for too long. I have no starting point. I’m sorry, Jon. I’m just as lost as you are.”

Jaime is, then, convinced beyond any doubt that Bran is the head of a web of spies spread not only through Westeros, as far as King’s Landing, but also beyond the Wall, probably more dangerous than Varys, which is impressive and almost as astonishing as the amount of magical creatures suddenly threatening the world.

“Fine,” Jon concedes with a sigh. He looks at the map again. “You may coordinate your people as you see fit to search for it, and the rest of us will concentrate on the Others.”

“And how do we kill people who are already dead?” Harry asks.

Jon’s eyes don’t leave the map, even though Jaime feels like the King has it learned by heart. “The dead die by fire or dragonglass,” Jon explains. “And the White Walkers, only dragonglass and Valyrian Steel. In any case, common swords are useless. When we kill a White Walker we also kill the corpses he raised, and when we kill the Night King we kill the White Walkers he created. So the most intelligent way to spend our efforts is to aim at them, and the Night King in particular.”

“So the Queen can just breathe fire on the dead with her dragons, and leave the White Walkers to us?” Dickon asks.

Jon twists his mouth. “It’s not that simple. The dead will most certainly come ahead,” he explains. “It’s like their own wall. We have to cross them to get to the White Walkers, and the Queen cannot simply burn the dead and the living alike. She’ll need to watch the battle closely to spot them before they can reach us.”

Jaime looks at Brienne over the table, catching the lady’s troubled gaze.

Time is what they’re fighting for. All those armies out there, all of Sansa’s efforts, all of their food supplies, all of this War is for time, until someone can reach the great Other and end the battle all at once, in the blink of an eye.

“We should set the Unsullied in the first line, then,” Jaime says, crossing his arms.

Daenerys frowns her brow to him, her voice as unforgiving as the day before. “So my armies can be slaughtered before yours and suffer most of the losses?”

Jaime doesn’t want to fight now; he suppresses the urge to roll his eyes, for Jon’s sake. “This is their specialty, Your Grace. To stand their ground. Among our armies they are the least likely to die in the first line.”

Daenerys’ eyebrows curl again, not in anger but in concentration. “How many dead are we talking about?” Daenerys asks.

Jon presses his lips on a thin line, and does not answer.

“Your Grace?” Jaime asks, politely. “How many?”

“I don’t know how many,” Jon answers. “I know for certain that when it comes to the Army of the Dead, their numbers surpass ours by no small margin. The Night King has been raising dead people beyond the Wall for thousands of years now.” He dabs his fingers on the border of the desk. “Needless to say that any of us who fall might be raised by the White Walkers to join their army, so it is important—” he says carefully, lowering his voice as if out of respect, “—to burn the bodies of our dead. As soon as possible.”

Jaime tries to imagine an army bigger than theirs, and lets himself fall on the chair behind him. It’s important to be realistic about the odds they’re facing, and they’re probably going to lose.

Daenerys, however, just nods. “And what about the White Walkers?”

“They’re not as numerous,” Jon informs. “But they are better swordsmen. The dead don’t fight so well, but they never stop until they’ve been killed. They do not tire. They’re just… hungry.”

Jaime feels a shudder crossing his spine. He has faced all kinds of enemies and monsters in his life, but never one that wanted to eat his flesh. Except, maybe, for the dragons outside, but it’s really not the moment.

He looks at his little brother, sees the dread Tyrion is trying to hide. For some reason, that prompts him to speak.

“So your idea is that we should just go there,” Jaime says. “And lure the Dead and the White Walkers to come to us, until we can get close enough to kill the Night King?”

“That is the idea,” Jon confirms.

“With a mighty Wall behind us?” Jaime presses further.

As if reading his thoughts, Jon eyes him suspiciously.

“I also don’t like to feel trapped, Ser,” the boy says. “But I don’t see any other way. The dead do not tire, and given their superior numbers we might need to take turns, to rescue our men, and to retreat when necessary. We have to stay close to the gates.”

“How many gates are we talking about?” Jorah speaks for the first time.

“And how are these gates?” Tyrion adds, frowning his eyebrows.

“Three on Castle Black. They are in a poor state, to be honest. As you know, my lord, the Night’s Watch has been lacking resources for years,” the King says, his voice bordering on the acid. “The gates lead to tortuous, narrow pathways through the ice. But since we are safe once we step inside the Wall, I believe they will be sufficient for our purposes.”

“If I were the Night King, the gates would be my primary aim,” Brienne says.

She hasn’t spoken in a long time, and all the gazes turn toward her as if startled by the sound of her voice. Jon frowns. “They can’t cross it, my lady. It’s magic.”

“The lady is right,” Jaime agrees. “If I were fighting against an army who only had three ways out of the field, paths that I could not cross myself, I, too, would try to make them impervious.”

Jon gives a thoughtful nod.

“I see. The men of the Night’s Watch will protect the gates, then.”

“And what if the Wall falls?” Sansa Stark asks.

Another silence, unintentional, tides over them, a cold quietness that settles in Jaime’s bones with a shiver.

Bran Stark speaks before the silence can breed hopelessness.

“We can’t allow the battle to come to Winterfell,” he says. “The women and the children will be here, and the castle is built upon a graveyard. If he raises the dead here, it will be a massacre. They will attack us from inside.”

“Where, then?” Jon asks, as if he’s been thinking of the question for months. “We can’t fight them on the open field. We need a place with obstacles to stop them.”

“The Twins are empty,” Arya says.

“And if they cross the Twins?” Sansa insists. “Any other castle south of the Neck is sheltering the people who cannot fight and keeping supplies for winter.”

“Harrenhal,” Brienne murmurs, almost inaudible.

Jon, Tyrion and Daenerys stare at her. Jaime, too, and she knowingly returns his gaze before she turns to the other people around them.

“The Lannister army is there.” Brienne explains, looking at him. “There are no women, no children being sheltered. And it’s three times the size of Winterfell.”

“And if they cross Harrenhal?” Arya asks.

“They won’t,” Jon decides.

“But if they do?” His little sister insists.

“They won’t,” Jon repeats, firmly. “If somehow they can get that far South, Harrenhal will be our last chance.”

“But how are we going to lure him to the places we chose?” Tyrion asks. “The Night King is not here to agree with our appointments.”

“He wants me,” Bran Stark answers. “He always knows where I am. I just need to be one step ahead, and he will follow.”

Jaime shares a confused look with Brienne, but she seems just as oblivious as he is.

Daenerys frowns. “You,” she says. “The Night King wants you.”

“I mean, he wants to take over Westeros,” Bran elucidates. “But he wants to do it through me.”

“Why?” Tyrion asks, squeezing his observant eyes toward the boy at the head of the table. “Doesn’t he have enough men?”

“He wants my powers,” Bran answers. Everyone but Arya and Jon stare at him, waiting; when he notices, he finally elaborates: “I’m the Three-Eyed Raven. I can see things.”

Tyrion pinches the bridge of his nose, trying to be patient. “Which things?”

“Everything, if you give me enough time,” Bran explains, in the calmest voice. “I can skinchange into any living thing and see through their eyes, what is happening and what already happened.”

“You’re a warg,” Sansa describes.

Should he know what that means? The name is distantly familiar.

Bran slightly turns his head to his older sister. “Yes, but I can enter the mind of any animal. Not just wolves. And I can see through the heart-trees as well.”

Jaime scoffs. No, there are no limits to the strange things that the world could accommodate. “And here I was all this time wondering how a crippled boy managed to send spies all over Westeros.”

For half a second, he can see the alarm on the face of his peers, but it’s very brief, because Bran just laughs. “No, Ser. That would have been much harder,” he says, casually.

“And the future?” Daenerys wonders.

“It hasn't happened yet, so there are no eyes there for me to see. I have green dreams about the future, and sometimes they happen as I dreamed, but they’re never as clear as seeing.”

“And the Night King wants to kill you?” Arya asks.

“Yes,” Bran answers, apparently unafraid. “I mean, not exactly. He wants to turn me into one of them. Not a dead man, but a White Walker.”

“Bran cannot be at the Wall,” Sansa says, decidedly. “I’m not letting my brother become one of those things.”

“You can see through any animal?” Jaime asks, curiously.

“Yes,” Bran answers.

“Say, an actual raven?” Jaime insists. “Anything that flies?”

Bran rolls his eyes. “Hence the title, Ser.”

“You can see the battlefield from above,” Jaime clarifies.

The boy hesitates, then. “Yes,” he says in a small voice. “Hypothetically.”

Jaime turns toward Jon: “We need him at the Wall.”

“Absolutely not,” Jon answers on the spot.

“This is every Commander’s dream,” Jaime argues. “To have information about any point of the battlefield in real time.”

“My brother is not a weapon, Ser,” Sansa says, in a voice that makes her sound so much like Ned Stark that Jaime flinches.

“I’m sorry, my lady, but he is, and if we leave him behind, we’re wasting him.” He looks at Jon again. “Bran can stay behind the Wall.”

“We’re considering the possibility of the Wall falling down. No.” Jon braces himself on his fists, leaning over the table. “If the Night King has hold of him, somehow, it will be the end of us. We can’t barely stand against him now, we for certain can’t fight him if he can see everything. Bran can send letters, if he wants to help.”

“Messages will take an entire day to arrive,” Tyrion says, in a guarded tone.

“Unless…” Meera Reed says, and then trails off.

She locks eyes with Bran. Raises her eyebrows suggestively. Whatever goes unsaid between them makes Bran shake his head furiously: “No,” he declares.

Meera puffs. “It’s the safest way,” she argues. “You can stay here in Winterfell and still help them. Ser Jaime is right, it’s a waste if you do nothing.”

“It is not safe at all,” Bran tells her. “It is extremely dangerous.”

“Let us in,” Arya intervenes. “What are you talking about?”

Meera’s eyes linger on Bran’s face, and then she sighs. “Bran can control the body of any living thing with eyes.”

It takes them all a while to follow that statement into its inevitable conclusion, but it is his little brother who recovers his voice soon enough to speak it out loud.

“Humans?” Tyrion asks, in a thin voice.

“This is an abomination,” Tormund growls.

“He is the greatest skinchanger I’ve ever seen,” Meera says. It doesn’t sound exactly like praise. It’s more like it terrifies her. “He has already done it before.”

“And the human died,” Bran finishes.

“Because you didn’t have enough hold of your powers at the time,” Meera says, quietly. “You have grown. You can control it better and we can practice here.”

Jaime still cannot believe it. “Seven Hells. You can control the bodies of people?” He feels cold everywhere, even where his missing hand was supposed to be. If the Night King has him—

“I can,” Bran says, casting down his eyes. “But I won’t.”

Meera reaches out to hold his hand. “Just to deliver messages, my Prince.”

“And you can do this at a distance?” Jon asks, inspecting his little brother with narrowed eyes. “Say, can you control the mind of a brother of the Night’s Watch right now?”

“I could,” Bran says, his voice still small, like a child’s. “But it’s not about distance, it’s about the mind being controlled. Some minds are easier than others.” He bites his lower lip. “It’s easier if I have a bond with the human in question.”

Jon doesn’t need much time to deliberate.

“You can have me,” he decides.

“And me,” Arya adds.

“I said no,” Bran repeats, almost angry.

“We’re volunteering!” Jon exclaims. “We’re your family, we have a bond, and we need you.”

“Did you hear what I just said?” Bran asks, anguished. “People have died because of that.”

Jon looks into Bran’s eyes across the table, his face half in shadows. “We are facing the possibility of annihilation, and I cannot let the Night King have the power of controlling our minds, so you are going to be as far away from the Wall as possible. I will take the risk.” He looks at the map again, as if he’s suddenly seeing roads where there were only forests before. “And besides, it’s just to deliver messages, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is, Jon,” Bran answers, as if he’s hurt by the implications of the question.

“You can have me, too,” Jaime says, suddenly.

A weird, baffled silence sweeps over the table; his little brother flinches as if someone had strung the wrong chord of a high-harp.

“Jaime?” Tyrion questions, confused.

But Jaime is not listening to him. His eyes are fixed on the boy he put in a wheel-chair, here, in this same castle, years ago.

“You don’t have to do this, Ser,” Bran says, warily.

“I think I do,” Jaime disagrees. “Arya will be with the northern forces, so you can deliver your messages to them,” he begins. “Jon will be with the Night’s Watch or with the Queen; the Unsullied are covered, the Khalasar, the gatekeepers. And the southern armies? The Tarlys, the Knights of the Vale? Do you have anyone else to bond with among them?”

“It needs to be a strong bond,” Arya mutters. “You’ve been in Winterfell for less than a moon-turn.”

Jaime remembers Bran beneath the leafless heart-tree of the godswood, a god he hadn’t recognized, forcing his knees to bend.

Working together against a common enemy, and willing to leave the past behind us. Can we agree on that?

But the past catches up with you; Jaime would know. He raises his chin in a dare.

“No, I think our bond is strong enough,” Jaime says, confidently.

Bran Stark is staring back at him with an old sort of sadness. He sighs, his shoulders drop, his silent consent written on his young, old face.

iv.

Son of Rhaegar. Jon Snow is the son of Rhaegar fucking Targaryen.

The small group of Daenerys’ counselors are reunited in one of Winterfell’s solars, especially separated for them. There’s a round desk at the center of the room, the leather map spread over it replacing the wooden table of Dragonstone, but the advisors are all scattered around in a disarray all over the room.

Missandei and Grey Worm flank the Queen, each of them looking in different directions. Jorah stands behind Daenerys as if not landing his hands on her shoulders is the biggest effort he’s ever made in his life. Varys stands quietly, deep in thought, in front of the hearth, staring at the flames, his back to Daenerys’ back: no doubt wondering how he missed that. Qhono, shoulders covered by white bear fur, is sitting behind the desk. His elbows are braced on the edge of the vellum map, but he’s not staring at it.

Theon Greyjoy should represent his sister as a Prince of House Greyjoy, but his allegiance to Daenerys is feeble without his sister around, even more so while in Winterfell, the house of his childhood. Yara Greyjoy sent most of her ships to sail with Daenerys’ armies who waited for the Queen’s signal on Dragonstone to go North, but the Captain decided to remain in Blackwater Bay until second order, trying to control the damage of the broken siege and at least keeping Cersei from escaping by the sea. And Theon’s bond to the Starks was too strong for him to remain in the room while this conversation happened, particularly after he started following Sansa Stark around the Kingdoms and serving her, so Daenerys had, wisely and gently, sent him away.

As for Tyrion, he is sitting on a corner, beside a closed window, with a much needed cup of wine in his hand.

Their chaotic disposition is an accurate mirror of their reactions after the Queen delivered the news: Jon Snow is actually the true-born son of Rhaegar Targaryen, and therefore, the next in line of succession to the Iron Throne. He is willing to lay down his northern crown to Daenerys when the War against the Dead is over, but his honor demands him to announce to his people the reasons why he’s doing it, therefore soon the North will know, as will the Knights of the Vale, the army from the Reach, and the Lord of Casterly Rock. Everyone. The whole of Westeros will soon know. They need to plan their next steps accordingly.

And this, after a long meeting in which it was revealed in detail the nature of dead men coming to them, and Bran Stark’s powers to control the mind of any living being he wanted, and move in time through it.

Tyrion couldn’t be more exhausted, couldn’t be more dazzled and confused by the face of this world in which dragons breathed fire and all sort of magic intertwined itself into their lives, but at the moment, even the most absurd of the tricks is not up to the shock he felt listening to the news from his Queen.

Rhaegar and Lyanna’s son. It made so much sense.

Tyrion cannot believe that all those years, right under their noses, right under Robert’s nose— gods. He stifles a laughter under his breath. Not even Cersei hid a secret from Robert so well. How did they believe it? How could they ever believe Ned Stark would father a bastard? Only because the idea of him lying to his best friend was even more ridiculous.

Ned Stark, the greatest liar of the Seven Kingdoms. The world really is ending.

“You need to marry him,” Varys says to Daenerys, still staring at the flames. He’s draped in his colorful robes and still smelling of lavender, even here, at the end of the world. His contribution to the end of silence is what everyone is thinking, anyway. “That’s the only way to neutralize the threat that he poses and bring him to your side.”

“What if he doesn’t want to marry me?” Daenerys asks.

“Tell him that refusing an alliance through marriage will be considered an act of rebellion,” Varys declares.

Tyrion tries to imagine Jon and Daenerys ruling, side by side, but the picture is blurry; something evades him, like trying to catch a butterfly.

Missandei winces. “Jon Snow already proved to be willing to pledge himself to the Queen. That would be harsh and unnecessary.”

“If he’s not married to her, he is a danger to her claim,” Varys says. “Unless he takes the black again, what is he going to do afterwards? Idly stroll around?”

It would be like Jon, Tyrion thinks, to pledge himself to the Night's Watch twice during the course of his life, but he keeps the thought to himself.

“He plans to stay in Winterfell and serve his cousins in whatever capacity they’ll allow him,” Daenerys says, in a cautious voice. She knows how that sounds.

“He is the lost son of the beloved Prince Rhaegar,” Varys argues. “Does he think he can live in Winterfell like a common steward? He is a Targaryen Prince. The Iron Throne is his birth-right and his duty.”

“What in the seven hells is birth-right?” Tyrion exclaims. Everyone looks at him, as if remembering he’s there. Against the sunlight, he is more of a shadow than anything in the corner of the room. “A mummer’s farce that we play along to make our lives easier. Jon Snow thought he was Ned Stark’s bastard his entire life, he’s spent his adult years as a brother of the Night’s Watch and prohibited by law to inherit lands or rule, and now he is a Targaryen Prince,” he continues. “None of these titles give him any claim to the northern crown, and yet he was crowned, because he fought for it and was chosen.” He looks Daenerys in her pale eyes, ignoring the rest of her council. “Wars win crowns. Armies win thrones.”

“What are you suggesting?” Grey Worm asks, in his usual hard voice, hard eyes. “That we turn our armies against Jon Snow?”

Tyrion raises one finger. “No. I am not suggesting that.” He says it clearly, unmistakably. Wars and armies are necessary but a good plan could avoid both, and it would be considerably cheaper. “Answer me one thing. What happens after you marry him?” Tyrion asks.

“We rule together,” Daenerys says, annoyed, but deciding to indulge him for a moment.

“And who is going to rule in Winterfell? What happens after you take away from the North the King they chose?” Tyrion presses further. “We know Bran Stark doesn’t show any interest in ruling. That leaves Winterfell in the hands of Sansa Stark, the oldest true-born Stark who never once tried to hide her opinion regarding the North’s freedom. Sansa brought an army home to get rid of the Boltons and spent her childhood suffering the consequences of Robb’s victories. We could, perhaps, convince Arya Stark to bend. But she literally slayed an entire House to avenge Robb and spent the last months ruling by Jon’s side. They have the stories, the reasons, the name and the blood to stir and inspire the North to rebel again. Are you willing to allow it?”

“No,” Daenerys says, resolutely. “I’m not giving up one third of my kingdom.”

“The Stark ladies wouldn’t rebel against the Iron Throne if Jon was occupying it,” Jorah points out. “They wouldn’t march against their family.”

“What if it’s the other way around?” Tyrion asks. He is absolutely convinced Sansa will propose this marriage, once she discovers the news. “What if they are willing to fight for the North because they know Jon would never fight back or resist them?” The Hand looks at Daenerys again. “Are you sure that, once on the Throne with you, once you share your crown with him, he wouldn’t free the North if pressed hard enough? Recent bloodlines be damned, he grew up here, your Grace.”

Another overwrought silence fills the room.

“Then, we’re hopeless,” Missandei declares. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“We are hopeless if Jon leaves to the South,” Tyrion corrects. “To keep the North, it is imperative that he stays here, and with actual power to yield. Besides, there’s a topic we’ve been avoiding for months—”

“If you talk about heirs now, Tyrion—” Daenerys warns, her voice edging with irritation.

“I will talk about heirs now, because we just discovered that there is a male true-born Targaryen in the world, and you can’t have children, Your Grace,” he insists, earnestly looking at her face again as he leans forward in his chair, toward her. “And I hate to put it in those terms, you can hate me all you want too. But I am your Hand, so allow me to be pragmatic: marrying Jon to you is a waste of royal seed. Unless you’ll allow him to have concubines or a second wife—”

“I wouldn’t like that,” Daenerys frowns.

“—As I suspected,” Tyrion says. “Assume for a moment that we’re the luckiest people on Westeros and we’re able to defeat the army of the Dead, defeat my sister, successfully gather the kingdoms around your campaign and after all that, you and Jon have a long, peaceful, happy, childless marriage,” he says, raising one finger to each of the enemies they have ahead of them to defeat. “In that scenario, our best hope to avoid another civil war as soon as you both die would be for you to die first, so he could breed another girl and pray that this hypothetical child lives to adulthood,” he continues. “I’m sorry if I don’t look forward to planning your reign based on your early death.”

“You always point out my problems,” Daenerys says. Her voice is sharp-cold with anger, which is even worse than the fire of her fury. “I don’t know why I still wait for solutions.”

Tyrion taps the arm of his chair, taking a single, deep gulp of wine. He can feel his father’s claws closing around his throat, Tywin’s grave voice in his ear: Do what you must, Tyrion, and be done with it. He feels like he’ll need all the wine in the world to say out loud the only thing he could think about since he heard the news, knowing his heart will break while he says the words.

But he’s Hand of the Queen, and he cannot not say them.

“If the North is an independent Kingdom won through right of conquest, as it currently is, Jon can rule. No further proof needed beyond victory itself. But if it’s an integral part of the Seven Kingdoms under a single rule, your rule, we need legitimacy,” Tyrion says. After a careful pause, in a cautious, low voice, he suggests: “What if we marry Jon to Sansa Stark?”

Another silence— this one lighter, like a feather, weightless like fire.

Missandei and Grey Worm share a look. Varys turns toward Tyrion. Their eyes lock. The Hand keeps his gaze, and the Spider nods.

“Oh,” Varys says. “This might work.”

“That could neutralize the Stark campaign for independence,” Jorah ponders. “If we do it right.”

“Aren’t you married?” Missandei asks. “Why not just keep this one?”

Tyrion rolls his eyes.

“A sham, never consummated. I’m sure Lady Stark will be thrilled to finally have it annulled. And believe me: Sansa is not so easy to bend. If we want her loyalty through marriage, we’ll have to aim a little higher than me.”

He gathers all his strength to look at Daenerys again.

“Fight for the living,” he says. “Accept Jon’s allegiance to fight with you against Cersei. He renounced the Iron Throne? Excellent. Name him a Prince of House Targaryen, a member of the royal family, and make him Lord of Winterfell, to be ruled in loyalty to you. Oh, he will not accept, because Winterfell belongs to the Starks? Marry him to the oldest Stark, then. Allow Sansa to be Lady of Winterfell, to keep her name and rule the North by his side, as his equal,” Tyrion proposes. “It’s only fair, it’s her home. Jon gets to stay in Winterfell, and as the true-born Stark, Sansa will be the one effectively ruling. They both will have just about what they want, their children will be Targaryens by blood and name, and their first son can be fostered in King’s Landing when he comes of age.”

He rests back against his chair, suddenly tired.

“There you go,” he finishes, though his voice lacks any sense of victory. “You have the North, the heir, the Iron Throne.”

Daenerys curiously looks at her Hand; Missandei looks at the Queen’s face, studying it carefully.

“We are betting too much on Jon’s word,” Jorah Mormont says. “Who is to say he won’t keep the North to himself once the Queen fights this War for him?”

“I’m not betting on his word,” Tyrion shakes his head. “I’m betting on his sense of duty. Out of duty to protect his people he is willing to give you the North.” He looks at the Queen again. “Out of duty to House Targaryen, he will keep it for you. All we need of him is formal allegiance. If he wants to spend his entire life in this frozen hell he calls home, by all means, let him have it, and let it be of some use.”

“He doesn’t see himself as a Targaryen,” the Queen murmurs. “Even for a formal allegiance only. I’m not convinced duty will be enough to motivate him.”

“Then make him see it,” Tyrion shrugs. “There are still two dragons out there.”

Dany widens her eyes. “Do you want me to make him a dragon rider?”

“I think it’s worth a try,” the Hand says, as casually as he is able. “I’m certain it would be more effective than a thousand negotiations.”

“That is not a bad plan, Your Grace,” the interpreter says.

“No, it isn’t,” Daenerys agrees. She tilts her head and gives Tyrion a half smile. “I thought you were in love with the Stark girl.”

Tyrion feels a sour taste under his tongue. He tries to remember a time when his love had any importance, and fails.

“Does it matter, Your Grace?” He asks, at last.

“That,” Daenerys gets up on her feet with a sly smile, “is why I named you Hand.”

“Well, I appreciate that.” He smirks bitterly, raising his cup in the air alone with not a trace of cheer in his voice. “To a little peace.”

Chapter Text

i.

“Thank you for meeting us so early in the day, Jon Snow,” Daenerys says, cordially. “I know you had practice last night. You must be tired.”

The Queen is right; he is tired. Jon has dark bags under his eyes since they left Castle Black to retake Winterfell, Sansa notices. She was encouraged to attend the audience requested by the Dragon Queen with Jon, which meant she wasn’t given much of a choice. Not that she planned to let Jon formally meet with Daenerys Targaryen alone ever again.

“We can have our rest later,” Jon answers, nonchalantly. Sansa knows what he means: he can have his rest after, everything can be fixed after they defeat the Night King. “You said you have a proposal to make?”

Unlike Sansa’s, Arya’s presence wasn’t officially demanded, but she doesn’t leave Jon’s side, so both Stark sisters sit by the King’s side. Sansa does not know if she and Arya are here to witness or to actively participate in the negotiation, but either way, she knows what’s coming. She can only hope Jon will trust her enough to say yes to the proposal.

Bran was warned of the meeting, and Sansa asked him to come. She wanted Daenerys to be aware they were a pack.

But Bran just huffed. You’ll have no need of me, he’d said. I’ll be in the godswood. Tell Jon to meet me there, later. Sansa had internally cringed, but didn’t insist. Apparently, her younger brother was too occupied with his visions of dead men to worry about anything else.

She looks at Jon with the corner of her eye. Like the older, she thinks, trying not to sigh.

Now the three of them sit across Daenerys Targaryen, Tyrion Lannister and Missandei.

“Yes,” Daenerys nods, carefully, and gulfs in a shallow breath of air before she begins.

“In the light of our most recent discoveries about you and…” the Queen quickly grazes her eyes over Arya and Sansa, perhaps to make sure they are all aware of the subject at hand, and only then proceeds: “your parents, it became clearer and clearer to me — and my council fully agrees — that there is no need for animosity or any kind of hostility between us.” Her hands, ungloved, palm the edge of the table. “We are all family, after all. Thanks to you, Jon, who unites us, we can work and plan the future of the realms as one.”

“I’m glad you think so, Your Grace.” Her brother is not so trusting, and can hardly conceal the suspicion in his voice, but his face is calm, impassive even. “It’s very important that we stand as one against the Night King and his armies.”

“Yes. Absolutely,” Daenerys agrees. “But I cannot help but plan for more than our survival,” she continues. “I want spring, Jon Snow. I want the thriving of the kingdoms, and a long, lasting peace. I want the tyrants removed from their seats and justice to be delivered to Westeros.” Her words are gentle — Missandei’s, Sansa is sure — but the tone, the color of the words are her own: hard, firm, final. “We are leaders. If we are hopeless, so will our people be. I want to let them know that not only we expect to survive, but we are so confident of our victory that we can already plan what comes after. Don’t you think so?”

Sansa shares a look with Arya, and between them, they see the corner of Jon’s mouth quivering with a smirk. “I do, Your Grace. I’m listening. Go on.”

Daenerys smiles back, this one not rehearsed, but genuine, to Jon only.

“And of course,” Daenerys continues, “the North is critical to this future. The largest kingdom of Westeros, taking the lead to protect the entire country against the biggest threat we’ve seen in generations — how could I set you aside? I also cannot bring myself to take away your autonomy, your power to decide, to deliberate about what’s best for you.” Daenerys doesn’t blink, then, as she stares at the King in the North. “The North has chosen you, Jon. You are the one they want, and the one they follow. It would be unfair of me to meddle, to interfere with the will of your people. I am not this type of Queen.”

Jon is fully frowning now, but he doesn’t say a thing, instead choosing to wait.

“And that is why I want you to remain here, as Lord of Winterfell, after we defeat the Dead,” Daenerys says.

Sansa’s shoulders drop; that’s not what she was expecting. Arya is only staring at the Queen, and listening.

“That was not our deal,” Jon reminds her. “I told you. Winterfell belongs to House Stark—”

“And you’re not a Stark,” Daenerys smiles, pleased. “No, you have always been a dragon, Jon, a Targaryen Prince, and it does not surprise me that you have found your way to the northern throne even while you mistakenly assumed you were a bastard. You were born for greatness. It is your legacy, your inheritance, it is in your blood. You cannot escape who you are.” Across them on the desk of Jon’s solar, Daenerys comfortably rests against her chair. “But I also recognize that Ned Stark protected you, saved you from the usurpers who took our throne, and I want to reward that. That act alone redeems House Stark from all their rebellion, all the pain that we caused each other. I want Starks and Targaryens to be allies again, the strongest of the allies, as we were meant to be. I want to give the North the place of highest honor in my reign, a seat of royal power just below King’s Landing. Dragonstone can be used for other purposes: I want you as my Prince and heir here, in Winterfell.”

A Dragon looking for a prey, a Prince uniting the Kingdoms once and for all and mending what his parents have broken, Petyr mocks in her ear. So, we’re in the realm of songs here. Where is the fair maiden, then?

Sansa looks at Tyrion, who is, with intention, avoiding to return her gaze, calmly studying Jon instead.

Jon leans over the desk, closer to his aunt. “You accuse the usurpers who robbed you of your Throne, and yet you plan to remove the Starks from their ancestral home,” Jon mutters. “How does that deliver justice?”

Daenerys frowns, as if confused.

“Oh, no, Jon Snow, I do not mean to steal the birth-right of House Stark. I told you. I am not this type of Queen. That is why I find it imperative to unite our houses through marriage.” So she looks away from Jon for the first time. To her. To Sansa. “And who better suited than Sansa Stark?”

A cold, sudden feeling of panic fills Sansa’s stomach. She feels trapped even before her mind can start working out the implications, the possibilities stretching out of the moment like branches. She looks at Jon, first, as if looking for help.

“I beg your pardon, Your Grace,” he says, a little lost, shocked. “Do you want me to marry my sister?”

“Your cousin,” Daenerys corrects, politely. Pauses, for a heartbeat, and adds: “Not that I think marriage between siblings should be a problem. But tell me, Jon. Isn’t that correct that Lady Sansa is the oldest true-born Stark? Just because she is a woman, it doesn’t mean she shouldn’t inherit Winterfell. It is already so in Dorne, and I see no reason why we shouldn’t expand the precedent.”

Jon squeezes his eyes shut. “That was not my issue with your proposal,” he mutters.

“And isn’t it correct that she fought by your side to retake Winterfell from the hands of usurpers?” Daenerys continues. She looks into Sansa’s eyes and smiles sweetly. “I’ve been informed that her aid to you during the battle was paramount for your victory.”

“Again, not the reason why your plan troubles me,” Jon continues, opening his eyes.

Sansa cannot blame Jon’s disarray, because she hasn’t even found her voice yet. But before the King can open his mouth again, Daenerys resumes her argument.

“You understand, of course, Jon, that in this scenario, not only would Lady Sansa keep her last name, but she would rule with you. By your side, not underneath you. She would be the Lady of Winterfell in truth, and, actually, not only the head of your household: I would like to name her the Warden of the North. I’ve seen her dedication and her competence. There’s no one better to hold the title.”

Slowly, gradually, as Daenerys paints her picture, Jon’s surprise shifts into a dangerous, calculated pondering. Sansa sees it, in the storm of his gray eyes, that he is listening.

“Keep talking,” Jon asks.

“Now, as the last of our kin, we both have a duty to House Targaryen,” Daenerys continues. “I cannot have children, so this is a responsibility that you and I shall share. Your oldest son will inherit the Iron Throne. I fully trust you and Lady Sansa to raise the next King of the Seven Kingdoms, to nurture and wisely guide him, someone who’ll be like you, Jon, a Targaryen and a Stark. I know of no other pair of people in Westeros more committed to justice, to freedom and duty, more prepared for this invaluable task, than the both of you. And our heir will be welcome in the Red Keep when the time comes.”

Oh, sweetling, Littlefinger laments in her ear. It’s not what I had in mind, but it’s close. Your child on the Iron Throne, instead of you. Maybe he’ll look like Robb. Maybe you can name him so. Isn’t that a pretty picture? Isn’t that a pretty song?

Sansa struggles not to cover her mouth behind her hands, instead flexing her fingers beneath the desk.

The gracious words are Missandei’s. The color of the tone is all Daenerys.

But the plan itself? The smooth edges of it, the deliberate, careful concealing of the North’s stolen freedom beneath the pretty picture? Sansa’s gaze finds Tyrion; he looks at her, something like regret and pain and resolve in his gaze, before he casts his eyes down.

She feels her heart shattered in a thousand tiny shreds.

“Jon,” she whispers, and hates how her voice trembles and cracks at such a short word.

Jon raises one finger to her, quietly, his eyes never moving away from the Queen across them.

“If we accepted,” Jon asks, “When would that marriage happen?”

“As soon as possible, of course,” Daenerys says, almost excited. “Before we leave to the Wall, as a sign of good-faith and a symbol of our alliance.”

Jon taps his fingers over the table.

“Jon,” Sansa repeats, her voice a little more steady.

His brother looks at her for the space of a breath, and, resolute, turns toward Daenerys again.

“I need to discuss this with my cousins, in private,” Jon says. “And if they agree to it, the marriage will happen after the War.”

Daenerys sighs, crossing her arms. “I am making you a very generous offer, Jon Snow.”

“It is generous,” he admits. “But I will not marry anyone until we defeat the Night King. That was our deal.”

The Queen frowns. “That deal was before. I am taking into consideration all that you’ve offered me, all of your terms, and even more.”

“Except for one. The North is not the coin I am using to bargain with you,” Jon reminds her. “The North is a reward you must earn first. We’ll close it after the War. That is not open to discussion.”

“Let them, Your Grace,” Tyrion suggests, his hand absently rubbing his bearded chin. “No good would come out of a harsh decision. They can have a little time to think.”

Daenerys and Tyrion share a look; the Hand gives her a quiet nod, and she sighs. “Very well. I can wait. But not too long, Jon Snow.”

ii.

As soon as Jon declares the meeting over, Sansa says her courtesies and storms out of his solar, and against every reasonable course of action, Tyrion Lannister has the audacity, the nerve, to follow her.

“Sansa,” he calls. “Sansa, wait.”

“I’m so stupid,” Sansa mutters under her breath, more to herself than to him. She doesn’t care if he hears or not. She doesn’t care what he thinks at all. “Gods, I can’t believe this.”

She is walking in long strides, and he hurries after her, trying to catch up to her rhythm. She feels cruel for not slowing down. And then, thinks it feels good to be cruel to him.

“Let me explain,” he asks.

“There’s nothing to explain,” she turns on her heels abruptly, and he almost doesn’t halt in time. He looks at her as if he wasn’t expecting her to actually stop for him and now that she did, he doesn’t know what to say. “I can’t believe that after everything that we’ve been through, you are selling me like a broodmare.”

“Selling you like a broodmare?” His face is a mask of self-righteousness, as if she had offended him, and not the other way around. They’re speaking too loud for a hallway; Sansa resumes her walking, and he once again follows her wake. “How on earth trying to prevent a War by keep you in your home, married to a good man is—”

“Do not insult me by pretending this is about me,” Sansa seethes. The whole world is burning red with her anger. She cannot believe that all this time, she thought she had him wrapped around her little finger and he— he just— “You want an heir to your Queen.”

“Of course I want an heir to my Queen. I am her Hand. To plan her reign is my job.” Sansa rolls her eyes as she pushes the door of her solar open. She doesn’t shut it in time to keep him out, so he gets in, watching her fuming in the middle of the chamber.

“This is all I could do to give you what you wanted,” he says. Now that they’re in a private room, now that they have proper walls, he decides to lower his voice down to a quiet murmur. “You’ll stay in the North, you’ll rule the North as you’re supposed to.” He looks in pain; Sansa knows better than to believe him. “You’ll marry a kind man, who will never, ever hurt you.”

“My brother!” She exclaims, exasperated.

But if you don’t marry Jon, Petyr whispers, would Arya deny him? They’ll not give up Daenerys’ precious heir. Would you give Arya everything? The North, the Prince, the child that is going to own the kingdoms someday? What are you going to be, if you refuse? Just a lesser broodmare to give Starks to the world instead of Targaryens. Jon doesn’t want freedom more than he wants to kill the Night King, Arya doesn’t want freedom more than she wants Jon to be home, Tyrion wants his Dragon Queen on the Throne. You’re on your own, Sansa.

Sansa shakes her head. She cannot. She cannot turn against her own family, the lone wolf die, but the pack—

Who told you that? Petyr mutters, displeased. Your father? Much good it did to him.

“Your cousin,” Tyrion corrects her, bringing her out of reverie. “A Prince.” Gods. She wants to hit him in the shins. She hates, hates when he corrects her. “It’s what you deserve.”

“Tyrion Lannister, how dare you,” she growls.

He sighs. “Come on, Sansa—”

She will not hear it.

“Don’t you dare say another word about what I deserve or not.” She walks toward him, glaring furiously into his eyes. “Don’t you ever again dare to assume what I want!”

“What do you want, then?” He asks, fisting his hands on his sides, just as frustrated.

“I already told you what I wanted! I wanted freedom! And I wanted— I wanted you! You idiot!” She hisses through her gritted teeth. “How could you use me like that? You were the only man I ever let— gods!” She screams. “I thought we were a team. I can’t believe I was that stupid.”

“We are a team,” he murmurs sadly.

“No. We are not. We never were a team.” She almost barks out a sour laugh, but it turns out it was just a sob, stuck in her chest. The tears come down with it, and Sansa finds she cannot stop them. Why did she let this happen? How did she allow such weakness? Never again, Sansa swears, finding her strength and lifting her spine in a mast of steel to look down on him. “You are the Lannister Hand to a Targaryen Queen and I am a Stark of Winterfell. So I’ll do my duty, my lord, and you’ll get to rule the world. Congratulations. You really are your father’s heir.”

He puts his hands on her waist, and Sansa remembers holding him under the moonlight as he followed her to the Vale, remembers the devotion in his eyes.

Stupid, stupid, stupid girl.

“Sansa,” he murmurs. “Don’t do this. This is not a War you could win. I was trying to keep you safe. You know that.”

“I never asked that of you,” she says. She fists her hands on her sides, refusing to clear her face; let him see her cry, let him see what he truly did to her. She stands still, unmoving, paralyzed by this hurt and this fury. “I didn’t need to be saved. Let me go.”

“I can’t,” he whispers.

“Oh, but you can,” she says, her voice full of contempt. “Apparently, you do it quite easily.”

“The lady said to let her go, my Lord Hand,” says a voice, suddenly reminding them they’re not the only two people in the world.

When Sansa looks up, and Tyrion looks back, Jon is standing at the open door, as regal as she’s ever seen him, staring hardly at the pair of them, and particularly at Tyrion.

“This is her home,” Jon says. “You’ll leave her be.”

It’s the order of a King, and not a friendly suggestion; defeated, Tyrion withdraws. He glances at her one last time and then turns around and walks away, past Jon, disappearing in the hallway.

Jon looks at her as if he pities her. “I can beat him bloody,” he offers. “Just say the word.”

“Oh,” Sansa mourns. “Oh, Jon. Don’t do that,” she asks, finally running the back of her hand on her cheeks, cleaning the tears away. “Don’t hurt him.”

“But he hurt you,” he says.

“It’s my fault. I let it happen.” She laughs, feels the familiar sting of betrayal, and her laughter immediately dies. “I’m so, so damn stupid, Jon. A stupid girl, with stupid dreams, who never learns.”

“Don’t say that,” Jon says, walking toward her with open arms.

Sansa all but falls into them, and even though she’s taller than he is, she buries her face in his shoulder and weeps like a little girl. He runs a hand on her back until her sobs have waned, but even then, she doesn’t want to let go of him.

“It’s all right,” Jon says, calmingly. “Do you love him, Sansa?”

“Does it matter?” She murmurs.

“It matters to me.”

Sansa cannot help but smile. “You are good and kind, Jon,” she says, raising her head just enough to hold his face between her hands. “You’re the best of us.”

“We don’t have to, you know,” he says, holding her wrist. “If you don’t want to marry me, then we won’t.”

“If I don’t want it?” She asks, baffled, giving just one step back, Jon’s arms still around her. Any hope for the future of the North would depend on Jon’s refusal, not only her own. “Would you?”

“To protect our family and give you the North? Yes, I would, if you would allow me,” he says, as if it were very simple. When he sees her flabbergasted look, Jon just sighs, dropping his hands from her waist to run them over his beard. “Would it be that terrible?”

Sansa looks at him, pondering that question. Would it be terrible?

It would be a lie to say she’d never thought about marrying Jon. It was Petyr’s fault, actually; no wonder he is so loquacious about the topic in her mind. When he suggested to her that it was unfair that the King in the North was a bastard and not a true-born Stark, she had thought, well, there’s a simple way to fix that.

She had quickly dismissed the idea, then. They weren’t close as children, that’s true, but he was still her brother and that was improper. She wanted to be Queen, but they weren’t Targaryens or, worse, Lannisters.

Of course it’s all terribly ironic now. And she knows: love blooms out of habit, or at least that’s what her mother used to say. She could grow used to seeing Jon as husband and not brother; everything can be learned. But what moves Sansa is how tired he looks, how completely worn out, how he looks like he just needs to rest.

I’m tired of fighting, he’d said to her, in Castle Black. She could do this for him; not to be his love, but to be his rest, a place for him to lay down his sword and stop fighting.

But Sansa cannot ignore that there’s more at stake than mere happiness.

“Don’t be silly, Jon,” she murmurs, quietly. “It wouldn’t be terrible at all. That is not the problem here.”

“I don’t want you to worry about this now,” he says. “We have a much more important War at our doorsteps.”

“I worry because you never do,” she argues. “I am trying to keep the North free. Don’t you see?”

“I thought you liked her,” Jon says. “You like her enough to think I could marry her, at least.”

“I thought her better than Cersei and I still do,” Sansa explains. “That doesn’t mean she poses no danger to us, Jon. Open your eyes and pay attention.”

“Your Grace?” A squire calls from the door, timidly, a boy no older than ten. “I’m sorry. It’s Prince Bran. He says he’s waiting for you in the godswood.”

Jon dismisses the boy with a wave of his hand, and then looks at her again, and for a moment they just stare at each other, both struggling to decide if they will fight about it now or later.

In the end, it’s Jon who sighs, who kisses her forehead and says goodbye.

“We can discuss all of that later,” he murmurs against her brow. She knows what he means: they can discuss it after. “We have time.”

iii.

“Are we not supposed to practice at night?” The Hound groans, breathless, as he raises his sword against Arya’s blow.

“Yes, we are,” Arya says. She does a thing with her body — moves so fast that she almost disappears into a shadow around the Hound. The giant man looks almost clumsy by her side while she graciously dances around him with sure steps, light feet.

There’s little to do between the hours, and so Samwell is watching them practicing. By his side, Gilly is attentively watching the sandglass, so she spots the precise second the last grain of sand crosses its narrowest section. Little Sam is in her lap almost disappearing beneath the layers of blankets they’ve wrapped around him, trying to reach out to Nymeria as if it were a dog, and not a giant lethal beast.

In Little Sam’s defense, Nymeria only places her own head under his tiny hand, and doesn’t even bark when he giggles trying to pull at the soft furs, though Gilly gently, patiently, disentangles his fingers and tells him: “no. Don’t hurt the wolf.”

And then, she looks at Samwell again. “Done,” she tells him, and turns the sandglass around once more. The sand of time starts to fall again, grain by grain.

Samwell sighs, rising with his measuring wooden ruler and going to the base of the nearest tree, close to the roots.

He marks the exact place where the shadow ends with a stone and frowns, looking at distance between this one and the other stone, the one he put on the ground one sandglass-hour ago. With his wooden scale, he measures the length of the current shadow, and then the distance between the two stones, writing the numbers down on the chart below the map of the godswood. And then he moves to the second tree.

“Then why the fuck we are here?” The Hound asks Arya, all grumpy.

“Mind your language in front of the child, Ser,” Gilly says, upset.

“Not a Ser,” the Hound mutters.

Little Sam is trying to reach out to grab one of the thousand little snowflakes gently falling over the godswood, now; it’s mid-morning.

“We are here,” Arya answers, taking a few steps back to take a breath and rest, “because I need to relax.”

The Hound sneers. It’s hard to tell, but Samwell thinks it’s the closest to genuine amusement he can express. “That’s how you relax? Why is everyone so fucking weird around here? You want to stab people and this fucking guy is just obsessed with trees.”

Samwell has finished the second tree when he raises his head. “You know,” he says, looking at Arya. “I do have something that could be useful to you.”

She seems suspicious. “What?”

“A Valyrian blade,” Samwell says, casually, taking notes about the measures of the second tree. “A family relic. It’s called Heartsbane. I would only ask you to take good care of it.”

Arya raises her eyebrows, surprised, interested. “Oh?”

“I don’t know why I took it, to be fair. I’m terrible with all of this…” He trails off, vaguely pointing to the glade where Arya and Sandor Clegane have been practicing since the sunrise. “It’s wasted with me, I’m not even going to the Wall.” He is going to stay here, in Winterfell, with the children and the women who do not fight. “And you definitely know your way around fighting.”

Samwell moves to the third tree and repeats the procedure: he marks the length of the shadow with a stone; he measures it; he measures the distance between the past shadow, marked by the previous stone; he takes notes.

Arya absently swirls her own sword around her wrist as if it were the easiest thing in the world. “Don’t you have a brother?” Arya asks.

Samwell cannot help but smirk. “When my brother gets that good with a sword, I’ll give it to him.”

“What is it that you’ve been doing all morning?” Arya asks, genuinely curious. “With the trees?”

“I’m taking measures of the shadows,” Samwell explains. “Don’t you feel like the days are getting shorter?”

“Are they not supposed to be short during winter?” Arya wonders. “At least here, in the North, they always are.”

“But aren’t they growing too short, too fast?” Samwell insists.

How is not everyone completely troubled by that? Samwell considered he might be going mad, but the length of the shadows don’t lie.

“Girl,” the Hound rasps behind Arya, catching her attention once more. “I’m hungry. If you want to practice more before the midday meal, leave Samwell to his trees and come here.”

Arya raises a finger to Sandor Clegane; the man rolls his eyes.

“Are you serious about the sword?” Arya asks, looking at Samwell. “Heartsbane?”

She looks so much like Jon, Samwell thinks. It’s very hard not to like her. Samwell tried to give him Heartsbane, but Jon already had Longclaw, of course.

“If you are serious about wielding it,” Samwell replies, and moves to the fourth tree.

iv.

Arya knows by name every man and woman working on the Smithy, and they all raise their hands and wave or try a hurried curtsy between tasks. She says hello to Benton, and to Gareth with the exact shade of auburn hair that reminded her of Robb, and to Helly and Olly, the twins, and all their apprentices.

In her way, Arya sees wagons filled with a collection of identical swords, carefully wrapped; barrels filled to the brim with arrowheads; boxes full of daggers. There are thousands of items. They all shine with that characteristic gloomy brightness, that deep-blue hues of the darkest night against the fire in the hearths, as if the blades could capture the starlit sky.

She’s avoided visiting the place with her own face since the Brotherhood Without Banners arrived in Winterfell, but she knows where he works. He’s shirtless; of course he is. In the forge, the heat is so intense that the cold of winter must feel like a myth.

Arya takes one of the smaller daggers and shifts it in the air, appreciating its beauty. The frozen fire, the Valyrians used to call it. She tests its weight: it’s so light. It’s like wielding a feather.

“Careful with that,” Gendry says.

Arya pulls a face. Obsidian is much sharper than steel, but she is offended that Gendry would even consider her to be that reckless. “I’m not going to get cut.”

“I know you won’t,” he mutters. “Dragonglass is brittle as hell. Tricky to work with, and easy to break.”

She places the blade, carefully, back into the box, watching the muscles of his arms as he works: with one hand he moves arrowheads, still burning, with a tong, from the hearth to a polished surface where they cool off, and with the other hand he takes the ones already cooled down into a box.

Of course, that doesn’t quite allow him to look her in the eye, and Arya is almost grateful.

“So to what do I owe the honor of your presence...” he pauses, frowns. “... what should I call you? My lady? Princess? Your Grace?”

“Just Arya,” she murmurs.

For a second, he looks at her.

Then, still looking at her, he screams. “Jean!”

“What?” A girl appears from behind the hearth, just her head actually, her face smeared with black powder and sweat covering her brow. She’s pretty behind the grime, though, with green eyes like summer leaves and a dark-blond hair that is messily curled into a bun at the top of her head, and though she is just a little taller than Arya, her arms are considerably stronger.

Arya knew Jean; she didn’t know the bastard girl was close to Gendry.

“Take that over for me, will you,” he says.

Behind them, the girl breaks a swear word or two, but she eventually takes Gendry’s place, not before she acknowledges Arya’s presence with a clumsy curtsy. Gendry guides Arya toward the depths of the Smithy, to a place where, surrounded by blades and swords and more arrowheads, they are alone.

He rests the sole of his feet and his back against the wall.

“Arya,” he repeats, after all.

“Is that your lady?” Arya questions.

“Why? Are you jealous?” Gendry smirks.

“Of course not.” She narrows her eyes. “I thought you left with the Brotherhood to be their knight, and not to remain a smith.”

“I joined to serve the realms.” He is studying her the way he used to when they were younger, with the careful attention that made him figure out who she was beneath the face, the mask, the name. “The realms need me here, apparently. At your castle, in your Smithy. Isn’t that odd, Arya Stark of Winterfell?”

“How are they? For a family?” She says, with a sting.

“I have no frame of reference, so they serve me just fine,” Gendry spats back. “You’ve been avoiding me for the past moonturn, so I’m worried. Do you have something to say?”

“No,” she almost yells. It feels louder in this confined space, as if the blades are shouting their voices back to them.

“Excellent,” Gendry decides.

“Excellent,” Arya agrees.

Gendry curls his mouth. “What do you want me to do? To apologize?”

“No,” she says, too fast, and then, with a sigh, quietly: “No, of course not. Don’t be stupid.” They share a longer look, full of what-ifs, and then Gendry chuckles. “What is it?”

“You still look like you could murder me with your eyes. I’m glad that hasn’t changed.”

Arya tries not to, but she chortles under her breath too. The past is gone, their decisions were made, Gendry has found himself some sort of family and he is here, alive and well. It should be enough.

“I’m not here to fight,” she says, walking over to him and giving him the sword enveloped by rich red velvet fabric.

Gendry swipes it off to reveal—

“Is that Valyrian Steel?” He asks immediately, balancing the sword on the back of his hand. Unlike dragonglass, which seems to reflect the light in the form of a thousand tiny blue stars, the dark blade of the Valyrian steel swallows the light.

“Yes,” Arya confirms. “It’s a gift. But I need you to use it to forge something,” she slides Needle out of its sheath, and hands it to him by the hilt. “Like this.”

He studies the two swords carefully.

“I can’t wield something of this size without losing my balance,” she points to Heartsbane. “But this,” she touches the thin flat of Needle’s blade, “is just common steel. I can’t use it against the Others.”

“I can make two swords like Needle out of that Valyrian one,” Gendry says, confidently.

“Good,” Arya bites her lower lip. “Can you keep that between us?”

“Not that easy to keep a Valyrian sword a secret in a Smithy, but I can try,” he says, still amazed at the blade. And then, after a moment of consideration, he turns to her with a frown. “Did you steal this?”

“What? No!” Arya replies, indignant. “Of course not. It was a gift, I told you.”

“Because I don’t mind if you stole it,” he says. “The rich man who you stole it from probably didn’t deserve it or even know how to use it as well as you, anyway. I’m just curious—”

“Gendry!” She hits him, hard, on the arm. It almost hurts her hand; she had forgotten he got stronger. “I didn’t steal it, all right?” Arya hisses, voice low. “Samwell Tarly gave it to me.”

Gendry’s frown doesn’t wear off with that new information.

“Isn’t he from the Night’s Watch? The one who spends his days measuring the length of tree shadows?”

“Yes!” Arya crosses her arms, embarrassed. “But he is the older son, so the sword is his to give away.”

The wrinkle on his forehead grows even deeper. “So the vows force you to give up everything,” he says, “lands, wife, children, titles, but not ancestral swords?”

“Maybe he stole it, but that’s none of our concern,” she says, exasperated. “The sword is here. It won’t do the living any good in the tomb of a dead man. Will you do it or not?”

“I’ll do it as m’lady commands,” he says, with a flourished bow.

Arya rolls her eyes but, despite herself, she smiles. “Thank you,” she says, gently squeezing his shoulder.

“All good swords have names,” he says, giving Needle back to her. “What is this one going to be called?”

She bites her lower lip.

“I don’t think I’ll need to name it.”

It will be no one’s sword, after all.

v.

There are few places in Winterfell where Jon can be left alone and undisturbed, the baths fed by the hot springs under the ground of the castle being one of them. The King does not think it a coincidence that Tyrion has found a way to him. Jon listens to the squabble at the bath’s entrance, someone arguing with his guards, until he says, “who is it?”

The water in the pools echo his voice back to him; Jon doesn’t need to scream.

“The Hand of the Queen, Your Grace,” one of the guards answers.

Jon sighs.

“Let him in,” he says.

Tyrion waddles in the maze of stone tubs, climbing the steeple steps of the one Jon is currently in. He looks at Jon, smiles, and removes his boots without a hurry in the world.

“You know, there are twelve pools in here,” Jon informs him. “All empty.”

“Oh, yes, I noticed,” Tyrion says, and gets rid of his jerkin.

“Who told you about this place?” Jon wonders. It’s not easy to find; that’s the reason why he’s here.

“Sansa, when we were on the road,” Tyrion replies, and removes his breeches. His tunic covers him to the knees. “Of course she won’t look at me now, so I had to bribe two maids to show me the way, and then, after all this trouble your guards didn’t want to let me in. I was about to bribe them too when you rescued me.”

“They can’t be bought.” Jon smiles, pleased. “And it’s their job to protect me.”

“From me?” Tyrion exclaims, mockingly pointing to himself. “It’s hard to hide weapons when you’re naked as a new-born.”

“Well, you’re not naked as a new-born,” Jon says, raising his chin and eyeing his tunic.

Tyrion narrows his eyes to him. “I was hoping you would believe I don’t want to kill you, boy.”

Jon rolls his eyes. “You would be smarter about it, if you wanted me dead.”

Tyrion laughs, then. “I would, I would.”

“But it’s still a bathhouse,” Jon contends.

Tyrion hesitates, and removes his tunic at last, revealing, after all, a complete lack of lethal weapons. That is, if his own body doesn’t count, but then, all bodies can be weapons after a fashion, large or small. He steps into the pool, across Jon, and the steam rises to greet him. Jon watches as he dips in, sliding down on his back against the wall of the tub until the water covers him almost to the chin, all his body submersed but for his face. He rests the back of his head against the border with a relieved sigh.

“Gods,” he groans. “I want one of these on the Red Keep.”

Jon chuckles. It's good therapy for sore muscles. “Good luck creating a hot spring from under the ground.”

“We’ll make do.” Tyrion grimaces. “Perhaps the dragons can heat the water.”

It would be like Tyrion, Jon thinks, to put the dragons to work in such a mundane task.

“You knew I would be here,” Jon affirms. “Were you following me?”

The Hand smirks, propping his head up. “I understand it is a King’s prerogative to be paranoid, and I won’t hold that against you.” His gaze wanders to Jon’s chest, only inches above the surface of the water. “So the rumors are true.”

Jon immediately sinks a couple of inches deeper, enough to hide the scar, but it’s too late.

“Back from the dead?” He says, voice sly. “You should add this to your title. Make Davos introduce you as the Undead or something similar. Though it would sound like you’re just one of the dreadful things beyond the Wall that we’re trying to exterminate.”

“The irony is not lost on me,” Jon mutters, dour.

“Oh, Jon,” Tyrion says, pitifully. “I don’t know what is worse, discovering you are really as honorable as I thought and that you were released of your vows only by virtue of literally dying, or knowing that someone stabbed you to death. Who would stab you? You can’t hurt a fly.”

Yes, I can, Jon thinks. I’m not the boy you knew. But he keeps the thought to himself.

“It was a mutiny,” Jon explains. “Because I allied with the free folk.”

Tyrion thoughtfully nods. “I understand.” The acuity of his eyes disturbs Jon, but it holds him there, on the field of his gaze and unable to look away. “I’m sorry. So it’s not just the crown getting to your head and you do have reasons to be paranoid, after all.”

Despite everything, Jon laughs, and Tyrion smiles, clearly proud of himself.

“I trust you,” Jon says.

Tyrion raises one finger above the water. “Lesson number one regarding the whole crown business: do not. Assume the worst of me.”

Jon smiles. Once, he remembers, his life was caught at the crossroads and Tyrion was there to guide him. He was more the devil tempting him away than the angel leading him on, but even devils have their role. “I usually do not assume the worst of my friends.”

Tyrion tilts his head, almost moved, and his eyes melt a little. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I could ask you the same,” Jon says.

He presses his lips together to hide his smile. “Well, Jon, you have grown. I am old but I am not dead.” The tip of his fingers glide over the water in delicate circles. “I, however, have not grown a single inch. So now you tell me. Why are you looking at me like that?”

It’s a relatively large pool, big enough that Jon has to consider if the distance between them is worth crossing. The vapor makes him look misty, the lines of him blurred.

“I'm wondering if you are still the same,” the King says.

Tyrion rests his head against the stony edge of the pool again, closing his eyes, as comfortable as if he were on his own bed. “I’ll spare you the wondering: no, I am not.”

“That is a shame,” Jon laments. “I had hoped you would be.”

Tyrion cracks one eye open. Then the other. “Why?”

Well, he thinks, two can play this game.

“I could use a friend to tell me the truth,” Jon says, simply.

Tyrion ponders that. “I’ll be frank,” he promises.

Jon shakes his head slowly. “I don't know if it's still possible. It is easier to tell the truth to a bastard than to a King.”

The Hand only grins. “I’ve made a job out of telling the truth to Kings, Jon. Try me.”

“What is it between you and Sansa?” Jon asks, because he thinks it best to begin from what they have in common.

It is only when Tyrion’s face falls that Jon realizes he’s made a mistake. Quickly, Tyrion slips behind his usual mask and smirks, but even masks cannot hide the eyes; an acute pain settles there, like a fresh wound, still open and bleeding.

“The same old story, I suppose.”

Jon remembers how Tyrion’s hands were placed on Sansa’s waist with natural familiarity when he found them fighting, as if they had already visited that same spot before; how, even crying in her brokenheartedness, glaring angrily at him, Sansa hadn’t pushed him away.

“You love her,” Jon declares.

“I do,” Tyrion confirms, as if it were a naked fact, a given as inevitable as weather.

It angers Jon. “How can you give her up like that?”

That same bitter half-smirk curves his lips up.

“I see you have already forgotten how it is to be a bastard. Not all of us can have the things we love, Jon. I’m happy for your newly acquired privileges, though.” He looks away, freeing Jon from his eyes for the first time since he entered the bath. “You wanted me to be frank.”

“Please,” Jon asks.

Tyrion Lannister crawls his way through the water until he can sit by Jon’s side, resting his arm behind Jon’s back, on the border of the pool. His hair is wet from the steam, and, this close, in the dim light, the scar crossing his face seems even deeper.

“I am offering you the life I wanted for myself,” Tyrion says. It sounds like a secret. “The life that was never meant to be mine.”

“That’s very selfless of you,” Jon mocks.

Tyrion gets the joke, but his smirk is no less sour because of it. He licks his lower lip as he thinks.

“My father thought that if I married Sansa he would have the North and end the War. But I was not the right man to do it. I wouldn’t be enough.” Jon is, once again, held captive by his gaze: the pain there shifts, revealing an older wound, a ugly scar in the home of his pain. “That was an ambitious plan, but it was doomed from the start, and it wouldn't have worked even if—”

He abruptly stops talking, as if some invisible hand had closed around his throat.

“Even if?” Jon whispers.

Tyrion just sighs.

“It doesn’t matter what could have happened,” he says, closing his eyes as if he’s being tortured. When he opens them again, they are honest. Truthful. “Jon, it’s you. Can't you see that? You are the one that could end this War,” Tyrion murmurs, earnestly. “The North listens to you. They chose you, they respect you, and if they are willing to follow you into a War against an army of corpses, they would follow you anywhere. If you could hold Winterfell, if you could let Sansa hold you, you could prevent so much bloodshed. So much pain.”

“And Daenerys holds all of us?” He suggests.

“It’s what Kings do,” Tyrion answers. “They hold their people together.”

“What about Sansa?” Jon wonders. “She’s suffered enough.”

He seems annoyed at that.

“What about Sansa, Jon? Loving her is the easiest thing. I assure you it won’t take you so long to learn it. And I never meant to make her suffer. Quite the contrary. She will have the best husband she could ever ask for in you. She will have her home, she will keep her name, and—”

“And give our children to your Queen,” Jon completes.

Tyrion pulls a face. “Just one,” he mutters. “And you know very well things are not that heartless. Children are fostered away all the time. Your father was fostered in the Vale. Do you think it was out of a lack of love?”

“My uncle,” Jon corrects him.

It takes him aback. “What?”

“My uncle was fostered in the Vale,” Jon reminds him.

Tyrion frowns compassionately, and then reaches out to palm Jon’s shoulder, his thumb almost edging the scar over his heart.

“No one expects you to be fond of a man you never knew. Ned Stark was your father. That hasn’t changed.”

“I thought all of your scheming relied on me not being the son of Ned Stark,” Jon says, surly.

“Just in the public eye, Jon. There’s no one here to hear us,” Tyrion murmurs. “You have to learn the difference. It’s all a shadow on a wall, a trick.” His hand remains there, wet and hot against Jon’s scar, and he shivers. “Stark or Targaryen. Lord of Winterfell or King. Bastard or Prince. What does it matter, the name on the surface? I’m offering you home and peace. That’s what I need you to understand. What would you do, for home and peace?”

“That’s a lot to offer.”

“I know,” he nods, drawing away a bit. “And I know you can’t see past these dead things coming to us. You don't have to. Let me take care of the future and trust me,” Tyrion’s hand hovers, ghosting his skin like Jon is a relic, untouchable. “Just… promise me you’ll think about it.”

“This is very tempting,” Jon says. “Why do you only appear when my life is in a turmoil?”

The Hand only chuckles. “Perhaps it’s what I’m meant to do,” Tyrion shrugs. He smiles, leans back, his arms spread over the edge of the bath. “And I told you not a single lie.”

This is not the same as telling the truth, Jon thinks: a shadow on the wall, a trick. In the end, he does not say it.

vi.

Jon should be working — he has letters to send to the Night’s Watch, and needs to check on Manderly’s ships to escape routes from White Harbor. Jon should be thinking, planning the future from different angles, and trying to come up with a plan to convince Sansa to please marry him so he could rest his head at night. Jon should be practicing down in the courtyard, should always be practicing. Jon should be with Bran, in the godswood, letting the Three Eyed Raven conquer his mind and body over and over again until his presence there didn’t feel so much like an intruder, an enemy’s invasion, yet another foe to fight against.

Instead, he is distracted by the sight of Daenerys Targaryen trying to wield a sword, and he is laughing.

It’s not that she’s bad at it. She has good instincts, as far as he can see, and he’s seeing from pretty close now. He first watched her from his solar, the open window giving him a good view of the courtyard, and then he decided to go downstairs to follow the lesson more closely.

Anyone can be taught, or at least that’s what he believes. It’s just that she is tiny, and Jorah Mormont, her teacher, is rather huge. Lyanna Mormont is practicing not far from them, giving a hard time to Podrick Payne. Daenerys is using a wooden sword, for children practice, and Jon hates how much he cannot avoid thinking she is lovely.

He doesn’t know how she can be completely terrifying in one second, ready to hurl toward Jaime Lannister on a whim, then tenacious and cunning in the middle of a negotiation, and then just look like a normal young girl. Her hair is singing in bells, she’s given up on her cloak and is just wearing trousers and a jerkin and a tunic.

He decides to cede to the temptation and cups a hand around his own mouth, so the wind will carry his voice. “Eyes on your opponent, Your Grace,” he tells her. “Not on your own sword.”

She and Jorah look up to the balcony he is in. She has to turn around to spot him and he shakes his head.

“Don’t do that!” He braces himself on the rails of the balcony. “Never give your back to your enemy. Amateur’s mistake.”

She frowns her very expressive eyebrows, rather annoyed; but behind her, Jorah sighs. “The King is right, Khaleesi,” the old man says.

“I will be atop a dragon!” Daenerys says, pointing the tip of her wooden sword to her sworn knight. Jon bites his lower lip to keep from chuckling again. “I have no need for swords, and you will protect me when I’m on the ground, my bear.”

“With my life, my Queen,” the man replies, dutifully. “But should I fall—”

“Jorah, you are a Mormont of Bear Island, and you shall stand,” she says, her voice resolute, final. She turns around, carelessly, aiming the wooden sword toward Jon. “You.”

Jon looks behind him. There’s no one else standing by his side or around him on the balcony. “Your Grace?” He asks. “Are you challenging me for a duel?”

Daenerys rolls her eyes. “Very amusing.” She rests the blunt tip of the sword on the snowy ground. “No, Jon Snow. I am challenging you to a much more difficult task. Come here and I’ll show you.”

vii.

They leave their men behind, their guards, northerners and Unsullied and Khalasar alike, and even Jorah. Daenerys walks through Winterfell with sure feet, as if the castle is hers, as if she knows it, even if she’s just been here for a week. She’s wearing a cloak again — black furs against her pale arms — and beneath it, her clothes are of a wine crimson that looks more purple than red and that brings out her pale lilac eyes, like the sun setting above them, warily peeking at them behind the thick gray clouds, a heavenly spy.

As they drift away alone, farther into the depths of the castle, the sounds of clanging swords and shouting are replaced by the clatter of the Smithy, and furthermore, by the quiet of the godswood: Daenerys opens the small, iron door, but Jon shows her the way, allowing her to guide them and go ahead.

It’s a beautiful, pink afternoon, not really how afternoons should look like during Wars. Their steps are muffled by the thick snow covering the ground. Jon realizes they have not spoken a word since they left the courtyard, and that he is not bothered by the silence; he doesn’t know why he’s inclined to break it.

“You know, I believe my sister is mad at you,” he says.

He is staring at his feet. But Daenerys never looks down, her eyes fixed on the hidden path ahead of them, among the trees.

She smiles, shrewd like Tyrion, but not as sharp.

“I figured she would,” she simply retorts. It occurs to him that here, alone with him, the Queen doesn’t bother to rectify: cousin. A couple of steps more: “I like Lady Sansa. She’s stubborn, and she probably hoped to have my Hand under her spell, but she is undeniably qualified. I didn’t mean to offend her.” A quick look at him, just with the corner of her eyes. “Or you.”

Jon doesn’t know what it is about Daenerys Targaryen that makes him want to smile; he wants to take her seriously, but he still has it seared into his mind’s eye, her clumsy attempt at sword fighting.

He reminds himself that this woman is a Queen, that she birthed dragons, that she freed slaves, and that she means to have Winterfell by this War’s end.

“You didn’t,” he answers, trying to sound serious and half managing it.

“She would make a lovely wife,” Daenerys comments, casually.

That makes him cringe. The entirety of the Seven Kingdoms seem to think that of Sansa. Lannisters and Tyrells, Boltons and Targaryens and Baratheons, men from the mountains and from the fertile lands of the Reach, and also, not a negligible part of his bannermen.

“I know,” he answers. His arms are crossed behind his back, hands clasped. He learned the habit from her, from Sansa. She never shows her hands, if she can avoid it. Right now, it makes him feel just as demure. “I’m not so sure she wants it that much.”

“Oh, Jon,” Daenerys says, glaring at him. “Any lady in Winterfell would want to be your wife.” He can’t quite tell if she’s being patronizing or sincere. Her eyes come back to the path; her fingers absently brush the trees as they walk by. “Lady Sansa is just the luckiest of them.”

He’s never been one to fall for flattery, and he won’t start now, no matter how pretty the mouth uttering the flattery is. “As her older brother, I have to protest on her behalf regarding the use of the term lucky. I think she sees it as a disgrace.”

“No,” Daenerys raises one finger. “She sees it as a defeat. I think you could convince her that everyone wins with this arrangement, including her.”

“Including her?” Jon frowns.

Daenerys smiles again, this time, sharper.

“Well, Jon,” she says. “Sansa has a claim. There is a way to give her Winterfell on the basis of her birth-right. A Queen, however, has to be chosen or take the throne by force,” she continues. “I don’t think Sansa would do the latter. The North had the chance to choose her when she was at the highest point of her victory, but they didn’t. Why didn’t they?”

Jon narrows his eyes. “Now you’re being cruel.”

“I am not. I am being clear about the state of affairs. And you didn’t answer me. Why didn’t they?” Daenerys raises one of her eyebrows. “I’ve heard how people call her. The wolfless one?”

“No one calls her like that,” Jon states, hardly.

Daenerys seems to sense his mood, and smooths out her words. “I think, by your side, ruling the North with you, she will look more like a wolf than ever, as soon as people find out about your parents. A true-born Stark lady and a Targaryen Prince, ruling the North under the banner of House Stark and in loyalty to the Iron Throne. Isn’t it a beautiful picture?”

Sansa is nothing like my mother, Jon thinks with himself. It’s Arya who looks like Lyanna. If that’s what you want people to think, it’s her I should marry. That’s what they would see, anyway, if Daenerys had her way: not Lyanna and Rhaegar, but Ned and Catelyn, all over again.

But it’s a disturbing thought, to be in the shadow of so many dead, so Jon tosses the notions aside.

They reach the other side of the godswood, and Daenerys opens the gates that show them the way out. They stop there, in the shadows of the trees. “I urge you to plan for more than our mere survival,” she says, her eyes burning with the last of the sunlight. “Plan for peace and prosperity. For the North and for the Kingdoms. It’s what I want. What do you want?”

Jon sighs. What does he want? He wants it all to be over. He wants to sleep at night and not dread what’s to come. He wants to be able to see the future, to plan, to dream again. He can’t do it with a horde of corpses filling his vision.

As he follows her out of the godswood, to the quietest part of the castle, an old soldier’s instinct takes over him. He looks around. There’s no one around them. “Where are we going?”

Daenerys smiles. “Don’t be afraid, Jon.”

I am not, he thinks, but then he realizes they’re heading toward the North Gate, and behind them, he can already see her dragons.

He stops in his spot. “Dany—”

(He doesn’t know why he’s calling her that.)

Dany smiles at him, turning around. “They know you!” She says, offering a hand, beckoning him closer, five steps ahead of him and fearless. “They won’t hurt you.”

“They do not know me.”

He’s seen the beasts, flying above Winterfell and usually resting outside the walls of the castle, beyond the North Gates, far away from Winter Town; it isn’t clear to him that they’ve seen him.

Dany sighs. She walks her way back to him, until she’s standing before him, looking up to stare him in the eye.

How on earth does she do those things with her eyes?

“Jon,” she says, firm as a mother. “My children are our real inheritance. They are the true gift of House Targaryen to the world. Not the Iron Throne, not the crown, not even the heirs I’m fighting so hard for. It’s them.” She blinks her impossibly light lavender eyes, just once. “And Viserion will serve us better with a rider.”

Jon’s eyes grow impossibly wider. “Rider?” He asks, trying to whisper, as if the dragons could hear them from afar and be repulsed by the idea. “Do you want me to ride a dragon?”

“When a dragon bonds with a rider, they can…” She sighs. “...Be more aligned with the wishes and the purposes of the rider. They are less likely to burn dead and living indiscriminately during the battle if you guide them through it, for instance,” she explains candidly.

Sansa’s voice sings in the back of his mind, tame them if you must; but his current situation feels much more urgent.

“But why me?” He presses further.

She cups his face. Her bare hand burns his skin against the cold of the air.

“You’re the last Targaryen Prince in the world.” Dany’s smile blooms like a winter flower. “Why not you?”

That’s not me, he wants to argue, that’s a mistake. Someone made a mistake. But while he goes frenzied with the mere idea of riding a dragon, his eyes wandering away, trying to see past the gates, Daenerys pulls his face to her again, capturing his attention once more.

“And he looks a little like your wolf,” she says.

“Who looks like my wolf?” Jon questions.

“Viserion,” she answers. “He also has always been the most well behaved of them, the most friendly. Viserion is lovely, actually. He never gave me much trouble.” Her voice grows melancholic, sad, but she soon shakes it away and looks back at him again. “I think you’ll get along.”

Jon is frightened beyond any word. “Lovely,” he echoes. What kind of woman describes dragons as lovely?

“Jon,” Daenerys declares, “You were born for this.”

“I don’t know, Dany,” he hesitates.

“Well, I do,” she says. Her hand lets go of his face to hold his hand, pulling him as she resumes her walking. “Follow me. You can ride Drogon with me today, just to know how it feels, and tomorrow we’ll try to send you alone.”

Send him. Jon follows, because what else can he do? Run away like a scared boy? As they finish the dusty pathway to the North Gate, the guards on shift nodding to him as they pass by, Jon genuinely searches for it, the dormant dragon inside of him, his father’s blood, or at the very least his mother’s alleged reckless courage. But it’s hard to be brave before Drogon and Viserion, who raise their heads and turn toward them as they approach. There’s still a good patch of road to walk until they’re within touching distance, but already they look too big, too monstrous.

But they are, also, beautiful; Jon cannot lie, he can only be in awe of them, their white-cream and black-pitch scales contrasting against each other, the Wolfswood around and beyond them looking suddenly a small obstacle to surpass.

Even an army of dead corpses, Jon thinks, could look like a modest obstacle, from the sky, on the back of a dragon. Even death itself would look easy to deceive; how must it be, to be immune against fire, to be insusceptible to a dragon’s lethal power, to walk among them unafraid? No wonder she’s never cared to learn how to properly wield a sword.

No wonder she is the way she is at all.

“What if I die?” Jon asks, suddenly.

Dany frowns. “What do you mean?”

“This is a War, and probably a bloody one. What if I die on the battlefield?” He explains. “How do you plan to get your heir?”

Daenerys crosses her arms, puzzled. “Do you think about your death often, Jon Snow?”

He would laugh, if he weren’t terrified. “All the time, Daenerys Stormborn.”

“Well, then stop,” Dany mutters, bothered. “You’ll be riding a dragon,” she points to Viserion. “No dead men will touch you.”

“I can’t spend the whole time in the sky,” Jon reasons. “My men will need me on the ground to lead them.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says, resolutely, as if right there and then she had solved the problem: “I am not letting you die.”

She says it so much like a Queen that Jon smiles, almost fond of her, and remembers who he’s been talking to for the past hour.

“Your Grace,” he says, “That is not something you can control in a War.”

She turns to him and presses a finger against his chest, forcefully. “Don’t you try to lecture me about wars, Jon Snow,” she says, angrily frowning her eyebrows. “Just because I am a woman you think I don’t know of battles, but all I have accomplished, I did on my own.”

When Jon keeps his stunned silence, she swallows down dry, as if regretting her demeanor, smoothing invisible wrinkles on her leather crimson jerkin.

“You are the last of my family. This is not going to happen,” she tells him. She declares it, speaks it into existence, absurd as it is: “I won’t allow it.”

And so she resumes her walking. Jon is left behind, staring at this woman, born in a storm, reborn out of fire, conqueror of cities and breaker of chains, taking small but steadfast steps toward her dragons, her children; as if her plan really consists of cheating death, of cheating his death.

He has to laugh. Everything about her is surreal.

Daenerys turns around again, this time staring disbelieving at him, and she puts her hands on her waist.

“Why are you laughing?” She fumes, beautiful in her fury.

“Nothing,” he says, shaking his head, and catching up with her.

“In any case,” Daenerys says as they finish the last of the distance between them and the dragons, who are patiently waiting, “isn’t that worry just another reason for you to marry Sansa as soon as possible?”

“Do you want me to breed Sansa before we go to the Wall?” Jon says, almost laughing again. She just gets more and more absurd.

Dany holds his forearm. “I don’t want you to feel pressured,” she says, delicately. “But it would be a guarantee for our future.”

“With all due respect, Your Grace, but you sound completely mad.”

“No.” She smiles prettily at him. “I sound right, Jon Snow. And you know it.”

When Jon looks ahead, the dragons are too close. The proximity robs him of words, renders their silly banter completely secondary in his mind.

Drogon, the bigger, darker one, is staring at him with curious, big eyes. Tentatively, Jon stretches a hand and touches one of his scales; he gasps.

It’s hot. It almost burns his gloves.

“Don’t be afraid,” Dany repeats. “Born for this, remember? Come with me.”

And then she takes his hand again.

Chapter Text

i.

Jon has an interesting mind. It is, above all, a very dark place.

But not dark enough that Bran can’t see a thing, can’t move around and through it. All the time, he can feel Jon’s presence, lurking at a safe distance but overall not interfering with his work. When he closes his third eye and comes back to his own skin, Jon is a little dizzy, but just for a moment.

Bran curiously studies his King, his brother-cousin. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m well,” Jon answers. They are in the godswood, where Bran can feel his powers best; Jon braces himself against one of the trees for balance. “We went to… the Armory?”

“And the Kitchens,” Bran adds. It’s good that Jon can remember something. Perhaps it’s a sign of a strong mind: he does not surrender control completely, he simply allows Bran to share it with him.

“Did you speak to anybody through me?”

“Yes,” Bran nods. “Your voice is hard to find, you know.”

Jon chuckles under his breath. “I’m glad you found it.”

It’s the voice they’ll need the most, after all. Bran smiles, sympathetically, but he’s distracted, still deep in thought.

Yes. An interesting mind, indeed.

Hodor used to stay in the corner of his own mind, afraid — which was, perhaps, natural: Bran was an invader, an outsider barging in. He can’t quite explain how he can feel it, but Jon has the reverse fear; not that Bran might hurt him, but that he could hurt Bran, somehow.

“I want to ask you something,” Bran says, with caution.

“Yes?” Jon says, raising his eyes.

“Do you think—” Bran frowns. It’s hard to phrase these things, to explain to people how he can perceive them at all. “Do you think you are dangerous?”

“What do you mean?” Jon asks, with a frown.

“Do you think you can harm yourself or other people?” Bran explains.

Bran notices, by the set of Jon’s shoulders, that he has taken it as a slight.

“You didn’t tell me you could read minds,” Jon rebukes, defensively.

“I can’t!” Bran answers, trying not to get his defenses up as well. He really can’t read them; that’s not how it works. He can only feel them, as companions, as guests sharing a room, though if he’s honest, he’s more of an invader than Jon, his taciturn host. “That’s why I’m asking.”

“Everyone is capable of harming themselves or other people,” Jon answers.

“I’m not sure everyone feels this way, Jon,” Bran says, worried and, to be frank, somewhat disturbed.

Jon tries to relax his shoulders, avoiding Bran’s eyes.

“I know the story,” Bran murmurs, more like a sibling and less like a skinchanger.

“Which story,” Jon kicks an unsuspecting stone that lands on the snowy grass only two inches away from him.

“About Azor Ahai and what he— what he had to do.”

Jon chuckles, humorless. “I don’t have a wife, and I refuse to have one.” A pause, a tilt of his head. “One could argue I don’t have a heart at all.”

Bran rolls his eyes. “Yes, you do. Don’t be dramatic.”

But it’s broken, Bran thinks. It has been pierced; it healed in the wrong angles, Jon’s heart, remade in unearthly ways. It grew scar tissue where it should have muscle and blood. It’s misshapen; it’s a heart touched by death. Bran can feel it with his third eye in the diffident steps of Jon’s soul, can see it now, with his own two human eyes, in the shadows on his brother’s face.

“I don’t know if I’m the best person to tell you that,” Bran says, trying to sound kind, “But we still have to choose, you know. Prophecies are tricky things, and the story never happens the same way twice.”

“I don’t know why I’m worried. I’m not a hero.” A bitter smile kisses Jon’s lips. “I’m not made of whatever it is the songs are made of.”

Bran smiles back. He sees his mother as a young girl, flowers woven into her hair, playing at being Jenny of Oldstones, a young Petyr Baelish her Prince of Dragonflies. He sees his sister, Sansa, living out her song with Joffrey Baratheon as her handsome prince that wasn’t. He sees Robb and Jon, just children, playing with wooden swords as if they were great heroes, kings and knights and conquerors and great lords, all unaware of the future lying ahead.

For all their world has proven them wrong in many things, Bran is his mother’s son, and he still thinks there is a slice of truth to these memories, however fleeting; a truth, perhaps, harder and more robust than winter.

“We are all songs in the end, Jon, if we’re lucky,” Bran says, because he believes in it.

ii.

At the Wall, no one calls Jon Your Grace; no one bows, no one curtsies.

Jon has missed this terribly, profoundly.

“Lord Commander!” A brother says, raising his hand to wave excitedly and managing to almost fall down from the top of a stair where he is perched on, repairing the second gate.

“Lord Snow!” The other — Satin, Jon recognizes — is holding the stair firm on its base, and is thoughtful enough not to lift his hand to wave, too.

Jon raises his hand to wave back. “Careful there, brother,” he says, pointing at the gate and the staircase.

The rest of the Night’s Watch is looking, with utter wonder, at the dragons Jon and Dany just landed outside the gates of Castle Black. The same wonder in their eyes is reflected back on Dany’s as she bends her neck backwards, aiming her gaze at the top of the Wall.

Faithful to her word, Daenerys was cautious and patient with him in his training: he fled for the first time with her, firmly holding onto her waist while they rose together, past the clouds, on the back of Drogon. It allowed Jon to be acquainted with some important features of flying. The height, naturally, but also the balance, the position of his legs and spine. It had been terrifying, and nothing short of miraculous, and Jon already missed the sky as soon as they came back to the ground.

This afternoon, they came to the Wall together: she on Drogon, he on Viserion. There was a sort of understanding between him and the dragon; a bond, indeed, as if he didn’t need to speak or whisper as much as to think or even intent, that unconscious stage before thinking, for Viserion to feel and think and want the same. It’s quiet, above the clouds, timeless, in a way; eternal, not like he had died and came back to life but as if he had never known death at all. He imagines it must be easy to believe one is, indeed, a dragon themselves, once the bond takes full form.

Edd Tollet comes toward them, shaking his head as he peeks toward the beasts.

“First you come back from the dead, then you’re crowned King, and now you can ride a dragon,” he mutters. “You’re a living nightmare to whoever succeeds you. Please, fail at something.”

Jon laughs with a flinch. “I’m sorry,” he says, sincerely. “And I’ve already failed at being Lord Commander.”

“That’s still open to debate,” Edd mutters, and pulls him into a bear hug, without much ceremony. “Welcome home, brother,” he says. When Jon pulls back, he can see the surprise Daenerys is trying to hide. Edd measures her with a casual, almost disinterested gaze. “The last woman Jon brought here was a witch. Are you a witch?”

“No,” Jon answers, firmly, glaring at Edd, who doesn’t even notice. And Melisandre isn’t a witch. She is a Priestess. But Jon doesn’t think Edd would ever appreciate the distinction. He turns toward the woman in question by his side. “This is Daenerys Targaryen, rightful Queen of the Seven Kingdoms and mother of those dragons,” he vaguely points behind them. He doesn’t remember the rest of her titles. “Your Grace, this is the Lord Commander of Castle Black, Eddison Tollet.”

“Birthing dragons sounds like witchcraft enough to me,” Edd mutters. “In any case, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Your Grace. We appreciate you coming to help us.”

Daenerys blinks twice, but doesn’t slip out of her pose. “It’s my pleasure to meet you and aid you, my lord.”

“Oh, don’t my-lord me,” Ed mutters, grumpily. “Just Edd is fine.”

“We call him Dolorous Edd,” someone says, passing them by carrying a load of lumber on his shoulders. “For his remarkably optimistic outlook on every situation.”

“Echiel would like to convince me there’s any hope in battling hundreds of thousands of corpses,” Edd explains, flatly, to Daenerys. “As for me, I like to be realistic about the odds we’re facing. It’s almost guaranteed we are all, indeed, going to die.”

“Edd,” Jon groans. “We need to go up the Wall. Her Grace needs to assess the battlefield.”

“Good thing we fixed the winches and the cages,” Edd says, leading the path toward the lifters; Daenerys and Jon follow. “Though you with your winged beasts could just, you know, fly high above the Wall and jump off of the back of the dragon, instead of us mortals who had to use the stairs when the winches were broken.”

Jon raises his eyebrows. He was, actually, expecting to use the stairs. “Did you?” He asks. “Fix it?”

“Aye. And the gates, and the stairs, and part of the castle,” Edd continues. He slows down his pace just enough to look Jon in the face. “Why the surprise? Fuck your royal, cocky ass, Lord Snow.”

“Edd,” Jon warns him.

“Oh, sorry, Your Grace,” he resumes his walking. “We are not used to having women around. When Sansa was here, Jon wouldn’t let us curse anywhere near her, so we just didn’t talk to her at all,” he says, in tones of complaining. “It was dreadfully silent for weeks.”

Daenerys tries not to laugh. She only smiles, instead. “I was once married to a Dothraki Khal. I think I can handle your foul mouth, Lord Commander.”

This time, he fully stops, eyeing Daenerys from head to toes and then looking at Jon to express his verdict: “I like her.”

Jon understands. “So do I,” he says. “The winches?”

Edd huffs, but goes on his way.

The winches are working wonderfully, indeed, but Edd doesn’t get in the cage with them as they are lifted up. Daenerys seems nervous, and when Jon laughs observing her, she glares at him with that indignant, offended look that makes her the perfect picture of a Queen.

“What is so amusing?” She belligerently asks.

“You ride dragons,” he states, “and you’re afraid of heights?”

“It’s not of heights,” Daenerys mutters. “This thing is shaking. Drogon doesn’t… shake.”

“It won’t fall down,” he says, with a patient smile. “Edd just fixed it. You heard him.”

She rests, uneasy, against the wall of the cage, tightly holding onto the bar cutting it through its middle and avoiding looking out. She chooses to look at Jon instead. “What he said, about you coming back from the dead…”

“That’s not the first time you heard this tale,” Jon says. Everyone talks about it in the North, though the variations of the story, the hows and whys and whens, are even wilder than the real one.

“No,” Daenerys confirms. Tyrion must have told her the truth; she pauses. “Is Edd your man here?”

“They are all my men,” Jon replies, simply.

“What happened to the mutineers?” Daenerys asks.

Jon looks at her longly. He doesn’t answer; she doesn’t press further.

It’s a long way up the Wall, and for the rest of their time in the shaky cage being winched up, he and Dany don’t talk anymore. Jon is lost in thought, and Dany is watching him being silent. Once on the top, he holds her hand as they step out, until her feet are sure and he can let her go. There are a few brothers up there, who also greet Jon with a “Lord Snow!” or, some, still, “Lord Commander!” out of habit, but they walk past them into a spot they can talk without being heard.

Dany looks to her left, and to her right, to the miles and miles of icy Wall. And then she joins Jon in looking ahead, beyond them, North of the Wall, the true North. The twilight is the only time the sun looks warm, gold instead of white: the fields before them are gilded, the top of the heart-trees are shining. Night will soon gather again. There is no body, dead or alive, to be seen.

This is the true top of the world, Jon thinks. Not on the back of a dragon. No, it’s here: atop the Wall and looking North. This is where the world ends. He feels proud of it, despite everything, and sad, because of everything, and, all in all, in the right place, for the first time since he’s left Castle Black with his sister in tow, to fight a battle that wasn’t even his.

“Who is going to stay up here?” Dany asks, in a quiet voice.

Jon understands: here, one is inclined to speak in whispers, not to disturb the silence of the universe.

“Archers and cannons,” Jon answers.

Dany nods. “And you said we need to collect… the bodies of our dead?” She is still careful.

Jon nods. “Yes.” Jon won’t let the Night King have his men. He owes as much to them, at the very least to let them die and stay dead. If he had any say in it, he wouldn’t have come back, even in a normal, living body like his. “One group exclusively assigned to collect them and bring them south of the Wall, and another group to protect the gates.”

Dany nods. Her eyes scrutinize the field, getting stuck in the haunted forest, certainly thinking what Jon is thinking. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they all just came out of their hiding right now?” She murmurs. “So you and I could burn them all to ashes until only the Night King was left? You would pierce his heart and we would be done with it.”

Jon chortles, dryly. “He’s a coward like that,” he says. No, Jon knows his enemy: he won’t come out of his hiding unless there’s fresh blood to feed him, a chance to grow his own army.

Dany takes in a deep breath, releasing it slowly, and confidently nodding her head. “All right,” she says, as if it’s settled, as if she’s ready. “When can we bring the armies?”

“Sansa and Arya tell me they are still preparing escape routes, for the North and the South, in the eventuality of…” He trails off. He doesn’t want to talk about it, can’t even imagine the Wall beneath his feet falling down. “And Gendry told me there’s still a couple of loads of raw obsidian to be turned into weapons. We’ll be good to come then.”

“Very well,” Dany says. She looks at his face; he can feel it, even while his eyes are fixed on the golden fields before them. “How is Lady Sansa? I haven’t talked to her in a while.”

Jon tilts his head. “She’s well,” he answers. It’s not a lie; it’s how Sansa looks, but Sansa rarely feels the way she looks. But Jon doesn’t have time for this kind of game. “If you want to know if she’s more inclined to marry me now than she was before, no, I don’t think she is.”

“Try harder,” Dany says. There’s a tone of amusement in her voice, like she’s joking. “You can be quite charming when you want to.”

Jon smiles sadly. “Dany,” he says, “This marriage is not going to happen.”

Dany turns toward him, away from the lands beyond the wall, their battlefield, and crosses her arms. “Is this your final word, Jon Snow? As King in the North?”

He exhales harshly. “It won’t happen until this War is over,” he clarifies. “Perhaps Sansa will change perspectives afterwards. War can do that to people, sometimes. But I won’t tell you any final word until the Night King is dead.”

“You don’t need to bed her, or to force her to do anything before the War,” Dany says, calmly. “You can just marry to seal the alliance between us and let the consummation happen when she’s ready and willing.”

“It’s not just her,” he says, his jaw tightening. “It’s— it’s me.”

“Is it because you see her as a sister?” Dany frowns. “Jon, time will fix that. Time can fix lots of—”

“No, it’s not that,” Jon shakes his head again. “I mean, yes, it is,” he makes a point of staring her in the eye, glaring almost. “Yes, I’m not looking forward to marrying any of my sisters, but it’s more than that, it’s—” he sighs.

She gives a step closer. Too close, Jon thinks, and, with intention, takes a step back.

Dany looks hurt by it. “What is happening?” She murmurs. “Talk to me. Let me help you. We can find a way together.”

No, we can’t, he wants to say. This burden is mine. “Have you ever heard of Azor Ahai?” Jon asks. He feels ridiculous for even asking. Who takes prophecies seriously?

And yet, how could he doubt a woman who brought him back to life?

“The myth?” Daenerys asks, curling just one eyebrow.

“It’s not a myth,” Jon retorts.

Dany rolls her eyes, dismissively. “Azor Ahai led the realms in the fight against the Others and in order to win, forged a sword in the heart of his wife, Nissa Nissa.” She says it like it’s a tale for children, until the words sink in, heavy like stones and taller than the wall. Her face falls and she looks him in the eye almost with mercy.

“Oh, Jon,” she whispers. “Do you think—”

“Melisandre tells me that's why her god brought me back,” he explains to her. His voice grows lower, quieter, setting with the sun. “I’m trying not to give R’hllor a chance. It could be anyone. Thoros and Melisandre think it’s Arya. I thought that was absurd, and I was relieved I didn’t have a wife, but now you want me to marry Sansa.” He swallows down, dry. He looks into the pale lilac of her burning eyes, eyes he knew in his dreams months before he even met her. “And now you’re here and you—”

He stops talking.

Dany takes another step closer and this time Jon doesn’t have it in him to step back. “What about me?” She asks, fearfully, trembling.

It takes Jon bravery worthy of a battle to respond. “I dream of you all the time,” he tells her. “I’ve been dreaming of you since…” He trails off again.

He’s been dreaming of her, of her fire, since he came back from the dead.

“I dream about you, too,” Dany whispers. “You know this. We’re family, Jon. We’re meant to stand together.”

“I hanged them,” he tells her, out of the sudden. She needs to know — he wants her to know — what kind of man he is. “The mutineers.”

She frowns his eyebrows, confused with the sudden change of subject. “I’m sorry?”

“When Melisandre brought me back from the dead, I hanged everyone who betrayed me. It was my last act as Lord Commander,” he tells her. “One of them was a child. He joined the mutiny because his parents were killed by the free folk. He couldn’t be older than ten years old. I hanged him too. His name was Olly.”

Do you think you are dangerous? Bran asked; Jon wanted to answer, I know I am.

We still have to choose, Bran said; Jon wanted to reply, That’s what I’m afraid of.

But despite all of that, all the evidence he should not be trusted with his own life, let another others’, Jon is too weak to stop her from coming even closer, from wrapping her tiny hand around his forearm, because he’s always so very cold and she never is.

“You shouldn’t be so close to me,” he murmurs.

He means, What if it’s you?

Perhaps Dany can see this, because she smiles at him, a smile that touches her eyes and that is as warm as any home. “I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be, Jon Snow,” she says. “I’m not afraid of you. You’re not going to hurt me. Or your sisters. You’re not the kind of man who hurts people like this.”

“Yes, I am,” he tells her. “I just told you I—”

He is trying to warn her.

I can’t love anyone, he wants to tell her, but the words don’t even form right in his mind. I can’t love you. Death took something out of me. It broke me. It follows me everywhere I go.

Because he’s afraid to know that he could do it. To end this, to end Winter and to end the War.

Jon could, would, do anything.

“You did justice for your own death against your traitors,” Daenerys says, hard. “This is different from sacrificing your family. I know men who hurt people,” her voice grows softer. “And they’re not like you.”

“Your faith in me is humbling,” he says, “but, I’m afraid, misplaced.”

“I’m not wrong about this,” Dany says, gently. “I’ve been wrong about many men, Jon, and that is how I know I’m not wrong about you.”

“I know what you’re doing,” he sighs.

Dany raises her eyebrow again. It’s distracting; she looks rather lovely doing that. “What am I doing?”

“You’re trying to convince me I’m fit to have a wife so I can breed her and give you heirs,” he states.

She licks her upper lip to keep from smirking. “Can you blame me?”

“I just need to finish this,” he tells her. “To kill him. Isn’t that our deal?” He asks. She hasn’t let go of his arm yet and he hasn’t made a single move to push her away.

Weak, weak man, he thinks to himself.

“Let me do this,” he asks, “and then I’ll be yours to command.”

That seems to please her. She nods, looking down with a maidenly blush that doesn’t quite match the hard fire of her eyes.

“I can wait,” she murmurs.

iii.

The third time Bran slips out from Jaime’s mind, he opens his two human eyes to see the golden knight stumbling until he can brace himself against the heart-tree, his body bending while he retches. Nothing leaves his mouth, though sweat has darkened his blonde hair, and Jaime slides with his back against the trunk of the tree until he sits down, resting his head between his knees and breathing deeply, slowly.

This is not going to work, Bran thinks. I’m not welcome in his mind. While Hodor was afraid of Bran’s presence and Jon was suspicious but amenable, Jaime is just enraged, not only resisting but actively pushing Bran away. It’s rather uncomfortable to stay there.

“Ser,” he says, gently, “I think that’s enough.”

Jaime raises his head. “No,” he decides. “We’ll try one more time.”

“I make you sick,” Bran says. “We can’t have you being nauseous every time I need to send a message.”

“I just need a moment,” Jaime insists. The man is proud as hell; he will not admit failure in a task he brought upon himself.

The boy sighs. “Why are you doing this?”

Jaime looks at him with hooded eyes. “Why am I doing what?”

“Letting me into your head,” Bran says, as if it’s obvious.

The knight closes his eyes again. “You’re already in my head anyway.”

“I’m not. I have eyes upon you. That’s different from controlling your body.” Bran looks at him with pity, a sentiment he knows for certain Jaime will not tolerate, but that Bran can hardly help either. “I can feel it, you don’t want me there. And I don’t like doing this more than you do. I certainly don’t want to do that to someone who’s not willing.”

“I’m willing,” Jaime murmurs. “I want to be useful.”

Bran just blinks. “You’re already useful. You’re a Commander.”

“A Commander who fights poorly.”

“You are the most experienced fighter in this castle,” Bran says, with a displeased frown. “And your expertise serves us in this War in more ways than simply fighting.”

“Simply fighting?” He smirks. “When you say the most experienced, you mean the oldest, the weakest, the slowest.”

“Your words, not mine,” Bran shrugs. He looks at Jaime, remembers the way he’d whispered the things I do for love and proceeded to try to kill him with not a trace of hesitation, no second guessing. He still is the most dangerous living person Bran has ever met. “I have a guess. I think you’re doing this because you want to apologize and you don’t know how.”

Jaime scoffs. “Your words, not mine,” he echoes.

“And you don’t have to.”

“I don’t have to apologize?” Jaime questions, with a dark shade of amusement in his voice.

“There are other ways, you know. Less radical ways,” Bran proposes, with genuine kindness in his voice. “You can just say the words, it will be just as effective. Repeat after me: I’m sorry, Bran, that I crippled you and tried to—”

Jaime squeezes his eyes. “Are you trying to punish me?”

“You literally volunteered,” Bran remembers. “And no. It would be cruel to control someone’s mind to punish them. I’m not Cersei Lannister.”

“I know that,” Jaime says, glaring at Bran with a sudden fury, almost spitting the words. “You’re not that pretty.”

Like thin dust adrift, floating, searching for a surface to land, Bran waits for Jaime’s anger to settle, for the words to sink. Jaime stretches his legs on the ground, rests the back of his head against the tree, and closes his eyes.

“Jaime,” Bran says, as gently as he is able. “Every single person in that castle did horrible things to survive. I did horrible things too.”

“I doubt that you’re capable of doing anything horrible,” Jaime says, eyes still closed.

“I am more than capable,” Bran promises.

“I don’t believe you. I’m sorry to inform you that screaming at your sisters once in a while or not eating the food on your plate are not horrible deeds.”

Bran smiles sadly. He tries to remember this life, tries to picture how he felt then, but it evades him like a dream. Maybe there’s nothing left of him anymore, nothing unshared, nothing distinctly, purely his. He is one with time now, one with the trees and the birds and the wolves and the world, he could be one even with Jaime, if only he would allow him.

“I had a friend called Hodor,” Bran begins.

Jaime opens his eyes, then.

“The giant? I remember him.”

“He was not a giant, but he was very big, yes,” Bran confirms. “He was a loyal protector and a simple man. He protected me when I ran away to escape from Theon. When I first started to discover my…” Bran hesitates, tries to search for the right word but ends up choosing the simplest way to say it, “my powers, I did it through my wolf, Summer, first. But Hodor was the first human.”

Jaime is looking him in the eye, paying attention, indeed paying so much attention that Bran feels inclined to look away. He doesn’t want to be Bran Stark at the moment; he wants to disappear into the flow of things and convince himself that’s who he is, just air, something light, some ethereal substance that the world can be immersed in.

But Jaime is looking at him. Waiting. And now Bran needs to finish the story.

“Sometimes we were on the road and he would throw tantrums or be stressed and nothing would calm him down,” Bran says. “We needed to stay low, so I’d simply slip into his mind and keep him quiet. And he was so easy to control. You’re like a raging ocean,” he chortles, humorless. “He was like a still pond. He was… Very easy.”

Hodor was very easy.

In Hodor’s mind Bran felt nothing but fear, but it was a quiet, small fear, as if Bran were a wolf barking at his door. Hodor wasn’t angry at him, and wasn't hurt or feeling betrayed.

He was afraid, and Bran never understood why, until the end.

“One day we were being chased by dead men. My mind was in the past, here, in Winterfell. I was looking for answers and I found myself with Hodor in his childhood. Just a normal child, really. But we were—”

Bran stops. Forces himself to return Jaime’s gaze, to look him in the eye, because when Jaime threw him out of that window, he didn’t look away.

“There was a tunnel, with a door at the end. The dead were at our ankles. And Hodor was so big and so strong… I kept him there. To save myself, to save Meera. I could feel him holding that door closed until dead men got to him and ate him alive.” He searches for the fear in Jaime’s face, or the disgust, but finds only sadness. “And I watched it happening in the past, where it began. I didn’t understand what was happening at first. But from that moment on, he was changed. He never uttered another word again. He spent the rest of his life holding that door.” Bran looks down, at his own hands, at his frozen, dead feet. “I didn’t just sacrifice my protector and friend, I permanently damaged his mind. Because I wanted to survive.”

There; that’s the end of the story. He can walk away from it again.

But Jaime reaches out, his voice a invisible hand pulling him back:

“You didn’t mean to,” the knight whispers. “Meera said you didn’t have control of your powers back then.”

“That doesn’t change anything.”

“You said you were in the past,” Jaime insists. “Maybe it was Hodor who wanted to save you in the present. Maybe you didn’t sacrifice him, maybe he sacrificed himself—”

Bran smiles a little. It’s actually kind of Jaime to try to alleviate him from the guilt, but it’s useless. “I’m not so sure about that. And to be fair, not knowing the answer is not that much of a comfort.”

“You’re the key to this War,” Jaime says, with hard resolve. “You needed to survive. For the greater good.”

“That doesn’t justify killing innocent people, Jaime,” Bran twists his nose. “It never did.” He takes a deep, long breath. “My point is, you’re not the worst of us. Ask anyone and they’ll let you know.”

“None of them tried to kill a child for being curious,” he says, looking at Bran with the most wretched look he has ever seen in the face of any man.

For the rest of their lives, that’s the closest Jaime Lannister will ever get to uttering an apology.

Bran decides he might as well just take it.

“No, I suppose not,” he says.

And it’s settled.

“I trust you,” Jaime murmurs. “I know you’re the one who’s going to save us all.”

“Sort of thanks to you,” Bran ponders. “In a twisted, wicked way.”

Jaime chuckles dryly. “No. That’s all on you.”

He looks past Bran, into the forest surrounding them.

“I don’t want to be that man,” Jaime murmurs. “I am— I’m not that man anymore.”

“I know who you are,” Bran says, simply.

Jaime eyes him with a look of defiance, and then gets up on his feet.

“All right,” he says, resolutely. “Let’s try again.”

iv.

Jaime is sweating when he comes to Tyrion, not breathless, but clearly straight out of practice and as devastatingly handsome as he’s ever been.

From his window, Tyrion can see the men and women fighting under the starlit sky, can hear the clash of their swords and their labored breaths and screams and, eventually, someone yelling instructions. Nights in Winterfell are not quiet or silent.

Jaime doesn’t knock on his door, silently occupying the empty chair across him. “Why are you reading maps at the hour of the wolf?” He asks.

“Why are you fighting Brienne of Tarth at the hour of the wolf?” Tyrion retorts. He drinks a sip of his wine. There’s a candle half-burnt by his desk, maps of Westeros spread in front of him, letters from Dorne. “We all occupy the darkest hours of the night with the important things for us, I suppose.”

Jaime chuckles. “I’m not fighting Brienne. She’s training me.”

“She is training you?” Tyrion narrows his eyes. “That’s rich.”

Jaime raises his golden hand, as if it’s self-explanatory, and Tyrion remembers a time where they were able to bond over the parts of them that were missing. A good couple of inches, a right hand. Now, it feels like he's lost that privilege.

Jaime is here, though, so Tyrion cannot waste the chance of talking to the only family he’s ever had.

“I need a favor from you,” he says, “and I know you won’t grant it to me, but I need to formally ask so I can say to my Queen that I tried.”

“I would love to help you, brother,” Jaime says. Tyrion doesn’t know if he’s serious or not.

“Daenerys would like us to rescue Ellaria and her daughters,” he says, with caution. “Obviously, the closest men to King’s Landing are your men in Harrenhal—”

“Under Ser Addam’s command, at the moment,” Jaime says, derisively.

“—and I did send him a word, but Ser Addam is yours just as the rest of them. His letter tells me he will answer to your command only.” Tyrion bites his inner cheek. “Any chance of you sending him a letter telling him to release at least twenty men to sneak into the city?”

“Not a single chance,” Jaime answers.

Tyrion sighs.

“Well, I didn’t expect any different, but thank you for making my life harder, I guess.”

“You’re very welcome,” Jaime replies dryly, “and Myrcella was your family, too.”

Tyrion glares at him. “I didn’t forget that.” He never does.

“Of course you didn’t,” Jaime looks at his own feet. “But I guess loyalties are complicated things, in the end.”

An uncomfortable silence fills them up to the brim.

“I didn’t see you this afternoon,” Tyrion comments, trying to break through it.

“I was letting Bran Stark get into my head,” Jaime says.

“I still cannot believe you volunteered for it.”

“Bran is a surprisingly kind boy.”

“No, I mean I literally cannot understand,” Tyrion says, resting back in his chair as he studies his older brother. “I thought it worked better with a bond?”

Jaime shrugs, frowning his lips carelessly. Tyrion keeps his silence until Jaime grows bored of it.

“Is there a question there, Tyrion?”

Yes, there is: no one ever said the bond had to be a healthy, happy bond, and Tyrion remembers well the last time they’d all be in Winterfell together, but, truth be told, some things are better left unanswered.

“No,” he answers, with a huff. “I don’t want to know.”

Jaime smirks. “Tell me, what did you need me for this afternoon? It was only to ask me to save the woman who killed my daughter or can I help you with something else?”

“I needed better maps of the North,” he explains. “I thought Sansa could have them, and I wanted to ask you to ask your very good friend Brienne to ask her.”

“And why didn’t you ask your very good friend Lady Sansa yourself?” Jaime asks.

Tyrion grimaces. “I don’t think Sansa wants to see me at all, let alone help me.”

Jaime crosses his arms, confused. “Well. That’s unexpected. What happened?”

Tyrion braces his elbows on the desk and hides his face in his hands, stifling his voice against his palm as he speaks. “I might have offended her by giving the idea that she and Jon should marry.”

His older brother is, then, even more confused. “And why on earth would you do that?”

Tyrion drops his hands, and gauges Jaime, clinically.

He knows his brother, his savior, his golden knight, is also the most openly hostile of Daenerys’ critiques. To put it mildly.

Maybe he’s just trying to win Jaime’s trust and affection again, to turn things back to the way they were before he betrayed their House and family, but in the hour of the wolf, Tyrion Lannister finds himself saying, “Because Jon is the true-born son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark.”

For all Cersei liked to berate him, and Tyrion often joined her, Jaime has never been stupid. Tyrion can see the pieces falling into place behind the green of his eyes, as his back almost falls against the chair he’s on. He knew the Prince, served him, even, and depending on the angle, failed to protect his legacy. That is, until now.

“Bloody gods,” Jaime mutters, looking at nothing in particular.

“Exactly,” Tyrion agrees.

“He’s the heir,” Jaime says; not a question.

“Willing to renounce,” Tyrion quickly adds.

“Who knows?” Jaime asks.

“The Starks. Daenerys and her advisors. Now you. And apparently Howland Reed, for some reason?”

“He was there,” Jaime says. He’s still too stunned to look Tyrion in the eye. “At the Tower of Joy— fuck. Tyrion, this is—”

“I know,” Tyrion says.

“Ned Stark!” Jaime exclaims under his breath.

“I know!” Tyrion agrees, enthusiastically. “The bastard.”

After a couple of heartbeats, Jaime is finally able to look at Tyrion, and not through him into some memory of his past.

“Your Queen is going to kill him,” Jaime says. “You know she could.”

“Don’t be stupid, Jaime. She’s not going to kill her only chance to have a Targaryen heir,” Tyrion mutters.

Jaime leans forward, bracing his elbows on his knees as he studies Tyrion.

“You’re using him as a shield,” Jaime says. His expression reminds Tyrion of someone. Not Cersei, surprisingly; he looks virtuous, and embodies it as prettily as he did wickedness. “You’re using Jon to protect Sansa. You know she’ll never bend to your Queen on her own accord.”

It’s only when Jaime utters Sansa’s name that the piece fits: Brienne of Tarth. She’s the one teaching his brother, after all, more than using his left hand.

“Well, I think Jon’s an excellent shield, don’t you think?” Tyrion says, with a bitter smile. “Isn’t that part of the vows of the Night’s Watch, to be a shield that protects the realms of—”

“You’re a fool if you think Sansa’s going to accept this.”

“And she’ll be a fool if she refuses to be protected,” Tyrion states, in tones of finality. “I know from first-hand experience that Sansa is many things, but not a fool.”

Tyrion is trying, with method, not to think about Sansa, not to say her name, if he can avoid it. He’s working or drinking or doing both at once; he is pretending he doesn’t notice when she dodges him in hallways, at tables, by corners, pretending it doesn’t shatter him every time their gazes cross by accident and she immediately looks away. He would tell Jaime, I didn’t give up on her, because I never had a chance with her at all.

But he and Jaime are not the brothers, the friends they were once, Tyrion made sure of that when he shot his father with a crossbow and sided with a Targaryen; the words get stuck in his throat, unspoken.

“That’s not the point. If your Queen didn’t have dragons ready to burn the world, there would be no need for any human shield at all.”

“Brother,” Tyrion says, with a sigh, “I do admire you trying to adhere to your noble knightly code. But trust me, some of us are trying to protect the innocent with a more effective approach than just bragging about our own virtue. I cannot believe you, of all people, would complain of my hands getting dirty.”

“Do whatever you want with your hands while you have both,” Jaime says. “But I’m curious. Do you never really worry about what she might do with these dragons? Does it ever cross your mind?”

(What Daenerys might do with her dragons crosses Tyrion’s mind all the time, every day.)

“No more than what she might do with her armies,” Tyrion answers.

Jaime bores his eyes into Tyrion’s. “Liar.”

“So what, Jaime? That’s what I’m there for,” Tyrion argues, hating how it sounds like he’s apologizing. “To advise her… Not to use them too harshly.”

Jaime scoffs. “Too harshly. Is there a mild use for a dragon?”

“Does it matter so much the method one uses for killing people? We’re all killers in this castle.”

“Why do you think flaying enemies alive is banned in the North?” He asks, almost enraged. “It does matter. If you had felt the scent of human flesh burning or heard them screaming, you would know this.”

Tyrion flinches. “Daenerys is not her father. I fail to see your point.”

“No, but she is not harmless. No one is harmless enough to own a dragon, let alone two. It baffles me that you can’t see this.”

“Well, Bran Stark isn’t harmless, and you spend your days with him now,” Tyrion crosses his arms over his chest. Perhaps they could come to a compromise in recognition that they are both, after all, just tangled in their own debts, but then, Tyrion lets his voice drop and, a hint of cruelty slipping into his tone, “you are hardly harmless either, brother.”

“No,” Jaime agrees. He tilts his head and gets up, whispering to Tyrion before he leaves, “but I only have one hand, no dragons, and I don’t want to be King.”

“Was that why you came?” Tyrion asks, before his brother crosses the door. “To speak ill of my allegiances?”

Jaime stops with a hand on the handle of the door. A gray light fills Tyrion’s chambers, announcing the dawn.

“I came to tell you that I assigned Bronn to your protection. He shall stay here, in Winterfell, to keep you safe should the worst happen at the Wall. Brienne commanded Podrick to stay as well, and watch over Lady Sansa, and I believe Jon might ask Theon to stay for Bran Stark.” Half of his handsome face is in the shadows of the hallway outside when his head sinks in, his eyes on the ground. “As for the other dangers threatening you, brother, I believe I have done all my warning. We shall not speak of this again.”

v.

Daenerys is waiting for the maids to bring in her bath, Missandei sitting by her side on the loveseat across the hearth; she’s just finished the long process of undoing Dany’s braids when the Queen notices the quickest movement with the corner of her eye. Looking back, away from the fire, she sees Arya Stark inside her chambers, hands crossed behind her back, completely still.

Dany stands on her feet, her long white hair loose around her shoulders, only a robe covering her body. Missandei gets up as well, just one step ahead: old reflexes to shield her Queen.

“Princess Arya,” Missandei greets, cordially, but Dany’s heart is in her throat. There are two Unsullied at her door. “We didn’t hear you knocking.”

Arya’s lips curve upward, but it doesn’t constitute a real smile. “I’m sorry,” she says, with the smallest bow of her head toward Dany, almost imperceptible for an untrained eye. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t,” Daenerys forces herself to smile.

“Your bath is on its way,” the Wolf Princess says. “Though if you’d like a proper hot bath, you can try the pools beneath the castle. They are fed by the hot springs. Just tell me when and I’ll make sure it will be available to you.”

“That’s very kind, Princess,” Daenerys answers, trying to sound warm. She doesn’t quite know what to do with her hands. This is Arya’s castle, yes, but does that mean the girl can walk into her chambers as she pleases? Certainly not. “I appreciate the offer.”

“I didn’t come here to talk about that, though,” Arya gives one step ahead and Daenerys feels every muscle on her back stiffening. “I came to give you a gift.”

And from behind her back, Arya presents to the Queen a sword.

It is clearly a sword, though it is, at first, wrapped in the softest crimson velvet until the hilt; Arya lets the fabric fall down to her feet, and then slides it out of its leather sheath.

The blade is black, as dark as a starless night sky; the handle is white, with intricate patterns of something like chain mail, and three heads of dragons branching out of it: two at each side, one at the top. Arya balances the sword by the flat of its blade on three fingers, the weapon perfectly still. Daenerys gasps.

“It’s so beautiful”, she says. It’s a rather slender sword, if that’s even a word to describe swords. She dares not to touch it yet, looking into Arya’s eyes. “Is that dragonglass?”

“It’s Valyrian steel,” Arya explains. “Dragonglass reflects a sort of blue light. But both materials are very light to carry.” With a sudden, swift move that almost scares Dany, Arya delicately holds the sword by its blade, offering her the hilt. “Try it.”

Dany grabs it, while Missandei holds the sheath. The chain mail pattern on the otherwise smooth surface of the bone makes the grasp harder to slip. Arya lets go of the blade, and Dany almost feels no difference in its weight. “It’s really light,” she agrees, amazed. “And small?”

Arya chuckles. It sounds genuine, and it makes her look younger. “For small girls, like us,” she explains with a small, considerate nod. “I have one made for me, too, not that different from this one. I thought, you being the blood of Valyria, it was only fair you had one. And you might need it at the Wall. It’s enough to poke holes in things, though not to cut them off.” Arya Stark makes a pregnant pause, then. “I saw you’ve been practicing with Ser Jorah and with Jon these days.”

Jon is teaching Dany, too. He swears she’s getting better, but he also laughs at her sometimes, so Dany’s not so sure. She twists her nose. “I don’t know if I’ve earned a Valyrian sword yet. I’m still learning.”

“We all are learning,” Arya shrugs. “It’s not hard. You just stick them with the pointy end.”

Daenerys laughs under her breath, admiring the blade once more and trying to swing it up, careful not to inadvertently hit Missandei or Arya.

“It’s really pretty,” Missandei whispers by her side, also raising her eyes, caught up in the strange darkness of the blade: when the afternoon sunset hits it, nothing is reflected back.

“Thank you, Princess,” Dany says, but when she looks around, there’s no one on the chamber.

The door is open, and there is a rush of maids coming in, bringing in buckets of steaming water to fill up her bath.

Daenerys frowns. She looks at Missandei, also confused.

“Did you see her leaving?” The Queen asks.

“No,” Missandei answers, handing Dany the sheath.

Dany slides the sword safely back in, and they both stare at the three-headed dragon hilt.

“What happened here?” Dany whispers, careful not to be heard by the northerner maids. “Is she spying on us? And threatening us?”

“Or offering us peace?” Missandei tries. “She did offer you the hilt, not the blade.”

Daenerys sighs. That’s true. “And she has a twin sword,” she murmurs to herself. “Do you think she likes me?”

“I have no idea, Your Grace,” Missandei replies, honestly.

The maids excuse themselves and leave, obliviously closing the door behind them. Missandei takes the sword from Dany’s hands.

“Come,” she says, taking Dany’s hands.

As Dany lets Missandei slip the robe out of her arms, sinking into the burning water, feeling the soft hands of her friend massaging her shoulders, she tries to make sense of this weird gift, of this weird girl, unable to decide if Arya is friend or foe or to even understand what is this game she is playing.

Dany doesn’t like being played with. She exhales hard, frustrated. The North is such an odd place.

“The best swords have names, Your Grace,” Missandei comments, spreading oil on the strands of her hair.

Dany breathes in the steam of the hot water, blended with the scent of eucalyptus oil.

“Yes, I’ll think of one,” she says, absently. “And Missandei?”

“I know,” the interpreter says. “I’ll work on it.”

They still need to find out how Arya Stark was able to sneak into Dany’s chamber unannounced and unnoticed, after all.

vi.

Around Arya’s mind, there is a fortress.

It is as thick and tall as the Wall, and, Bran thinks, just as magical — he searches for cracks in it, any rupture that he could slip into, any gate — but finds none. He sighs, frustrated, and, back to himself, closes his third eye and opens his human ones.

His older sister is standing in front of him, arms crossed, waiting, her feet dabbing rhythmically on the ground. Nymeria is lying on the snowy grass beneath the heart-tree, raising her head and ears, as if asking her mistress, are we alright? Is something wrong?

So Arya repeats: “Is something wrong?”

“Stop doing that,” Bran complains.

“I’m not doing anything,” Arya says, blandly.

“You’re not letting me in,” Bran mutters. “You have to trust me.”

Arya bites her lower lip. “I trust you,” she says, though the words sound small and shy in her voice. “I swear it’s not on purpose.”

Bran is not offended. He knows he’s asking too much.

“Try to remember something we did together,” he offers. “Here, in the godswood.”

“All right.” Arya takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. “Give me your worst, brother.”

Bran chuckles a little. He cannot know what Arya is thinking about — it is not how it works; he cannot read her thoughts, he can only share the space of her mind that controls her body. When he closes his two human eyes and tries again, the giant Wall around his sister is still there; but when he touches it, it melts away, like ice turning into water, fluid enough that he can cross it.

And then, he opens his third eye and—

And Bran can see himself, sitting in his wheel-chair, can see Nymeria by his side and not across him. He searches for it — it is always strange, this part, to find the body he is in, to locate hands and feet to move, muscles around the throat, searching for a voice.

Arya’s body feels ethereal, like it barely carries any weight, like she could just float away. Her hand moves to the hilt of her sword without him meaning to; a reflex, then, the first in the face of an invader. Predictable. Bran reins it in, touching Needle’s handle, but doesn’t slide it out of its sheath.

He tries Arya’s legs — the hardest part, for him; seeing and talking he can do, but walking is so weird, like he is a toddler in a functional adult body in the first minutes. Thankfully, walking is also a matter of reflex for almost everyone, so he gives a step, then another, and soon he is walking around the godswood.

He listens to Nymeria trotting behind him, a low growl rumbling in her chest, at a distance, as if feeling the difference in the air.

He sighs and stops, kneeling and beckoning the wolf closer. He cannot have Arya’s body if Nymeria doesn’t trust his presence there between them. He offers his sister’s hand, looks Nymeria in the eyes, and tries to smile. The direwolf sniffs the fingers, and then neck, and then ears, confused. Is anything wrong?

“I’m sorry, Nym,” he mutters in Arya’s voice. “I know this is awkward. Winter is a time for wolves, and I’ll need you and your pack to trust me.” Nymeria licks his fingers, as if trying to sense his taste through the skin. “I’ll not hurt her,” Bran promises. Not more than necessary, but it’s useless to add that. “I’m trying to protect her as much as you. All right?”

From then on, Nymeria is more trusting. She follows him as Bran walks the entire expanse of the godswood, past the gates toward the glass gardens, waving at the women inside growing fruits, too busy to pay attention to the weird way Arya’s body is moving or the particular whiteness of her eyes. Bran goes farther away still, testing the limits: into the crypts, to the statue of Lyanna, to the tomb of their father and beyond, to the hallway of the dead Kings of Winter. He climbs up the stairs of the ramparts, covering the northern wall, the broken tower where he was crippled, past the First Keep toward the East Gate. He’s about to make his way down the stairs again, heading to Winter Town, when Bran realizes it’s been a couple of hours and he’s been, all this time, oddly alone.

It scares him so much, like a punch in the chest, that he’s brought back to his own body, opening his eyes to the godswood again. His heart pounds wildly in his ears. The overwhelming emptiness of his sister, the loneliness of her, lingers under his skin like a sickness.

It takes Arya a long time to make her way to the godswood again, Nymeria easily coming to nestle against Bran’s feet once she arrives. She must have come back running, because her cheeks are red and she’s a little breathless.

“Very amusing, Bran,” she says, half annoyed, half amused herself.

Bran frowns. “What?”

“You, just dumping me on the other side of the castle, out of nowhere,” Arya says, crossing her eyes. “You would have been insufferable if you were the Three Eyed Raven when we were younger.”

Once, Bran played with Arya, perhaps more than with any of his siblings. Rickon was too young, Sansa too much of a lady, Jon and Robb too old; it was Arya who would play hide and seek with him, Arya who would conspire with him to steal sweets from the Kitchen, Arya who would play with wooden swords and watch Theon, Robb and Jon practicing in the courtyard with real ones.

Most of the time, Sansa was the one taking care of Bran, telling him stories of knights for him to sleep at night, Sansa who smiled at him and kissed his hair when he said he would be a knight himself someday.

But it was Arya who joined Bran in dreaming about it.

When they were children, Arya never wanted to be just one thing. She wanted to be a thousand things.

One day she would want to be a knight and the other, a Maester; one day she would dream about being a Queen and then, on the other, the Hand of a King. One day, she wished she could travel the world; the other, she wanted to ride a dragon.

“You don’t remember how we got there?” Bran asks, worried.

It’s Arya’s turn to frown. “Was I supposed to?”

Bran doesn’t know. Jaime remembers, perhaps too much; Jon can only remember in vague flashes; and he will never know about Hodor.

But Arya’s skin—

“Maybe,” he whispers. “How did it feel?”

Arya sits among the roots of the heart-tree. “Like dying, I think.”

“Like dying?” Bran asks, sadly. “Did it hurt?”

“No, not in that way,” she says, struggling to explain. “I mean it was like someone else was wearing my face.”

Arya is absent.

She is simply not there in her own mind. It’s like inhabiting a ghost city, like taking a lifeless corpse. Once Arya surrenders to him she disappears, hiding so well from herself that Bran can’t hear or feel her at all.

That cannot be possible, he thinks to himself. No one can be truly gone from their own minds, can they? What has Death done to you?

“Sister,” Bran says, resolutely. “Come here.”

Arya promptly gets on her feet again, worried. “What is it?”

“Come closer and look at me.”

Arya obeys; she kneels before him and looks up, staring Bran in the eye and holding both of his hands.

Bran searches her eyes. His sister is right there. A wolf and a princess and anything she wants to be. There must be someone there, somewhere, hidden, alive.

“Do you still do it?” He asks. “Do you still wear faces?”

Arya flinches away from him, letting go of his hands, almost angry, but it’s a pitiful demonstration of anger when she’s still on her knees. “That’s none of your business, Bran.”

“You know you are…” Bran also struggles with words. “You know you’re not no one. Right?” He asks, carefully. “You are a person. You are someone.”

She looks at him as if Bran’s hurt her, and her eyes well with tears, but she sets her jaw hard enough not to spill them.

“I know that,” she murmurs, stubbornly.

“Say it,” he orders. “You are Arya Stark of Winterfell.”

“I am Arya Stark of Winterfell,” she echoes in a shaky voice.

“Good,” Bran lets go of a hidden breath. “Good.”

Chapter Text

i.

In the shadows and alone, she is watching from the northern ramparts when her brother and Daenerys Targaryen come back from their visit to the Wall.

It’s almost a five day’s trip for an army, less than that for small groups; but on the back of a dragon, the Wall is just hours away. When they left, it was mid-morning; now, the night sky is clear, and for the first night in many, it’s not snowing.

She looks down to see her brother’s hand resting on the small of the Queen’s back to help her balance her feet as she climbs off of her dragon. It’s hard to tell at night, the forest to the North of the castle illuminated only by the pale light of the half-moon and by the fire lit on the top of the towers and walls, but Daenerys clutches his arm, and leans comfortably against Jon. He uses the opportunity to say something in her ear, and the Queen hides a laughter behind her hand, almost demurely, as they walk their way back into the North Gate.

And Sansa Stark smiles, pleased, as she finds her own way into the warmth of the Keep.

ii.

He comes to the Queen drinking. That is the first mistake.

Tyrion knocks on her door and, after being invited in, finds Daenerys alone, sitting by the fire, with a sword on her lap, the blade black as the darkest night. He sits on the empty chair across from her; the Queen looks with contempt at the pitcher in his hand, the empty cup in the other, that Tyrion fills before speaking.

“How did it go?” He asks, and drinks.

He saw her yesterday, back from the Wall.

It was night, then, and the blush in his Queen’s cheeks when she came back home with the King in the North could have been just the winter wind. The same could be said, maybe, about all those sword lessons, every time Jon stood behind the Queen to show her how to properly swing a blade. Just the cold.

“What?” Daenerys asks, apathetic.

If she wants to act like a child when the future of her reign is at risk, then he’ll treat her as one.

“With Jon,” Tyrion says, patiently.

“It went well.” She shrugs, her mouth frowns. She’s sad, he realizes. “But he’s adamant about waiting until the War is over to marry anyone.”

Tyrion sighs.

“Your Grace?” He empties his cup into his mouth in a single gulp and fills it again. “He’s a pretty boy. I’ve noticed, too.” He stares at her, who stares only at her precious fire, burning in the hearth. “But I don’t fall all over any pretty boy who catches my attention whenever I wish because—”

“Perhaps you should, my lord,” Daenerys mutters. She’s still in trousers and tunic. Like a King. “At least you would leave me alone.”

Tyrion narrows his eyes. “How does it look when you’re laughing and whispering with the King in the North like a commoner?

“It looks like we are united, allied, and working together,” Daenerys says, in a self-righteous tone. “It looks like harmony.”

“It looks like you’re in love,” Tyrion states, undoubtedly. “This is not the plan we’ve agreed on. Do you want to begin your reign surrounded by enemies? In the North and in Dorne?”

“Maybe Varys is right,” she murmurs. She looks so young that Tyrion almost pities her. “Maybe Jon and I could marry, after all. Sansa would be Queen in the North and our ally, not our enemy...”

That is going to give Arianne Martell one or two ideas, Tyrion thinks. “And what do you plan to do about your heir? Did you forget you are—”

“Barren,” Daenerys says, bitterly. She gets up on her feet, placing the sword on the chair she’s left vacant, and walks toward the hearth to stand closer to the fire. “Say the word. I can’t have Jon because I am barren.”

Tyrion rolls his eyes and drinks another sip of his wine. “Oh, for the bloody gods, Daenerys,” he mutters.

“Did I forget that I am fruitless?” Daenerys says, almost ignoring him. “That my womb is cursed and drier than the Deserts of Dorne—”

“Does it make you feel beautiful and young that he likes you, Your Grace? Go ahead and fuck him,” he says, finishing the wine in his cup again. If his heart is to be discarded as waste, as a rug softening her feet on her path to the Iron Throne, he wants, at the very least, for her to take her own victory seriously. “As long as you don’t marry him, I don’t care what you do in your free time behind closed doors.” He starts to fill up his cup again, to the brim, with the last of the wine on the pitcher. “Perhaps he’ll finally do what you’re asking if you grab him by the cock, men being the simple creatures that we are.”

He doesn’t see it coming, half-drunk as he already is, when she rushes toward him and throws his wine on the ground with a single blow, the metal clashing with a loud thud on the stony ground, the wine spilling like blood. It is, however, enough to awaken him when she raises her hand again, this time aiming her palm against his cheek; Tyrion holds her wrist before it can hit him, and raises his head to look her in the eye, to see the burning anger in them.

He tilts his head, holding her wrist in the air, not letting go.

“I am not one of your whores,” Daenerys says, her voice trembling with fury. “If you want to keep your tongue, do not ever speak to me like that again.”

In that moment, Tyrion remembers that Daenerys was never raised to be a Queen. She was raised to be forever a Princess in Viserys’ shadow. He remembers that she rose on her own, alone against the world, just a young girl and her baby dragons, and in order to do that, she had to grow a little hard, a little sharp— a little dangerous.

She looks so much like a dragon herself there, with her palm held half an inch from his cheek, that he’s almost inclined to bend his head in worship, like many men before him did, recognizing that she is, indeed, something mythical and magical and long promised.

But he was not chosen to be her Hand to adore her, he was chosen to advise her in her time of need. Perhaps that’s what keeps his head held high, in the end, just a sense of duty and loyalty; perhaps it’s just his old Lannister pride; he doesn’t know for certain, but the effect is that he keeps his gaze on hers anyway when he speaks again.

“I’m not of very much use to you without my tongue,” he says. “I’m curious, Your Grace. Is that how it looks? Waking the dragon. Isn’t that right?”

She looks hurt beneath the ire, as if she’s regretting ever telling him the stories of her childhood. “I am not Viserys,” she says. “If I were, you’d be dead a lifetime ago.”

“How comforting. I should be very thankful to be in the service of such a merciful woman, who doesn’t burn me to ashes when I don’t hesitate in telling her the truth, unlike the rest of her advisors.”

He lets go of her wrist with a sway, but Daenerys doesn’t step away. She stands before him, towering above him taller than ever before. Tyrion takes a deep breath and studies her face, the young lines of her cheeks, the self-possessed set of her lips. He doesn’t cast down his eyes.

“All of that plan is for you, not for me,” he murmurs. His voice is barely a breath, barely there at all. “I’m putting my own heart at stake here.”

“I never asked for your heart,” Daenerys says.

He chuckles, humorless. She is not wrong; his heart was never much of a matter.

“No, you didn’t,” he agrees, getting up on his unsteady feet. He finds his balance, and only then heads toward the door. “You really didn’t.”

“Where are you going?” Daenerys asks.

When he turns around, she has her hands on her hips, her chin high as she looks down on him and curls one eyebrow, as if asking, Aren’t you forgetting anything?

And Tyrion remembers that he is, at the end of the day, the Queen’s man. He’s lost the West, he never truly had a chance with Sansa, he barely can hold his own brother next to him. Daenerys is, for better or for worse, all he has left.

“I’m sorry.” Though he doesn’t lower his head, he crosses his free hands on his back. “Am I excused, Your Grace?”

“Yes,” she nods, turning her back on him at last. “You can go.”

iii.

“Jon!” A familiar voice says from behind him in the hallway, just before he opens the door to his chambers.

It’s Sansa; he knows before he turns around. They both just shared the table with their guests, Sansa the ever perfect hostess.

Jon smiles. “Hey,” he says.

She gets close enough to place a hand on his arm. “Can we talk?”

Jon frowns, but her voice is friendly, and her eyes are brighter than they’ve been in a couple of weeks, so he only agrees. He doesn't like keeping guards on his door, though Sansa always advised him to; they’ve compromised by keeping guards at the entrances to the hallway.

So they both get into his chambers, and Jon closes the door behind him and waits.

Sansa neatly folds her gloved hands together in front of her. “I just wanted to thank you,” she says, primly. “I know we had our disagreements in the past, but I want what’s best for the North just as you do, and I appreciate you listening to me, or at least giving a thought for what I say.”

Jon’s smile slowly dies as his confusion takes its place. “I am sorry?” He asks.

“I saw you yesterday,” Sansa says. “With the Queen and the dragons.”

Jon blinks, still not following. Sansa tilts her head, and he recognizes the sharpness starting to hone her eyes.

“Which one of them is yours?” Sansa asks, carefully.

“Mine?” He echoes. “None of them are mine.”

“You rode one of them,” Sansa says. “I saw you. I think a lot of people saw you.”

“Yes, but I don’t own Viserion.” A deep frown is wrinkling his brow; he can feel it, heavy on his face. “I don’t even know if you can own those beasts, but if they are anyone’s, they’re both hers.”

Sansa is not convinced. “But you bonded with him?” She asks. “Tyrion once told me that dragon riders bond with the dragons.”

Jon sighs. “I did, he—” He closes his eyes, trying to explain. “He knows what I want, somehow.”

Sansa presses her lips together, with an understanding nod. “This is good, Jon.”

“Sansa,” he says, in tones of warning, because he suddenly understands what this is about. “I won’t turn her dragon against her. Are you going mad?”

“I’m just being cautious,” she argues. Her fingers twist against each other. “Perhaps it won’t come to that,” she concedes. “I saw the way she looks at you.”

“For the old gods,” Jon swears, hiding his face in his hand.

Sansa looks at him as if she’s very disappointed. It makes her look so much like Catelyn that he flinches.

“Jon, are you really paying attention to what you’re doing?” She asks. “I tell you to tame the dragons, and suddenly you’re riding Viserion—”

“That was her idea,” Jon says, “It wasn’t mine, I didn’t ask for that—”

I didn’t ask for any fucking part of this, he thinks.

“—I tell you to tame her,” Sansa continues, “and suddenly she’s blushing like a maid when you make her laugh.”

He is thoroughly confused. “No, she isn’t,” he retorts.

“Oh, Jon,” Sansa says with a sigh, shaking her head. “If it counts for anything, I think you both look very pretty together.”

“I’m not seducing her,” Jon says. It feels like he’s talking to a wall.

Sansa rolls her eyes, as she usually does when she’s annoyed at him.

“Yes, you are,” she informs him. “I was hoping you were doing it on purpose, but we can work with you seducing her completely by accident.”

He huffs dryly at the irony of it all. “Do you know what we talk about the whole time?” He asks, unable to avoid the harshness in his tone. “How wonderful would it be if I married you sooner rather than later.”

Sansa raises her chin a little, the set of her jaw suddenly harder.

“Well,” she curls her lips. “I’m sure you shall dissuade her from this fanciful idea.”

“She doesn’t want to marry me,” Jon says. “Even if you won’t, she wants her heir. She’ll marry me off to anyone else.”

For some reason, saying that, stating the obvious, seems to anger his sister. “This is exactly why you need to— gods, I don’t know why I thought you were listening to me at all,” she mutters under her breath, crossing her arms over her chest. She’s wearing a black dress and a black cloak and, in the dim light of his chambers, she looks more like a shadow than a person. “You never did. Why would you now? I’m such a fool.”

Jon is just so tired of this. He doesn’t want to cast his sister out of the room, or worse, order her out like a King, but he doesn’t have the will, the strength, to carry this conversation on.

“Sansa. I can’t,” he says. He’s tired of being played, tired of being caught in a thousand games, and he really, really needs to rest. He’ll skip practice again, because he feels suddenly drained out of energy to do anything but lie down. “I can’t do this now, I’m sorry. I’m tired, I’m going to sleep.”

“To sleep?” Sansa asks, exasperated. “We’re talking.”

“No, we’re not,” Jon walks past her, toward his own bed, and starts to unclasp his cloak from his shoulders. “We are in parallel conversations. We’re pretty much talking to ourselves.”

Sansa gravitates toward him, turning around to watch him while he sits on the edge of the bed and removes his boots.

“Well, then meet me halfway here, Jon,” she pleads. “I’m trying to—”

“I know what you’re doing,” he says, resting his elbows on his knees. “And I don’t have time for this.”

“What am I doing?” She asks, throwing her hands in frustration. Even that seems delicate when she is the one doing it.

“You want to send me off to the South to marry Daenerys so the North can be yours,” Jon says.

It’s only when he says it out loud that he feels how cruel it sounds, but even then, he doesn’t have it in him to regret the words because they are the truth. And the truth can be cruel.

“I beg your pardon?” Sansa asks in a murmur.

When he looks up, to see her face, she looks as if he’s just struck her.

“It should have been yours, this crown. You could do this better than I do, you deserve it just as much, you are a Stark and I am not. I know.”

He thinks about it all the time; he even agrees. It should have been her; it’s the source of the tension between them, always ready to snap, making them raise their walls or grab their weapons against each other. They both know this, implicitly.

He remembers the nasty commentaries Daenerys spoke about, the wolfless one. None of the people who say that truly knows his sister.

But.

“But Sansa, there is an army of dead people gathering beyond the Wall,” he says. If he has to say this one more time he might go mad. “I don’t have time or energy or will to meddle. I didn’t ride a dragon to have a weapon to match Dany’s, I did it because we’ll need two riders at the Wall. I’m not getting closer to her to marry her, I’m doing it because she is our strongest ally, because I’ll need her at the Wall.” He glares into Sansa’s blue eyes. “Don’t you know me? At all?”

“Is that what you think of me?” Sansa asks, and the sadness in her voice is so deep, so profound, that he almost takes the words back. But it’s too late for that now. “That I only want to usurp your throne? I think it’s you who don’t know me.”

Thankfully, Jon doesn’t need to order her out; Sansa turns to leave his chamber in a perfectly graceful manner, but before she does, she stops, halfway, slightly turning back her head to say:

“I’m not gambling our freedom. If you’re not comfortable making difficult decisions for the North in our time of need, why did you accept this crown at all? What did you think it was for?”

She’s already left before he can answer.

iv.

He is half-asleep, listening to the clash of swords from the courtyard, when a voice cuts through the quietness of his own chamber.

“So you’re a dragonlord now,” the shadow says.

Jon jumps out of his own mattress, reaching for Longclaw by his side out of reflex and listening to Ghost suddenly waking up to stand on his four paws, regretting not following Sansa’s advice to have a guard at his door, but it takes him only two seconds to recognize the voice.

“Fuck, Arya,” he mutters under his breath. He didn’t hear a single step, didn’t even listen to the door cracking open, but he’s already given up trying to understand how she can do this. “This isn’t funny.”

“Sorry,” Arya says, amused.

He lies back on the bed, his heart still in his throat from the scare. Arya chuckles and, soundlessly, crosses the length of his chamber, stopping to pat Ghost’s head before she’s next to his bed. He makes space for her and she lies down by his side; she smells of leather and snow, and Jon welcomes her tiny body under his arm.

Then, it’s just the two of them again, and every other noise seems distant, far away.

“I didn’t see you in the courtyard,” she says, wrapping one arm around his waist. “I was worried.”

“I just needed to rest,” he murmurs, though he was completely unable to fall asleep once Sansa left his room.

“So how is it?” Arya asks, looking up at him. “Flying? Is it magical?”

He laughs at her enthusiasm. “It is,” he confirms, tucking a strand of wild hair behind her ear. “It’s like nothing can touch you up there.”

“Good for you.” Arya rests her face on his chest again. “You know, I’ve got a Valyrian sword.”

Jon looks down on her. “Really?” He asks, surprised. “Where?”

“Samwell gave me his,” she tells him, “and I had it split and forged into two. Mine is just like Needle.”

Jon smiles and feels happier than he has in, well, in weeks, to be honest. “And the other?”

Arya hesitates. “I gave the other to Daenerys.”

“Oh?” He is even more surprised at that. “Why?”

Arya turns to lie on her side, facing him, instead of wrapped all around him. Jon mirrors her. “I needed to see her face,” Arya says, simply, resting her cheek on the back of her own palmed hands.

“While receiving an ancient sword?” Jon asks, confused. He knows Arya only plays a single game, the game of faces. He knows she can be anyone, can impersonate any story, can empty herself out and take another life as easily as Bran can take people’s skins. He doesn’t know why, or how, but he knows she knows what she’s doing.

“A weapon,” Arya explains. “I needed to see how she would react to a weapon.”

Jon ponders that with a nod.

“And did she pass the test?”

“Yes, for now.” Arya frowns her eyebrows. “I know Sansa was here,” she says, in a quiet whisper; of course she knows. “Did you fight? About the Queen?”

Jon exhales, raising his hand to draw absent circles on the ball of her shoulder. “Just more of the same,” he answers.

He can hear in her voice, more than see in her face, the worry. “I don’t like when any of us fight,” Arya murmurs. “We’re a pack. We can’t be divided amongst ourselves. Father wouldn’t approve.”

He scoffs. Ned Stark is not my father, he thinks to himself, bitterly. Has he ever been part of this pack at all? “Are you here to tell me I should marry Sansa or Daenerys, after all?”

Jon feels her gaze on his face in the darkness, her hand approaching, landing on his cheek, familiar and warm.

“I’m here to remind you that your happiness is important too,” Arya says, and Jon feels a sudden lump around his throat. “Can you do that? Can you promise me that whatever you choose, you’ll be happy?”

“I can try,” he answers in a thick voice, though he can’t quite promise more than trying. He brings her palm to his mouth, placing a chaste kiss there. “Come here.”

Jon brings his sister into his arms, as if she’s a shield protecting him— from what, he’s not sure, but soon and at last, sleep claims him.

v.

Since she last came back from the South, Winterfell is a world upside down.

With all the armies training at night and retiring to sleep at the sunrise well into the middle of the day, the mornings are the quietest part of the day. She can’t say she dislikes it; it’s good to be able to break her fast in her own chambers, alone, to go to her solar and work with nothing but the sound of birds chirping outside. And lately, as the snows grew harder, not even that. Even though she feels there’s never enough time, even if the load of work to be done overwhelms her, at least she has the first hours of the day to herself.

Mornings are silent and peaceful, usually, and that is why Sansa is alarmed when she is summoned with urgency to Samwell Tarly’s chambers. Arya is already there, waiting, apparently fresh from a bath. Sansa frowns. “Shouldn’t you be asleep?”

“Yes, I should,” her sister glares at Samwell. “I was told it was urgent, and yet Samwell makes me wait.”

“Jon also needs to hear this,” Samwell explains.

In front of him, there’s a desk with books, some open, some closed; rulers, wooden scales; weird glass objects shaped after the body of a woman containing sand; a map of the trees of the godswood with a giant compass pointing North drawn in the middle of it; a— chart?

“We can pass it on to him,” Sansa says. “What is so urgent?”

Samwell doesn’t look overjoyed in starting this meeting without their brother. His hands are sort of twirling; she’s never seen him so apprehensive before. He dashes toward the desk, landing his hand on the glass object. It seems to have the effect of actually stilling the nervous trembling away, to have his hands actually be useful.

“This is a standard sandglass,” he begins. “This one corresponds to, exactly, one hour, so we can call it an hourglass.”

Sansa looks at it. She remembers, vaguely, lessons from Maester Luwin about how the order of Maesters was able to measure time. But nobody used sandglasses on a daily basis in their households; they had the sun and the moon for that.

“They are fabricated in Dorne, though the Dornish prefer to use water-clocks,” Samwell explains. “We use them in Oldtown, because it offers a reliable, constant measurement of time across seasons and across kingdoms. There are sandglasses corresponding to half a day, one third of a day, one fourth of a day or an entire day, but for our purposes right now, this one will do.”

Arya and Sansa share a look, and her little sister gives out a quiet sigh. “Is this about the days getting shorter?” Arya asks. “Because I told you, during winter—”

“—the days are shorter in winter, yes, and the North feels it worse than other kingdoms. I know,” Samwell nods, impatient. “But I’ve been corresponding with Oldtown and they have been experiencing the same phenomenon.”

Arya frowns. Sansa is not sure she understands the argument enough to frown.

“Hm,” Arya murmurs under her breath.

“So I made an experiment,” and then he moves to the chart. “These are the length of the shadows of the trees, every day, for the past three weeks, measured hour by hour,” he taps the sandglass again. “According to their placement, north or south or west or east, in the godswood—”

Arya is carefully studying the chart — she’s always been naturally better at numbers than Sansa — and Sansa is only vaguely aware that Samwell is explaining the experiment was repeated in Oldtown for good measure to compare the results, because all she can feel is a cold feeling settling in her stomach, of panic, before she even understands.

“Now, three weeks is not a very long time, I admit. And it’s hard to compare two different gardens. There are flaws in the method. But there is a way to use the length of those shadows, based on the length of the tree casting the shadow and its position, to estimate the angle in which the sun is hitting the earth, elaborated thousands of years ago by Maester—”

“Samwell, Samwell,” Sansa closes her eyes, trying not to be exasperated at him. “Just skip the technicalities and tell us what you mean.”

“He means we’re running out of sunlight,” Arya says, her eyes still on the chart. “Isn’t that right, Sam?”

“Everywhere, my lady,” Samwell says, looking at Sansa. “Much faster than we would expect in a natural winter. We didn’t notice it, because it’s a little every day, and two thirds of the castle has been switching day and night. But this is also why everyone is so tired all the time,” he explains. “They spend much more time training than… resting.”

Sansa clutches her hands together, trying to stay calm. They can handle this, she thinks.

“And how long do we have?” she asks, poised, “How many months with sunlight?”

Samwell doesn’t answer.

“Weeks?” Sansa tries, in a thin, small voice.

“At this rate, three weeks,” he says. “One month, if we are very lucky.”

“And what happens after that?” She asks.

Samwell sits on his chair with a sigh.

“I suppose,” he says, suddenly unnervingly calm, “A very long night.”

Arya walks to the map of the godswood, touches the compass pointing North in its middle. “The Night King is growing stronger,” she whispers. “It’s time. We have to leave.”

“We have to wait,” Sansa urges. “We’re still waiting for shipments of supplies for the armies. Of food, of milk of the poppy, and wool and—”

And we’re not ready, she thinks, but she is not sure they will ever be ready for what’s to come.

“No, Sansa,” Arya says, shaking her head. “He is pushing away the sun. He is besieging us with darkness and with cold. We don’t have time to spare.” Her eyes are defeated, even now, while they stare at Sansa as hard as iron. “We have to tell Jon and go to the Wall now.”

Chapter Text

i.

The eyes of the raven can see the whole world unravel from above.

Bran watched. He wore the skin of wolves and birds and wandered through forests and skies and caves and hiding places.

Their enemy remained hidden behind a curtain of white, blinding light, beyond the line where the world of the living ended. Bran was not allowed to cross it; not without becoming one of them.

He watched the humans, the living, his people: watched as they made their way to the Wall, settled camp in Castle Black and on the lands around it. The Night’s Watch’s keep was too small for the Seven Kingdoms; the armies raised tents outside its walls, on the safe side of the Wall, under its shadow.

The days grew thinner, shorter. The winter winds grew harsher. Bran wore the skin of his fellow humans — Jon, Arya, Jaime, but mostly Jaime; he needed Arya and Jon listening — and reported all that he knew about the battlefield as they prepared, but until the battle began and the dead came to them, there was little he could say they didn’t already know.

When the day finally came, it wouldn’t be right to say they were ready, but the humans opened the gates and crossed them in a winter morning beneath white skies: the Unsullied on the front line; Daenerys on the back of Drogon, casting a shadow beneath the cold sunlight; the brothers of the Night’s Watch ready to defend the gates from the attacks that would come not to cross them, but to destroy them; free folk and northerners side by side; Tarlys on the top of the Wall; men of the Vale right behind the Unsullied; Dothraki and their horses flanking them.

And Jon. Jon amidst that human, living crowd, walking through their middle until he was on the front line, too. He stares at the empty, snowy field ahead, and the dense forest far beyond, on the horizon.

For a moment, as thick as the snow beneath their feet, there’s only silence, until Jon cuts it in half. He draws Longclaw from its scabbard and screams to the winter: “I am here! Where are you? You coward!”

Another silence follows. The raven flies over the humans and, seeing the movement hidden by the tree branches, squeaks longly, desperately.

They are here, Bran wishes he could say, they are coming, they are coming, they are coming—

But a raven can only croak. From the back of her child, Daenerys sees him flying by her side, and her face iluminates, as if she understands.

“Drogon,” she says, “Naejot!”

The dead come out of their hiding. Thousands of them, from behind the trees and out of the caves and clawing their way from holes on the ground, they come running, with white blades in their hands, and then it begins.

ii.

“It’s been too long,” Meera murmurs. She’s sitting on the ground, in front of Bran, her legs crossed.

There’s a small group gathered around him, but Bran is not with them. Not really. His eyes are rolled to the back of his skull, all white, and sometimes his eyebrows curl and frown, sometimes his hand shakes, but he doesn’t move and doesn’t speak.

“Has it?” Podrick asks. “I think yesterday he also took a little longer.”

“The more he stays away, the harder it is for him to come back to himself,” Meera says. She gets on her feet and starts pacing around the fireplace. “He will start to feel, to think and act like a bird or a wolf or—”

“Or worse, my brother, the Seven save him,” Lord Tyrion mutters.

Podrick cannot help but chuckle a little, and Lord Tyrion smiles at him and fills up his cup with more wine.

“That would be the greatest anomaly I’d ever see in my life,” Ser Bronn says, staring at the fire. “A Bran Stark speaking like a Jaime Lannister. Monstrous thing, even in a world of dragons and dead men rising.”

Meera furiously stares at the men in front of her. “For you this might be a joke, but Bran is not a weapon. He is my friend, and it’s his life you are mocking.”

An uncomfortable silence surrounds the silent boy in the wheel-chair.

“I’m sorry, my lady,” Podrick says, sincerely ashamed of himself. If Brienne were here, she would scold him.

“You’re right, Lady Meera,” Lord Tyrion agrees, sipping more of his wine. “We’re just anxious, and trying to alleviate some of the strain of waiting, that is all.”

“Well, if it’s bad for us, it must be worse for him!” Meera argues, hands on her hips. “How is he going to eat? Or rest?” She says. “I shouldn’t have given him the idea.”

“Bran might be the only person who actually knows what he’s doing in this whole War,” Lord Tyrion says. “If it’s taking him longer, it’s because he is needed there. He’ll be back,” he finishes, soothingly. “He always does.”

Lord Tyrion talks with confidence; Podrick is not completely sure if it’s real confidence or not, but Meera starts to pace a little slower after that, and so he takes notes.

It’s like that everyday and every night since the armies left, ten days ago. Bran comes and goes, even while he remains in the exact same spot: in his wheel-cair, in his solar, in front of the ever-burning hearth. Meera is never too far away from the boy, and at first, Podrick joined her mostly to keep her company. Brienne ordered him to stay behind to be in Lady Sansa’s service, but after the nightly meal, when she ate at the Great Hall at the head of the table among all the women and children and the people who stayed behind, the Lady of Winterfell retreated alone to her solar and rarely demanded anything of Podrick.

But now it’s not just in solidarity to Meera that Podrick finds himself waiting by her side. He truly wants to know what Bran is seeing. He wants to know how the armies are thriving, if Brienne is alive, if he and the other people who stayed behind will be demanded to go to North too — they still practice at night, sometimes, women and some of the older children, even when the weather is harsh, wanting to be ready to answer the call if it comes to them — or if the dead are winning and they should just all sail away from the country. He wants to listen to Lord Tyrion’s advice, that Bran passes on to the living at the Wall. It’s almost as if Podrick is there, fighting with them. Doing things knights are supposed to be doing.

Podrick is not a knight, though.

With a violent shudder and a gasp, Bran blinks, and his eyes are his again — dark Stark eyes, looking around the room as if to identify where he is. And when.

Meera Reed hushes toward him, kneeling before him again. “Bran,” she says. “It’s me.” Slowly, his eyes focus on her. She is always the one he searches for first. Bran breathes in deep looking at her face, and exhales carefully, intentionally. “You’re all right.”

“How long have I been gone?” He asks.

“More than an entire day,” Meera answers, clearly displeased. She reaches for the bowl of bread and olives she’d saved for him.

“I need to come back,” Bran murmurs. “I think I might need—”

“Bran Stark,” Meera holds his chin with one hand, forcing him to face her. “You are staying here. You need to eat something. By the old gods, you need to survive this.”

Bran doesn’t look very happy with being ordered around, but he doesn’t complain when Meera gives him the bowl. He slowly chews on the bread.

“So,” Lord Tyrion asks, studying the boy with sharp eyes. “How are they?”

“Not the worst they could be,” Bran says, staring at the fire.

Tyrion chortles dryly under his breath. “That’s an interesting way to put it. Is Daenerys well? Jaime?”

“Your brother is a competent Commander. As for your Queen, without her dragons I think we would already be all dead,” Bran says. He bites an olive. “And the Unsullied are almost a second Wall. But the dead keep coming down from the North— I need to try to see up there. Higher.”

“Why don’t you?” Tyrion asks, curiously.

“There’s a… A curtain,” Bran frowns, upset. “I can’t see past it.”

“Bran,” Meera says. “I’m serious. No flying further and higher tonight. You need to sleep.”

“Whatever for?” Bran exclaims, exasperated. “The third eye shows me dead men and dragons everywhere at the Wall, and then I try to close my eyes to sleep and I only dream of fire again.”

Ser Bronn crosses one of his legs. “What sort of dreams?” He asks.

The former sellsword and the Hand of the Queen share a look that Podrick doesn’t quite understand, at first. Are there different types of dreams?

“I don’t know anymore,” Bran murmurs, somewhat darkly.

“Where do you see fire?” Tyrion asks, casually. Podrick thinks maybe too casual; it reminds him of the old days as Tyrion’s squire in King’s Landing. “In your dreams?”

Bran stares at the flames again.

“I see a cold, blue fire over the riverlands,” Bran says, ominously. “Green fire consuming King’s Landing and dragonfire raining over—” he fixes his gaze on the Hand of the Queen, “—a sea overlooking the sunset, actually, Lord Tyrion. That’s the West. Am I wrong?”

Tyrion presses his lips together. “No, my Prince. That would be the Sunset Sea.”

“Stop talking,” Meera says, bringing Bran’s attention to her again. “And eat.”

iii.

Above Dany, the sky is fire and blood: the sunset paints it crimson red, and, beyond the Wall, streams of dragonfire from Viserion's mouth light it up. It’s another sunset; she is not counting the days anymore, all she feels in her bones is the fatigue. Darkness is swallowing daylight, faster and faster, and therefore this is a common sight now: the twilight, that is, days ending.

When the sun finally sets, the storm comes: thick snow, furious winter winds.

Soon, they will be robbed of even sunsets, and then it will be only night, never-ending, and snowstorms. And though their losses aren’t as severe as they had predicted, they are nowhere close to winning. Bran guides them through and they follow the track of the Night King, but the monster is able to evade even the sight of the Three-Eyed Raven, disappearing into the woods.

Dany walks to her tent on hobble legs, her muscles cramping, crying out for rest. She can feel the burns between her legs from riding Drogon for hours. This is her life now. She climbs on the back of her child and chases dead men beyond the Wall and when she’s sure the living are at a safe distance she screams out all the fury drowning her lungs, Dracarys, and burns them — and then there’s more. They never stop coming. As each battle advances, her job grows harder: the closer the living get to the Night King, the harder it is to separate them from the dead.

Inside her tent, it isn’t quiet; somehow, Dany prefers the noise. It means they’re doing something. There are moments when the dead retreat to their side, toward the safety of the Land of Always Winter — they run so deep into the dense woods that Jon is forced to order a retreat so they won’t stray too far from the Wall. The living enjoy moments of silence, then, but their guard can never be too high, their watch unending: their ears are always attentive to the dead approaching, to their cold murmur, to the change in the wind as they come trying to attack the soldiers on shift on the gates, sending icy arrows toward the men on the top of the Wall. Their sleep is shallow, in those hours. Their hands tremble, yearning for battle, unable to remain idle while the enemy is not defeated. The muscles on their backs are taut, their feet are ready to move even while they lay.

On the Wall, quiet is never rest.

But it is lonely in her tent, or at least the illusion of loneliness. She lights up three candles that fill the small tent in a dim, timid, shaking light. She picks up the ointment prepared by her friend Missandei for this kind of burn — she had it a lot when she first started to ride Drogon, but she’s never spent so many hours on a row flying, and even the special trousers she brought aren’t enough to keep the skin from hurting.

She removes her boots, slides the trousers off her legs, and searches for a mirror among the few things she’s brought. Finding it, she uses it to assess the extent of the damage on the soft skin of her inner thighs. There are red patches all across her inner legs and, in the sensitive dip of her crotch, small points of blood where the skin is ripped, torn, two blisters starting to swell. She drips the ointment on the tip of her finger and, with a shaky hand, tries to spread it over the open wounds; it hurts, it burns, Dany bites her lower lip hard to keep from crying out in pain.

“Your Grace?” Someone says from the opening of her tent.

“Not now!” Dany cries out. There’s little privacy in Wars, no space for decorum, to separate proper from improper. They walk on each other bathing and fucking and tending to wounds all the time. Nothing they could possibly sneak on would be worse than the horrors they face on the battlefield; death puts certain things in perspective.

And still, there’s a slice of pride, of dignity, that remains, and that pushes them to fight at all. She doesn’t want anyone to see her like this, half naked, holding a mirror before her open legs and crying of pain.

Daenerys lifts her head and it is Jon, Ghost by his side. She doesn’t know if she is relieved or even more mortified. They rarely see each other now; there must always be at least one dragonrider in the sky, and so they take shifts. When she is not flying she is trying to rest or tending to her own wounded men. When Jon is not flying he is trying to rest or leading his men on the ground, in the midst of the battle, or serving as Bran’s vessel. They share a tent to save up time; they’re rarely, if ever, at the same place, at the same time.

He looks at her and his usually austere, hard face falls. Ghost lies down by the entrance of the tent. He walks toward the bench she’s sitting on and kneels before her. The irony is not lost on her, but she sighs. “Jon, seriously, you don’t have to see this.”

“Let me help,” he murmurs. He is, after all, the only person who knows how it is to ride a dragon for hours on a row.

Jon is every inch a soldier, methodical, focused: if he is feeling anything at all in having her bare cunt open and inches away from his face, he doesn’t let it show. Instead, he inspects the wounds, the burns on her thighs, the blisters, and shakes his head. “It’s worse than mine.”

“I just need ointment,” Dany murmurs.

“Come lie down,” he says, getting up and taking her hand.

He guides her to the thick carpet she uses as a mattress, laying her head down on the only cushion available, and touches her hip. She timidly opens her legs again; he takes her discarded trousers and covers her womanhood as much as he can. It’s a small gesture, but for some reason, Dany almost cries. Jon doesn’t notice; he just takes the balm from her hand, removes his gloves and spreads it on the pad of his index-finger. Dany grabs the sword Arya gave her. She never used it, but she carries it with her all the same. It gives her comfort.

When he rubs the medicine over the wound, Dany fists her hands around the hilt, trying to kill the whine scratching her throat as her body shudders with pain. Jon looks up at her face. “You can cry, Dany.”

“No,” she says, determined, through tight teeth. “Go on.”

He looks wary, but when she gives him a nod he tries again. This time she fists her hand against his shoulder. He doesn’t complain. Ghost tentatively trots toward them, studying what Jon is doing and then lying on the ground, resting his head close to her belly. Dany moves the sword away to lay it on her other side, keeping it away from the wolf, just in case.

“Leave her alone, Ghost,” Jon mutters to the wolf.

Dany buries her fingers in Ghost’s white fur. “No,” she shakes her head. “It’s all right. I like him.”

Jon studies the pair of them with a careful skepticism. “That’s odd,” he says, and then applies another layer of the balm on her wounds. “He doesn’t like it when people do that.”

“He’s warm,” Dany says. “That's all I need. A little bit of warmth.”

“What you need,” Jon declares, “Is to rest.”

“I can’t,” Dany shakes her head.

“You must,” Jon says, all Lord Commander. Since they’ve arrived here, he looks ten years older. “You are no good for the living if these wounds get infected. You need to heal.”

“There are men about to lose their limbs,” Dany murmurs. “This is just a blister.”

“Two blisters,” Jon corrects, “and the men at risk of losing limbs are being sent to Winterfell. Do you want to go back to Winterfell?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Jon,” Daenerys rolls her eyes.

“Then rest. This is an order,” he stares at her, hard, in the eye.

He spreads more of the ointment on the palm of his hand and starts to massage the muscles of her thighs. The skin is not torn open there, and instead of crying in pain, Dany sighs with relief as he kneads her sore flesh. She grows comfortable against the carpet, her shoulders dropping as the worst of the pain wanes out.

“You should have brought a maid,” Jon comments, casually, as he switches to her left thigh.

“Why, when I have you, Lord Commander?” She jokes, and he laughs, just a little. Here at the Wall, a lot of people call him Lord Commander still, particularly his former brothers of the Night’s Watch.

He seems to enjoy it more than being called Your Grace.

“I’m pleased to serve whenever I can, but can’t tend to you all the time.”

“I don’t need to be tended to,” Dany says.

Jon smiles again. “Of course you don’t.” He looks at the blade. “So, what is the name? All great swords have names.”

Dany chortles under her breath. “It’s a rather small sword,” she jokes.

Jon pulls a face. “It’s a Valyrian sword. No Valyrian sword is small.”

Dany blushes. She hasn’t blushed since they left Winterfell. “Dragonblood.” She looks away from his face. “I know it’s silly, but—”

“It’s not silly,” he says. Everyone says Jon is a true specimen of a northerner, with his long face and dark eyes and his quietness, but when she hears his voice she can only think of things that accomodate heat: dragons, hot water from springs, bonfires, home, home, home—

“Lord Commander?” Someone says from the other side of the curtain that serves as the door to their tent.

They share a wary look and Jon pulls up a blanket to cover her body from the waist down, and then yells, “come in.”

It’s Satin, hands crossed on his back. “Yes?” Jon asks.

“The dead are climbing the Wall,” Satin informs.

Ghost stands on his four paws.

“They can’t jump to our side,” Jon says, calmly.

“But can they stand over it, Lord Commander?” Satin asks.

Dany looks at Jon’s face, who seems to be exhausted beyond any human limit, as he contemplates the question.

“I don’t know,” he answers, at last. They know for sure the dead can’t cross the Wall. They can’t step beyond the gates; they fall dead for good whenever they accidently do. The top of the Wall is another story.

“We have soldiers up there,” Satin says, with the caution of someone who knows how to speak with his superiors. “Northerners archers, and also some of the Tarlys managing the cannons. Even if they won’t cross it, they can do a lot of damage… Standing there.”

“Can we breathe fire on the north face of the Wall?” Dany asks.

“No,” Jon shakes his head, running a hand over his beard. “Dragonfire is magic, as the spell on the Wall. It would melt it down.” He looks at Satin. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

Before he can get up, as Satin leaves and Jon is ready to follow him and Ghost to follow Jon, Dany holds his wrist.

“Jon,” she whispers, “be careful.”

They only tread in places ruled by death, now. They have to be careful every step of the way, all the time.

He nods and kisses her forehead. “And you rest.”

iv.

Tyrion searches for Sansa after it’s been three weeks since the day the armies left Winterfell; two week and two days since the battle began; when Samwell tells them they have one week and three days left of sunlight; when the day lasts four hours and the night, twenty.

She is in her solar, alone; the only place she is left alone. Once, it was the godswood, but the winter winds are growing too cold to do anything outdoors.

“Come in,” says her voice when he knocks, muffled by the wooden door.

She is surprised to know it is him, in this unavoidable place where she can’t hide or run away or disappear into the nearest hallway. But Sansa is fast, faster than he is; before Tyrion can open his mouth, she has already found her way out.

“My lord Hand,” she says, distantly, folding her hands together. Her impressive blue eyes are as cold as the Wall that now protects them.

Her courtesies are worse than a blow, worse than being kicked out. They bring his mind back to a time where this was the only way to communicate with her at all.

“My lady,” he returns. “I’m sorry to interrupt your pastime.”

She is bent over an open book, a heavy tome, but there are at least three other books around her on the desk, and an entire bookcase behind her.

“I’m not…” She looks down on the pages, and then back at him. Purple half-moons are painted under her eyes. “I’m studying.” Her voice is as practical as ever. “How can I help you?”

“Studying?” Tyrion frowns. He steps into the solar and closes the door; she watches, not exactly pleased, but doesn’t immediately send him out, either. He carefully approaches her desk, as one would, perhaps, a dangerous predator.

He feels very much like a prey at the moment; there’s something wolfish in her, as if winter has turned her into a dangerous beast, always ready. But when she sighs, she looks like a woman. A human; tired, but the prettiest one at it.

“Bran told me they will start to send the injured men back to Winterfell,” Sansa explains, as if it is taking a great deal of her energy to interact with him. “The ones they cannot heal, I mean. And the dead eat human flesh.” She points to one of the books on her desk; it’s about the children of the forest. Tyrion shivers. “So we are not to expect clean blade cuts; we’re expecting bite wounds.”

“What are you studying, exactly?” Tyrion asks, out of genuine curiosity.

“I have found out there are better techniques…” She takes a deep breath. “To cut out necrotic tissue or infected limbs that cannot be healed,” she completes, with caution. “And you can use thread made of ram guts to sew up inner viscera, too. It can heal better with them than with woolen thread, and avoid a painful recovery, but I don’t know if we can spare our ram and lambs to make threads, because we need to eat them, and we don’t know how long the War is going to last, and I don’t know how many flocks and herds we can count on, and—”

On instinct, he leans toward her. The desperation that started to slip into her voice suddenly halts, her speech interrupted mid sentence; she looks at him, alarmed, sharp, as if saying, don’t you dare give a single step forward.

So Tyrion stops, frozen in his spot.

“Sansa,” he says.

“Don’t,” she mutters.

“My lady,” he corrects, trying to rein in his frustration. “Let me help you.”

“I’m afraid you cannot, my lord.”

“Of course I can,” he insists, exasperated.

He needs to work. It’s not even for her sake alone; if he spends another day just idly waiting around, he is going mad. Being with Bran helps, but it’s not enough. He needs to do something other than waiting.

“You cannot rule a household, heal the sick, correspond with the rest of the realms and keep the accounts of every supply for Winterfell and the North all at once. Not if you plan to actually sleep like a normal person.”

When she keeps looking at him with a face set in stone like marble, a statue raised in homage to the girl she once was, he adds, in a whisper, “you don’t even like keeping accounts.”

Sansa sets her jaw hard, raising her chin. In Highgarden she was excellent at many things, but excelling at them never meant she enjoyed it; she didn’t. She complained about this part to him, more than once, while they drank wine after dinner. Now she looks as if she regrets sharing that with him. Sharing anything at all with him.

“I cannot trust you with the accounts of Winterfell,” she says, slowly and hardly.

The words are meant to hurt him, and they do.

He takes a deep breath. “Why not? We are allies in this War. We are here together. My survival depends on this book of accounts as much as yours.”

“But this War is going to end, eventually,” Sansa says, “And when it does, it would be to your advantage to leave the North in shambles, in debt, and in need of even more financial aid.”

Very well. He’s earned that one, too.

Were Sansa the child he once knew, he would say it the way he feels it: Tell me what I have to do to earn your trust again. You don’t have to love me. You just need to let me help you. Please, you don’t have to do this alone.

But the world made sure of rendering desperate declarations of love completely useless for her, he thinks. He surely collaborated on it.

So he can only appeal to reason.

“What if you let me work on the bulk of it,” he suggests, “and Samwell supervises the results?”

She narrows her eyes. “Samwell?”

“Samwell is a man of the Night’s Watch,” he shrugs. “He is bound by a sacred vow not to interfere with the politics of the realms. If there’s a single person in this castle apt to offer neutral evaluation, it would be him.”

That Samwell is still a man of the Night’s Watch could be a controversial matter, with him and Gilly clearly being something; but if he would tilt his judgment toward some side of this quarrel, it would certainly be in the North’s favor.

Sansa nods, quietly. “Very well,” she says. “This could work.”

“And maybe Lady Meera could help you with your household?” He suggests. “Or Gilly?”

Sansa narrows her eyes.

“I’m just trying to get you some hours of sleep,” he says.

Sansa casts down her eyes for a moment. When she lifts them again there is… not warmth, but a sort of conciliation in her. A compromise.

“I’ll speak to Samwell myself,” she says, still as politely and distantly as ever, sliding one of the books toward him and raising one eyebrow. “You can take a look.”

He steps forward again, enough to take the book of accounts in his hands.

“Thank you, my lady,” Tyrion says. He’ll take whatever scraps of a truce she has to offer.

v.

Being on the safe side of the Wall after three sunsets in the wild land where dead men tread and thrive is like finding the surface after almost drowning.

“I’m going to search for Jon,” Arya says, looking at Jaime first, and Brienne second. “To report our mission.”

“Our failed mission,” Jaime mutters.

“We killed four White Walkers,” Arya says. Her face is splattered with dirt, her dark hair sticking to her forehead. “That is at least a hundred dead down on the battlefield. And that’s not counting the dead we killed, too.”

“But no Night King,” Jaime says. “And four of ours fell.”

Out of the battlefield, they left in a group of twenty five to chase the Night King; came back in twenty one. Few losses, but even one would be already too many; they had to burn the bodies of their brothers-in-arms right there, beyond the Wall, no time to carry them back. They were able to kill four White Walkers, but the Night King escaped amidst a forest so dense and so far North that Bran advised them to retreat.

He does that all the time, the Night King, that tricky bastard. Lures them deeper, until their only choices are to go further beyond the dense, unknown woods, or retreat. They always retreat. They cannot allow this War to be fought on the enemy’s territory; they need the Wall. They need him to come closer, and not to follow him into the dark.

She rolls her eyes, holding Jaime’s forearm. “No, but we assessed his terrain. Next time, we’ll get him.”

Arya looks at him, at Jaime. “Are you well?”

It was Jaime leading them. Unlike Arya and Jon, Jaime had the distinct gift of vividly remembering everything that happened while Bran was inside his head. It made him more apt to the task: Bran guided the group through him, but when it came to fight, the Three-Eyed Raven left and it was only Jaime, slashing his way through the dead.

“Of course,” Jaime says. “Are you?”

Arya nods. “You did a good job, Commander.”

Jaime doesn’t answer, and Brienne knows he feels personally responsible for the men who died, even though they were all northerners, following Arya’s orders.

Around them there are screams, we need support on the second gate! Reinforcement now! and Archers up the Wall, hurry, hurry! and Off to Winterfell with this lot, now! The lot in question are wounded, but living soldiers, the ones too hurt to keep fighting. Brienne walks amidst it, Jaime by her side, amidst the noise of urgency. At the Wall everything is urgent.

At her right, there is a bonfire of corpses, and no one to mourn them.

At her left, one of Daenerys’ Dothraki men is feeding water to a tired horse. Brienne doesn’t know how much longer they will be able to live through this, the Khalasar and their horses. They are not meant for this kind of battle or this kind of weather.

The women from the North and the free folk are all defending the gates or in the group sent to search for the Horn of Winter, so the tent is empty when they arrive. Above them, the sky has started to grow from blue to dark purple at the horizon. Brienne has lost track of the days — sunrises and sunsets are simply not a reliable measure of time anymore — but Bran has told them this is the last one. The last sunset.

Tomorrow there will be no sunrise. But they’ve been growing used to darkness for a few weeks now.

In silence and with no hurry, after resting their swords, she starts to work on the plates and straps of his armor, trying to tune her ears to the sound of his breathing and ignoring the screams outside the tent.

“You’re more efficient than that. Are you doing this slowly on purpose?” Jaime asks, after she’s done with his armor.

Brienne moves to stand before him, and reaches for the clasps of his golden hand. He doesn’t flinch away.

“Yes,” she answers, and he chuckles, dryly, under his breath.

“I think they might need reinforcement on the second gate,” Jaime says.

“I’ve heard. But we barely slept for the past three days. There are other people to back them up now.” She removes the asset and carefully studies his stump beneath the candlefire. It’s swollen, but not bleeding or blistering. “Does it hurt?”

“No,” Jaime answers, softly. “I told you not to fret.”

“You shouldn’t spend three days on a roll without taking this off,” she mutters, worried.

“Brienne,” he calls.

She lifts her eyes to him, and he’s smiling. She sighs.

“Thank you for saving my life out there,” Jaime murmurs, kindly. “Again.”

Brienne frowns her lips. “There’s no need to thank me.” What else was she supposed to do? Let him die in front of her eyes while Bran was inside his head, with no time for him to take the lead? Jaime was so absurd, sometimes.

“Do you need help?” He asks, looking at her own blue armor.

“No,” she shakes her head. “Light us a bonfire and find us a meal. I’m starving.”

He nods and leaves the tent. It’s dreadfully cold as Brienne straps herself off her armor, even with the layers of wool beneath it, and she works on her own armor as slowly as she is able. When Jaime comes back, a bowl of water in his left hand, she is sitting over a trunk of clothes, sharpening and cleaning Oathkeeper’s blade.

He finds a clean cloth, and comes to kneel before her.

“You know what I wanted?” He says, cleaning her face of the worst of the dirt. The water is heated, at least. “A hot bath.”

She tries not to laugh and it makes a hideous sound come out of her throat. Jaime laughs, too. She thinks absolutely no one in the world would be able to make her laugh at the impending end of all things except for this impossible man.

“A hot bath?” She echoes as he wipes out the dirt off her neck.

“I saw a hot spring beyond the Wall,” he says, dipping the cloth in the water, squeezing it in his left hand, bringing it to her face again. “When we were chasing those dead things.”

Brienne blinks, taking the cloth from his hand and committing herself to the task. “Beyond the Wall is the main problem of your phrase,” Brienne says, delicately cleaning his face. It’s such a pretty face, Jaime’s; it deserves gentleness. “I hope you realize that.”

“The dead can’t swim,” Jaime argues. “As long as we are in the water, we’ll be safe.”

He’s looking at her eyes while she tries to wash the dirt off his beard, her lips frowned in concentration. “So you and I should just battle our way to the nearest hot spring and just—”

“And jump in there and never leave,” Jaime finishes. “Until the War is over.”

“You would risk your life for a hot bath?” Brienne asks. “Gods, Jaime, you should shave.”

“I don’t have time for shaving. And yes, Brienne. I would die for a hot bath.”

“Ser, we are not going to go on an adventure beyond the Wall to find a hot spring.” She huffs, remembering another hot bath they shared, a lifetime ago, when he was also hanging between life and death. “You are absurd, and without me to put some sense in your stubborn head, you would die.”

“I would,” he says, no mockery or joke in his voice, though he is smiling brightly, happily.

“You want the luxury of a hot bath,” she mutters, letting the cloth drop on her lap. “And all I can think about is that I’m happy we’re back in time to watch the last sunset.”

Jaime stares at her, unbelieving, and laughs. It’s warm, a rare kind of laughter for a War camp; it makes Brienne blush in a way she thought all the battles and want and losses had stolen from her permanently. “Why are you laughing?”

“Because you, Brienne… You are my favorite person.”

“Where did that come from?”

“You are the most lethal soldier I’ve ever seen in my life on the battlefield, but then you come back to yourself and you just want to watch the sunset.” He looks at her almost adoringly, and gets on his feet: “Come. Find your cloak,” he says, offering her his hand.

She holds it before she asks, “where are we going?”

He looks at her as if it’s obvious.

“Well, to watch the sunset while we eat something. The gods only know when we’ll see another one.”

vi.

There is a certain hallway in Winterfell where there are always people screaming now, but that should be something Theon is acquainted with.

The wounded soldiers started arriving at the gates a few days before. The journey between the Wall and Winterfell was a long one for horses pulling carts full of injured men: they came to them with open, big wounds, with limbs hanging from their bodies by small straps of flesh, with exposed bones; they came to them too late. There was little to be done, but finish what the dead had started. Remove the limbs that couldn’t be saved, clean the wounds and close them, try to contain infections before it could spread in the whole body, and take care of them while the War went on up North.

Theon tries to be as far away from this hallway as possible, from this roll of rooms. But that afternoon he walks through it toward the exit that opens to the western ramparts, following the wake of Sansa. Outside, there’s no snow storm yet, but it is coming: when the sun sets, that means the storm is coming. It comes with the night, with the dark, every time.

“My lady,” Theon calls, kindly, trying not to startle her.

Sansa turns around. Her auburn hair, braided in a single, thick braid, is the same color of the sky. She is shivering in the cold.

“May I?” Theon asks, raising the cloak in his hands.

Sansa nods. He approaches her and quietly wraps the cloak around her shoulders, and then stands by her side. Both of them look West.

“Thank you. I forgot mine,” she says. Theon looks at her hands, ungloved. There’s still blood under her fingernails. “I came in a rush. I didn’t want to miss it.”

She is helping to take care of them, of the soldiers: not only ordering medicine or sending Podrick and Theon to buy more milk of the poppy and bandages in Winter Town, she is sewing them up with her own hands. It makes Theon remember their childhood, and how she’s always embroidered the dresses of her dolls herself. And then, as she grew older, her own dresses. Theon supposes human skin must feel a little different than silk and wool.

“I didn’t want to miss it either,” Theon says, simply.

Samwell told them this is the last day of sun. Until the Night King dies, that is.

“I feel so useless,” Sansa murmurs.

Theon snorts. “You?” He says. “You’re the least useless person around.”

Sansa looks at him with a self-commiserating frown. “I have nothing to do but wait.”

“And keep your people fed, warm and safe. And take care of the wounded and the sick. And give them hope.” Theon pauses to think. “Hope is a lot to manage.”

“I don’t think I’m giving hope to anyone,” Sansa says, melancholy.

“You are. You just don’t notice it, but hopeless people don’t work that hard.” Theon watches the empty courtyard. “I keep thinking I should be there. With him.”

With Jon. Theon means Jon.

“Jon knew Bran and I would need you,” Sansa says, gently.

“To do what?” Theon asks. “To just… Keep your company?”

He can’t help but think that Jon judged him too damaged, unfit to battle. Or, worse, to loyalty.

Sansa shakes her head, folds her hands together nervously. “I don’t think so,” she says, watching the sky. “I think Jon was… Preparing for the worst.”

“Worse than this?” Theon asks.

“You know very well—”

“It can always get worse,” he finishes.

Theon looks at the horizon again. It’s about to get worse.

Sansa nods. “Yes. It can always get worse.” She turns to look at him. “This must be familiar, this tower and the screaming. I’m very sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. You’re not torturing anyone,” Theon says. “You’re healing them.”

There are no clouds on the last sunset. It’s a clear sky, burning in red and purple. Sansa reaches out to take his hand, and Theon holds on to it, tight, as in the day they jumped from the ramparts. They watch the last of the sun disappear beyond the horizon.

vii.

Jon receives the news on the same day he finds out the second gate, the one in the middle and the largest, is lost.

They managed to kill the dead men who did it, but the gate is gone, completely impervious. Jon is looking at the map of the Wall, all the posts of the Night’s Watch they are not using, and he wonders if he’s made the best decision in concentrating their forces on Castle Black. He wonders if there’s still time to spread them.

But that would only attract more dead, and not effectively dilute the enemy’s forces, only their own. It would mean putting all their men into the battlefield, no time to rest on the safe side of the Wall. And how long until they died out of exhaustion? Or hunger? Or cold? All of these, best case scenarios, of course, assuming they would survive the battle for so long.

“We have to fix it,” Jon says.

“This is insane,” Edd, the actual Lord Commander, says. “How are we going to fix a gate in the middle of the battlefield?”

Since the last sunset, since night fell permanently over the world, their attacks are more constant. The dead retreat, but come back faster. And stronger. Their moments of rest are brief, and growing briefer.

“If we have men to gather bodies just so they won’t be reanimated, we can certainly manage to fix a gate, with the right strategy.”

“We still have two functional gates,” Satin says, more as an information than as a directive.

“We have two gates now. If they already destroyed one, it’s almost certain they’ll try to destroy the others and our men will be jailed on the wrong side of the Wall.”

“Then we should put more men to better protect the remaining gates.” Arya suggests. “To fix the second gate, we’ll have to put men to work, and more men to protect the men who are working from more attacks. It’s a waste of time, energy, and people. The dead were only able to close and destroy the gate because there was a shortage of men there.”

But there is a shortage of men everywhere. It’s not even that they are terribly outnumbered at a first look, it’s that whenever they kill the dead, somehow, there’s more coming. From the woods, down from the north: they never stop coming.

The greatest advantage of his adversary, however, the thing he has in abundance and Jon hasn’t, has nothing to do with numbers or strategy or weapons.

It’s time. The monster has all the time in the world, and instead of a sudden slaughter, apparently, he plans to win simply by exhausting the living.

Jon feels an invisible cold hand wrapping around his throat; he rubs his face. His eyes are stuck on the lands of always winter in the map, on the far, far north. “This is not working,” Jon murmurs.

“Which part?” Arya asks.

“All of it,” Jon answers. “We’re investing so much in defending. Defending the gates, defending the Wall… We’re thinking the wrong way about this War.”

“We are attacking,” Arya murmurs.

“Are we? We are sending small groups, when they manage to pass through the sea of dead people blocking our way, to chase the Night King when Bran is able to see him, and every time he disappears into the woods atop his dead horse. He is playing with us. We should advance the whole line, attack as a united front, everyone going deeper and further North,” Jon explains.

“And when do we stop?” It’s Edd speaking again. “Until we push him back to the lands of always winter and imprison him there?”

“If we have to, then so be it,” Jon says.

“How are we going to do that? We don’t know what’s out there,” Satin asks, anguished.

“And why does that sound like doing exactly what he wants us to do and falling right into a trap?” Edd asks. “He wants our armies deep into his terrain so he can destroy the remaining gates and keep us trapped there. Our strategy is to lure him closer to us to—”

“— not stray too far away from the gates, to ensure a free path to our escape to the safe side, I know, but he is not coming, Edd. He is sending his dead, he is even sending his White Walkers, but he is not here, and as long as he’s not here—”

“The dead cannot keep coming out of nowhere forever. If we have to kill every one of them to the last, we’ll do it—”

“That’s madness. He’s been raising this army for thousands of years, how long do you think it will take to finish it if the best we’ve got is to kill them one by one—”

“Jon?” A feminine voice says from the entrance of his tent.

It’s Val.

“Come in,” Jon says.

She comes in alone, her gait heavy with tiredness, and from the layers of her furs, she takes out an object and places it over Jon’s adapted desk — the flat lid of a large trunk — right on the middle of the spread map. It’s a Horn.

It’s beautiful — white as the moon, with a blue wavering brightness that reminds Jon of the Wall itself, but not nearly as big as the myths had told him it would be. There is something written in an unknown language around the edge of its wide mouth.

“You found it,” Jon whispers in astonishment and a relief he hasn’t felt since he arrived at the Wall.

It won’t fall. The Wall won’t fall. He feels suddenly reinvigorated.

“You sent me beyond the Wall to find it,” Val says, sitting on the nearest trunk, her elbows resting on her knees. “Why the surprise?”

He is almost afraid to touch the thing. “Are you sure that’s it?”

“For the way they chased after us when we found it, I suppose yes, it is,” she says. “But if you want to be sure, you can blow it.”

“Next to Craster’s Keep?” Jon asks, ignoring her dark wit.

Val nods. “I believe it’s one of their command posts,” Val says. “It’s heavily, heavily protected. Bran guided us to the hidden place through Nymeria. It was in one of forests, in a cave deep into the woods, almost a maze of caves. I had never been there. It was surrounded by obsidian blades, small fragments of it. But then the Others somehow discovered we had it. It was as if they were waiting for us to do the job just to steal it from us.” She shrugs. “Maybe they were wary of getting into a mine of dragonglass.”

“Did you see him?” Jon asks. “The Night King?”

“No. Just White Walkers,” she reports. “Did you know they can speak?”

Jon frowns. “Which language?”

“None of ours,” she says. “And not yours either. Nothing I could comprehend.”

Something occurs to Jon, then. It comes with a cold drop in his stomach, as soon as the high of relief and victory starts to wane off. Because Val has always been a fighter, a leader of her people.

But she was not the one he commissioned as the head of this task.

“Where is Tormund?” Jon asks.

Val looks at her own feet for a long time, and then raises her head to stare at Jon, but she doesn’t answer.

Jon feels it again, the cold hand around his throat, tighter than ever.

“Did you—”

He means to ask, did you burn his body? but somehow he cannot make the words come out; he doesn’t want to hear the answer.

“How many?” He tries, then, masking the thickness of his voice.

“We lost twelve,” Val reports. “Eight of us survived.”

Jon nods.

“I’m not taking my people back there, Jon,” she says, and the dread in her voice is the most alarming thing of all. He’d never seen Val shrinking back from a battle until now. “Not that far. Leave us at the gates, or in the front line even, but—”

He raises his hand, interrupting her, looking at the map again.

“I know,” he says. “You did a good job. Go, take your rest.”

viii.

The geography of Winterfell changes.

The solar given to Daenerys for reunions became a room separated for procedures: to remove infected limbs or tissues, seam up open wounds. Where once the cabinets were full of books, now ointments, potions, spices, milk of the poppy, and medicines fill its shelves; threads and needles embedded in antiseptic liquid; blades, clean cloths, soaps. More rooms were emptied to shelter the wounded soldiers in their convalescence and recovery. What was once Sansa’s private bedroom is now a chamber shared with Meera, Missandei, Gilly.

Her solar is the only place she can be alone.

Well. Almost alone.

There’s an anxious knock on the door, followed by a too familiar voice on the other side: “My lady?”

Across Sansa’s desk, at the disturbance, Tyrion lifts his head from where it was buried in the book of accounts of Winterfell, and their gazes meet by accident for a fraction of a second. Sansa is the one who looks away first, and, because there’s no one else in the room but him, she ends up setting her eyes on the wood of the still closed door: “come in, Samwell.”

It was in this slow shifting of places that Tyrion ended up coming to work with her, with his quill and inkpot, his numbers and figures and charts. She didn’t have any other choice but to allow him in; the wounded soldiers needed more privacy than he did to work, and all the books were in her solar, anyway.

His desk across hers could be at the Wall, miles away, for how little they talked; the silence between them is louder than the harsh winter winds outside her window.

Still Sansa feels his gaze on her, sometimes, with the corner of her eye. She’s learned to recognize the particular pattern of the sound of his scribbling. She thinks she could tell, by the way he sighs, if he’s tired or angry or sad. And if he’s the perceptive man she suspects he is, there’s a chance he might know the same about her only by sounds of her steps and the level of tidiness over her desk. Sansa pretends she doesn’t cling to these small knowings almost lasciviously, pretends she doesn’t linger in her solar longer than necessary; she keeps to her corner of the room, and doesn’t utter a word.

There are things that only the silence knows, after all. Samwell walks in, Gilly by his side, and Tyrion immediately turns his attention back to his book, as if, if he’s quiet enough, he’ll camouflage with the furniture. It works: Samwell looks only at her.

“There’s an issue, my lady, about the men who are hurt?” He says, making it a question at the last word.

Sansa frowns. When Samwell is insecure is not a good sign. “What about them?”

“Well, they’ve been demanding increasing doses of milk of the poppy and I’m afraid we don’t have enough for all of them,” he begins.

“Yes, we do,” Sansa frowns one eyebrow.

“We have enough to sedate them during the procedures,” he agrees, “but the recovery is painful, my lady, and slow. We were ready for a long winter, but we didn’t expect the War to last so long, or the armies to be so large—”

“We can buy more,” Sansa says.

“Where?” Samwell asks. “Winter Town doesn’t have medicine any more than we do.”

(The scratching of Tyrion’s scrabbling grows careless, nervous, afraid.)

“White Harbor,” Sansa answers. “I’ll need to ask for more wax and oil anyway, I can include milk of the poppy in the ordering.”

“That is going to take weeks,” Samwell says, carefully, as if it would be a disrespect to utter the obvious.

“Only one week through the White Knife.” Even upstream, it was faster than the road, at least for a big shipment.

“The river has been freezing, my lady, since last week,” Samwell informs her, still very guarded. “It’s not completely frozen yet but it’s impossible to sail through.”

Sansa sighs. She closes her eyes and draws slow circles on her temples.

“Then through the Kingsroad. There will be a delay, because of the weather, but it will arrive.” Perhaps they need a lightning system on the Kingsroad. And more stations to lodge and change the horses, since there’s less drinking water available for them, with the lakes and rivers freezing. But she knows Lord Manderly well; if she pays him, he will deliver it, even if he needs to cut the long night with a knife in half.

Samwell and Gilly share a gingerly look, and, opening her eyes, Sansa wrinkles her brow. “What is wrong?”

Gilly looks at her own feet.

Samwell presses his lips together. “While we don’t receive a new load, it has been made—” he cocks his head, “A suggestion.”

“Then say it.”

Gilly, with aim, keeps looking at the ground.

“A group of women have offered themselves to… Help.”

Sansa curls one eyebrow; Tyrion’s scribbling grows slower. “Of women?” She echoes.

“Yes,” Samwell confirms, and says nothing else.

“Nurses? Healers?” Sansa asks.

“Not exactly,” Samwell replies. “They present a more ancient solution, my lady. More natural. Faster.” A pondering pause. “And perhaps with more lasting effects.”

Sansa waits for a clearer explanation, and when Samwell adds nothing, she exhales raggedly. “I don’t understand.”

“Whores,” Tyrion says from his desk, without ever raising his eyes from his book.

Sansa looks at him with a cold kind of offense. “I beg your pardon?”

But it’s Sam who answers.

“It is a well known fact that… Sexual pleasure could—” he flexes his fingers while he thinks, and only stills them when he finishes: “—Ease the pain, my lady.”

“Says who?” Sansa asks, a little bit skeptic.

“All the credible books,” Sam replies.

“And common experience,” Gilly adds, quietly.

Sansa looks at the woman in the eye for the first time since she entered her solar.

“It works,” Tyrion says, turning a page of the book of accounts and barely lifting his eyes to her. The candle on his desk makes his eyelashes cast shadows over his face, his cheekbones deeper. “Why do you think there are camp followers at every battle? I bet most of them have gone straight to the Wall with the armies when they left.”

Sansa could, would, be even more offended at his rudeness, and perhaps embarrass herself further if Samwell didn’t hurry to confirm.

“It is true,” he says. “The soldiers themselves mentioned so, my lady, even before those resourceful ladies… presented themselves at our gates.”

Sansa huffs, baffled. “Why are men such despicable creatures?”

“It works for women too, my lady,” Gilly murmurs. When Sansa glares at her, she quickly adds, “according to the books.”

Sansa feels a flush beneath her skin, of shame and aggravation, and decides it best to stare at Sam. “Do you want me to turn Winterfell into a brothel?” She thinks of the bones of her father, resting in the crypts below Winterfell, and almost shudders.

“Perhaps we could find a way to carry some of the men to Winter Town?” He suggests. “With appropriate discretion? It’s just outside the gates.”

“What is discreet about carrying wounded soldiers into a brothel?” Sansa exclaims. She doesn’t mean to sound impolite; Samwell is doing his best to fix a problem that is not even his responsibility, but something about the situation makes Sansa feel trapped, cornered by these three people who knew, most likely through experience, that sexual pleasure had healing properties, while she— didn’t.

“It’s the only alternative to the castle, my lady,” Samwell explains, patiently. “We can’t have them meeting out in the open in this weather.”

“Why do you have to consult me about this?” She asks, at last. “I’m not keeping hostages, everyone is free to go wherever they please.”

Across the room, behind his desk, she can sense, more than see, the tilt of Tyrion’s head.

Samwell and Gilly share another long look. Gilly raises her eyebrows and gives a shrug.

Whatever conversation happened in the silence, Samwell turns to Sansa again. “Because not all men have coin with them,” he says, simply.

Sansa blinks once, twice.

“Do you want the coin to come out of our coffins?” She asks, completely unbelieving. “To pay for whores?”

“Some of them are in a great deal of pain, my lady,” Samwell says.

Sansa takes a calculated, deep breath, and lets it out at once.

“I see,” she nods. “Samwell, you’ll visit the house in which these women work,” she commands. “You’ll examine them, talk to them, make sure they are in good health and that they are working on free accord. We’ll lend the soldiers the money, and we’ll charge it when the War is over.” She stops just a second to weigh it, “With interest.”

“Yes, my lady,” Samwell says with another measured nod. “Though it is Lord Tyrion who is handling the book of accounts, now.”

Sansa does not meet Tyrion’s gaze. “Is my Lord Hand following?” She asks.

He dabs his fingers over his desk. “I am, my lady,” he confirms.

When Samwell and Gilly leave, closing the door behind them, it feels like the distance between his desk and hers has grown wider. At first, Sansa tries to keep her composure, but being with Tyrion lately feels much like being alone, and she lets her body slosh in her chair. She is thinking of what her father would think of her when her musings are interrupted.

“I’m surprised you didn’t know about that,” Tyrion says, casually. There’s no judgment in his tone, no cynicism. In fact, there’s barely any surprise at all, as if he’s trying to save her from the awkwardness.

He always thinks he is saving her, but he isn’t. “How could I possibly know, Tyrion?” She avoids his eyes, staring at the ceiling, but she can’t quite ignore him when he talks and she is the only other person in the room.

He has no answer to that.

“With interest?” He inquires, with an elusive bite.

Sansa straightens her head to, at last, stare at him. “Do you disapprove?” She asks, daringly. “As the one responsible for our accounts, I mean?”

“Not exactly,” he says, with a frown that weighs on his face. “And I can’t disapprove of a chance to increase your profits. It’s just—”

And he hushes his speech, cuts it midway and lets the unspoken line hang in the air like a noose.

“It’s just…?” Sansa tries, almost kindly.

“It’s horrible to be in pain all the time,” he says, dismissively. “I wouldn’t condemn them so quickly.”

“Perhaps I should be merciful and simply not charge them at all?” Sansa proposes, testing the waters. “And simply donate to brothels, like charity?”

He rolls his eyes. “I didn’t say that. And I have nothing against charity, but as the one responsible for your accounts, you can’t afford it now, so I would advise against it.”

Something in his face makes Sansa remember the way he limped when the nights were colder on the open road, the look of surprise on the first time she asked about the pain in his legs, that only night they shared a bed in Highgarden. She remembers more: the way people called him the Imp, as if it were a dirty name.

A man with appetites, they said, a pervert.

“Is that why you go to—” She begins to ask, and, halfway through it, discovers she can’t. Her words die, a wall raising around her throat for her own protection. For a moment she thinks he won’t even understand what she meant, with the question unfinished and unprompted. But somehow he does.

“Sometimes,” he shrugs, as if it were, really, nothing of consequence. “It comes with a lot of painful days, being…” He looks down, vaguely points at himself. “Anyway. I think everyone has to find a way to handle their own painful days,” he raises his eyes, wildfire in the candlelight, “don’t you think?”

No, Sansa thinks. She’s never quite learned how to circumvent it, how to skip it, alleviate it. She’s learned how to endure pain; how to pass through it.

In any case, he’s not wrong; enduring is a form of handling, perhaps not the most pleasant one. It makes a shimmering shame burn beneath her ribcage. Is she doing this wrong? Survival, that is?

“Is that supposed to make me pity you?” Sansa asks, bitterly.

“No more than you meant to make me pity you,” he rebukes, without a second of delay.

She does wonder, truly, which one of them deserves more pity: someone who pays to have his pain eased like that, or someone who lives on with it, feeling the ache of bruises and the pull of scars and the memory dwelling in the bones every day and every night.

It’s not a hard dilemma to solve, Sansa decides. At least you know a touch that doesn’t hurt you. For once, she decides to abandon her courtesies and gets up from her chair without excusing herself, toward the door.

Chapter Text

i.

The sun hasn’t come up for one week now, and because of that, the snow is also relentless. Gentle, but constant. Some cities are pretty under snow; King’s Landing is no such place. Flakes of ice fall in an ungainly waltz. The snow piles up on the ground amidst dirt and human dejects; the city stinks.

It comes from the North, the cold winds. Everything bad and ugly comes down from the North.

From the balcony of her bedroom, Cersei can see King’s Landing and Blackwater Bay beyond the shore. She cannot see the shape of the ships occupying the waters; it’s too dark for it. But she can feel the trap in her bones; she feels it in the sheets of her bed at night.

She cannot escape.

“My Queen?”

It’s Qyburn. Cersei slightly turns around. “Come in,” she says.

He comes in and closes the door behind him; Cersei fixes her eyes on the alleys and lanes of the city, but she can’t see anything properly. They’re saving oil, so the city is swallowed by darkness.

“Any news about the sun?” She asks. It strikes her as a humorless joke that the long night turned out to be so… designative.

Qyburn shakes his head. “No, Your Grace,” he says. “It’s been night above the Neck for almost a month. In the Riverlands, it has been a fortnight. I believe it will keep sweeping the continent until Dorne for the next few weeks.”

She doesn’t like it. The darkness. She doesn’t like the silence in the streets; she doesn’t trust the people. She can see square points of fire through the small windows of their decrepit little houses, and she knows, she just knows they are plotting against her.

They are hungry. It’s always like that when they get hungry. They get unreasonable, surely to blame her for a thing as natural as the weather. They grow ungrateful, vengeful.

Dangerous.

“Until they win the War?” She questions. “At the Wall? Does it still stand?”

Grumpkins and snarks, dragons and monsters: if her father were alive, this War against the dead would have been over by now.

“It appears that is so, Your Grace,” Qyburn continues. “My little birds don’t go further North beyond the Neck, but it’s safe to assume the Wall stands. As for the sun, we cannot know for sure, for it’s been thousands of years since the last time, but our sources…” He shifts on his feet, uncomfortable. “Appear to imply… the long night will not end until the dead are defeated.”

Cersei nods, and drinks a sip of her wine. She’s been drinking watered down wine for a month now; it reminds her, suddenly, “And our stocks?”

He looks at the ground.

“We have enough for a fortnight,” he informs her.

Cersei looks at the city again. She cannot buy from merchants; her Bay is occupied. The food of the country is in the Reach…

“The Tarlys went North, didn’t they?” She asks. “With their army?”

“Yes, Your Grace. After the siege broke.”

“So Highgarden and the food were left unprotected,” she muses out loud.

Qyburn seems to hesitate.

“We don’t have an army either, Your Grace,” he reminds her, carefully. “The Lannister men are stationed in Harrenhal. On Ser Jaime’s orders.”

Cersei turns around to face him. “I know where my men are.”

“Of course, Your Grace.” He swallows down, hard. His skin is thinner, falling in layers on his cheek, as if it had unstuck from his flesh when he lost weight over the last month. “I didn't mean to lecture you, but—”

He stops, then; Cersei rolls her eyes. “But?”

“Whatever course of action we decide,” he says, with caution, “we better plan quickly.”

Cersei walks to the chair in front of her mirror. Her skin is dry and lifeless. Her lips are cracked. Her eyes are buried deep into its sockets. She doesn’t look like a Queen. How could anyone, in a place like this, in a time like this?

It’s when it strikes her.

“There’s food in Casterly Rock,” she says, thinking out loud.

Qyburn's face lights up, just a little. “Should I send a word to your castellan, Your Grace? The Rock will surely aid their Queen.”

Cersei shakes her head. Why is everyone so slow around her? She stands on her feet and walks closer to the mirror. In Casterly Rock, the mirror in her private chambers is twice as large, with a golden frame of lions. Everything is covered in gold.

Casterly Rock is how the house of a Queen should look like, how a royal keep should look like. It never fell, she remembers, absently. It stands at the top of the world, unmoving, imposing. And safe.

“Here’s what you’ll do,” she says, looking at herself. “You’ll prepare our horses and our carriages. We are leaving. All of us.”

“North, Your Grace?” Qyburn asks.

“Why would I go North?” Cersei snaps. “Are you paying attention to me? You are my Hand. I expected you would have thought about this sooner.”

“Your Grace, I do not follow,” Qyburn confesses.

She rolls her eyes and turns to him again. “How are the Snakes?”

“Alive,” Qyburn tilts his head: “barely.”

“Good,” Cersei nods. “Feed them. I want them to be strong enough to survive the journey. I don’t want them to die before their time. Gather the crown’s jewelry and our gold, and the last of our stocks. We’ll also need to carry our ballista with us,” she keeps musing. Surely the dragon bitch will come to her, if not sooner, then later. “Tell the lords at court we are moving. Or better… Set us to dinner tonight. At the Great Hall, together. I want to tell them myself.”

Qyburn frowns, confused.

“We are moving the court?”

“To Casterly Rock, yes,” she nods.

“But the War against the—”

“The War against the dead is happening in the North. I have no reason to launch myself in the midst of my enemies. You tell me the Wall still stands, so it’s my understanding that if we are to move, we must do it quickly, while it’s still safe.” She clasps her hands together. “The Bay is occupied. We cannot sail away anywhere. The South is the home of all our enemies. The pathetic siege they tried to impose on us fell, but King’s Landing can no longer keep us safe or fed. Do you see any other way out? We must move West. The Goldenroad is far away enough from Harrenhal that we won’t be caught.”

“What about the people of King’s Landing?”

Cersei cannot believe her ears.

“They can blow to the skies for all I care,” she says, feeling oddly calm about it. “I will not allow my reign to rot with this city.”

“And… the Iron Throne, Your Grace?”

She huffs. “We can build a golden throne just with the lion statues at the gates of Casterly Rock. What use is the Iron Throne for?” She asks. “King’s Landing is the capital because here, the Conquerors settled. It’s not the city that makes the King. It’s the King who makes the city. I want to settle in Casterly Rock. And the court must follow me. Are you loyal to a castle or to your Queen?”

“To our Queen, surely, Your Grace, but to move while it’s dark… And the people out there… If we leave they will surely take the Red Keep.”

She walks toward her Hand again.

“They can have the Red Keep. They can have the whole city. They can eat those red bricks, if they’re so inclined,” she tells him. “We’ll have food. We’ll be safer. Casterly Rock is impossible to conquer through a military army, and we’ll have a much better chance at killing her dragons with your little toy from a higher place. Besides, stone doesn’t melt.”

“Actually, Your Grace—”

“Do as I tell you,” she cuts him off, patting his shoulder. “Go. Summon the Commander of the City Watch for me. I need to speak with him.”

Qyburn leaves. He’s a little hesitant, but Cersei is sure that will be fixed, once he sees the glory of the West.

She lies back on her mattress, pleased, and looks at the ceiling. Soon this nightmare will be over. The War against the dead will be dealt with. She’ll be home.

And she just knows Jaime will get the message. He’ll come home to her. He will.

ii.

There are fifty barrels with grains. Fifty.

“Why didn’t you warn me sooner?” Arya asks, annoyed, crossing her arms in front of her chest.

“I didn’t want to bother you, my lady,” Satin answers.

Satin is a pretty boy. He has Arya’s dark hair and dark eyes, but even with the northern coloring, there’s something delicate about his features that makes Arya think of princes. He has a gentle tone, even now, while he presents the Tower of Castle Black where they keep their provisions.

With their current numbers, fifty barrels are enough for a week.

“I thought you had prepared,” Arya says. She doesn’t mean it to sound as chiding, but it does. “I thought Jon had warned you to prepare for this.”

She touches the hilt of her sword, looking for comfort. The nameless Valyrian sword, shaped after Needle, is hanging from her waist; the actual Needle is stuck across her back. She doesn’t let go of it, ever, even though Needle is useless against the dead.

“With all due respect, my lady,” he says, quietly, “we couldn’t possibly be prepared for armies as large as the Queen’s.” A pause. “Or a War that doesn’t end.”

“It will end,” she answers.

“We can only hope at this point.”

“No. We will make it end.” She lets out a harsh exhale. “The Queen contributed with provisions, didn’t she?”

“She did,” he nods. “She sent her caskets ahead of the armies, but even those are, too, dwindling.”

Arya nods. “I will send word to my sister,” she assures him. “I’m sure she will send us more food.”

“There has been a suggestion,” Satin says, with caution.

Arya looks at him and curls one eyebrow. “And what is that?”

“Some of my brothers have noticed that—” Satin looks down, “—well, we burn the bodies, anyway, don’t we?”

Arya takes a long time to understand what he means.

“Human flesh?” She says. The candle in her hand trembles. She doesn’t know if it’s her hand shaking or the breath of her voice, suddenly louder. It’s quiet out there; dreadfully so. It’s one of the quiet hours of retreat where all they’ve been doing is wait for the next attack of the Others. Soon, the watchers on the Wall will scream and blow their horns, and they’ll all be back on the battlefield again. “Do you think we should eat human flesh?”

Satin tilts his head.

“The brother in question thinks we should not stop fighting,” he says, “and we cannot fight well if we are hungry.”

Arya stares at him, hard and unrelenting. “We are not feeding from the flesh of the men who fought by our side.”

“The dragons eat them,” he murmurs.

“The dragons are beasts,” Arya retorts. “Are you a beast?”

Satin doesn’t answer. He is looking at the fifty barrels of grains, the only food they have for the next week. Will they kill the Night King in the next seven days? It sounds unlikely, for some reason.

“Look at me,” Arya orders, grabbing his chin. Satin is startled by it. She thinks of the House of the Undying, and she thinks of serving death as a feast or poison as water. She thinks of being a woman with no body, no name. “The dead eat human flesh. If we are to do the same, we might as well give up the fight and let the Night King have the kingdoms. Anyone who engages in such activities — I want it reported to me. That cannot be allowed to happen among us. These people must be banished from our midst.”

“Where will we send them?” Satin asks, with genuine concern. “To the Land of Always Winter? Back to Winterfell? The Wall is already the place for the exiles. They are desperate and have nothing else to lose. We cannot afford to lose more men.” And, quietly, he adds, “And that doesn’t solve our problem.”

“And do you have any suggestions that do not involve eating people?”

“Well, yes,” Satin looks down, gently moving Arya’s hand away. “But someone would have to convince the Khaleesi.”

Arya, then, searches for Daenerys Targaryen after that.

In a camp that extends to the lands around Castle Black, with dozens of thousands of fighters and tents, under the heavy snow, Daenerys Stormborn is the easiest one to find: she is always close to her dragon, the biggest one. She is often surrounded by one of the Unsullied, a man Arya learned was called Grey Worm, a Dothraki named Qhono, and Ser Jorah Mormont, the exile from Bear Island. They are her Queensguard and her Council, as protective of the Queen as Drogon. When Arya approaches them, in front of her tent, they all turn toward her in unison, as if she’s a threat, and then look at Nymeria.

Old reflexes have Arya almost reaching for the hilt of her sword, until she forces herself to keep her hands clasped in front of her body, where the Queen can see them.

“Your Grace,” Arya bows down her head, but not her eyes. “I was hoping to talk to you.”

None of the men around the Queen move, and so Arya sighs.

“Alone,” she adds.

Daenerys looks at them and says something in Valyrian, something in Dothraki, and to Ser Jorah she doesn’t say a thing, instead simply putting her hand above his and looking into his eyes for a fraction of a second. They all dutifully leave: Grey Worm toward the Unsullied, Qhono to his horselords, and Jorah to the Mormonts, the only family among the northmen who has accepted his return to Westeros.

Daenerys stands, too. “Should we get inside?” She points to the flapping layers of her tent, the biggest one in the camp.

Arya nods, and follows her in. Nymeria waits by the entrance of the tent. It seems unfair to bring her when the Queen is alone, as if the wolf is some sort of weapon. Arya still carries her swords, though. The leather tent cuts the wind, creating a little bit of warmth; she looks around. It’s no different than any other tent she’s seen, perhaps just larger. Daenerys sits on an improvised bench, her legs parted. She is wearing her cloak, breeches and a heavy, thick tunic; her white hair is braided in a single, long braid — like a northerner — that rests on her left shoulder, the tip reaching almost her hip bone.

She absently remembers the intricate pattern of braids the Queen wore in Winterfell. Perhaps there’s no time for that here.

Daenerys looks at her. “So?”

Arya sighs. “We need to kill the horses,” she says. It’s better to just be pragmatic about it.

Daenerys straightens her shoulders.

“Well,” the Queen says curiously.

“We are low on grains,” Arya explains. “We need the meat.”

“My Dothraki are not the only army with cavalry. Why don’t you speak with Dickon Tarly? Or the Hardying boy?”

“We are using their horses in the carts to send men back to Winterfell when they’re injured. They’ve been fighting on the ground.”

“We can hunt,” Daenerys says. “There are forests nearby.”

“We don’t have time for that. We only have one week of grains and thousands of men to feed.” Arya bites her lower lip. “I know horses are sacred to your people.”

With a sigh, the Queen closes her eyes, toying with the ends of her braid. Her face is dirty with sweat and foul, her braid is messy. She gave up on the little bells attached to it; the quieter they are, the better.

“They believe it gives them strength,” Daenerys explains. “Horse meat.”

“Oh,” Arya says. “That’s even better.”

Daenerys shots her a hard glare. “That doesn’t mean they are happy in sacrificing them,” she continues. “We are at War. For them, horses are a weapon just as your sword is yours.”

“We gave them arakhs made of dragonglass,” Arya murmurs.

“They are horselords,” Daenerys presses. For a fraction of a second, Arya is able to picture her beneath a burning sun in a deserted land; she looks more like a Khaleesi than a Queen. “It’s how they fight. To kill their weapons is to effectively diminish our strength against the Army of the Dead.”

Arya takes a deep breath, and looks at the empty spot beside the bench where the Queen is sitting. “May I?”

Daenerys slides to the side, widening the spot in silent invitation; Arya sits by her side.

Her legs are tired. Her mind is tired. Her eyes are tired. She would like to go home. “I want this War to be over,” Arya says.

“We all do,” Daenerys says.

“The Dothraki are the largest army we have,” Arya continues, without pause or hesitation. “Their numbers by themselves match the sum of every other army together, including your own Unsullied.”

“Are you saying they should sacrifice more because they have more?” Daenerys asks. It is not asked gently.

“I am saying we are about to starve in a week,” Arya answers, patiently. “And while they are the best army in the world in an open field, their usefulness here is limited to the moments the dead attack in one big front line, when Bran warns us soon enough to prepare for it, which is not often lately as they keep aiming for the gates—”

“If Bran spent more time watching the army of the dead as a whole and not playing hide-and-seek with the Night King, we could use—”

“Killing the Night King is our only chance at ending this,” Arya cuts in, harshly. Daenerys looks alarmed; Arya recovers her calm. Calm as a lake, she chants to herself. “Bran is doing his best. As are you, as am I, everyone is doing their best.”

Something in Daenerys cedes, softens.

“You are their Khaleesi,” Arya murmurs. “You’re the only one they’ll listen to.”

Daenerys holds her gaze for a long time, and then buries her face in her hands, irked.

“They are going to resent me,” she says. “I’ve already asked too much from them.”

Arya knows this. The Dothraki don’t fare well in the cold. Nobody does in this kind of cold, but they suffer more than any other people. They are the largest army, but whenever they go to the field, their losses are proportionally bigger than the Unsullied, who simply refuse to die and stand as firm as a wall, the two armies being their two first lines of defense. The Dothraki numbers are so immense that the losses are not heavily felt. But they happen. Steadily and consistently.

Arya sits still and listens. Daenerys drops her hands on her lap, defeated.

“I didn’t bring them here to die,” the Queen says. “They crossed oceans for me. This is no place for a Khalasar to die.”

Arya reaches out for the silver braid over the Queen’s shoulder. “As long as you keep your braid,” she says, and Daenerys chuckles under her breath. “We can take the matter to Jon, if you approve. I am no Commander.”

Arya isn’t, really. She is just a girl who fights in the dark and who wants her people to survive this and who wants to come back home. She doesn’t even know why people come to her with those matters.

“Neither am I,” Daenerys replies. She looks at Arya and smiles. “But they look up to you here. The northerners.”

Arya shakes her head with a frown. “I don’t know about that.”

“They do. I’ve seen it,” Daenerys says, softly. “You look like him, you know.”

It goes unsaid who is him.

“Perhaps they just mistake me for him,” Arya says. “It’s so dark here all the time.”

Daenerys genuinely laughs. “I don’t think so, Lady Arya,” she says, fondly, and reaches out to hold Arya’s hand. “Talk to Jon. I’ll talk with my Qhono, and we…” She gently squeezes Arya’s fingers. “We’ll find a way to survive this.”

iii.

Tyrion Lannister is looking at the charts and the counts of grains in Winterfell, trying to picture an infinite timeline coming out of the parchment.

Bran told him that the living are stuck in a paradox, that the living are resisting but so are the dead, and all Tyrion could listen to was: no, it’s not over, it’s far from over. Which meant he should plan ahead.

How long ahead, though, was the question. If he’s learned anything at all, was that hope was not the best advisor in predicament like theirs—

“My lord?”

Tyrion lifts his eyes to the sound of Sansa’s voice, standing just by the door.

“I didn’t hear you coming,” he says.

She’s fidgeting with her fingers, looking around her own solar, looking anywhere but into his eyes. “I’d like to ask you a favor,” she murmurs.

He realizes her hands are clean but there’s still blood under her fingernails. She was with Samwell, then. Looking after the sick and wounded. Her hair is braided in a single plait, northern-style. He supposes it’s easier to keep it from getting bloodied like that. “Of course,” Tyrion shrugs.

“Would you mind leaving?” She asks, as if she’s being terribly improper, terribly impolite. “The solar, I mean. For just half an hour, maybe less than that.”

Tyrion frowns. “Of course I wouldn’t, my lady. It’s your solar.”

“I know you’re busy,” she says, apologetically, looking at his desk. It’s very messy, very untidy. Her desk has a pile of letters, all still sealed, unread. Her hands tangle and untangle in each other. “I just— I’d like to have a bath.”

He frowns even deeper.

“Here?” She has a private chamber, as far as he’s aware.

“I’m sharing my bedroom,” she explains. Her voice is uncharacteristically timid. “Meera is asleep already, and Gilly and Missandei are awake, talking, and I—” she sighs. “I’d like a bath. I thought it would be easier to ask you out than all of them.”

He waits. It’s an odd request. When she doesn’t add anything, he interjects, “It’s fine, I can leave. But I don’t think they would be bothered if you just—”

“I don’t want them to see my back,” she says. Her voice is suddenly surer, clearer, her chin half-raised and her expression hard, as if she’s daring him to say anything else.

He has nothing else to say but the obvious. “Of course, my lady,” Tyrion says, with a pang of shame for not realizing it sooner. “Of course.”

She nods, and leaves without excusing herself.

After a while, two maids come in, bringing a bathtub. They place it in the fireplace, over the carpet between the hearth and the loveseat. Then, they bring buckets full of steaming water. Another maid comes in, bringing a soap, a towel, a night shift, a robe, small clothes, what looks like woolen thigh highs, placing all of them delicately over the loveseat.

Then they all leave, and Sansa comes in. Tyrion leaves before she asks for it and doesn’t look back. He passes her by as he walks out, listening to the thud of the bolt behind him as she closes the door. He considers going to his own chambers, but the men’s rooms are two hallways and one flight of stairs away, and the pain in his knees, swelling from the constant cold, decides it.

He rests against the wall next to the door and waits.

He cannot help but pay attention — it’s dreadfully quiet at this wing of the Keep, and he listens, mostly, to the noise of water. It’s almost an ethereal sound; so quiet, so delicate. It isn’t really the sound of War, and in any other moment that would bring him some kind of guilt for not doing more, for being in Winterfell and not on the Wall.

But it’s Sansa, he thinks, Sansa bathing behind that door, and though the thought makes him feel like a lech for standing there, he cannot take a single step away. He remembers Highgarden, remembers the scent of rosemary on the tortuous night he slept by her side.

They should have made better use of that bed.

He’s lost in the fantasy when the door opens again, startling him. He looks at the side and uncrosses his arms as Sansa stares down at him, a little surprised.

The Seven take her, she is smelling like rosemary again. It’s sweet of her to give in to this kind of vanity in the middle of War. “I didn’t know you’d wait literally here,” she says, with a veiled rebuke. Her hair is dry, loose, but combed: soft waves falling all over her shoulders. She’s wearing a thick nightgown beneath a floral robe, and leather sandals on her feet.

“I’m sorry,” he says. It’s almost sincere. “Can I come in again?”

She just opens the door wider enough for him to come in. On his way to his desk, he looks at the bathtub, the pools of wetness on the carpet where she must have stood, her old change of attire dirty, but perfectly folded on the arm of the loveseat. Sansa stands there, in the middle of the solar.

He stares at her tenderly, warmly. He thinks of saying, Sansa, we should have fucked in Highgarden. He says, “Go to sleep, my lady.”

She looks at him as if she’d forgotten, not that he was there, but that he could initiate a conversation. She shakes her head. “I should read those letters,” she says, more to herself than to him, looking at her own desk. “And answer them.”

“You can do that later,” he says, softly. “You would have been warned if they were urgent.”

Her hands find their way into each other again.

“I can wake you up,” he offers. “If you’d like to nap here.”

She looks at him, then at the loveseat, then at him again. “You’ll let me sleep too much.”

Tyrion chortles. He opens the first drawer of his desk and takes a thin candle out of it. “One of those,” he says, placing it on the candlestick after he lights it up in the flame of one of the lit candles.

Sansa narrows her eyes. “Half of one,” she says. Not a question.

Tyrion rolls his eyes. “All right.”

Sansa moves to a cabinet next to the fireplace and takes a blanket out of it. As she lies down on the loveseat and covers herself, Tyrion is absently thinking that she’s already done that before — slept in her solar — when he hears her voice, muffled by the distance.

“How are we?” She asks, quietly.

She only ever asks that now referring to their food and supplies.

“Low on candles,” Tyrion answers.

“Already?”

“We use more than twice the usual number since the sun disappeared.”

She grows quiet. He takes his quill, starts working again. It is so long until she speaks again that he thinks she’d already fallen asleep.

“Why don’t we buy them from the Vale?”

Tyrion sighs, rests back into his chair a little. “Because merchants from the Vale are the most expensive among Manderly’s suppliers. Higher price than King’s Landing, higher price even than the Reach.”

“Only because their candles last longer,” she explains. “They sprinkle salt in the wax.”

Tyrion frowns again. He didn’t know about that. He’s about to ask her how much longer they last so he can do the math, but then he looks at her dainty, bare feet, hanging from one of the arms of the loveseat, her long hair like a curtain falling over the other arm, and her body hidden from his sight.

She always looks so tired these days.

“Why don’t you nap,” he suggests, “and we can discuss that when you wake up?”

He hears her sighing, turning to face the flames. Her hair and feet shift, too. If she’s fallen asleep or not, he can’t tell, but she doesn’t speak again.

iv.

After the sudden attack on the third gate, the world is quiet again, and Brienne doesn’t want to disturb the quiet. When she hisses, it sounds as loud to her ears as if she’d screamed.

Jaime lifts his gaze to her face, worried: his left hand stills its work; his eyebrow quirks, curls in silent question.

Brienne clenches her jaw. She’s lying on the carpet and she looks at the roof of their tent. “Go on,” she mutters.

It’s slow work, to tend to a wound with a single left hand, but not impossible, and Brienne doesn’t want anyone else seeing her like that. Her tunic is lifted and knotted just beneath her bosom to expose her belly; it was the only way to access the bleeding wound in her flank with bite marks. The White Walkers are crafted swordsmen, but the dead just bite and slash their way toward their goal.

Jaime is sitting by her side, with a bowl of clean, hot water, a clean cloth, two vials of ointment he grabbed from someone else’s tent, a dagger and a candle, the only spot of light in the tent, casting golden light over her open flesh.

“I’ll have to burn this,” Jaime murmurs. “It won’t stop bleeding otherwise, and it will infect you. I’ll just clean it up first.”

“All right,” Brienne says.

Samwell had told them that there’s poison in the dead’s rotten teeth: every bite is an infected wound. One must burn it before it spreads and festers.

Jaime is angry with her. She knows this. The attack happened out of nowhere, as per usual lately, and Brienne was asleep when she heard the horns from the Watchers, the sign that they needed reinforcement at the gates. She woke up, Oathkeeper already in hand, and wore her coat of mail. But not her armor. There was no time to put on her armor.

Jaime gently cleans her wound, but his face is a mask of rage. Brienne waits. He’s not a man who takes offense without rebuke, and she knows he will speak first.

And so he does, after long minutes of silence.

“You could have died,” he mutters.

“We all could have died. It’s a War. It was ten against one there.”

“That’s why we don’t go to the battlefield without armor,” Jaime says, patronizingly. “For the Seven. I fancied you many things, but not reckless.”

“Don’t speak to me like that.”

“I’ll speak to you however I wish, wench,” he spits out.

Brienne holds his left wrist. “No, you won’t,” she says, looking into his eyes.

He holds her gaze, daringly.

“You won’t,” she repeats.

“You could have died,” he echoes in a low, quiet voice, as quiet as the winter out there: Brienne knows better. “I want you to stop trying to save me.”

There’s that. Brienne might have placed herself between Jaime and a dozen dead men.

“No,” she answers, simply. She understands his grief, but it’s what they do. They keep each other alive. Brienne doesn’t even remember when exactly this pact was made. Perhaps it was agreed since the first time they met. Perhaps it’s in the nature of their bond. But she couldn’t, possibly, have it any different. And it’s not the first time they have had this argument.

The dead had come with stones and cannons of their own. They ripped off the gates and filled the pathway with bodies, giant rocks, tree trunks until it was impossible to pass through it. The living attacked them, killing them with fire, with dragonglass — and more dead arrived to replace them and finish the work. Until they lost it. They lost another gate, and only one remained to them.

He lets out a harsh, impatient exhale. “Stubborn wench,” he comes back to his work. “Was it worth it? We lost the third gate either way, and you almost died—”

They are way past their limits. All of them. No one is acting reasonably anymore. Everyone is reduced to a shapeless mass of instinct, fight or flee, eat and sleep and wake up to fight.

Brienne doesn’t know for how long they’ll be able to bear it.

“But I didn’t die,” she says. “Neither did you. Stop whining about it.”

He looks up to her face again. Jaime doesn’t think he is worth it; that’s his problem. Brienne can see through him as if he were crystal clear. She can reach out and trespass him with her hand as if he were water.

So there’s nothing to do here but stand her ground. Nothing to do but catch his gaze and refuse to look away.

Jaime sighs, and looks away first. “What are we going to do?” He asks. It sounds rhetorical. And not about the two of them: he’s talking about the living. “He will seal every gate, and then what, we’ll move to Eastwatch by the Sea? The castle is abandoned, and so are their gates. It will take us months until they’re functional—”

“They just have time to waste, Jaime.” The living don’t have time. Brienne looks at the leather roof of the tent again. “It’s like the Night King is trying to send us away.”

“Perhaps he’s not trying to send us away,” Jaime says. “Perhaps he’s inviting us in.”

Brienne frowns. “We can’t stay here without gates to protect us.”

“And what are we going to do then? Come back home when they finally destroy the last one and spend the rest of our lives in the dark and in the cold? We can’t leave before we kill him. We’re hostages here.”

Brienne bites her inner cheek. Putting it that way, it sounds like there’s one solution to their problem. She thinks about Tormund, who wanted her and who she hasn’t had the time to mourn yet: he knew it. He knew before they all understood it and he died for it.

It’s not about the gates, after all; it’s about the Wall.

But it is too dreadful to even think about it, and Brienne sets the idea aside. There has to be another way.

“You should speak to Jon,” she says, absently. “About going in. Deeper, I mean, further beyond the Wall.”

Jaime huffs a white breath. “Jon already knows that.”

“I know he does. He knows it because he is a good Commander, but perhaps he needs reassurance from a more experienced one that he is not going mad,” Brienne says, softly.

He chuckles, dryly. It’s a mad idea. Just venture beyond the Wall and chase dead men until the end of the world.

“I’m going to speak to him,” Jaime assures her. “But first I need to take care of that wound.” He looks at her face, eyes tender with empathy. “Ready?”

Brienne holds her body still as a stone, and nods. Jaime reaches for the candle.

v.

Tyrion puts his quill down with a heavy sigh and Sansa can feel when his gaze settles on her.

“My lady,” he says, across the solar, from behind his desk. “Can we talk?”

She is not working. Not really. She’s been looking at that parchment for almost an hour, and she’s sure he noticed. The household has already been instructed about their tasks, she already read and answered her letters, she already visited the wounded with Samwell and changed their bandages, she already spoke with Bran to hear reports from the Wall.

She is here because she lies on her bed and remains restless. Here she can lie to herself, pretend she’s doing something.

“We’re already talking,” Sansa answers. “How are the stocks?”

She doesn’t know when was the last time she slept, or for how long. Without the sun, it’s hard to tell; she’s vaguely marking the passing weeks through the waning of the moon. The daily hours, unlike Samwell and his dear hourglasses, Sansa prefers to measure on candlelight: I’ve been working for two candles straight; I’ve been in the nursery tending to the wounded for almost three candles.

But sleep is harder to count. She wakes up, and it’s as dark as it was when she fell asleep, and her body is still tired. She dreams of death and cold, and wakes up to death and cold.

It makes no sense anymore to talk about days. Time stands still, and refuses to go on; but it doesn’t stop their barrels from being consumed. This is another measure of time, a more desperate one that falls, mostly, on Tyrion to count.

Which, she assumes, must be the subject of the talk in question. He looks at the spread chart over his desk and shifts, uneasy, in his chair.

“I’ve been wondering if it wouldn’t be the time for us to go on a three-quarter ration,” he says, guardedly.

“Already?” Sansa asks, dismayed.

He only nods.

“It’s too soon for that,” Sansa shakes her head. “We’ve only been here for—”

“Not even three moons, I know, I know,” he interrupts. “And we are not in danger,” he says, blandly. “We’re safe for now. But we are not only supplying the North, we are supposed to supply for the armies in Castle Black for as long as the War lasts. They asked for a new load of grain just last week. Obviously, there’s a limit of available grain for the whole country if there’s no sunlight to grow crops, so we have to think of these stocks as… The only food we’ll have for the entire duration of this War,” he argues, at first looking everywhere but at her, and only finding her eyes when it seems he has already scanned every other surface of the solar. “Even when the War ends, and the sun — presumably — comes back, there’s no guarantee that spring will follow immediately. Perhaps we’ll just have a normal, natural winter. So we’ll still need those stocks.”

But Sansa hears the reports of her brother, too. “We are not losing the War,” she says. “There are wounded men, but we don’t have as many dead on our side as we thought we would.”

“No. But we are not winning, either.” He sets his lips in a straight line. “And not as many dead means more soldiers to feed for a longer time.”

“Tyrion!” Sansa exclaims, so affronted she forgets her manners.

He raises his hands in surrender. “I don’t want to sound heartless. I’m just trying to be pragmatic.”

“I don’t like the message this would send to my people,” she mutters.

He raises one confused eyebrow. “Of caution?”

“Of lack of faith in our armies,” Sansa elaborates. Her usual attitude about the War is to make sure her people know it’s almost over. They pray for sunlight and tell each other summer tales. That assurance is the only thing keeping Winterfell from complete, collective madness and despair. It’s a hard narrative to maintain in a three-quarter ration.

The confused quirk of his eyebrows turns to cynicism. “My lady,” he says in a way that makes her feel like a child. “You want to risk our supplies for morale’s sake? Pray with them, give them a speech…”

“I do have faith in them. It’s not an act. Waiting can be as hard as fighting, and managing the hopes of my people is my hardest job here,” she states, hardly. “And I’m not risking our supplies. We are ready. We have enough food for more than a year.”

They had enough for three years, but that was not counting a Dothraki army. The Reach had food, too, but they would probably need that once the War was over, and the logistics of sending food from Highgarden to the Wall was prohibitively complex.

“I have faith in our armies as well,” Tyrion says. “But I don’t think we should plan our rations based on that. If this War lasts longer than we anticipated, we will wish to have done this sooner.”

“How much longer are you thinking?” Sansa asks, half curious, half worried.

He presses his lips together again, looks away while he thinks. “What if it takes them… I don’t know. Six months?”

Sansa almost doesn’t find her voice.

“It will not last six months,” she says.

“We have no idea how long it will last.”

“Not six months,” Sansa insists, stubbornly. “Not half a year.”

They cannot be in the dark for six months. They’ll all go mad.

He looks at her longly, and in the silence, the balance of the moment tilts in his favor of the quarrel: the words feel heavy in the air.

“We can keep the children on full rations,” he says, quietly. “They’re more vulnerable to the cold. And we can suspend rationing, if we actually hear any substantial advance is being made at the Wall. It’s just a precaution.” Whatever shows in her face makes him grow a little softer. “Let me at least present the idea to Samwell, and we can hear his opinion about it.”

He always treats her like that: politely, carefully, as if she is his better. It’s not really like him, and it makes her think he is afraid of her, more even than he is afraid of his own Queen.

It gives Sansa a nasty kind of satisfaction.

“Why are you doing this?” She asks.

“Doing what?”

“Helping.”

He joins his hands, lands his tangled fingers over his own chest. “Is it so hard for you to believe I am not your enemy?”

“Yes,” she answers, without thinking twice. “Yes, it is.”

He laughs, joylessly. “All right. I deserved that.”

“You never apologized,” she says, wishing she could rip that smirk off of his face with her nails. He’s unhappy, she knows this, and she would like him to let it show. The sound of that laughter, so dry, so devoid of the warmth she once loved, is like being punched in the gut.

Tyrion studies her with a cold, calculating gaze.

“For what?” He asks.

“For what?” She huffs under her breath. “Are you joking?”

“Do I look like I’m joking?” He asks, feigning confusion; no, he looks, indeed, very serious. “Say it. For what?”

“For selling me away,” Sansa says, the words a dagger stuck between her teeth. “For betraying my trust.”

It’s only when she speaks it that she realizes he wanted that. To see her angry, rather than indifferent. She takes a deep breath to recompose herself.

“I don’t remember you telling me you trusted me,” he murmurs.

“I remember telling you I trusted you just the right amount,” she snaps back, wondering if he remembers that. A bed shared in Highgarden, just one night, for the first time in years. She wonders if they should have made better use of it, wonders if they would be here in this situation if she hadn’t tried to be so goddamn honest and honorable with him in the first place.

He shrugs. “It’s up to you to decide the right amount.”

“How are you any different from Littlefinger, now?” She says. “Selling me in marriage because of my claim to give Winterfell to… Whoever?”

That hits. It makes him narrow his eyes. It makes him lean forward in his chair, as if he wants to cross the distance between their desks to do the Seven only know what with her. She almost waits for him to bare his teeth.

“Are you comparing me to Petyr Baelish? Truly?” He seethes. “I tried to arrange a marriage between you and the most stubbornly honorable man of the Seven Kingdoms. Who happens to be a man you already know and trust.”

“Who happens to be my brother,” she adds, because everyone seems to keep forgetting that detail.

“Your cousin,” he corrects, and Sansa would roll her eyes if she weren’t so mad already.

“You sold me to my enemies,” she states, in plain, clear words. “To accomplish the aims of my enemies.”

“Daenerys is not your enemy—”

“She became as soon as you seized my body in her name.”

“I did not seize your body,” he fists his hand over his table. “You still have a choice. We offered you a deal. Do you refuse? Say it, and we’ll negotiate from there.”

“Do I have a choice? Really? Between… What are my options?” Sansa wonders. “Letting Daenerys have my womb to give her an heir or… A War against the North? Winterfell being burnt to ashes by dragons?”

He exhales, harsh, lies back, sinks into his own chair. “I hate when you say it like that,” he mutters, closing his eyes, pinching his nose.

“And I hate when you don’t say it,” Sansa replies. “Call it for what it is. Just tell the truth and stop talking as if you’re doing me a great favor.”

“What do you want me to say?” He says, eyes still closed.

Sansa wants him to open his eyes. She raises her voice. “I want you to admit that you didn’t do it for me! That you did it for her!”

He opens his eyes, and Sansa is surprised to find in him not anger, not frustration, but agony.

“I did it for myself,” he rasps. “I did it because that was the best plan, the best course of action, the most efficient way to solve the problems that are mine to solve.”

Sansa claps the arms of her chair. She feels suddenly small, stupid, stunned, for getting what she wanted. The truth; isn’t that what she wanted to hear?

“Don’t act surprised,” Tyrion mutters. He looks completely, utterly miserable; Sansa finds out it is of little consolation. “You asked me to do this.”

“When have I ever asked you to betray me?” She asks in a whisper.

“I told you I would wait for you,” he reminds her, and of course. Of course he is thinking about that ship to the Vale.

He is thinking about the way she embraced him against her heart and wrapped her own cloak around him. When she decided she would be truthful, she would be honest, she would not to play the game for once, because he deserved her honesty. He is thinking about the gentle way she broke his heart.

I should have kissed him, she thinks, absently. Under the moonlight, when he asked — oh, gods, he asked, and she said no.

She should have made better use of that moment.

“You looked me in the eye and told me not to dream, not to plan, not to wait for anything. Do you remember this?” He asks. “You told me we didn’t know what it would cost us. This is the cost. I did exactly as you told me to. You asked me not to fight for us. And I learned how to let you go a lifetime ago, Sansa.”

A single tear falls off her right eye and Sansa cleans it fast with the back of her hand, but he is so concentrated on her face that it would be impossible for him to miss it. The log burning in the fireplace crackles, the flames sigh; there’s a moment of silence, of mourning.

“What would you have done in my place?” He asks in a very quiet, very low voice.

“I would never give you away,” Sansa says, surely.

“Yes, you would,” he smiles. Still unhappy, still joyless, but this smirk is not cynic or bitter, it is just sad. “Let me ask you something. When you knew about Jon, about his parents, what was the first thing you thought? A marriage between him and Daenerys?”

Sansa looks away, fights the urge to roll her eyes.

“Of course it was,” he says, voice languid, almost proud really. “How couldn’t you think of it? You would have a King on the Throne sympathetic to the northern cause and the North in your hands.”

“That’s not the same,” Sansa says, still refusing to look at him; she cannot believe he is playing that card, putting her in that place. The unsaid part hangs between them, guilty like blood: it is not the same, because she is not in love with Jon.

“No, it isn’t,” he agrees. “My point is, you would give Jon away. Wouldn’t you? To keep the North to yourself.”

“Not to myself,” Sansa corrects, finally setting her eyes on him again. “To keep the North free.”

He licks his lower lip as he thinks. She’s surprised he hasn’t reached for his wine a single time, and, actually, grateful. She likes him lucid, sober, likes to see his eyes in their sharpest form.

They do look keen when he stares at her now.

“Sansa,” he begins, softly. “I am Hand of the Queen. I was trying to shorten this War. The more we allow it to go on, the more we’re wasting material and human resources that could be avoided with diplomacy. No matter how bloody a War is, it always ends with an alliance, with compromise.” He crosses his arms over his chest, suddenly tired. “And believe me or not, I was trying to think of the best scenario for everyone involved.” When she pulls a skeptical face at that, his gaze grows heavy. “I’m not trying to be sentimental here. You are the key to the North and Jon is the best man you know. He would make you happy,” he explains. Pauses: “Given enough time.”

Sansa cannot help but feel tremendously bitter about all of that.

“That’s very noble,” she mocks. “Very easy to say when you’re doing it in the name of a Conqueror and you’re not losing your freedom.”

“But I lost you.”

“We never had a chance at all to begin with,” she says, on a whim — she can be sharp, too, and pierce him where it hurts.

It does hurt. She can see his pain, splashed over him as if it’s blood; can see the way it settles on his eyes and his mouth and his shoulders. But it brings her no relief, no happiness.

“You’re right,” he murmurs. “We never had a chance.”

It’s a sad thing to reckon with.

“I keep thinking you never said it back,” she says, her voice quieting down to a whisper, too. “So really. I don’t know why I was so disappointed.”

“I never said what?”

“I told you I was in love with you.” Sansa almost gets up on her feet, walks toward him, holds his face between her hands and asks, Do you remember this? Tell me you remember that I said this. “Did you forget?”

“No. Never.” He does not hesitate: his answer is quick, prompt on his tongue. He leans his head to the side, as if it’s a weight he is suddenly too tired to carry around. “I do often wonder if I dreamt it, though, so it’s nice of you to confirm I didn’t.”

“You could have just asked,” she says, and it’s light, her voice; it’s almost a joke, truly.

She thinks about it all the time, how close they were on that part of the road. Even closer than in Highgarden.

She looks at him, looks at his face, and it’s like having the memories reflected back at her, can almost scent the remembering.

It makes her draw a breath through her lips. He notices. “Sansa,” he soughs. “Would you believe me if I said—”

She shakes his head, interrupts him mid sentence. “No, I wouldn’t,” she says, “so don’t. Are you trying to hurt me on purpose?”

“No… I’m trying to make you understand—”

“Understand what?”

“That it doesn’t matter,” he answers, harshly, shutting his eyes tight as if he’s trying to concentrate. “It never once mattered before in my life, and it won’t start now.”

“What does not matter, Tyrion?” Sansa asks, almost out of patience.

“Who I love and want. The fact that I want you now, and I love you now. It doesn’t matter,” he opens his eyes, bores them into her as if he needs her to understand this. He exhales, looking so, so very exhausted. “Have you ever played cyvasse and realized you already lost, not because the game was already over, but because you were practically blocked? There are certain pieces that can go just about everywhere, but there are those that are stuck in a very limited set of moves.”

He pauses for so long she almost thinks he’s done, but then he speaks again. Quietly, calmly.

“I can’t move, Sansa. I’m the Lannister Imp, the Hand of the Dragon Queen, and I am hopelessly in love with Winterfell’s daughter.” He shrugs. “I’m stuck here. There’s no place I can take this love I have for you, nothing I can do with it. I can keep it, waste it. But I can’t move.”

She cannot help another tear, and struggles not to fall into full weeping in front of him, because she knows what he means. After all the bad blood, the War, all the alliances and loyalties and all he’s done to win it, there’s no place for him but at Daenerys’ side. She sees it, the game from his point of view. And she wants to take him and run away and leave it all behind.

But they can’t do this.

“We are not pieces in a board game,” Sansa murmurs, cleaning the corner of her eyes.

“Yes, we are. You and I, we are. I thought you would understand that.” He smiles sadly at her. “I love you. I want you. That doesn’t change anything.”

She nods, tangling her own fingers together. “This is very unfair,” she murmurs, more to herself than for him to hear. He does, anyway.

“It is,” he agrees. “And… I am very sorry. I’m more sorry than I’ll ever be able to say to you.”

Sansa drinks the words in. She would say she forgives him, but there’s no point, no meaning; it’s amazing how he is right about that. She just wanted him to confess, to apologize, to declare his love: now he did, and not a single thing has changed.

“If it counts, in all my years as Hand, to any monarch, I’ve never done anything as hard as giving you up,” he adds.

“That’s comforting,” she tries to say it kindly.

He wrinkles his nose, shaking his head. “No, it isn’t.”

Sansa chortles through her nose. “You’re right, it isn’t,” she agrees. She looks, distantly, to the fire in the hearth. “For what it's worth, I thought it was a very elegant solution. Cruel, but elegant. Sophisticated, even.”

“That’s hardly a comfort, either,” he replies.

“It was a little hard to admit that at the end of the day, I was still in love with the man who planned it,” she says, without thinking.

She hears his breath caught up in his throat and turns to look at him. She sees his longing, his want, all perfect mirrors of her own, and too heavy to carry. Her own love is already too much of a burden; Sansa gets up and walks to the loveseat before the fire. Sits down on it, her head on her hands. Listen to the familiar pattern of his gait as he approaches her.

He offers her a cup of wine. Sits by her side, but still safely distant. She accepts it; their fingers brush against each other.

“Sansa—” he begins.

“You can speak to Samwell,” she says, drinking a deep sip of the wine. “About rationing the food. See what he thinks.”

He nods. “All right.”

She finishes the wine, hands him the cup.

“That doesn’t change anything,” she echoes him.

Tyrion nods. “I know.”

And they enjoy the silence for a while.

Chapter Text

i.

It never snows in Dorne, but Arianne Martell feels winter in her bones all the same.

The sky is cloudless and purple, like the scarf she’s wearing around her neck and the gloves on her hands to protect her from the brutal winter winds. She slides the right glove off and sinks her whole hand into the cold water of the pool; her fingers grow numb, and she shivers.

The Water Gardens are empty; she cannot hear children, high-borns and common alike, playing and giggling together, sun-burnt, splashing in the water. The trees are bare, fruitless. The pleasant autumn breezes are gone: dead leaves are ruptured at the harsh wind’s leisure. The pale pink marble of its walls are painted dark purple in the dimming light. The sun, slowly, gives her its farewell.

It’s a last farewell.

Caleotte approaches her silently, calmly, as he’s fond of doing. She can listen to his steps on the stony ground; only winter could render Caleotte’s slippers audible at all.

“My Princess,” he greets her, and waits. “Areo is here.”

They are supposed to escort her back to Sunspear. Her father had prefered the Water Gardens in the last years of his life, due to his deteriorating health, and Arianne had taken residency in it as soon as she and Quentyn were given Dorne back. But there’s nothing here anymore; it’s an open castle, full of terraces and balconies and large windows, utterly unfit for winter weather. It’s also full of ghosts and bitter memories: a happy summer spent with her cousins, now her enemies; the ever-constant presence of her father, overlooking them, somber, planning his revenge.

Doran never lived to see it. The Great Lion is dead, but his children live and reign, and Gregor Clegane remains alive, or some form of alive.

A dry leaf floats, lonely, on the surface of the water. She turns her eyes from the pool to the sunset sky again. “The last one?” She asks.

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” he answers, mournfully.

Her Maester had informed her that a long night has been sweeping over Westeros, a wave of darkness. The sun hasn’t been seen at the Wall for three months now. A month since the dark had taken over the skies of King’s Landing.

Arianne had hoped Dorne would be spared, somehow. Dorne wasn’t made for winter, after all, and they were safe from the snow. But not from the long night, and not from the harsh cold. Northern winds, she sighs, and her breath is a white smoke over her face.

There’s something bitter about the sun disappearing from Dorne. Something fundamentally wrong.

“Do you believe in omens, Maester?” She asks.

Caleotte walks toward her and sits at the pool’s edge by her side. “No,” he answers. He is the kind of man who gives direct answers with gentleness; Arianne likes him a lot. “Do you, Princess?”

Arianne purses her lips. “No,” she answers. “But it sounds ominous, don’t you think? A sunless Dorne?”

Caleotte tilts his head. “We are better now than we were before.”

This is true. The loyal Dornish men and women who remembered Elia, who remembered Doran, who remembered Oberyn, had protected her and Quentyn from Ellaria’s misguided wrath, and now they are safely back at Sunspear, after those treacherous Snakes and her bunch of turn-cloaks were caught in Cersei’s trap.

But better than before doesn’t necessarily mean all is well. Daenerys Targaryen refused to break her alliance with the Sand Snakes; Arianne had refused to bend to her new reign in return. The claimant Dragon Queen had left Dorne with their business unfinished. She wouldn’t count with Sunspear’s support or loyalty, not while she chose to stand by and save the people who had killed Arianne’s father.

Dorne had resisted dragons before. They could do it again. But that’s not how she had envisioned her future, with more War. And she knows she is supposed to wait, until this War against the Others is finished, until the sun comes back. She is supposed to be very patient.

But in that, Arianne has never been much of her father’s daughter.

“How are our stocks, Maester?”

“We are ready,” he assures her. “We are not to starve.”

She pauses. “And our ships?”

The Maester hesitates. “What do we need the ships for, my Princess?”

Arianne smiles. “The siege in King’s Landing has fallen, hasn’t it?” She asks him, rhetorically; he had been the one to bring her the news, months before. Why the Dragon Queen’s armies hadn’t attacked and sacked the city when they had the chance remained beyond Arianne’s comprehension; but where their courage failed them, hers wouldn’t. “The city is open, vulnerable. I doubt they are waiting for attacks in the middle of the long night. That’s our chance.”

“Not the shore, my Princess,” he reminds her. “Yara Greyjoy’s ships still occupy Blackwater Bay.” Again, he vacillates. “What is your business in King’s Landing?”

“The Sand Snakes are alive,” she says, getting on her feet and wrapping her thick winter robe tighter around her curvaceous frame. “Daenerys Targaryen plans to save them and spare their lives. I will not give her the satisfaction, nor will I wait until it’s too late. I would show them Dorne’s justice sooner rather than later. We must act before the sun shows up again.”

“They are Cersei’s prisoner, my Princess.”

Arianne shrugs. “Then I’m afraid I’ll have to kill Cersei Lannister as well. All the better.” She puts her hands on her hips. “Do you disagree, Maester?”

“I am here to serve you, my Princess, in whatever capacity you’ll ask of me,” he says.

She smiles. “Excellent. Back at Sunspear we’ll gather our spears and call our bannermen.” Only one thousand Dornish are worth ten thousand of those northerners, she knows that for certain.

“I would, whoever, avoid the ship route,” he notes. “Yara Greyjoy is said to be unwaveringly loyal to the Dragon Queen, and… very close to Ellaria besides.”

“Yara is not there to protect Cersei,” Arianne says, upset. “She’s there to keep Cersei from escaping. Besides, if she liked Ellaria so much, she would have already invaded the city and rescued her.”

“Maybe we miss information about what happened when the siege fell, Princess,” he continues, carefully. Arianne tries to come up with a hypothesis. A betrayal? Whose? If Yara were to betray her Dragon Queen, it would have been in Ellaria’s favor. That didn’t happen. Maybe the Lannister twin sabotaged the siege, secretly plotting with his sister and lover to kill the women who killed their daughter? Arianne doesn’t know. “If we are to act alone, we better be careful. Stealthy, I’d say. They better not see us coming at all.”

Arianne huffs. “Oh, Caleotte, you spent too much time with my father,” she says, and immediately, her heart clenches.

She’s filled with rage. It burns in her like the sun. She wishes she could fly all the way to King’s Landing, to avenge Doran with bare hands.

Caleotte seems to notice it. He smiles sadly at her. “I did, Princess, and I’ve learned from him. Time has shown me we often regret our lack of caution when our plans fail.”

Arianne rolls her eyes. “It’s a long way by the road.”

“Yes,” he nods. “But we’ll find the city gates open for us.”

Arianne gives it a thought. Stealthy, she thinks again. “I guess there must be something of my father’s patience left in me, after all,” she mutters, displeased. “May the goddess protect us; the road it is.”

The man smiles at her. “I’ll send the ravens as soon as we are home.”

“Oh, Caleotte,” she says, just as he gets up to follow her. “That portrait of Princess Daenerys Targaryen? On my father's old solar?”

“Yes, Princess,” Caleotte nods.

It’s the other Daenerys. The one who married Prince Maron, who brought peace to the Seven Kingdoms and to Dorne in doing so, a hundred years ago. Arianne remembers, absently, Prince Maron had built these Water Gardens for her.

We built your ancestors a garden, Arianne thinks, looking at the dead trees, the still, gelid water, and you pay us with indifference.

She looks up to the sky last. It’s blue already. Night has fallen, after all.

“Get rid of it when we get to Sunspear,” she commands.

ii.

“We are going to change our strategy,” Jon announces.

Arya is looking at her brother.

They are all reunited in Daenerys’ tent, surrounding the only vellum map they brought with them.

The Queen is standing by Jon’s side, so close that their arms are brushing. Candlelit, their faces are masks of somberness, mirrors of each other, Jon’s darkness against her paleness. Blood, Arya thinks, eventually shows. Earlier, she saw them under the moonlight, sitting next to the roots of a tree on the border of the forest, where the woods grew dense. Jon had white eyes, two full moons: Bran’s eyes. He was speaking with Bran’s face, and Bran’s voice, while the Queen attentively listened, nodding.

(But it wasn't Bran’s hands Daenerys was holding.)

“We’ve been acting as defenders of the realms,” Jon says. He points at two long lines made of little round stones — Unsullied and Dothraki; they didn’t care to bring wooden pieces — on the field just in front of the Wall. “We assume they are coming to attack us, so we have to defend the Wall or defend the gates.”

Daenerys is surrounded by her usual, loyal shields — Grey Worm, the head of the Unsullied, Qhono, the second in command of her Khalasar, Jorah Mormont. Edd, the Commander of the Night’s Watch, stands next to Jon; Dickon Tarly and Harrold Hardyng by his side — these boys of summer have aged ten years in the past three months. Val, Jaime, Brienne and Arya close the small circle.

(Yesterday, they decided they would kill one hundred horses. As an emergency measure.)

“We defend because they are attacking us,” Edd says.

“Are they?” Jon asks. “Their attacks are random, disorganized. Their only purpose is to destroy the gates because they know we depend on them and we cannot afford an endless night, and an endless war even less. How long until they have destroyed every other keep across the Wall?”

“But we haven’t been defending only. We are trying to follow the Night King,” Harrold Hardying says. “We’ve followed him a dozen times by now.”

“And yet he escapes us,” Jon shrugs. “He’s trying to tire us, to wear us out, to make us lose time here so our supplies end and winter gets worse. We have two dragons, the largest army in the world, and eyes to see him anywhere. We win the battles but we can’t win the War, because while we are defending, he is not truly attacking us. He is just teasing. And waiting.”

“Waiting for what?” Val asks, frustrated. “We are already here.”

“He wants us to chase him,” Jaime says.

“We are already chasing him,” Harry retorts.

“To really chase him,” Jon shakes his head. “To leave the safety of the Wall. Their armies are disposable. Ours isn’t. And why would he show up? His only job is to survive. So this is what we are going to do.” Jon raises his eyes from the map. “No more taking shifts. No more wasting time and men. We are all going in. Two dragons and all our forces, I want everyone on the battlefield, attacking, full strength. We must advance our entire front line, or we are going to spend the rest of our lives here.”

“And the last gate?” Edd asks.

“We just need the brothers of the Night’s Watch to keep the gate.”

“I thought you wanted to fix the broken ones,” Edd says.

“Forget that,” Jon shakes his head. “I want our forces on the battlefield.”

“And how is Bran going to talk to us?” Edd asks. “Are you staying here? Or Princess Arya?”

Arya is about to say not a thousand men, dead or alive, would keep her away from her brother, but Jon speaks first.

“No,” Jon shakes his head. “I need them on the field. I need Bran with us. The Wall has the height advantage. You can see attacks from miles away. We won’t have that sight on the ground.”

“And the food?” Dickon asks.

“There are animals beyond the Wall. We can hunt.”

Arya observes Daenerys’ face; it barely changes, but Jon’s hand shifts, slides a little closer to hers, almost instinctively.

“But most importantly,” Jon proceeds, “if we manage to advance the front line, we’ll settle camp. We need to mark territory.” Jon’s eyes move around them, grasping each one of them in its stormy depths. He looks fearless. He looks, Arya thinks, like some kind of beast, a wolf or a dragon or both. “He acts as if there’s a line in those forests that separates us from him, acts as if he’s safe as long as he is in his lands. He isn't safe. Everything is our land. He is the one unfairly occupying our world. But we have to cross that line. In the next few days I want us settled, at the very least, in Craster’s Keep.”

“He has Craster’s Keep,” Val reminds him. “It’s his Commander post.”

“He’ll have it no more. We’ll drive them away and take it. And then we’ll occupy the Fist, and we’ll keep chasing them further, deeper. The Night King cannot hide forever.”

“This is not safe,” Val murmurs. “For us. Straying too far from the Wall.”

“No,” Jon agrees. “No, it isn’t. We’ll be safe when he’s dead.”

iii.

The silence in Bran’s solar is unbearable.

It’s been days since he’s told them that the living would change their strategy, and that they would advance the line, leaving the Wall far behind them to occupy the terrain of the forests as far as Craster’s Keep. They’ve barely left Bran’s side, since; the battle has been going on for more than a day. Bran almost never left the Three-Eyed Raven’s sight. The fire casts a golden light upon his pale face and white orbs, and makes him look like either a god or something straight out of a horror tale.

Meera is never sure, with Bran. All she knows is that he belongs here, in the marrow of winter.

Podrick and Theon are sitting at each of her sides, Lord Tyrion and Samwell are impatiently dabbing their feet on the ground, Bronn is hovering. There’s a sense of urgency while they wait that never breaks and that it is almost physically painful, like holding your breath underwater.

When Bran finally shudders, dark Stark eyes back in Winterfell, all of them rush toward him as one single mass, a human wave of anticipation finally breaking. Meera kneels before him and holds his hands. Theon brings him water. Podrick dries the sweat in his brow with a cloth. Samwell puts a comforting hand on his shoulder. Tyrion stands, arms crossed, before him, and Bronn just keeps on hovering.

The first seconds after he comes back are almost worse than the waiting, like the burning agony of breathing again and yet not breathing enough after you finally find the surface. They know this gift takes its toll on Bran, and they don’t want to hurry him, but-

“So?” Tyrion asks. He is trying to sound calm, but Meera knows better. There’s a certain kind of intimacy that only waiting together can breed.

“We have it,” Bran says in an exhale, still breathless, his voice like the sigh of the wind. “We have Craster’s Keep. The dead retreated.”

Everyone exhales with him, but there are more questions in line before actual cheering:

“The Night King?”

Bran sighs.

“Escaped. Barely showed, to be honest.”

“And ours?” Theon asks.

Bran knows what he means. There’s a certain kind of intimacy, after all, that only waiting together can breed.

“Some losses— thank you,” Bran tells him as he tilts the flask toward Bran’s lips. Bran swallows it all down, thirstily. “But none of… None of our friends.”

Meera can see relief painting Tyrion’s and Podrick’s face, even Theon’s, who’s the most guarded about his emotions of them all.

“So we’re closer,” Tyrion can only conclude. He means closer to winning, of course.

Bran rests back against his wheel-chair as if he’s just ran a mile at full speed.

“Yes,” he says, hesitantly. “I believe we are.”

“No three-quarter ration?” Samwell asks.

“No,” Tyrion shakes his head. And then, he smiles. “No, my friend. I don’t think we’ll need it.”

Somehow, that lightens up the mood in the room, a silly happiness that allows them to, finally, rejoice in their victory. Theon smiles at Bran and brings him olives and bread; Tyrion, Samwell and Bronn leave the room talking in loud, cheerful voices. Meera turns to Podrick, and gives into the urge to hug him. The boy returns her embrace — but his arms weaken around Meera’s waist.

She draws back, embarrassed at first, and then worried as she looks at his face. He doesn’t look happy.

“Cheer up, Pod,” she says with a reassuring smile. “This is good news.”

“Then why is he not happy?” Podrick asks, anguished.

Meera turns around. Bran is quietly staring at the flames as he absently chews at a piece of bread. By his side, Theon holds out a bowl of berries, but he is too absorbed in his own thoughts to notice Bran’s introspection.

Meera cannot blame Theon; it’s not unusual for Bran to get lost in his own head, but she approaches her friend all the same. She slowly walks toward him and sits on the carpet, crossing her legs in butterfly-wings at his feet. He seems to awake from a stupor as his eyes focus on her face. He tries to give her a weak smile.

“Tired, my Prince?” She asks, gently. “I can take you to your bed. Perhaps you should sleep.”

Bran shrugs a little. “I don’t want to sleep. The nightmares are worse.”

“Worse than dead men?” Meera clicks her tongue. “I doubt it.”

Bran twists his nose and lets out another tired sigh. At their right, Theon subtly pays attention to them.

“At least here I know for certain what is happening. Or I can go back and see what already happened and cannot be changed. But lately I only have green dreams and they are all confusing and…” He shudders. “I don’t want to think about them. But I can’t ignore them either,” he says, anguished, and looks at the fire again.

Theon crawls until he can sit by Meera’s side. “How can we help you?” He asks. “We are here. You don’t have to do this alone.”

Bran frowns, as if the flames are talking to him. But Meera knows that isn’t true.

The gods never speak to Bran. None of them. The only thing he listens to, the only vision he has, is given by time.

“Fetch me a parchment and a quill,” Bran says. He sounds, suddenly, like a true Prince, the Lord of Winterfell he was supposed to be. His boyish worry is replaced by a placid, cold calm. “We need to send ravens.”

Theon promptly gets up, and while Meera waits, two ravens perch at his window, chirping. She frowns.

“What is happening, Bran?”

“We have to prepare for the worst,” he says. His voice is commanding, chilling, calm and silent as the night. “The Night King took a heavy loss today, but the battle was not hard for us. It was almost too easy. Whatever he is planning…”

He doesn’t finish the sentence.

And what do you mean by the worst? What could be worse? Meera thinks, but she doesn’t find it in her to ask it.

Theon comes back with two parchments and a quill. He wheels Bran’s chair toward his desk at the corner; Meera follows them. She watches, uneasy, as Bran’s clumsy hand-writing fills the first parchment.

“Where are these going?” She asks, crossing her arms.

“One to Harrenhal,” Bran says. He raises his eyes to her. “And another to King’s Landing.”

The ravens chirp again, louder, as if they are impatient, and Meera feels goosebumps running all over her spine.

“Are we going to attack her?” Meera asks. “She can still burn the city to ashes.”

“We are not going to attack the city. We are going to ask for more aid. If the worst happens, Harrenhal is our last chance.”

Meera wrinkles her brow, confused. “I thought the Queen hated all of us,” she says.

“She does. Cersei is not in King’s Landing anymore,” he says. “But Arianne Martell is. We’ll need all the help we can get.”

iv.

Craster’s Keep is not enough to shelter their forces, of course, so when the keep and the cellar were full, they settled camp in the forest around it. When the attack was over and the dead retreated and the world was calm and quiet again, when it was clear they won the battle, they raised tents — uncomfortable, rude things, made only to protect them from the winds; a dozen men cramped beneath the same improvised leather roof — or found caves.

The further North they go, the harsher the weather is. It snows all the time, hard, unforgiving.

Jon was offered a place inside Craster’s house; he refused. The brothers of the Night’s Watch stayed behind to protect the last gate, so he found his place among the wildlings. Daenerys also refused the protection of the Keep; she said she doesn’t feel any cold, and remained with her Dothraki instead (who could raise a tent faster than anyone Jon has ever seen).

In the first days, they slept. They found spots in the forest to make bonfires. Some wildlings went hunting. Nymeria’s pack — hundreds of wolves — settled their own sort of Wall around them: in the dark paths of the forest, quiet and still but always alert.

The world was suspiciously calm, and they were only waiting for Bran’s command to go further North and advance the front line even more, but they heard no word from Bran for three days, and Jon felt a cold sort of dread in the pit of his stomach.

He finds Jaime in front of the tent he shares with the Knights of the Vale, alone, feeding from the leg of a rabbit. “Ser,” Jon says.

The man raises his eyes, and then stands on his feet; it looks more like a habit than intentional deference.

“Your Grace,” Jaime answers. He is still one of the few people who call Jon that way.

Jon makes a move with his hand for Jaime to sit back on the trunk of the tree he is using as a bench, and mirrors him. He takes the meat from Jaime’s hand and gives it a bite, and they stare at the fire for a moment, enjoying its warmth.

“Where is your lady?” Jon asks. It’s rare that Brienne is seen without Jaime, or Jaime without Brienne.

“Sleeping,” Jaime points to the tent at their backs. “I had to use my prerogatives as Commander.” He hesitates, then. “She’s not my lady.”

Jon turns to him. “Oh,” he says, surprised.

“Brienne is too good a person for the likes of me,” Jaime chuckles, taking the meat back from his hands, sucking what’s left of the meat, throwing the bones in the fire. “The Dragon Queen?”

“Where would we be without her?” Jon twists his mouth. “No time for more than that.”

“No,” Jaime agrees. “No time for that at all.”

Jon stares at the fire again.

“Answer me honestly, Ser,” Jon asks. “In my place, would you have brought our men further North?”

Jaime Lannister seems to consider that question.

“Probably would have done it sooner,” he says, “I’m not a patient man.”

Despite everything, and caught by surprise, Jon laughs a little.

“I wish we could win this War purely out of restlessness,” Jon quips.

“War has many unpredictable elements, Your Grace,” Jaime shrugs. “We only won the battle for Craster’s Keep because the dead weren’t waiting. It was the element of surprise in our favor, thanks to Bran.” Jaime shrugs. “I still haven’t found a better strategy than to surprise your enemy.”

Jon looks ahead, suddenly serious.

“I don’t know which of your fathers gave you that brooding face of yours,” Jaime says, in a low voice, “or the stubborn honor. It could be either of them, honestly. But I think they would be both very proud of you,” Jaime says, almost softly.

Jon doesn’t turn to look him in the eye.

“Who told you?” There’s silence, and Jon shakes his head. “I swear by the old gods, your brother sometimes…”

“He didn’t mean you any harm,” Jaime says, defensively.

“He rarely means me harm,” Jon comments, absently, “and yet.”

“I guess he was just feeling overwhelmed with—” Jaime says, and, abruptly, stops talking.

His body shakes, and by reflex, Jon holds his arm, his shoulder, as the man shudders, his face pressed against Jon’s shoulder. “Ser?” He asks.

Jaime raises his head, and his face is childish. His eyes are scared, all white.

“Bran?” Jon asks.

“Jon,” Bran says. It’s never not completely disturbing, to listen to him through Jaime’s voice, Jaime’s body. He looks around, to the camp around them, as if he’s searching for something. “Jon, they’re coming.”

“Bran,” Jon says, soothingly keeping his hand on Jaime’s armored shoulder. “We are in the present. They’re already here. Look,” he points around them. “This is Craster’s Keep. We occupied it. Remember?”

“No, more of them,” Bran says. Jaime’s hands are shaking, agitated. “So many more of the dead and the White Walkers too, Jon, I can’t count them, but they’re coming all at once this time. It’s his whole army this time. All of them. They’re coming, running down from the Land of Always Winter—”

Jon listens, for a moment, to the sound beyond the chatting and laughing of the soldiers around them — to the forest. There’s nothing, nothing but silence. He pays attention to the wind — it is still.

It’s quiet. It’s too quiet.

Suddenly, Nymeria's pack all stand on their four paws, ears raised, eyes open, sniffing the air.

The wind doesn’t change, but it’s about to. Wolves feel it first.

“How many?” Jon asks, suddenly focused.

“I don’t know how many. A sea of them, an entire ocean of them. Hundreds of thousands?”

Hundreds of thousands. Jon repeats the numbers in his mind; he tries to visualize it, to turn it into an image, into something solid. He imagines it occupying the empty veins between the lines of trees surrounding them.

“Where?” Jon asks.

“They’re at the Fist, now,” Bran says, “that’s why I didn’t see them at first, because it’s dark, and because there are dead attacking the last gate, too, since yesterday, so I was looking at— I had my eyes on the Wall, I’m so sorry—”

Jon frowns. “The last gate? How? Where the hell did they come from? We’ve been here for days, no dead passed us by.”

“A group of them came down from Hardhome,” Bran explains. “Jon, there is no time for that. You have to leave. You all have. This is no open field. There’s no way for the Dothraki to be your first line of defense here.”

“And how fast?” Jon asks. “How much time do we have? Bran, Bran—” Jon holds Jaime’s chin. “Keep calm and talk to me.”

Jaime’s face is anguished, but he nods as if he’s trying to calm himself down. Jon has learned that when Bran is afraid is never a good sign. “Half a day? They run faster than us, so maybe… less than that?”

“I see,” Jon nods, calmly.

They don’t have that time. He cannot retreat thousands of living people through one single gate, a gate that is under attack, safely to the other side of the Wall.

He had left the Horn of Winter at the Wall; he couldn’t risk the Others taking it. He thinks of Tormund, for some reason, and then he thinks of the Night King, smiling, arms open wide at Hardhome.

Daring Jon to rise to battle.

“I’ll bring down the Wall,” Jon says. “That’ll pull him out of his hiding. I’ll try to kill him when he appears, but if we can’t, it’s safer for you to be ahead of him, as far away as possible.”

Jaime’s face is hard as winter, Stark-cold, nothing like Jaime at all. “I’ll flee to Harrenhal,” Bran answers. “He’ll occupy the North. Even when he comes after me, you still need to send men to Winterfell.”

“As we planned,” Jon nods. “Go.”

Bran leaves Jaime, then: as if Jaime is exhaling him out, as if Bran is heavy air. Of the three of them, Jaime always suffers the most whenever Bran appears, particularly without warning like this; Jon is ready to hold him when he curls forward, almost falling.

“Jaime, Jaime,” Jon says, soothingly. “With me, you’re with me.”

Jaime, whoever, has something neither he or Arya have: flawless memory of everything Bran does and says in his body, perfect awareness.

The pair of Lannister green eyes boring into Jon are in shock.

“Jon,” Jaime says, finally himself again, “are you completely mad?”

“The Night King is going to trap us,” Jon says. “As you warned he would. He’s going to drive us against the Wall. And our last gate is under attack.”

“You can’t bring down the Wall,” Jaime says through a clenched jaw. “It’s what he wants you to do. There are other castles, other gates—”

“We don’t know if the other gates are functional,” Jon answers. “Think, Jaime. His full army is dozens and dozens of times bigger than ours. If we bring the Wall down now, we can tell our men to retreat. We run to the South, and we can separate the dead from the living, so Daenerys and I can burn as many of them as possible,” Jon explains. “And if we don’t kill the Night King here and now, then maybe we can have something of a fair battle at the Twins, with even numbers. But if we don’t bring the Wall down now, we’ll have nowhere to run and no way to make this distinction when they reach us. If we’re trapped and we’re attacked by hundreds of thousands of dead men, all of ours will die. We’re not going to survive this. We need to ensure our retreat.”

“If we don’t kill the Night King here and now they are going to spread across Westeros,” Jaime almost spits out. “The kingdoms are counting on us—”

“I am trying to protect the kingdoms. These men, our men, are the kingdoms,” Jon argues, pointing to the camp around them, still oblivious to their conversation. “Ser, I don’t have time. Do you see any other way?”

Jaime shakes his head, but refuses to utter an answer. “There has to be,” he mutters.

Jon puts both of his hands on Jaime’s shoulders and looks him in the eye; even in the midst of the snow, Jon feels something hot and ancient burning beneath his skin, beneath the layers of wool and the coat of mail.

“Ser Jaime, this is his price,” Jon says.

“The price for what?” Jaime asks.

“For showing up,” Jon explains. “He wants Bran and Westeros. Bran is not here, and we have the Horn to keep him from our lands. This War is not going to end until the Night King shows up. But if we bring down the Wall, he will, and we know where he will be going. We’ll finish this at last. Do you understand me?”

Around them, there’s only snow and darkness and death.

“So we’ll bring it down,” Jaime whispers, as if he can’t believe he’s actually saying the words.

“Very well.” Jon stands on his feet. “I’ll speak to Dany. I’ll fly back to the Wall, warn our brothers, and grab the Horn of Winter. She’ll fly ahead and burn the army that is coming.”

Jaime gets up on his feet, too, looking around. “And what would you have me do?”

“Lead them South,” Jon says, and he feels ice and stone slipping into his throat, into his voice, the Lord Commander that he never had time to learn how to be and that yet cannot let go of him. “Lead them to the Twins.”

“Someone has to stay here and slow down the attack,” Jaime murmurs.

“No,” Jon shakes his head. “The dragons will slow down the attack. You have to run. We are probably going to spread. It’s inevitable. Find the leader in each army and order them to retreat, to run, Ser Jaime, as fast as you can. Do not let them linger. Do not stop, do not look back. There’s no time to gather clothes, food, nothing but our swords and the clothes of our bodies. Anyone who can ride a horse, grab a horse, and go.”

“All right,” Jaime nods again, jaw tight. “We can do it.”

“And when you hear the Horn—”

“I know.”

Jon takes his hand. “Good luck, Commander.”

And it occurs to Jon he simply does not know if he’ll see Jaime Lannister again.

It doesn’t matter, not anymore. He goes to Daenerys as Jaime goes to each tent, gathering the head of the armies and waking up the sleepers.

In his blood, Jon can feel Viserion’s approach.

v.

Sansa comes to the solar after hours in the nursery, and finds Tyrion asleep on the settee.

He’s breathing deeply, his lips half-parted, but his brow frowned as if he’s not having the most peaceful of sleeps. Standing by his side, Sansa bends down just enough to cast a shadow on his face, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t wince: he must be really tired, she thinks, for unless her memory is betraying her, his sleep is not usually that heavy.

She’s been trying to avoid him since their last confession.

It was easy, before, when she was officially mad at him, to ignore his presence, fifteen feet away from her, right there across the solar. It was easy to enjoy the loneliness without being alone, to make a house out of him, when the space between them was filled with silence: to have him without having him. It was the only way they ever learned how.

Now they can’t ignore each other anymore. Now, she wants to get up and walk toward his desk and ask him about the availability of their sheep while she looks into his eyes. She wants him to come to her and fill her empty cup of wine, even though she does not want to drink it. She wants him to offer a break before the hearth. She would sit close to him on the couch, closer enough for their arms to brush, and maybe—

Sansa’s been avoiding him since.

She works when he’s sleeping and retires to sleep when he’s working. She tries to ignore the pull in the air, the stiffness on her back whenever he shifts in his chair, as if the slightest of his movements could cast a wave that would drown her all the way to the other side of the solar. She’s been avoiding him.

And now, she finds him asleep.

She goes to her own rooms, finds her own blanket, and comes back to the solar. This time, she kneels by the settee, and raises her hand to touch his face; then stops halfway, studying him, the rhythm of his breathing, fighting the lump in her throat.

She’s tired of crying for him.

Tears, Cersei had once said, are not your only weapon.

Perhaps distance is not the best strategy, Sansa muses, at last brushing his hair out of his brow.

He still doesn’t wake up.

It wasn’t her initial plan, but it could work; the North certainly deserves her swallowing her pride. If he had any hope of marrying her, would he give up on the ridiculous idea of marrying her and Jon? Would he give up his post as Hand of the Queen if she made him a better offer? Was she a better offer?

Certainly it would make things easier, if she and the Dragon Queen could exchange the men in their lives. With the right move, she would have Tyrion by her side, Daenerys could keep Jon as her King or her heir or in whatever capacity she needed him, and the North would keep the crown.

Since she discovered about Jon’s parents, she’d been so single-minded about him as the center of it all, as their last chance at freedom. If Jon were King on the Iron Throne, he would never force the North to bend. A marriage between him and Daenerys was the most natural solution to ensure that and avoid a War between contestants. It would be, really, the simplest way out of this, had not Jon been Daenerys’ only hope of continuing her line.

She considers Tyrion, still asleep, for a moment longer. What if it isn’t Jon? What if it’s still Tyrion, after all, the piece she should be trying to move, the man who could move the Queen?

When she was a child, her father taught her that simply saying someone’s name when they were asleep in an inappropriate moment, like a dinner or a feast, would be enough to wake them. You don’t need to scream, he’d conspired with Sansa. You can just whisper their names in their ear and they will rise.

“Tyrion,” Sansa whispers.

He blinks his green eyes awake. Looks at her and, for the fraction of a second, she sees the sheer terror in his face, even after he recognizes her.

“You fell asleep,” she murmurs, softly.

“Oh, hi,” he says. His voice is sleep-hoarse, and he looks around as if to remind himself where he is. He presses a wrist against his eye. “Sorry. I just— wanted to rest my eyelids.”

“It’s all right,” she says. “I brought you a blanket— may I?”

He’s looking at her as if she’s a hungry beast, and he is the prey, when he nods.

Sansa spreads the blanket over him, tucks it under his chin. She remembers, distantly, that he didn’t have a mother to do this, that his sister most likely didn’t fill that void, and in the back of her mind, Petyr smiles, pleased.

“It smells like you,” he says.

“Because it’s mine,” Sansa replies. She withdraws a little. “You need it now more than I do; I’ll let you rest your eyelids in peace.”

“No,” he reaches out and wraps his fingers around her hand where it’s still holding the hem of the blanket. “Stay.”

Sansa stays. His touch startles her, and she aches for more of it.

Don’t get distracted, Petyr chides in her ear. There’s your chance.

Instead of untangling her wrist from his grasp, she slides her hand further up, coils it around his ear, and he closes his eyes with a sigh. She can see his strain, the way he’s trying not to lean against it.

See? Petyr says, with a smirk. Easy.

“Were you afraid of me?” Sansa asks, with honest curiosity. “When you woke up?”

“Yes,” he answers, simply, and opens his eyes.

“Afraid I would kill you in your sleep?” Sansa presses further.

He shrugs under the blankets. “Maybe.”

“Why would I do that?”

“For vengeance,” he says. “To eliminate a potential threat.” And, with a grin: “For the simple pleasure of killing.”

“I take no pleasure in killing,” Sansa replies.

“Of course you don’t,” he agrees, but the lopsided smirk hasn’t left his lips.

She knows, just knows, that under the blankets, he is fisting his hand to keep from touching her face too. But he hasn’t moved away. Why do you like danger so much? She wonders, tilting her head as she moves her hand to his hair.

“If I told you I just smeared poison on my lips,” she asks, “would you still let me kiss you?”

She meant it as a dark joke, and so it still manages to surprise her the readiness in his answer, his earnest eyes: “Yes.”

And Sansa thinks, oh.

She leans over the settee, until her face is hovering above his, inches away. “They say it’s a woman’s weapon,” she whispers, and to be quite honest, she is almost amused.

“I’ve heard,” he nods, and he’s slightly, but undeniably, breathless. “Sansa—”

Sansa has heard the stories and the tales and the songs, and has known the truth behind them. She puts a hand on Tyrion’s cheek — this man who is her friend and her enemy — and wonders if she can win a kingdom with a kiss alone.

She tells herself, This is for the North, and presses her mouth on his. She feels his breath, warm and inviting, and feels his hand, finally leaving the confines of the blanket to twist on her hair, his tongue sliding over the seam of her lips; she opens herself to him, and forgets about the North completely.

He kisses her as if the world is ending, which is indeed happening, and as if he’ll never have the chance again, which might as well be true. And she lets him, because she’s been starving for it. Winter is a time for hunger. She presses her chest against his and lets him cross the line just so, just enough so he can have something to miss and grieve and think of what he’s losing when he’s alone drafting plans for his Queen; he touches her throat, her cheek-bone, and — gently — the sides of her breasts; he sucks her lower lip, Sansa moans against his mouth, doesn’t even need to fake it.

And while he drinks from her, she keeps thinking, I should have done this sooner, I should have done this before we even knew about Jon. Perhaps it would have spared them—

Well. It’s useless to think about that, the what ifs, what could have happened. Had she done it sooner, she wouldn’t have the leverage to use it now, wouldn’t have him craving for her forgiveness and for her touch the way he is beneath her at the moment. And that’s what he wanted, after all, wasn’t it? To be able to place this love in the game, to make use of it?

She palms a hand against his chest and reluctantly pushes him away. He chases her mouth, as if he’s not had enough, and Sansa lifts her thumb to press her pad against his swollen lips, stopping him.

His head falls back against the settee again with a groan. Through the fog of lust in his eyes, he focuses on her face. “Where did that come from?”

“I had this urge. You look so peaceful when you’re asleep,” she lies.

“And you decided to disturb my peace,” he mutters, feigning discontentment. Sansa only smiles. “I know what you’re doing, woman.”

She’s counting on the fact he knows. “Giving you some perspective?” she asks, demurely. “You said you were blocked. Well, I am not.”

“I also know,” he says, a little more somberly, “that on such matters, I usually end up paying.”

“I believe you just called me a whore,” Sansa says, raising one eyebrow.

“No,” he answers, softly, and laces his fingers through hers, holding her hand firmly against his heart. “Everyone has a price, Sansa.”

“You know mine,” she answers, and lets him hold her hand, because you can’t take all the hope away from a man like that. She doesn’t need him desperate; she needs him hopeful.

“I have no intention of betraying Daenerys,” he says, in a cautious, gentle tone.

“I didn’t expect you to,” Sansa answers, trying to stop her own fingers from growing stiff in his grasp. “I only had hoped you would advise her properly. You’re a smart man, my lord. I’m positive that you can come up with a better strategy for your Queen.” She looks into his eyes and smiles. “Sometimes all one needs is a little inspiration.”

He chuckles under his breath, and brings her knuckles to his mouth. “Inspiration,” he says, amused, his mouth and beard brushing on her skin. It’s distracting. “You know very well I have nothing against the North in particular, but Daenerys’ alliances are fragile now. Caution is critical. There are other kingdoms that could, perhaps, see a free North as an inspiration. I need to think of what’s best for her now.”

“I do not differ, my lord. I just believe it is in her best interest not to make an enemy out of me,” Sansa says, in a delicate voice.

He stares her in the eye from under his eyelashes, his pupils suddenly dilated, wide with want amidst the green of his eyes.

“We can’t let Jon go,” he says, carefully. “You must know that.”

“I understand. But if Jon can be her Prince and heir here, he can be her Prince and heir anywhere. If all you need him for is to breed heirs, he could marry anyone.”

He nods, not in agreement but in understanding, which is enough for the night. In a fair game, the players know the rules.

“A kingdom for your hand, then,” he says, in tones of questioning.

“I’m not cheap,” Sansa shrugs.

He pauses. “And your forgiveness?”

Sansa sighs. If he didn’t look at her like that, perhaps she would be able to think more clearly. This isn’t about forgiveness; it never was. She looks away. “Think of it as atonement,” she says, hating how much she phrases it as Petyr would in her place. “You gave up on me to give the North to your Queen. Give me the North back. Convince Daenerys to let the North go without war, and you can have me too.”

“And we get to keep Jon?”

Sansa sighs. “Yes,” she says.

“And you and I would live—”

“Here, in Winterfell,” she says, confidently. “I’m afraid you would have to name a successor for your post.”

“I don’t need to name it. Daenerys would choose Missandei regardless of my advice.” Tyrion smirks. “But the North is not going to be very enthusiastic about a Lannister as their King. Or even your Consort.”

Sansa curls the corners of her mouth. That really could be a source of complication for the future, and probably what he meant by being blocked.

“Arya can have the crown,” she ponders. She’s not sure her sister would like being Queen, but the gods know Arya is competent enough for it. “Or Bran. He is the rightful heir anyway, and I’m sure he’ll be more tractable once this War against the dead is over.” Sansa could be Hand to either Arya or Bran, and would happily be their advisor. As long as the North remained free, and a Stark ruled from Winterfell…

“I see,” he sighs. “What if we grant you the title? You can call yourselves Kings in the North, the way Dorne still has Princes and Princesses… You can even wear the crown, if you’d like. But still keeping the North as a principality of the Seven Kingdoms and recognizing Daenerys as sovereign.”

Sansa narrows her eyes. “I don’t like the sound of this.”

“It’s important for Daenerys to keep the kingdoms together as one,” Tyrion explains, absently stroking her long fingers, one by one. “Yara asked for her title, and Daenerys granted it, but the Iron Islands are still part of the country and at our service, perhaps now more than ever before. We can recognize your distinct culture and history without cutting all the ties between us. Whether you like it or not, you are going to need the South when this War ends, Sansa. You can’t just burn all the bridges—”

“I’m proposing a peaceful alliance between two free, equal countries,” Sansa interrupts. “How is that burning bridges? This is me building bridges. I haven’t forgotten your sister, my lord. I’m still determined to see the end of her reign. We’ll defeat her together, and make sure the Iron Throne belongs to your Queen. We just refuse to be part of what the Iron Throne represents.”

“A coalition of our strengths? Integration, convergence, harmony?”

“The right to remain silent,” Sansa contends. “While our people are murdered and betrayed, the obligation to forgive and forget everything that has been done against the North in its name.”

“That was War. We are fighting for peace here. The North is part of this country like any other kingdom—”

“What does it mean, in practice, what you’re proposing?” She inquires. “Will we still owe her taxes? Will the lords and ladies of the North be able to serve the monarch they chose without fear of deposition or southern meddling? Will we be free to make alliances at our own discretion with other kingdoms, regardless of her approval? Will she treat us with equal deference, monarch to monarch, or will we still look at her from down our bent knees?”

He delicately sinks his head further on the arm of the settee. “Why are you so stubborn?” He exclaims. “It’s a high price you’re setting, Sansa.”

“And am I not worth it, my lord?” She asks, coyly.

His gaze finds hers again, and something scrutinizing settles there while he studies her.

“You can set your terms, too,” Sansa reminds him. “Where would you like to spend our honeymoon? Maybe Dorne?” She slips her hand out of his grasp to toy with the fastenings of his jerkin. “Or the Arbor. I remember well you fell in the graces of Lord Redwyne, and he makes good wine…”

“You have a sweet tongue,” he whispers almost desperately and reaches up for her chin. “Come here.”

Sansa does his bidding, and this time, she kisses him. His hand strokes her face, and when their tongues touch again, she feels his moan in the back of her throat. It’s careful and sweet, this time, and she lets it linger just a second too long — and then retreats, slowly.

“Promise me you’ll give it a thought,” she murmurs, trying not to get as breathless as he already is.

“Oh, I will think of nothing else,” he whispers wistifully. He touches his own lips, feels the wetness Sansa left there. “So how long do I have left? Until the poison sets in?”

Sansa chortles through her nose, pauses as she lets her hands slip away from him. “What’s the fun in telling you?” She asks.

“I might as well drink it to the last drop,” he says, looking at her lips as if he means to kiss her again.

Perhaps he did mean it; they’ll never know, because just as he’s reaching up to palm her cheek again, someone opens the door. Or breaks it, actually, without knocking and abruptly.

It’s Podrick.

Sansa withdraws, but it’s hard to explain why she is kneeling by Tyrion’s side as he lies down, hovering inches away from his face. She sits on the ground, discreetly cleans her lower lip with her thumb. Tyrion doesn’t even bother. He just stares at the young man at the door with something akin to murder in his eyes.

“This better be important,” Tyrion says.

“It is,” Podrick says, breathless. He looks at Sansa, at Tyrion, at Sansa again. “I am— sorry, m’lady.”

“As in life-and-death important,” Tyrion emphasizes.

“It is,” Podrick insists. “The Wall fell. Bran has to leave.”

vi.

Bran Stark is sitting in his usual place, in front of the hearth of his rooms, surrounded by the small crowd of expectant habitants of Winterfell that every day waited to hear news of the battlefield from him. This particular report has always been the one everyone dreaded the most.

Ser Bronn and Varys are flanking Theon’s each side. Meera is standing behind Bran’s wheel-chair. Podrick remains at Tyrion’s side when they arrive, and Sansa hushes toward her brother.

The Three-Eyed Raven, then, repeats it, for good measure: extreme measures had to be taken and the Wall has fallen as a consequence of it. They must carry on with the plan and Bran has to leave as soon as possible.

“This is madness,” Sansa says.

Tyrion would be relieved to hear in a clear voice what everyone is thinking, but there’s little relief about any part of this situation.

“That was always the plan,” Bran says, shaking his head. He has a determined, focused look about him that Tyrion hadn’t seen since their great reunion to plan the battle, when everyone was safely sheltered in Winterfell and permanent darkness was not even a possibility being considered. “The Night King is coming after me. I need to be one step ahead, remember? We’re sitting in a graveyard. He can’t stop at Winterfell. I have to go to Harrenhal, and if they don’t kill him now, the armies will try to stop the dead at the Twins.”

“That plan was before, when we had sunlight,” Sansa argues. “How do you plan to get to Harrenhal this quickly, in the dark? In this weather?”

“We can follow the White Knife until White Harbor,” Theon suggests, quietly.

“The river is frozen,” Meera reminds him.

“But the sea isn’t,” Theon replies. “We don’t need to sail through the river, we just need to follow its course so we won’t get lost in the dark. The dead don’t swim and they don’t sail ships. We just need to get you safely to White Harbor, and we can sail to the Saltpans from there.”

Tyrion shakes his head. “The Saltpans?” Gods above. When was the last time he heard that name? “Is there even a port still there? Or people?”

“Lord Cox’s daughters are alive,” Varys answers. “And they’re vassals to your Uncle Edmure.”

“It’s a small harbor, but it is a harbor,” Theon says. “From Saltpans to Harrenhal it must be a one day trip, less than that if we don’t stop.”

“And it would give us the advantage to stop at White Harbor to gather the dragonglass that Lord Manderly has been stealing,” Bran says, nonchalantly.

Everyone turns to him at once in stunned silence. Particularly Sansa.

“I am sorry?” She asks, in a burning rage.

“Lord Manderly kept a small share of every weekly load of dragonglass you sent to him,” Bran says, as if it’s really a very small matter as they all listen, flabbergasted. “He’s been forging weapons for months now.”

Varys chuckles under his breath. “I’ve always thought him a smart man,” the Spider says, as if he admires Manderly. Tyrion glares at him a not now gaze.

“And it didn’t occur to you to share this information with me?” Sansa asks.

“It was too late when I saw it,” he answers, simply. “The armies had already left for the Wall. I just looked at White Harbor when I really started to worry about evacuation plans.”

“Even still, you should have told me!” Sansa exclaims. Tyrion is distracted by the sheer, raw beauty of her anger. “Right away, as soon as you suspected it! Gods, I’ve been doing business with this man for months! What else has he been stealing from me?”

“Nothing,” Bran answers, in a guarded tone. “In everything else he’s been fair and just; he doesn’t count the dragonglass loads as theft.”

“It’s not theft?” She seethes. “That was for people who are risking their lives on the battlefield! I spent months far from home to get these weapons!”

“He thought the weapons were for the North and White Harbor is part of the North,” Bran shrugs. Sansa is looking at her little brother with so much fury that Bran raises his hands. “Don’t look at me like that! I’m just the messenger!”

“How much?” Sansa presses further, her voice boiling. “Half of it?”

“It depended on the load,” Bran answers. “Not much, to be fair, not enough to be missed. Sometimes one third of it, sometimes one quarter, or even less than that.” Bran shakes his head, as if he’s trying to concentrate. “We are getting distracted. My point is, imagining the worst case scenario: if the living don’t kill the Night King right now as the Wall falls, the dead will march south, and the living will gather at the Twins for the next battle. And if for some reason they can’t contain the dead when they reach the Twins, the armies at Harrenhal don’t have appropriate weapons. So Theon’s plan has the advantage of providing that for us.”

“Is there anything else you think you should tell me, Bran?” Sansa asks, tapping one of her feet on the ground impatiently and crossing her arms beneath her bosom.

“A lot, actually, now that you mention it,” Bran answers, “but I don’t really have time to explain. We have to go.”

Sansa fists her hands and slowly spreads her fingers, as if she’s training the muscles of her hand to hit someone in the face. “I’m going with you.”

“That’s a horrible idea,” Bronn mutters.

“Why is that, Ser?” Sansa asks, bitterly.

“Because if you go, Tyrion will follow,” Bronn says, pointing toward Tyrion unceremoniously. “And I have to protect the little fucker, otherwise his Queen or his brother or both are going to kill me when they come back. So if he goes, I have to follow. And I don’t want to go out in this weather.” He crosses his arms over his chest. “I’m warm here, I have food, and out there, we’re going to fucking die.”

Sansa looks at him, and Tyrion thinks that ten minutes ago, he was contemplating marriage with this woman, negotiating kingdoms to finally have her, and now they’re marching off to their frozen deaths. Voluntarily.

“You can stay,” she says; closes her eyes, as if in pain, and amends, “you should stay.”

“Not a chance,” Tyrion replies, calm but firm. “If you’re going, I’m going.”

“You should stay,” Theon says, looking at Sansa. “I can take Bran to White Harbor. I’ll protect him with my life, you know I will.”

“I’m not leaving Bran alone, so of course I’m going,” Meera says, looking at Sansa, “but may I be honest? In this weather, with dead men coming for Bran, perhaps a larger group would increase our chances of surviving. And if the plan is to take the dragonglass in White Harbor with us… you are best suited to handle Lord Manderly than we are.”

“It’s settled,” Sansa says, with finality. “I am going. Samwell can be castellan in our absence.”

“I’ll go with you, my lady,” Podrick promptly vows. “I’ll protect you all the way.”

“You shouldn’t,” Bran says, guiltily looking at his sister. “I can handle Lord Manderly. There should always be a Stark in Winterfell, and our people will be here.”

Sansa kneels in front of him and palms his face. “The best I can do to help Winterfell and the North now is to get you safely to Harrenhal,” she says. “I’m not going to let you die alone in those snows.”

“So both of us should die?” Bran asks, with dark humor.

“All of us should die, you mean,” Bronn suggests, “since everyone in this room is going.”

“Not me,” Varys raises his hand. “I am staying.”

“A sensible choice. If you ask me, horrible idea to have the Hand of the Queen and two of the heirs of the King out there, being chased by the most powerful creature we know, but don’t mind me,” Bronn shrugs. “I’m just a former sellsword.”

“The mercenary has a point,” Varys agrees, calmly, as if their world is not about to be invaded by a host of dead people who eat human flesh.

“Bloody hells,” Tyrion mutters, “no one is going to die.”

“Exactly,” Sansa agrees. “No one is dying. It’s the whole point of a larger group. We’ll protect each other.”

“Then we should hurry,” Bran says. “Jon will try to stop him, but if the Night King manages to escape, we only have three days of advantage. We should make the best of it.”

Chapter Text

i.

Arya is riding alone.

Well, not alone. In the dark, all around her, a pack of wolves runs amidst the forest, their pace faster than her horse. She tries to see through the branches, but it’s a moonless night. She bends forward, leaning down toward the neck of her horse to escape from the arms of the forest: hands of wood threatening to grab her and throw her on the ground.

She cannot fall. Nor can her horse stumble. The wind is unnaturally cold. She cannot hear them — they can never be heard until it’s too late — but she knows the dead are not too far behind. And if she falls, they’ll get to her, and she’ll die.

Fear cuts deeper than swords. Arya rides faster.

In the chaos of Jaime’s announcement, she had sent part of her wolves to lead off the Unsullied and the Khalasar on their way south, and then helped the wildlings and the northmen to organize their way out. Brienne was at her side the whole time — until she wasn’t, until a group of dead men arrived and everyone simply started to run or fight or do both at once.

Arya fought, until she found herself surrounded by nothing but darkness: the last one left behind.

Somewhere in the skies, above the net of branches over her head, hidden from her sight, Daenerys Targaryen is flying atop her dragon and will soon burn this forest, infested with dead men, to ashes.

Arya hears, then, a long, wailing cry that seems to sweep over her like a wave, that travels to the end of the world and echoes back to her: a horn. But it’s graver, longer, sadder, as if Night became a sound. Her horse neighs, means to break. She whips the reins harder. Faster, faster, come on—

The wailing of the horn lingers in the air, dwindles like the last breath of a moribund man and eventually dies; far, far away, the Wall crumbles down— her horse cries out, whining, and rears up. Arya tries to hold on, tries to shush it, to calm it down, but it is no use.

The animal violently shakes with fear, and she falls to the ground.

Her horse flees. Her wrists hurt; she touches her forehead, near her eyebrow, and finds it wet with blood. For a moment, she is left with the sound of waning hooves, and then nothing.

Absolute silence: no sound but the wind.

I’ll die here, she thinks. I’ll die here, cold and alone. She reaches for her nameless Valyrian sword.

And then, somewhere in the branches, a crow caws. Suddenly, her world goes black.

ii.

Arya opens her eyes first. She breathes with a gasp second.

Her body is back. Her feet and hands, all hers again. No sign of a horse, but her legs burn, and she’s breathless, so she must have ran here. It’s dark, she can’t see a thing, but she can feel the shape of a hilt in her closed fist. She adjusts the grip, fixes her stance, raises her elbow, all without much thought. Muscle memory.

There’s silence, so much silence. Amidst the leafless, thick branches, she can see patches of sky burning golden orange: tongues of fire crossing the dark dome.

Dragons, she thinks, but it’s a faraway sight, nowhere near her. The fire is not a threat to her, but neither is it close enough to illuminate up the clearing she’s in, or to warm her. Here, in the middle of nowhere, it is dark and cold.

Arya hears an annoying sound. She cannot see the crow perched on a low branch, but she can hear it, and hearing is all she needs.

Quiet, Bran, she thinks, but Bran cannot hear thoughts, as far as she’s aware.

She closes her eyes — it won’t make any difference anyway in the pitch-darkness of the forest — and when the dead come for her, her sword-hand is ready. If there’s one thing she knows how to do, it is to fight in the dark.

iii.

It happens over and over.

Every time it happens, she’s in a different place — another clearing, a denser part of the forest, the ruins of what was once the Wall, a burning water spring, an abandoned village. Every time it happens, she’s alone but for a crow. Once, as soon as she opens her eyes as herself again, there’s a horse nearby; the next time, the animal is gone.

Bran comes and takes her mind, takes her body, takes her away from one place to another, and she never knows if it will be the last time, if she will open her eyes as herself again at all.

iv.

The dead come to Arya in clusters, as is their habit — she finds herself fighting them guided by her ear alone, her only clues are the grunts and groans and hushes of wind in the dark. Then, after she’s brought them down, it’s over — the world is filled with nothingness until she opens her eyes again, sword in hand, to slay another load of dead people.

It happens and keeps happening until she’s lost track of time and of her own body; until she’s past exhaustion, until she wants to cry in that crucial span of time — the blink of an eye, only — she feels Bran has come to take control. And it goes on until she cannot bear it any longer.

It’s over, Arya decides, and gives up: sometimes Death comes and you cannot say not today. She will not fight anymore. Bran cannot force her. But she opens her eyes to find her hand free, without a sword, and instinct, despite her resoluteness, has her reaching for the hilt of her Valyrian blade, because there’s movement around her, and in the Long Night movement only ever means—

“Wait, wait, wait! Arya! It’s me!” says someone. “What in the Seventh Hell—”

It’s dark, and her eyes have a hard time adapting at first; but the dead, remarkably, do not speak. They only grunt and moan. The White Walkers talk in a language no one understands, and Arya is sure someone just called her by her name.

Still her sword-hand keeps raised, her stance ready. She tries to will her body to relax; can’t do it. She’s still slowly gaining consciousness of herself again.

This is my left arm, behind my back. This is my right hand, holding the bone-hilt of a nameless sword. These are my feet, standing a little wider than my shoulders for better balance. These are my breathing lungs. This is my beating heart.

She feels like a wild beast.

“Lower your weapon, girl,” says someone else.

“She was just speaking to me!”

“It wasn’t her, it was her brother,” the second voice retorts. “She can’t remember. Give her a moment.”

“Arya, it’s me,” the first person repeats.

She recognizes their voice before she can discern the face.

“Gendry,” she murmurs, and repeats — a question: “Gendry?”

“Yes, Gendry,” he confirms, soothingly. “Come on. Drop this sword before you hurt me or yourself—”

“Tell Bran to stop,” she cries. Truly cries, like a stupid little child, sobbing and all, the tears hot and thick on her cheeks, salty on her mouth. “I don’t want to do this anymore. Is he listening?” She looks around. Tries to find the bird, the raven with its annoying chirp, its three all-knowing eyes. “Are you listening, Bran? I don’t want you to do it anymore!”

Gendry reaches for her fingers, stiff with cold and tension, and untangles them from the grip of the sword.

“It’s over now, Arya,” he promises.

She’s vaguely aware they are on a road, surrounded by nothing, but despite the absence of trees she can still hear a raven tweeting far away, somewhere in the night sky. For a second, Arya is too busy being cradled by Gendry. He holds her against him, his arms like towers. He is so warm that she wants to cry even more, just from relief. Even through the layers of their furs, there’s nothing like human warmth.

“You’re safe,” Gendry promises. “We’ll keep you safe now. You’re not alone anymore.”

“How can you know?” She cries against his chest, and lets him hug her. She feels like a tamed beast now. “Bran— Bran wants me to—”

Boy, girl, it doesn’t matter. You’re a sword, Syrio’s voice says.

The memory covers the world with his blood.

But then a wolf sniffs her clothes, and whines, and Arya cries even harder. She lets Gendry go to kneel on the dirty snow. “Nymeria,” she breathes with relief. “My girl…”

Where is your pack? Arya wonders, but she’s too selfish to let Nymeria go.

“Bran was just trying to bring you to us,” the second voice answers. “We were waiting for you.”

Now Arya realizes the second voice is Beric Dondarrion. Thoros stands by his side as per usual, and the Hound is a shadow, as dark as the night, behind them both, warily and silently observing her.

She shivers. Nymeria growls on the back of her throat, and Arya shushes her.

“Shhh, girl,” she says. “It’s fine, we are fine now,” she tries to reassure the wolf, though to be honest, Arya is not quite sure herself.

She looks for Gendry’s eyes, always kind, and he smiles at her.

“Come,” he murmurs. “We saved you some food.”

v.

She has a hard time sleeping, at first, so she volunteers to stay with Gendry on duty and he finally explains the situation to her, as well as he’s able.

The Brotherhood Without Banners take shifts in pairs: two of them stay awake, and the others sleep. Beric and Thoros always go together, to bed or guard. Gendry tells her that won’t change, probably, because of—

Well, he tries to explain to her the inexplicable, because they’re Beric and Thoros. No point in splitting them apart. So Arya will stay on duty with Gendry or the Hound.

Gendry gives her raw meat. She asks where they can gather wood to light up a bonfire and roast it, maybe?

“No fires,” Gendry says. “It can attract people.”

“The dead are afraid of fire,” Arya says.

“Living people,” Gendry explains.

But the living are not our enemy, she thinks, but then realizes she doesn’t actually believe that.

They stopped at an abandoned stone tower — they’re still too far North for inns. Before they settled in for rest, Beric and the Hound scanned the place, looking for people — dead or alive. But there was no one.

“The smallfolk fled to Winterfell,” Gendry explains. Pauses. “At least the smart ones. We stopped by some villages, met people, tried to convince them to come with us. But some folks would rather die than leave their home.”

Arya nods, sharing the raw flesh of a rabbit with Nymeria, and does not say a thing.

“When we get further south it will be better,” Gendry says. “Things are still a bit uneasy after the Fall, but past Winterfell it will be safer to light up bonfires,” he continues.

The Fall, Arya assumes, must be the falling of the Wall.

“Why?” Arya asks, burying her fingers in the warmth of Nymeria’s fur.

“Because the road’s further from the forest there,” he says.

It’s true: the stretch of road they’re on right now is flanked by a small area of clear land, but soon the trees edge in. When she traveled with her father South from Winterfell, the surrounding forest wasn’t so close, so dense.

“Your brother told us to stick to the Kingsroad,” Gendry continues.

“In the open?” Arya questions, licking her fingers. “Isn’t that more dangerous?”

Gendry shakes his head. “The dead hide in the forests. They’re afraid of open places,” he points to the night sky. “Dragons.”

Arya looks up, remembering the darkness cut in half by dragonfire, at the Fall. She wonders if Nymeria’s pack is there in the deep forest, tearing dead men to pieces without their leader, their she-wolf.

“Where are we?” she asks. “Is this the Gift? The new Gift?”

“We’re about to cross the Last River. You’ve been away for a while,” Gendry chuckles. “Anyway, further South there will be more inns, too, so if the people ran away as they should, probably more dead horses, more meat, more places to rest safely,” Gendry says. “Until we get there.”

He sounds confident.

“Until we get where?” Arya asks. She feels she was supposed to know the answer to that and for some reason can’t remember, as if the answer has lost its meaning in the face of the Fall.

Without a Wall to protect them, what is there left to do but run away, now, and survive? Walk, walk, walk in the night, until—

But Gendry just frowns at her.

“To the next battle,” he says, as if it were obvious. “Remember? To the Twins.”

vi.

They’re way past the Long Lake when Melisandre comes to them.

“At least the girl is safe,” Melisande is murmuring, “and that is all that matters, for now.”

“Come with us, my lady,” it’s Thoros’ voice, a whisper somehow fierce in the dark. “You’ll be safe, too.”

Later, when Arya remembers the long trip to the Twins with the Brotherhood Without Banners, she’ll think that it was odd to find Melisandre so soon down the road; but then again, dwelling on it just a little longer, she’ll realize there’s simply no point on the journey too soon or too late for Melisandre to appear at all. She’s never expected, and yet never a surprise.

“The dark cannot touch me,” Melisandre answers quietly. “Do not worry, Thoros. Take heart.”

Arya will wonder, too, if it was a coincidence that the Red Woman happened to come to them on the occasion that Thoros and Beric were on shift while she, Gendry and Sandor slept.

Or were supposed to sleep; when she rose, Gendry was starting to stir by her side and Sandor was already standing on his feet, keenly watching while Melisandre, Thoros and Beric talked at a distance, three shades of red heads assembled, speaking in hushed tones about their fiery god, around a bonfire— it’s not everywhere they can light a fire; she wonders if they’ve lit it to warm themselves or to listen to their god.

They’ve been walking for what felt like days and days without rest and without seeing anyone, dead or alive, in their way. The landscape is like a snowy desert: when the half-moon comes out of its hiding behind the clouds, Arya can see only white around her, and black above her.

The whole world, she has learnt, is a giant, unescapable, death-worshiping House of Black and White.

She cannot know for how long the three of them had been there, talking. She turns toward Gendry, and it’s his face that prompts her to action: kind, audacious Gendry, recoiling at the sight of Melisandre as soon as he’s conscious enough to translate her image into a real presence among them, is simply too much for Arya to bear. He’s afraid of the witch, she knows he is, but he won’t say it.

She gets up. Walks toward them with her hand on Needle’s hilt; Nymeria follows, the wolf never sleeps while Arya is resting. Arya can feel the thin, light shape of her nameless Valyrian sword against her thigh. Absently, she wonders if Melisandre is like their enemy, a thing immune to common steel, only killed by dragonglass. Or maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe she’s something Unburnt like Daenerys, drawing her strength from the flames.

Arya will take the leap of faith anyway.

She’s about to speak: What is she doing here? when Melisandre jerks her head toward her, as if she’d clearly heard Arya’s thoughts. A cold shiver rises on Arya’s spine.

Fear cuts deeper than swords, she repeats to herself, and gives the thought a voice anyway.

“What is she doing here?”

It’s Beric who answers. “The Lord of Light sent her to us,” he says. He looks at the flames, never at Arya.

“As he sent you,” Thoros completes. It seems to Arya that Beric and Thoros are always finishing each other’s sentences and thoughts and actions, like they’re two faces of the same coin.

“Bran brought me,” Arya reminds them. “Your god had nothing to do with it.”

“You’re a fool if you think the Lord of Light is limited to something so fragile as the human will,” Melisandre says. Her eyes glint red and they never, not for a fraction of a second, leave Arya’s face. “His plans aren’t our own; he straights up our wandering paths.”

“I think Shireen Baratheon has something to say about human will,” Arya snaps. Jon told her the story; she tries to keep her emotions in check — calm as still water — but Melisandre can wake her most childish whims.

“In any case,” Thoros says, almost bored, as if he’s resuming an argument Arya missed; he speaks like that, sometimes, as if Arya was supposed to know things. “She was sent to guide our way. We are to avoid Winterfell.”

“We cannot avoid it,” Arya says. “Winterfell is on the middle of the road.”

“It is,” Melisandre says. “But your way is to the Twins. Skip the castle. There’ll be a battle around Winterfell, too dangerous for you to be in.”

“A battle in Winterfell?” Arya comes closer to the group, feeling like a foreign among them. For some reason, the heat radiating from the bonfire is not a comfort. She touches Nymeria’s fur again, just for the comfort of it. “Bran said—”

“Bran is far away from Winterfell now. His plan is working,” Melisandre explains. “But the Night King’s armies are large and occupy the North. They already have Karhold, Last Hearth, Deepwood Motte. Winterfell is one of the last castles standing and safe for the living. Almost everyone in the North who isn’t fighting is hiding in Winterfell. The dead are going to attack. Perhaps not a very large group of them, since they are moving South, but there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t; the castle is on their way.”

Arya feels a skip in her heartbeat. Karhold, Last Hearth, Deepwood Motte. The Others have taken all the main castles surrounded by forests, then; Bran was right, they should avoid the woods and stick to the road. Alys Karstark and the few Karstark men that hadn’t been slaughtered in the battle for Winterfell followed Jon to the Wall; Little Ned Umber was too young to fight and took shelter in Winterfell as winter got worse. Arya wonders what became of them.

The winter air is dry and hurts her throat when she breathes.

“If there’s a battle in my home,” Arya says, “I want to be there.”

Nymeria whimpers in sad agreement.

“No,” Thoros says, definitely. “Your safety is our priority. If it all goes to plan, the battle won’t arrive at the castle at all. The Dragon girl will burn the dead before they can even get there, northmen and wildlings on the ground will slay any dead man who is able to escape her fire. Jon Snow will protect us wandering soldiers from the sky while she’s there, and when it’s dealt with, we will all meet at the Twins, with the other armies that are already on their way.”

The mention of Jon is like a fist, clenching and unclenching around her heart.

“I don’t want to be safe,” Arya argues, “I want to fight with Jon for my home.”

“Jon has a dragon,” Beric reminds her. “He doesn’t need you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Arya argues, though she thinks that yes, Jon does need her, as she needs him. He is too busy protecting everyone to protect himself; they were never supposed to have split apart.

“In fact, it does,” Thoros continues. For the first time he turns away from the fire to stare Arya in the eye. “Winterfell to them is just another castle. This battle isn’t ours, Arya.”

“But not for me,” Arya says, her voice rising. Her breath seems too loud to her ears; she can see it, white smoke from the warmth of her mouth as she speaks. “It might not be yours, but this battle is mine.”

“Quiet, girl,” Beric mutters. “Months at the Wall, and you still act like a spoiled little girl who doesn’t understand the ways of war. We have not been called to this battle. We will move along. That is the accorded plan. We’ll stick to the plan.”

“You don’t need to come with me,” Arya says, crossing her arms. “Nymeria will be with me.”

And Nymeria’s ears stand, as if she’s ready to attack this very moment.

“Don’t you even think about that,” Beric says. It sounds, Arya cannot help but notice, like a threat, and in response, Nymeria turns to him, slightly but unmistakably.

“I’ll go with her,” the Hound says, out of the sudden. Arya hadn’t realized he had approached the bonfire. “I’ll keep her alive.”

“Clegane,” Thoros says, with an exasperated sigh. “Don’t. Not now, please.”

“Why can’t you just obey?” Beric asks, equally exasperated; Arya is not sure if he’s talking to her or to Sandor. “It’s so simple. We have clear directions. We are in the middle of nowhere. Just obey the orders. What kind of soldiers are we who cannot obey a simple command?”

“I don’t need anyone to keep me alive,” Arya says, ignoring him entirely. “If your Lord of Light is so smart, why are we here and not with Bran? He is the one we should be protecting. You have the wrong Stark child.”

“I’ve seen your face in the flames, girl,” Melisandre says. Her voice is like silk. Her voice is like a burning blade. “They all did. Why do you think they’re here?”

Arya turns to her again. Melisandre’s been quiet for so long; Arya almost forgot she was there.

“I’m sure I can see anything I want in the flames if I look at them long enough.”

The red woman is unmoved. “R’hllor whispered your name to me,” she says. “Bride of Death.”

Nymeria’s growl is a rumble in her chest, low and threatening: it’s the sound of winter. Melisandre’s words are heavy in the night, sinking into Arya’s heart like stones in a lake. Arya cannot avoid fearing, and the fear springs from some place within her that she was supposed to have left behind.

After all this time, it should be easy to forget the House of Black and White. Forgetfulness: it’s an act of unlearning, of becoming nothing, it’s a kind of death. Arya knows how to die: no one has no memories.

There’s only one god, Syrion told her, once, and his name is Death, and there is only one thing we say to Death—

She hears, then, cutting the silent night and interrupting her reverie, the familiar clang of a sword being dragged out of its sheath — with dragonglass the noise is softer, but still unmistakable. And then, the Hound has thrown himself in front of her, right between Arya and Melisandre, and lifted his sword, more to defend than to attack. Nymeria trots ahead to stand in front of Arya and by Sandor’s side, baring her teeth to the red woman.

Melisandre recoils at the sight of the wolf, stepping back, but she looks at the Hound with bravery, lifting her head to meet his eyes — he’s a head taller than her. Arya is vaguely aware of Beric, by her side, “Clegane, what in R’hllors name are you doing,” and Thoros, “Arya, control your wolf now,” and Gendry finally getting up and approaching them, his hand on the hilt of his obsidian hammer just in case.

Arya doesn’t reach for her sword. She reaches for Sandor’s arm. He barely registers her touch.

“You are not going to touch this girl,” Sandor growls, sounding more like a wolf than like a dog or a human. “None of you are. We must be clear about that.”

Arya shivers, in fear, in cold, and in a sort of affection, too.

“Sandor,” she murmurs.

“Clegane,” Thoros says, commanding, “drop your sword. Lady Melisandre is one of us.”

Melisandre is smiling when she speaks. “Do not bother, Thoros,” she says, soothingly, looking intently at the Hound’s face. Arya can see the way she trembles with fear, trying not to stare at Nymeria or make any sudden moves. “Your knight understood the mission. No one here means Arya any harm, Ser. Quite the contrary.”

“Not a knight,” he mutters, and Arya rolls her eyes. He still has his sword half-lifted, and behind him, this giant of a man, and her giant wolf, Arya feels very much like a child. She would repeat, for good measure, that she needs no protection, but the fact is that Melisandre scares her, as do Thoros and Beric. She could use a protector. A friend. And Nymeria could use some help.

“You might mean her no harm now,” Sandor continues, “but if you think I am going to simply stand and watch while you hand her over to your precious Azor Ahai so he can save the day when the final battle comes, then you are sorely mistaken. You might need to take me down first.”

For the way she growls, Nymeria seems to agree with him.

“Is that an invitation?” Melisandre curls one eyebrow.

That sets Arya into action, out of her stupor. She steps ahead, between Sandor and Nymeria.

“Don’t,” she says, her hand sliding to Needle’s hilt. “I am going to the Twins. Alright?” she says, looking at Melisandre. “We skip Winterfell, we go forward. Just— don’t hurt him.”

“I would never hurt such a devoted servant of the Lord,” Melisandre says. She smiles.

And the blade in Sandor’s hand catches fire.

Arya has seen it happening before, with Beric, of course. The man has his flaming sword, and also is a sort of dead man himself, with Thoros hovering around him to bring him back every time he falls. She supposes it must be hard to doubt the Lord of the Light with so much evidence presented in favor of his power; harder, still, when his priests and priestesses can set anything on fire with a word or even a thought.

Sandor suddenly drops his sword, his eyes wide with fear: the blade burns still, alive and golden against the darkness, and not even the snow can consume its flame. Even Nymeria steps back, scared, and with good reason. Arya steps ahead of them, trying to push Sandor away from Melisandre, from the fire, but the Hound is furiously glaring at the red woman.

“You fucking witch,” he mutters.

“Sandor, stop,” Arya pleads, “stop—”

She keeps pushing his chest, but trying to move him is like trying to push the goddamn Wall; she might as well get a Horn of Winter. Gendry has approached them and raised the hilt of his dragonglass hammer. Beric is cursing, Thoros is pleading with Melisandre something that Arya does not care to pay enough attention to understand, Nymeria is furious and crouching on her front paws as if she’s ready to jump. The tension mounts on Arya’s shoulders, squeezes around her lungs until all she can think, like a mantra, a prayer, is don’t hurt him, don’t hurt him, please, don’t hurt him, he is afraid of fire, don’t.

She turns toward Melisandre. “Put that thing out! Now!”

With a slight look at Thoros, and then at Arya, Melisandre just nods. The flames consuming the sword die with a quiet, timid sigh.

“You think I need a sword to kill you, witch?” Sandor growls. “I can do it with my bare hands.”

Melisandre smiles again, not even Nymeria being able to scare her any longer, and that is what disturbs Arya the most. She gives up on trying to move Sandor and instead, reaches out for his face. She needs to stand on her toes to do it, to grab his chin and pull it toward her.

“Sandor,” she hisses, “look at me. What are you doing? Stop.”

He does look at her, after a fraction of a second.

“She is dangerous,” Arya reminds him, urgently. “Stop. Let her be.”

“Listen to the girl, Sandor Clegane,” Melisandre tells in her imperious voice. “She is, too, a servant of the Lord.”

Arya turns around to face the woman, her hand still holding onto Sandor’s arm, as if to make sure he’ll stay right there. As if she could, possibly, keep him still, not with her strength but with a gentle touch as a reminder, as a warning, as a comfort.

“I am no one’s bloody bride,” she declares, angrily, and turns to stare Thoros in the eye. “I will go to the Twins with you, but she can’t come with us.”

Thoros and Melisandre share a look. The wind sweeps the layers of her red robe. She gives a nod.

“Very well, then,” she says. “We’ll see each other again.”

Arya is not looking at Melisandre as the red woman disappears into the darkness. She is looking at the Hound. He hesitates before he picks up his obsidian sword. When the moon casts its silver light on them, the blade is clean, shining black and pure as a starlit night.

Sandor Clegane looks at her with painful gray eyes, and then looks away.

vii.

There’s a watchtower near the wolfswood. It has been abandoned for a much longer time than this winter. It’s too close to the forests, so they don’t light up the hearths. But the winds are harsh, and they’ve been walking for too long — long enough for the moon to change — without food or shelter, and the high stone tower offers enough protection from the relentless snowstorm.

There wasn’t any food in the tower, of course. There weren't blankets, either, or any furniture beyond a round table, notably without chairs. But for some reason, the gods only know why, there was wine. Caskets of it, as if someone had been keeping it hidden and forgot to reclaim it at winter’s advent.

They all drink until their guts are warm; they cannot make any noise, sing any song, crack any joke, and so they fall asleep in silence, on the hard wooden floor, with nothing but each other’s heat for warmth.

The Hound stays awake; Nymeria goes out into the woods to hunt. A little drunk, Arya remains crouched against the closed door, peeking out through the window. She tries to see the road, but it’s too dark, a new-moon night, and the world is a black veil before her. She tries to see past the white clouds covering the sky, tries to remember Maester Luwin lessons—

“Don’t even think about it, girl,” the Hound rasps.

Arya turns toward him. They haven’t talked about what happened with Melisandre, but something has shifted between them since that day, fallen into place like the missing piece of a puzzle, as if they’ve implicitly agreed to stop pretending they don’t care.

“About what?” Arya asks.

“You promised you wouldn’t go to Winterfell,” he says, patiently.

Arya rolls her eyes.

“And you said you would come with me,” she reminds him. He seems to consider that for a moment, and Arya takes advantage of his half-heartedness. “I thought you didn’t like the witch.”

“I don’t,” he shrugs. “I don’t have to like her to believe her.”

Arya huffs under her breath. “I never took you for a believer.”

Sandor turns his face away, gives Arya the scarred side of him.

“It’s not so simple as that,” he mutters.

Arya crawls away from the window until she is sitting by his side on the wooden floor. “Then enlighten me.”

She can feel his gaze on her. It’s a rare thing that the Hound looks directly at her face, and she feels a familiar heaviness from it, setting upon her brow like a crown.

“I know what I saw in the flames. I’m not fucking mad.”

“You saw me?” She asks, timidly. “Did you all? Even Gendry?”

“I don’t think Gendry needed to see anything to protect you,” he says, sourly, then shakes his head. “But that doesn’t mean anything, Arya. I saw your face in the flames. Beric and Thoros also did. For them it means to protect you so you can fulfill your destiny. For me it means to keep you safe. From anyone and anything, even from—”

“From my destiny?” she finishes, before he can say something else, something worse, something too terrible to be uttered. In the end it sounds, accidentally, like a question.

She knows what he means, what they all mean by that, without Sandor ever saying it.

He sighs.

“What is easier to do?” Sandor asks. “Protect you here, on the road, with a bunch of fuckers who are ready to die for you if they need to, or protect you in the middle of a battle with dragons breathing fire from the sky and—”

“And Jon,” Arya finishes.

Jon will be around, somewhere in the skies. The Hound knows that he’ll never be too far away from his northmen and his freefolk.

She also can guess just fine what Beric and Thoros and Melisandre must have told the Hound about Jon. Arya’s not an idiot.

“Sandor, Jon wouldn’t hurt me in a million years,” she tells him, trying to sound confident and soothing. Jon wouldn’t.

He wouldn’t. Truly. He wouldn’t.

“Not even to save the world?” Clegane asks, without malice.

“No,” Arya answers, uncertain. “Neither would Bran. Why would Bran hand me over to the people who want to sacrifice me?”

Clegane looks at her softly. “I insist,” he murmurs. “Not even to save the world?”

Arya remembers the night Bran came back home, when Jon placed his crown before Bran and kneeled at his feet, how both of them agreed to give the North away without a second thought, without hesitation.

Nothing is more important now than to defeat the Army of the Dead, Bran had said. I thought we all agreed on that.

And Arya had answered, We agreed on nothing.

Sandor gives room for silence. It is a very long silence.

“I can take them down, you know,” he murmurs. “Gendry would fight by our side. He would never give you away. But Thoros and Beric… If it came to it… Gendry can go for Thoros first, because he is the one bringing Beric back, and he’s not much of a fighter, and I can handle Beric—”

“Sandor,” she hisses, suddenly afraid they might be heard conspiring to kill the rest of their caravan.

Arya looks at Beric and Thoros and Gendry. They’re all snoring.

“What?” He hisses back. “It’s a long road. If it ever comes to that, I would— I would keep you safe,” he promises.

Arya thinks of Winterfell, thinks of Jon, of Bran and Sansa lost somewhere in this longest of the nights. She instantly misses Nymeria.

“None of us is safe,” she whispers.

“Still,” he insists, earnestly. “Just— don’t go. Follow the plan, alright? I’m sure I can find a rope here somewhere. Don’t make me tie you up.”

“You wouldn’t,” she says, glaring at the vicinity of his face in the dark, just so her voice will carry out better.

“You know very well I would. But I’d rather think we’re past that,” he rasps, resting the back of his head against the wall behind him, looking away from her. “Don’t go anywhere I can’t see you and we’ll be fine.”

viii.

Arya stays with the Brotherhood. And if she’s being honest, not only because the Hound threatened to have her tied up.

They take a detour from the road as they head south, toward the northern branches of the White Knife.

It takes all of her — every bit of her — to keep going forward, even when the first signs of battle start to echo in the air, far, far behind them; even when the darkness is split apart by streams of dragonfire in the skies, north of Winterfell.

Arya Stark marches on, where she is needed, where the battle waits for her. No one has a home anymore; no one has a family.

ix.

When Gendry brings the topic up, they’re at least a week past Castle Cerwyn, and already back on the Kingsroad.

They are on shift while the others sleep — Sandor’s back is turned to them, and Beric and Thoros are tangled in each other like wolves, their chests rising and falling in tandem like they share a ribcage and its contents, heart and lungs and all.

This place was once a village — there are always villages and small towns close to the rivers — but now it’s deserted and abandoned, like they are taking shelter in someone else’s memory of a village. It’s quiet and the snow falls hard, harder than usual; the storm forced them to stop. They almost can’t hear the river flowing beneath the frozen surface.

They haven’t heard battle sounds slashing the air in a while. The world is unusually quiet. Thoros told them to prepare for attacks. It’s getting closer, now, he says, staring into the flames whenever they can light one. For all of them fire is warmth; for him it’s vision.

Gendry kicks her feet amicably. She looks at him, out of her reverie.

“I think we should get married,” he says. “You and I. To each other,” he cares to make sure.

Arya laughs— laughs too loud, and then covers her hand to muffle the sound — it’s such a maidenly, childish gesture, she thinks — making sure no one’s sleep was disturbed.

Beric and Thoros shift in each other’s embrace but keep sleeping; Sandor barely moves. They’re too tired to be awake by something so silly as laughter.

Arya bites her lip and looks at Gendry. His hair has grown, and for the first time since they’ve met, he has a stubble covering his face and chin. It makes him look older, and handsome, but then again, maybe it’s just the complete exhaustion of it all.

“Should we?” Arya asks, playfully. It’s weird how the tables turn, how the places shift. A lifetime ago she made a similar proposal. I could be your family. But they were children, and Death wasn’t done with them, back then. She wonders if it is, now.

Nymeria is warming her feet. She and Gendry are eating a handful of berries that they gathered on the road and kept until the hunger became absolutely and utterly unbearable, which is the case now. Arya licks the juice from her lower lip, and wraps the cloak tighter around her shoulders.

She found it in one of the two rooms. The cloak, that is, white furs made from a bear. They’re dirty, but thick, thicker than the one she had time to gather with her from the Wall. They haven’t found a body here; sometimes there are frozen bodies, and they burn them before occupying the house. But this time there weren’t, which means only two things: either the people left and headed to Winterfell before it was too late, or they rose from the dead to add numbers to the enemy’s army.

In her mind, Arya gives them names and faces and pictures them in the Great Hall in Winterfell.

“I mean it,” he says. He’s smiling brightly. Arya hasn’t seen him smiling in ages. “After we kill that thing and the sun returns and all.”

“What about that girl in the smithy?” Arya tries.

“Which girl in the smithy?” He asks, confused.

“The pretty, fair one,” she says, trying not to sound jealous.

“Jean?” He answers, and laughs, too. “I think I lack important things that Jean likes. A good pair of teats, by instance. And in any case, you are the one. Not Jean or any other girl out there.”

Arya blushes. “Did you see our wedding in your Lord’s precious flames?” she mocks.

“Don’t be stupid,” Gendry mutters, and Arya bites her lip again to keep from laughing. “I don’t need no god commanding me to ask you for your hand.”

“That’s a relief, but I’m not going to join your fire cult, Gendry.”

“What are you going to do, then?” He curls one eyebrow and lifts his chin. It makes him look, the gods damn him, even more handsome. “Be a Princess in a tower for the rest of your life? The Brotherhood is not a cult, you know. We care about people. Just normal people, the ones you fancy folks ignore. We could live on the road. I would never make you wear a gown.”

“That’s sweet,” Arya says, and means it. She pauses. “But my brother needs me by his side.”

“Bran?” Gendry sighs. I was thinking about Jon, Arya almost says, but for some reason, doesn’t. “You think he won’t get married too, eventually? He is Jon’s heir.”

“It’s not just that. I want to be home. When this is all over, I—” she sighs. “I’ve been trying to get back home for years.”

“Then I’ll live in Winterfell with you. I’ll sleep on the smithy if your sister refuses to give me a room.”

She pulls a face, trying to ignore the pang of pain with the mention of Sansa. How would her face look if Arya came back home after the War announcing she married a bastard during the Long Night?

“I would never let you sleep in the smithy,” she says.

“I am just trying to say I am open to the conditions proposed by my hosts.”

You wouldn’t be my family, he’d said. You’d be m’lady.

She grows quieter. “I thought you didn’t want a lady.”

He frowns his lips. “I’ve had enough time without you around to reconsider that.”

Arya blushes. “You’re stupid, Gendry,” she mutters, with a nervous laugh.

“But you’re laughing,” he winks at her.

It’s true. She tries to suppress it.

“How can you even think about the future, anyway?” She wraps her arms around her own frame. The winds scream furiously; the naked branches of the trees shake. The night stretches ahead of them as if it were space, a land, vast and empty. “How can you be so sure we are going to survive this?”

“We are going to win,” he says. And it sounds so confident that Arya turns to look at his face. His voice is not boisterous; Gendry usually isn’t. “What choice do we have?”

“That’s an excellent point,” she murmurs.

They enjoy their shift in friendly, comfortable silence.

x.

“You should have accepted,” Sandor says.

They’re on shift again. They found a shed, not too far away from the road, and took shelter in it not because of the cold, but because they were too weak to go on.

Nymeria went out to hunt again. Arya waits, hope, that she’ll come back with something that can be eaten. She wouldn’t mind eating raw flesh; she just needs to eat. She’s delirious with hunger and maybe because of that, she doesn’t understand what the Hound means, at first.

“The marriage proposal,” he says.

It is not like the Hound to initiate conversation unless absolutely necessary and so, Arya can only conclude he is talking to her to keep her from drowsing off. There’s a serious chance she might not be able to rise — alive, that is. She doesn’t even look to make sure the others are asleep or just already dead; she doesn’t want to find out.

“Weren’t you supposed to be sleeping while we weren’t?” Arya mutters, feeling suddenly exposed and frankly offended that he wasted one of her shifts.

“He’s a good lad,” he says, ignoring her question.

“I know that,” she retorts, grumpy.

She’d like to have it in her to pick up a fight with him, for overhearing her private conversations and meddling with affairs that were none of his business. But her body is numb with cold, and her stomach hurts with emptiness, and she looks out the window but Nymeria can’t be seen anywhere.

I’m going to die here, she thinks, Cold and hungry and with these men, half of them planning to give me in sacrifice for the sake of humankind, the other planning to die in the effort to prevent it, and she simply cannot bear to spend her last days on Earth fighting with Sandor Clegane over Gendry Waters.

The wind whistles, melancholy.

“I’m not,” she whispers, after a very long moment, so long that Clegane doesn’t even understand what she’s talking about. “A good lad, a good person, I’m not really—” she bites her lip. “Gendry is pure. He has a good, kind heart.”

“What makes you think you don’t have a kind heart?” Sandor asks.

“I’ve murdered people.”

“You think Gendry has never killed people?” he asks, cynically.

Arya doesn’t know. She’s never asked Gendry that, but murdering is not the same as killing. She can see he is not the boy he used to be — she can feel the weight of time in him, his innocence in ruins, like hers — but there’s still something about Gendry that has been kept safe from decay, something alive that has been dead in her for far too long now to be resurrected.

It’s different, she wants to tell Clegane. I’ve done it as if it were worship.

She’s even liked it, on occasion. And most times she felt nothing. Nothing at all.

“Why do you care so much about who I marry anyway?” She snaps.

“I don’t,” the Hound shrugs.

“Then mind your business, Sandor,” she mutters.

“I will,” he says, when suddenly Arya notices a crow, black, three-eyed, perched on the broken window they’re watching the world through. It calls desperately.

And somewhere out in the night, a wolf howls in anguish.

Arya gets up on her feet.

“They’re here,” she says.

She reaches for the nameless sword on her hip.

“What?” Sandor asks. Arya puts a finger over her own lips and signals for him to shut up while she goes to the bundle that is the rest of their caravan, lying together on the middle of the small shed — Gendry and Thoros and Beric all wrapped up in each other to keep the cold off — and kicks them gently. She covers Gendry’s mouth, the one most likely to make any noise while rising, as they all open their eyes.

She listens to the sounds of the night while a pair of scared blue eyes stare at her face, Gendry’s mouth beneath her palm. The wind, which has been whistling like a sad song, has lowered down to quiet, soundless whisper, and then the air was still and cold. Cold like death itself.

Arya gives Gendry a hand so he can get on his feet, and then she turns around, staring at the door. She doesn’t open it, not at first. There’s no sound to be heard out there, no steps, no groans, nothing.

Sandor is standing beside the door, his back pressed against the wall, his dragonglass sword in hand. Beric and Thoros are ready, grabbing their weapons even before they can understand what’s happening, lining up behind her.

A wolf howls again.

Arya is considering that maybe the best course of action would be to get out before the dead could break in — that it would be harder to fight them here, inside a small shed, without moonlight and four walls closing them in. She did not like this place when they found it, did not like the idea of taking shelter in a shed that had just one door and one broken window, both on the same wall. But it’s not as if they had much of a choice; it was the shed or the open road. They don’t even know how many of them are out there, at the door, right now, but—

But there’s no time to reconsider, to plan or to prepare; it all happens in five seconds.

The dead start scratching against the wooden door, mindlessly throwing themselves against the walls, against the door, one after the other, the sequence of thuds from the impact of their bodies, their tormented groans, the harsh sound of their nails against wood and glass all finally breaking the silence.

Arya and the Brotherhood step back, as much as they can against the back wall. She can see limbs of putrid flesh reaching inside the broken window — many limbs, legs getting stuck on the glass, hands reaching for nothing in particular. One of the dead hands grabs Sandor’s arm, who, with a disgusted grunt, slices it out of its dead body.

But no pale-blue, icy skin; no White Walker. Just dead men. Probably strays who found their way out of the forest. How many? There couldn’t be too many, not without an Other to guide them.

“Gods,” she hears someone murmur by her side, over the sorrowful shrieks. Gendry.

With the corner of her eye, she can see a bright, golden light, pouring out into the night: Beric’s sword in the dark, one second before the dead break in.

The door finally wears out and falls to the ground, and she can barely see them — it’s more like a wave of dead men and women, of open mouths and putrid teeth screeching in grotesque tones, of moldy hands holding on to rusty swords, rushing toward them.

She closes her eyes as she lets their sounds guide her sword hand.

(Here’s why Arya can’t trust her eyes:

Because it’s dark.

Because her eyes will burn the memory of those dead people into her brain and she doesn’t want images in her sleep. The noises are enough for nightmares.

Because she will see the inhuman, bizarre way they move, and she’ll forget they were, once, people.

Because she will see the shape of a human face hidden in their rotten flesh and she’ll remember they were, once, people.)

The dead make different noises than her living peers. Their flesh feels different than human bodies, too, both at the edge and the tip of her sword. Unlike White Walkers, dead men are easy to kill in a fight because they have no skill, no ability, no talent. They have stubborn strength and insistence; they’re desperate for living things — desperate for fresh blood and human flesh. They are hunger personified, never sated.

Arya knows well how to kill hunger. How to never yearn, never long for anything. Her sword also knows it, and so she slices the dead down, cutting through them one, two, three men at once.

She brings them down, and another line of them comes right after; she feels their grip on her ankles, on her shoulders, someone cuts them down for her, she opens her eyes, she sees it all in a fraction of a second: dozens of dead people around Thoros and Beric, their backs against each other — they are screaming in each other’s ears, but Arya cannot discern their words. She sees Gendry fighting in a corner as dead men attack him almost as if in a line, as he takes them down one at a time; she sees Sandor, everywhere, a shadow sometimes helping Thoros, sometimes helping Gendry, but never too far away from her. She sees everything while her hand keeps striking the dead down, while their bodies fall to the ground and stay that way around them — stay dead, the stinking scent of decay almost unbearable in the cramped air.

There’s almost no light but from Beric’s sword, but at some point — she wouldn’t be able to tell how long it all lasted — the line of dead people simply stop coming, the loud noises fade out to occasional shrieking that is soon silenced down by someone’s blade, until Arya realizes there are only five people left standing, and they were all alive at the beginning. It’s her people. Breathing, warm and still alive.

She breathes in, for a moment too afraid to move, still gripping the hilt of her sword too hard. Beric’s sword is still aflame and he sways it left and right. She doesn’t know if he means to fight any possible dead man left in the dark, or if he’s just trying to light up their surroundings.

It doesn’t matter anymore. She’s the first to get out of their collective stupor.

“We have to leave,” she says.

The door is— well, the door is gone, it’s torn down to pieces on the ground, and the way out is a square hole through which starlight illuminates the shed around them in feeble silver shades. Beric’s sword paints it all golden.

Dozens, maybe a hundred, of dead men piling up inside the shed, no clean, free surface available but for the ground their feet are on.

If there’s a White Walker nearby— if the Night King is around to raise them again—

“We have to leave,” Arya repeats.

She reaches for Gendry in the corner, grabs his wrist, has to step on the bodies to get to him. He’s still too stunned to do anything so she pulls him. “Gendry, come on, we have to leave,” she tells him. “We all have to leave, now.”

He stumbles on a stack of bodies as she drags him out; she holds on to him. Beric and Thoros are more careful on their steps. The Hound is the last in the line. As soon as they’re out, they run, run to a safe distance from the door of the shed and unconsciously organize themselves on a circle, their backs to its inside, their swords raised in the air, waiting for more, more of them.

The air is whistling its sad winter song again. It’s impossibly cold, but they barely breathe in order to hear better and there’s— nothing.

They wait for a long, long moment, stances ready to fight, until, at last, Thoros:

“I think they’re done,” he murmurs.

“Stand your ground,” Beric orders. “Don’t move.”

The flame of his sword cuts through the darkness.

They can see the wind dancing in the leaves; they can see the road, not too far away. They can see the starlit sky and a half-moon hanging from it, casting a silver shadow over everything. But they cannot see anyone else. Dead or alive.

Arya listens to the heavy breathing of Sandor by her left. By her right, her arm is brushing against Gendry’s. In a moment of madness, she almost turns to him and tells him, If we survive this, I’ll marry you.

She doesn’t say it, though. Does not move and does not speak and does not think. She is a sword, ready to kill; but the more they wait, the more nothing happens.

Until they listen to a noise coming from the forest — steps over dry leaves and sticks — and they all turn in that direction, but it’s just Nymeria, coming out of the woods with a fat, big rabbit that she lays, gently, on Arya’s feet.

Arya almost wants to cry. She bends down to embrace Nymeria’s neck. “Good girl,” she shushes, and, still holding on to her warm fur, “I think it’s over, Beric.”

He gives a small nod, the flame of his sword dying with a sigh as he runs his hand through the blade.

“We knew this would happen,” Thoros murmurs. “At some point. Some of them would come out of the woods.”

“But no White Walker,” Beric says, thoughtfully, finally lowering his Valyrian sword. “That means they are here because they strayed.”

“I thought we would be safer this far South,” Gendry murmurs.

“We have more places to hide, aye,” Beric says, “but they move faster than we do. They were ahead of us. We’re just meeting them halfway now.”

Arya thinks about that for a second.

“So it’s going to keep happening,” she says.

“Aye, girl,” Thoros nods. “It can happen again.”

“Not only it can,” Beric interjects, “but it will.”

And then, he walks toward the shed.

“What are you doing?” Sandor hisses.

“What do you think I’m doing?” Beric answers, grumpily.

He walks into it, walks to the midst of the rotting bodies and reaches for the destroyed door; he grabs its pieces and stacks them upon each other, and then, lighting his sword aflame again, sets it on fire.

Returning to the group, his back to the shed, Beric doesn’t see how easily the fire consumes the wood and then the bodies until the entire shed is licked by its golden flames behind him. Arya thought that devoted, pious man that he was, he would take some kind of satisfaction in it, in the sight of fire destroying death. But she looks upon his face as he approaches them again, and Beric just looks tired. He looks like a man who’s been woken up from his rare sleep by the assault of a horde of dead people.

“Let’s go,” he murmurs.

They all look at each other. The burning shed is a giant bonfire in front of them; Arya has forgotten how much warmth the world could provide. It’s the closest to a sun she’s seen in many, many months.

It could keep dead men away for hours, maybe days.

“Go where?” Gendry asks.

It seems she is not the only one who wishes she could stay a little longer, within the reach of that heat, within the dome of protection of that fire.

“Where have we been going this whole time, Gendry?” Beric asks, impatiently. “South. To the Twins. To the final battle.”

“It’s safe now here,” Sandor rasps. “Let’s eat, at least. Nymeria brought a rabbit.”

“Eat the rabbit raw if you want. We’ll be safe when the Night King is dead,” Beric says. “And the sooner we’re all there, the sooner this will be over.”

Beric’s voice leaves no space for questions.

So they go back to the road.

xi.

Beric is more rigorous with their journey after the attack on the shed.

He pushes the limits of their exhaustion and in fact, greatly exceeds it. They pass by an abandoned inn, another shed, a stone tower, and on every occasion he prohibits them to stop. Arya has no idea where he’s drawing strength from.

When they cross another abandoned inn, nearby the road, poorly hidden behind wild bushes, Arya stops on her track and refuses to go on.

“We’ll stop and rest,” she declares, with ironclad stubbornness.

Mercifully the winds are kind, this far South, but the snow is still falling. It’s a new moon week and the world is as dark as it’s ever been.

“No,” Beric says. “We’ll keep moving.”

“Until we all pass out on the road?” Arya crosses her arms. “No. We need a safe place to sleep.”

“We’re not too far away from the Barrowlands by now,” Beric says. “Let’s wait until we get there.”

“Nymeria needs to sleep too,” Arya argues. “She can’t hunt while she’s tired like this. We are going to starve to death and then your mission will be for naught.”

“We really need to rest, Beric,” Thoros says, thoughtfully.

“I know I do,” Arya says. “If you don’t, go on. The road is free. But I’m staying.”

Beric sighs, defeated, and in less strenuous circumstances, Arya would have smiled.

“I’ll assess it.”

“I’ll go with you,” Gendry says promptly.

And so they walk together toward the abandoned inn, Nymeria following right behind them. Arya tries to make her steps as quiet as possible. In the dark, she listens to Gendry chuckling under his breath.

“Gendry,” she shushes.

“Sorry,” he whispers.

“What are you laughing about?” Arya asks, as quietly as she is able.

“It’s nice to see you standing up to Beric is all,” he says with a smirk.

“I don’t know how he is still walking at all,” Arya mutters. “I can barely feel my feet.”

“I’ll give you a massage before we go to sleep,” he says.

“Do you think I will be bribed into marrying you with massages?” She asks, though, for the way her feet are hurting, she might as well be convinced. They’re closer to the door, now, and Arya draws her Valyrian sword out of the sheath on her hip.

Gendry has his sword in hand, too. He shrugs. “I’ll keep trying,” he says.

Behind them, Nymeria whines.

Arya stops, turns around on her heels. Nymeria is not growling or howling; she is not ready to attack. She’s just standing still, sitting on her back paws.

“Nymeria, come on,” she calls.

Nymeria doesn’t move. She lets out another low whine and a sniff.

Gendry laughs again. “Isn’t it great that she’s doing to you what you did to Beric?” He comments. “She’s really your wolf.”

“Shut your mouth, Gendry,” Arya says. “This isn’t funny. She’s distressed.”

He pauses, then, to observe her. It’s true; whatever Nymeria can feel in the air is upsetting her. Gendry turns his face toward the abandoned inn again, now only four steps away. It’s a large building, with a porch, a portico, and many windows.

He raises his sword. Arya can see, dimly, his eyes scanning the front of the inn.

“I’ll take a look,” he says. “Stay here.”

“Gendry, don’t be ridiculous,” Arya says.

“I mean it,” he says, his voice grave. “Stay here.”

Arya doesn’t listen to him. She follows right behind as he stealthily and silently approaches the inn. Their feet don’t make any noise, muffled by the thick snow covering the ground. Gendry rushes ahead and presses his back against the stone wall, between two window-frames, as Arya crouches down so not to be seen, not that she thinks it would be likely for anyone to see anything in such deep darkness.

He peeks inside the main hall, and then slides his back against the wall to squat by Arya’s side.

“It’s empty,” he whispers. “But there’s fire burning in the hearth.”

“Fire is good, right?” She says. The dead don’t light up fires.

“Fire means people,” he says.

“It means living people.”

“That’s not necessarily a good thing,” Gendry murmurs.

“But you said it was empty,” Arya argues. “Maybe they already left. I can’t hear any noises.”

“It looks empty, but I don’t know.” He frowns. “I think we should go back to the road.”

“Absolutely not,” Arya shakes her head. She has no energy left to walk for the gods only know how long under relentless snow until they can find another place to rest. She was on shift the last time they stopped, and the moon has already turned since; she hasn’t slept or eaten in days. “Let’s at least assess inside before we give up.”

“Alright,” he acquiesces. “But you stay behind me.”

Arya ignores that, getting up and taking the lead instead. Nymeria, too, follows, her head bent in resignation. She waits until they’re all ready in front of the closed door before she pushes the wooden door. Quiet as a shadow.

It’s unbolted; it opens without resistance and only the smallest creak.

Arya keeps her nameless sword in hand, just in case. So does Gendry. They step inside.

The great hall is large: it has three fireplaces, with settees, benches, even a carpet, and fire burning in only one of them; many long tables surrounded by chairs — all empty. Over one of the tables there’s a plate with crumbs of bread that seem to have been left there long ago. In the right corner Arya can see the first flight of spiral stairs. In front of them there’s a hallway that seems to lead to chambers. The corridor is pitch-black; the doors seem to be shut, but Arya’s not sure.

The whole place looks, and feels, really forgotten. Except for the fire. And the door unlocked…

Nymeria is no longer whining but ears up in the air, alert. Ready.

Fear cuts Arya, then — deeper than swords.

“You were right,” she murmurs, realizing the truth as she says it. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Oh, what was that?” Says a voice from the stairs in the corner, steps quickly coming down.

In a second Gendry is standing by her side, wielding his sword in the air.

The fire illuminates a man. He’s dressed in dirty clothes, and holds a sword of common steel, which he swings casually around his wrist.

He doesn’t really look like an innkeeper.

“Visitors!” The man says, gleefully. He has lost many teeth, but his hair — long and blonde — is surprisingly clean. He is a little taller than Gendry, much thinner. Worst part: his walk is graceful, almost elegant, in truth, as he walks toward them. Arya pictures him evading the edge of her blade. “Oh, we haven’t had visitors in so long.”

Arya gives a step back, and another, carefully returning to the door, keeping her sword raised in the man’s direction, until she listens, with a sinking panic in her stomach, to a quiet thump behind her back. She doesn’t turn around, doesn’t take her eyes off the man approaching them, but with the corner of her eye she can sense the movement of someone else, locking the bar over the door behind them.

“We were just leaving,” Gendry says in a tranquil, but tight, voice. “We are sorry to disturb you, we thought the place was empty.”

The words sound hollow when they’re uttered with a sword in hand, in a fighting stance.

“Oh, don’t leave. There’s enough space for all of us,” the man says, sympathetically, as he takes another step closer to them, and another, and yet another one. They move, instinctively, to stand behind one of the empty tables. “How many of you intend to stay?”

“Just the two of us,” Arya lies. Always better to have the element of surprise, just in case. “And we appreciate the hospitality but we don’t intend to stay.”

“And the dog, of course,” the man goes on, and smiles. “A dog, Lomas. Isn’t it wonderful?”

The man behind them at the door, presumably Lomas, has nothing to say but for a grunt.

Nymeria growls. Gendry moves slightly around her, until he is facing the man at the door, his back against Arya’s. No point in pretending the situation isn’t horrible, after all.

“She’s a direwolf,” Arya clarifies— and then regrets it immediately.

With the man closer, she can see, beneath his rags, a dull mail shirt. She wonders if he is a deserter or if he stole it from the last soldier he killed. She wonders if that sword has always been his at all.

He keeps his distance from Nymeria, studying the animal carefully. Then he raises his eyes to Arya and studies her too — her face, her clothes.

Arya thinks. She, Gendry and Nymeria could easily take them down, but the problem is, she doesn’t think these two men are alone. She doesn’t know how many are hidden in the dark, in the many chambers and rooms of this inn, and a living person is not as easy to fight as a mindless dead man. Whoever strikes first is going to declare the conflict official and open. The best — however unlikely — outcome would be to leave and go back to the road without a battle.

Gendry seems to be of the same mind.

“We don’t want any trouble,” he says, in a hard voice. His hand is firm, unshaken around the grip of his weapon. The man just keeps approaching them. Surrounding the table slowly, like a snake, floating around like a vulture. “We will leave.”

“These are fine clothes you’re wearing, m’lady,” the man points to Arya with his chin. “Is that Valyrian steel?”

Arya doesn’t answer him.

“And the glorious direwolf… Oh, Lomas, I think we have a Stark lady in the house.”

“The wolf would make fine skin in this cold, Ser,” Lomas says. A knight, then. “And good meat, too.”

Nymeria gets ready to attack; Arya can feel her hesitation — knows Nymeria is split between attacking and waiting for her mistress’ command. But Arya is still, against all odds, hoping to just escape this without bloodshed.

“Easy, girl,” Arya says, soothingly. “I would advise you not to speak like that, Ser. She can understand you.”

The man laughs. Arya, suddenly, feels the urgent need to know his name.

“Smart animals, aren’t they?” he says, still laughing. “Lovely.”

“Why do you always have to talk to them, Robar?” Another voice asks — with terror, Arya realizes, a voice that comes from the hallway. So at least three. “Just get on with it.”

“They’re armed,” Robar answers, in tones of explanation.

“But isn’t that a girl?” the voice says — and its owner comes out of the dark hallway.

Under the yellow light pouring out from the fireplace, Arya studies him: his short, dark hair; the same death in his eyes; muscular, tall, brutish eyebrows.

“A girl with a sword,” Robar, patiently, reiterates.

The third man leans over an empty chair. He also has a sword hanging from his hip.

“I haven’t had a living girl in weeks,” he comments, casually.

Their conversation is interrupted by three knocks on the wooden door.

“Everything alright there?” Sandor asks, his voice muffled by the wooden door.

The first man — Robar, Arya repeats to herself: You need to know the name: Robar — looks at her and smirks as if he’s very pleased: “you nasty little liar.”

Arya fights the urge to shrug. She sees, in the shadows, more people moving, coming closer, coming out into the light. All men. They gather behind chairs, swords in hand, uttering no words, just watching.

She counts them. One, two, three, four, five— she stops counting.

Fear cuts deeper than swords. Fear cuts deeper than swords. Fear cuts deeper than swords. Arya takes a calculated breath. She had forgotten the living could also be monsters. She had forgotten the living could also paralyze her with dread.

Some of them are looking at Nymeria, the rest of the men are studying Arya and Gendry as if they were food. Four of them walk around and past them and line up by the door.

“I will advise you again,” Arya says, trying to sound calm. “It is in your best interest to let us leave.”

Robar smiles his toothless smile.

“I don’t think so, Lady Stark,” he says. “Why don’t you answer your friend?”

She takes a deep breath.

“No, not alright,” she says, loud enough for Sandor to hear: “Five by the door.”

There’s a second of silence and then, a loud blunt against the door breaks the quietness: Sandor gave it a kick. It falls to the ground, one of the doormen sliding out of the way just in time not to be crushed by it.

Immediately, every man in the room — Arya forces herself to count them, she needs the count: sixteen total — raises their swords.

So that’s it. That’s an impressive number of evil people to share a single space, even a large inn like this one. Arya wonders how long they’ve been building this small cruel kingdom, here, in the middle of the road, halfway to nowhere, and how long it would have taken for them to destroy themselves; but it doesn’t matter how long they would have lasted, because she’ll have to finish the job now, anyway.

“Alright, lads, party’s over,” Sandor says. There are five swords pointed at different parts of his body. “We’re leaving. Get behind me, Arya. You too, Gendry.”

“Oh, so Arya Stark,” Robar says. “Tales of you have reached us, m’lady. Of what you did to the Freys? A pack of wolves just like this one,” he smiles at Nymeria, who bares her teeth to him.

“Very brave,” Lomar says.

“A fighter,” another nameless man agrees. “I like when they fight back.”

“I never had a high-born lady,” one of the men around Sandor says.

“Neither of you are dying before I cut out your tongues first,” Sandor replies.

Robar opens his arms, apologetically, studying the bulk of Sandor at the door.

“No, no, you’ll forgive my men. They behave like beasts! We can have a deal. We’ll keep the wolf and the swords. You can go.” He eyes Arya gingerly. “Even you, Lady Arya. Unless you want to keep us company, of course. The hospitality of the house is yours.”

“Well, fuck you,” Sandor spites.

Nymeria growls again, loud and rough and rumbling in her chest, and—

“Nymeria, don’t!” Arya screams, but it’s too late.

Nymeria jumps on Robar’s neck, and then the chaos starts.

Arya is aware of many things at once: of the noise of her Valyrian sword against common steel as she swings it on an instinct to protect her left side — a man coming out of nowhere to assault her. She cringes at the sound. Her sword, shaped after Needle, was not forged for this. Trying to keep her balance as she spins around to return the attack, she then sticks the point of her blade deep into his thigh; he falls on his knees with a scream, and then Arya swiftly runs the edge of the blade across his neck. It’s a clean, deep cut, and blood pumps out of the wound, all over the floor.

Fifteen, Arya counts. She had almost forgotten how it is to fight another living person.

Behind her back, Sandor fights five men at once — or four: one of them he simply crushes against the wall before burying his dragonglass longsword into his chest. Fourteen. She turns around to help him, but not before she can see the blood on the ground in front of her — Robar’s neck completely torn apart. Thirteen. She can hear, more than see in the blur of the crisis, Nymeria and Gendry fighting together. She can hear the noise of chairs falling down and tables being turned, of blades clashing together and people screaming and grunting, she can see Beric and Thoros rushing in, two red shadows in the corner of her eye getting in to help Gendry.

(There’s a certain space in Arya’s mind, a part of her that she slips into, and that accommodates her so well that it feels like she was born for this. For killing, that is, for being a killer. Sometimes she’s convinced it’s true, what she’s learnt in the House of Black and White: she was born to serve Death.

She’s aware there was a time in her life that she didn’t feel like this. But with each passing day she forgets how it used to be.)

She grabs the hair — auburn, she barely registers, curly and dirty — of one of the men attacking Sandor, pulls him back to expose his neck and delicately slides her sword across his neck, too. Valyrian blade is so sharp that she doesn’t even need to put much pressure in her hand for the cut to go deep, all the way to the main vessels. It’s a great asset when fighting while sleep deprived. This man, too, falls. Twelve.

Sandor takes notes of her presence but, looking at something behind her, pushes her shoulder down with one hand. Arya doesn’t resist: with his right hand, he strikes someone down. Arya doesn’t see it: she just listens to a scream of pain in her ear. Turning around, she sees another man — a very young one, he must be younger than her — holding on to one of the chairs, a deep wound across his right shoulder, bleeding out. She finishes what Sandor started, burying her sword into his chest. Eleven.

It is with the tail of her eye that her eyes glaze over the fireplace where Nymeria, Gendry, Beric and Thoros are fighting dozens of men at once. And it’s weird, because it feels like she’s just killed three men in two seconds; she’s vaguely aware that the Hound is still killing people around her; but this moment is slow-motion. She sees so much detail, she sees so much in just another couple of seconds:

Arya sees, across the Great Hall, Gendry cornering a man against a wall, and wielding his dragonglass hammer with all the might of his arm.

Arya sees when the man crouches down and the hammer meets stone, shattering into a million pieces.

Arya sees, at the same time, right by his side, Nymeria ripping out a man’s arm and throwing the limb into the fire, and she sees another man approaching her from behind, his sword raised in the air and then falling, falling, falling toward her neck.

Arya sees Gendry, without a weapon anymore, simply throwing himself in front of Nymeria as if acting on impulse, trying to push the wolf away from the blow.

Arya sees a common longsword pass through Gendry’s belly, all the way to the other side of his body. Arya sees how the man twists it around his wrist, and Arya sees Gendry falling.

Arya gasps as if someone had just punched her chest. She’s breathless.

“Arya!” Sandor screams behind her.

He pushes her away and she falls to the ground, and she sees when he strikes down another man in front of her eyes: the Hound kicks his knee first, breaking it, and the man falls by her side. Then Sandor pulls his jaw open. He cuts out the man’s tongue, and while the man is still screaming he mercifully slashes his sword across his chest as well.

There’s blood everywhere, and no more men left standing around them.

Sandor gives her a hand. Arya is not able to take it. Arya has an image of Gendry falling burnt into her pupils and she cannot see anything else and the Hound pulls her up to her feet and she runs, runs toward the fireplace. Sandor follows.

Nymeria has eaten away the head of the man who attacked Gendry. Some of the men of the inn, realizing they’re about to die, decide to run away, heading to the dark hallway. Beric and Thoros chase them. Sandor and Nymeria stay to finish the last ones who couldn’t make it past them.

Arya cannot see any of it. Arya doesn’t care. She kneels by Gendry’s side. She puts her hand on Gendry’s belly.

The wound is deep and there’s so much blood. There’s blood in his clothes and on the floor beneath him. She tries to apply pressure on it, but it only drowns her hands in red, and with horror she realizes she’s touching more than muscle and skin, she’s touching viscera, guts. She pulls her hands away.

It stinks of death.

“Gendry,” she says. “Gendry, Gendry, look at me— open your eyes, Gendry, open your eyes—”

She holds his face with blood-stained hands, pulls his head to her lap.

His eyes are closed, he looks pale, the pulse on his neck is so, so weak, it is barely there.

Blood keeps gushing out of the wound and Arya realizes she’s holding on to a corpse and the realization makes her want to scream. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense at all.

She doesn’t scream, though. She begs.

“Gendry, I’ll marry you,” she says. She doesn’t know what else to say to bring him back. “Can you hear me? I’ll marry you, I promise, open your eyes, please, please, please open your eyes—”

Nymeria comes by her side, whining, and licks Gendry’s wound; Arya realizes there’s quiet around them, just a distant echo of clashing swords coming from the hallway.

“Arya,” a voice says, soft, in her ear. “Come here.”

She’s still embracing Gendry’s shoulders.

She lifts her head to see Sandor Clegane, unharmed, staring at her with tender gray eyes.

In the background of her mind, she can listen to another scream coming from the rooms in the hallway, and then an unfamiliar voice begging No no no please, and then a blow; and then absolute silence.

She lifts her head to see bodies spread everywhere: on the entrance next to the door, over the table, thrown over the back of chairs, lying next to the fire.

We are a bunch of monsters, she thinks, absently. The things we do to survive have turned us into monsters.

Gendry lies, lifeless, in her arms.

“Come on, Arya,” Sandor repeats, squatting down by her side. Even crouched like this he’s still taller than her, and she has to look up to look him in the eye.

Sandor pulls at her hand. He pulls her away from Gendry. Arya holds on to him tighter.

“No,” she says, and realizes she’s crying.

“We have to, sweetling,” he tells her.

Arya doesn’t understand what Sandor is talking about. Nymeria is wrapped around her like a living cloak. Beric and Thoros are back from the hallway, dragging bodies behind them. They sigh, tired, and look around the inn. They contemplate what they did.

And then, they start to gather the bodies together, to line them up.

Arya is startled with realization.

“We’re not going to burn him,” she says, protectively leaning over Gendry’s corpse.

“We have to,” Sandor reminds her.

“No, I can’t let you,” she shakes her head. She sobs. Stupid child, she thinks, just a little— “It was my fault.”

“It wasn’t,” Sandor says, soothingly. “They were going to hurt you, Arya. They were lying. It had to be done.”

“But Gendry told me we should go back to the road, he—” she swallows down a sob, feels a despair that consumes her, “—oh, oh gods, he told me we shouldn’t come inside, he—”

Sandor touches her hair. His hand, too, is soaked in blood.

“We were very tired,” Sandor reminds her. He reaches for her hand again, gently unknots her fingers from Gendry’s clothes. “Come here.”

Arya sees herself from the outside looking in, a girl holding on to a body until the shadow of a hound comes to her. Nymeria remains by Gendry’s side. Sandor gathers her in his arms as if she’s a baby, cradles her against him, his arms supporting her, hands beneath her knees and her shoulders, laying her head against his right shoulder.

Beric and Thoros come to take Gendry away.

“Close your eyes,” Sandor murmurs in her ear. “You don’t have to see this.” Arya tries to shake herself out of his embrace. She struggles to get out, shifts in his arms until she’s no longer lying in his arms but rather around him, her legs around his waist. His hands are holding on to her back; he still doesn’t let her go. “Arya, stop.”

“I need to see it—”

“No, you don’t,” Sandor says. “Shut your eyes. Trust me.”

Arya obeys. She lies her cheek on his shoulder, defeated, and by the sway of his body she realizes they’re walking out of the inn; suddenly there’s chill, cold air, suddenly there’s winter wind and snow falling over her again. She keeps her eyes closed.

She cries, and cries, until she’s weeping, and Sandor keeps one hand on the back of her head — eyes closed, Arya, he keeps whispering.

In the middle of the long night, a wolf howls in grief.

She opens her eyes just in time to see, over Sandor’s shoulder, Thoros and Beric walking out of an inn on fire.

Chapter Text

i.

When Jon comes to him, Dolorous Edd is contemplating the idea of going to the ground, to the last gate, in order to die an honorable death.

“Aim!” Edd screams; a hush of wind comes from the North, and the archers draw at their strings, taut, waiting.

From the top of the Wall, Edd can hear the cacophony of battle down below: the screeching of the dead, the yelling of orders from the other commanders on the ground, the familiar clang of swords. He can hear, remarkably, the sound of things breaking: wood, metal. Their last gate, being taken down.

“Loose!” He screams, and arrows fly to meet the dead men approaching them from the forest. Edd listens to the quiet sigh of fire, to the line of light that cracks the darkness of the sky open.

They will not stop coming. The dead, that is: for hours, now, without break, and he’s thinking he will go down in History as the Lord Commander who lost the Wall to the worst enemy possible.

Not even goddamned wildlings, he thinks, bitterly, and screams “Ready!” again.

It is the fire of the arrows that illuminates the giant shadowy shape flying overhead: at first it scares him, that monstrous thing, so close to the Wall that the wind mobilized with the flapping of its colossal wings threaten to bring his men down, just when he’s about to tell them to lose a new set of shafts.

Jon Snow hops off of the back of the dragon, landing on the top of the Wall, bracing himself on the icy surface with the palm of his hand and barely losing his balance. It is very smooth, very elegant: a bastard worthy of the name. His dragon soon circles back toward the northern side of the Wall again, breathing fire over the dead men approaching.

“Better late than never,” Edd says, lending Jon a hand to hold. “I thought you wouldn’t come.”

Jon accepts the hand, getting on to his feet. He looks around, to the archers; and then down, to the ground, to the battle they are about to lose. Maybe with a dragon, we won’t, Edd thinks. It is a hopeful thought.

It makes him sick to his stomach.

“I was honestly considering that the best way to redeem my name would be to just go down to the gates and die with the rest of our men,” Edd says, following Jon’s gaze.

“Where is the Horn?” Jon asks, as if he hasn’t heard a single musing Edd just said.

“With me, at all times,” Edd answers, sliding the thing out of where it is perpetually hanging from his waist; Jon wouldn’t trust anyone else with it. “I’m not trying to offend anyone, but is it a bad time to say I told you this would happen?”

Jon doesn’t answer. He takes the Horn of Winter from Edd’s waist with a jerk and, then, looks at his face for the first time. There is a hardness in his gray eyes, a stark thing that Edd has already seen before and that means, as a rule, a really bad omen.

A cold, heavy stone of dread settles in Edd’s belly, then, and try as he might, he cannot master it.

“You’re about to tell me something horrible,” Edd whispers, trembling, because, consider: in the present circumstances, what could be worse?

Jon uncomfortably shifts his jaw to unclench it.

“I’m going to bring down the Wall,” he says.

There is no trace of doubt in his voice, no wavering, not an ounce of fear in him. Amazing, Edd thinks. Maybe for a man who’s already died, things are easier. But if Edd falls, his only chance of coming back again rests upon the Night King. It is not a rising from death he is particularly looking forward to.

“There it is,” he mutters. “Will you explain to me why?”

“I don’t really have the time,” Jon says, walking again, dodging the line of men in their way. Edd follows. Of course Jon doesn’t have the time. “But it is crucial that you know that a group of hundreds of thousands of dead men are coming South in a few hours.”

“And we’re just clearing the way for them to pass, I suppose,” Edd comments, casually.

“No. We’re clearing the way for our men to pass,” Jon corrects.

There is a moment of silence as they keep walking. Edd understands; he does. They need to ensure their retreat. He did say this would happen.

“And are you sure about it?” He asks in a small voice.

“Not really,” Jon answers. “But, again—”

“No time,” Edd finishes.

“Exactly,” Jon says. He stops at a relatively empty spot at the Wall. “Edd, do you trust me?”

Edd doesn’t need to think twice. “You know I do.”

“Well, good. Because I need your help.”

“Just tell me what to do,” he says, somewhat relieved that he’s just following orders instead of screaming them.

Jon grabs his arm.

“You take our men South,” Jon tells him, storm-eyed. “You flee. Help our men to go to the Twins.”

“We can’t just flee,” Edd argues. “We need to stay here and take a last stand. Who is going to fight them as they cross to our lands? Who is going to stop them?”

“The dragons. The dragons are going to stop them.”

“You’re just one, Jon, against hundreds of thousands of—”

“Daenerys will be with me.”

“Still two dragons against a horde of—”

“The gods damn you, Edd, I am trying to save your lives,” Jon mutters, shutting his eyes. “Obey me. Flee to the Twins. If I manage to kill the Night King, then you’re safe. If I don’t, then you’ll have time and space to get ready. This is what we planned. Go.”

Edd nods, quietly. He has the sudden feeling of clarity that all he’s ever done in his life, the things that brought him here, to the Wall, were leading to this moment. But that must be just the approaching death, misting his memories backwards.

He looks Jon Snow in the eye, holds his hand in a firm grip and brings Jon close, chest against chest.

“You're a bloody bastard, Jon,” he says, fondly.

“I am sorry,” Jon says, with feeling. “I am very sorry.”

Edd shakes his head. He has the distinct feeling they won't see each other again.

“It was an honor to serve by your side, Lord Snow.” A pause: “Brother.”

“The honor was ever,” Jon says, with raw honesty, “and entirely mine, Lord Commander.”

Edd nods. He lets go, leaving Jon behind with the Horn of Winter and the fate of their world in his hands.

“Alright, folks!” He screams as he makes way amidst the lines of archers. “We’re bringing the Wall down, so everyone needs to go down— no questions asked! Everyone to the ground and South, to the ground and South, now!”

ii.

The world can end in a thousand different ways. This is just one of them:

A man in black, half dead, half alive, stands alone at the top of a Wall, surrounded by darkness; a dragon, flying in wide circles over his head, waits, ready to break his inevitable fall.

A man blows a Horn.

The sound is ancient, and the earth recognizes it. The last note ends with a dying breath.

This is how this world ends: with a gasp for air.

And then, ice shatters beneath the lonely man’s feet.

iii.

Dany cannot see a thing.

It was easier when they were fighting at the feet of the Wall, on an open field. Here, as she flies on Drogon’s back hovering above the forest surrounding Craster’s Keep, all she can see are the tops of the trees, poorly illuminated by starlight hidden by the clouds. The darkness is denser, though, and even narrowing down her eyes, she still sees only blurs.

She tries to listen, then, but the only thing to be heard is the whistling winter winds: this far up high, everything else sounds distant, echoes uselessly coming from all directions. Horses galloping, people screaming.

There, she waits for her clue.

It is in the swollen silence of the waiting that she feels, suddenly, Drogon launching off — clumsier than usual. Agitated, the dragon bends its neck backwards and lets out an agonized screech that scratches the air, like a knife on glass.

“Drogon,” she screams, “gīda ilagon!”

But Drogon doesn’t calm down. Instead, he sets out to fly without Dany’s direction or command, closer to the clouds and to nowhere in particular. She clutches the reins around his neck, trying not to lose her balance. She never fell from his back before; she cannot afford to now.

“Dohaeragon nyke, Drogon,” she tries to tell him, terrified and confused, above the sound of the wind. Serve me, she commands him, obey me, but the core thread between his heart and hers, the bond that allowed him to know her thoughts even before she’d thought them, seems to be gone.

It is only when the dragon opens his wings wide to glide smoothly across the air, shifting his gigantic head to the side that Dany sees, not without horror, his eyes as white as two full moons.

“Bran?” She murmurs.

But a dragon cannot speak. Drogon keeps flying until he stops, hovering above a point in the forest that seems random to her. That is when Dany hears it — the song of a Horn, filling the air with gloom.

What follows sends a chill down Dany’s spine: she cannot see it, but she can hear the sound of ice — miles and miles of solid ice — breaking down all at once.

She knows what to do. She can only pray that Bran knows what he’s doing, and that the living have escaped in time.

“Dracarys,” she says, and one second later, the forest beneath her is on fire.

iv.

She loses track of time.

Bran remains with her, controlling Drogon’s mind for a while, at least until she has a grip of what to do and where. It is easier to see after the trees catch fire.

She listens, far ahead, her own men, finally out of the limits of the forest, escaping to the South, where there is no longer a Wall to trap them. She sees the dead, at last: they come in a wave of darkness and silence, quietly swallowing up the light.

All of those months at the Wall, and she’d never seen so many of them together.

She is consumed by rage, then, forgetting that they were once humans. They’re like a plague, running toward the people she loves and the kingdom she is sworn to protect.

She rains fire on them without mercy until the entire forest has become a bonfire, until the snow has melted into dirty dew.

v.

The world becomes a wasteland.

From the back of her dragon, at the place where the Wall once stood, Dany sees hubris — tents abandoned, dead horses, barrels of food left behind, the wreckage of the buildings that were once Castle Black.

The earth is scorched next to the ruins of the gates. There are parched ribbons of land everywhere, marks of the last battle amidst the bodies that have been burned: all definitely dead now, definitely fallen, no distinction between the factions. Her only hope is that, among the once living, their dead have remained dead, here, blackened in the desolation of the aftermath, instead of rising to join the march South.

At the distance, deep into the true North, the forest burns, too, the flames not done consuming the last of the wood and the trees. It will burn for days. The air is choked with smoke. The lakes that were frozen are melting in the heat.

An eerie quietness surrounds Dany as she flies on the back of her dragon, searching for stray dead men to burn. There is nothing, she realizes in the emptiness of her own heart, of her own throat, that she wouldn’t do now to win this War. This, right now, must be the worst thing that could happen: what comes after is just an echo.

The whole of the country is now death’s territory, open for claiming. Intuitively from that day on, they will call it, simply, the Fall.

She needs to find Jon. It’s all she can think of.

vi.

She sees a dragon amidst the clouds and her heart seems to stop for a second because at first, she cannot see a rider.

She realizes it’s just because Jon is not able to sit upright anymore. He is leaning against Viserion, arms loosely circling around the neck, too tired to do anything but be taken away in the sky.

Dany lands on the ground, and raises her hand to the air, catching her child’s attention. Viserion is a good, obedient dragon, who is careful with Jon as they set down on the ground, and who allows Dany to climb atop him to help Jon off.

Jon stands on wobbly legs and Dany tries to hold him up, her arms around his waist. She is too tired and too small to stand up for two: he’ll need to put up some effort.

“Jon,” she whispers. Around them there is only darkness and emptiness and two dragons for shields. She doesn’t think about it at the moment, but this will be their life for a very long time. Dany grabs his chin. “Open your eyes. Come on.”

Jon is strong enough to stand, but not strong enough to stop himself from hiding his face on her shoulder. She holds him and realizes he’s shaking with sobs.

Dany closes her eyes. She doesn’t know how long it has been since the Fall, how many days they’ve been flying, without stopping to eat or sleep, barely taking a break to rest their legs and too afraid to be on the ground to properly rest; hanging on the edge of the old world and the new one, looking for dead men to burn, watching the remaining of their men who couldn’t escape to the South dying on a fruitless battle, on a barren land. How long? Probably a couple of days, but it feels like they’ve aged a dozen years.

We were young, she thinks. Not that long ago, she used to be a young girl.

“Jon,” Dany croaks, “it is alright—”

“What have I done?” He mutters against her neck.

“Only what was needed,” she answers, too afraid to draw back and look him in the eye.

Whatever happened, it was a thing they did together. She cannot allow him to carry this burden alone; she lets him there, laying in her arms for a while.

“We need to go,” she whispers in his ear. “We need a shelter.” And a plan, she thinks but does not say it. Not yet. “Come on.”

“I can’t do it,” he shakes his head. “I can’t ride anymore.”

“Then come with me,” Dany says, taking his hand. She finally looks him in the eye. She presses her forehead on his, cupping his cheek. “I’ll take care of us. Trust me.”

vii.

Jon climbs atop Drogon with her, as in the first time she tried to teach him how to ride a dragon, his arms circling her waist from behind. Viserion flies right beside them. The cold wind feels as sharp as a blade on her skin.

Even this far away, the smoke stings in her eyes.

Daenerys guides Drogon to glide low, as close to the ground as possible — not only to spot possible stray dead men, but, most importantly, they need a refuge. The main road is empty. The living are ahead of them; the dead are nowhere to be seen; she’s not sure what they’re supposed to do next, but she’s convinced that if they don’t rest they will pass out and die. They cannot go on like this.

The dream of sunlight, the promise of a kingdom — those seem surreal, now. They belong to another life; a different, alternative reality in which death did not fill up the very air she breathed. The only thing keeping her from giving up entirely and surrendering to the next White Walker or dead creature that materializes in front of her is the pressure of Jon’s face against her back.

She almost cries with relief when she finally sees what passes as a shelter — it is in fact an elaborate tent raised against the foot of a mountain, more a cave than a house. A river flows right by its side.

Daenerys lands. She wraps one arm under Jon’s and around his waist, helping him walk toward the safety of the tent. Inside it is not exactly warm, but there’s potential for it: they are protected from the hushing winds by an architecture held together by wooden sticks and leather and bear skin and ropes.

Jon rests against the stony wall of the mountain, half-sitting but slowly sliding to lie down.

Dany looks at this man she promised to take care of mere hours ago. She is hungry, she is bone-tired, she is sure Jon must be cold; but above all, she is thirsty. She’s never been so thirsty in her life, not even in the desert, beneath the midday Essosi sun. Jon’s eyes are deep into its sockets; he can barely keep them open.

She’s positive that, without water, they are surely to die.

She kneels by his side.

“Jon,” she grabs him by the shoulders. Her tongue feels heavy. “Wake up.”

He shakes his head. “I want to rest,” he babbles.

“No, Jon,” she wants to cry so very badly. What is she going to do if he dies? She cannot allow it. She suddenly wonders where Jorah is, where Qhono is, where Grey Worm is. Where are her people? Did they survive the Fall? “Please.”

Jon just sleeps.

Daenerys summons memories, then. She’s always been one to draw strength from dreams, but in the Long Night she feels wary of them. There is no guarantee of a future anymore.

So to the past: eggs of stone cracking, alive, as she birthed her dragons into the world. The first time she rode Drogon. A long lost memory of Viserys when he was still her brother and king, and not her captor: alive with laughter and mischief, telling her knight stories as they shared a bed. Her Unsullied, finally free, a dusty sunset. Cries of Mhysa in her ears. Braiding Missandei’s hair. Daario’s hands on her skin. Sharing a flagon of wine with Tyrion on their ship to Westeros until they were drunk and silly. The first time she saw Jon Snow and simply knew he was the one.

She takes off her own clothes. Then Jon’s, one by one. He doesn’t help, and unlike her, he cannot stand the cold. Soon his eyes open.

“What are you doing,” he mutters.

“We are going to jump into that river,” she commands. “I’ve been in the desert. Thirst will kill you before hunger.”

“But not before the cold. We’re going to freeze to death,” Jon says.

It is a relief to know he still has his wits about him.

“We won’t,” she says. “We have a shelter. We’ll light up a fire and sleep. Then Drogon will hunt for us and we’ll eat and— we’ll survive, Jon Snow, because the realms rely on us,” she says, finishing tugging his pants down his legs. “Do you hear me?”

His breath is ragged through his nose.

“Yes, Your Grace,” he quips.

Daenerys doesn’t laugh, but she won’t berate him either. If he’s conscious enough to joke then he’s conscious enough to fight.

viii.

The cold does almost get to him. Properly hydrated and back to the tent, Daenerys grabs whatever scrap of wood she can get around their made-up tent, builds them a fire, and when she’s about to dress up again, Jon urgently pulls her into his arms.

There's nothing romantic about it. It’s just a desperate survival instinct. He’s shivering from head to toes; Dany is too shocked with the pressure of his bare body against hers to do anything but stay very still, very quiet.

She never feels cold, not really. Jon seeks her skin with the same thirst he cupped water into his palms and drank it. He leans against her, curls up to her—

And Dany wants him to take her fire. It’s yours, she thinks, you can have it.

When she wraps her arms around his broad shoulders, she can feel him sighing.

“You’re so warm,” he says, in the clear voice of a lucid man, finally free from danger.

She tries not to cry.

“Sleep, Jon,” she murmurs.

ix.

She wakes up first and it occurs to her that it is the first time she sees him sleeping. Months at the Wall, and their schedules of rest never matched — one of them needed to be in the air, atop a dragon, at all times.

The bonfire has turned into embers. It’s time to range again.

Dany lingers for a moment, watching over him, braced on her elbow. Then, because she knows Jon, she rises and puts on her garments.

When she’s fully dressed, she shakes him awake by the shoulders, as lightly as possible.

“Come on,” she prompts him. Like most soldiers, he wakes up instantly and ready, sitting up and reaching for Longclaw even before he acknowledges her. His gray eyes calm down as they settle on her face, and Dany tries not to make too much of it. “We need to find dead people to burn.”

The entire world is the battlefield now.

x.

The living move South in sparse groups; from the advantage point of the clouds, Dany and Jon can set them apart by the sound of their voices, by the noise their steps make, by the fires they light up, by the eventual song the most reckless ones sing in the night. The dead, on the other hand, are just a shadow darker than the night, moving in eerie silence until the screeching begins.

It’s the screeching that gets their attention, along with the human screaming.

They follow the sound, heading towards the North. Daenerys commands Drogon to fly lower; Viserion and Jon follow.

Soon they find the source: a small village just between Last Hearth and the Long Lake. It borders the forest surrounding the first castle, close enough to both water and main road; communities like that were generally occupied by the small folk, merchants of low birth and free folk who found a way to live peacefully south of the Wall, and were always raised on the sides of the river. Water was a precious resource in the North.

When the Starks were preparing for the War, Dany often saw Arya and Sansa sending letters and emissaries to their people, not only to the main castles and noble lords, but to every small village like this, to the outskirts of the great castles of the North in which their people dwelled and made a living for generations. They were often the hardest to convince to go to Winterfell for shelter, and that exasperated the Stark ladies greatly, Sansa in particular. Those people were as attached to the land as roots to the earth; with the Wall firmly standing, there was no reason to abandon houses they had built with their own hands, with great sacrifice and risk.

On their way up to the Wall, at the beginning of the war, Dany had seen many villages like this. Not all of them responded to the urgent summoning of Winterfell. In the past few days, not all their ranging was to fight the Others and their dead mean; sometimes, they only needed to let people know the Wall had fallen and they should flee to Winterfell. Better late than never.

Now, as they fly lower and closer, it seems that a dense darkness has taken over the community. It swallows up the starlight. She can hear people screaming, running, some even fighting — common steel, Dany realizes. Useless.

The dead and the living are one uniform stack of bodies: fighting to eat, fighting to survive, each with their own needs.

It is, Daenerys realizes quickly, impossible to burn the enemy without burning the humans. And just as quickly the solution appears in her mind: there is nothing to do but set them apart.

“Ilagon, Drogon,” she commands, and her child obeys.

Drogon flies lower and slower, his wings spread steadily open as he smooths his way down.

Dany looks behind her, hoping Jon will get the cue. Most times the dead are just strays, but sometimes there are White Walkers with them, at least one, and for that her fire won’t be enough. If that’s the case, they’ll need his Valyrian sword to truly be done with the threat. She’s still carrying Dragonblood, Arya’s gift, across her back; but she never needed to use it.

Drogon circles back and finally lands on the ground. Daenerys jumps off of her child’s back, promptly sending the dragon back up to the sky.

“Sōvegon!” She tells Drogon, “Jikagon bē!”

On the firm ground, she can see better. She grabs stones and runs toward the houses being attacked, as close to them as she can make it without ruining the element of surprise.

One of the humans figured out what could defeat them, and tried to set their own little house on fire. It repelled both living and dead, but it gave Dany a sudden flash of sight, of light. The dead shriek loudly, open mouths with rotten teeth and rotten tongues, as the living fight with futile weapons.

One thing Dany learned about the dead at the Wall was that they were very simple creatures. They wanted to feed. That was all.

The same could not be said about the White Walkers, who were elegant, and beautiful, and lethal, and very hard to find and kill. Their army, though, was made of humans reduced to a base animal hunger. There was very little intelligence implied in their demeanor. Without a White Walker to command and organize them, the dead were simply willing to go to great lengths to eat, and like any creature that lived by the rule of its own gut, it just wanted easy food.

“Daenerys!” Jon screams. He’s still flying on Viserion’s back, trying to see her.

Dany runs forward, closer to the core of the attack, until she can throw one stone at the nearest dead person.

“Here!” She screams, as loud as her throat will allow her.

Some of them, living and dead, turn their heads toward her voice, above the guttural groans and desperate cries for help.

She throws a second stone, aiming at another dead; and then another, and then another. The stones do nothing to harm them; they’re just upset, which is how Dany wants them.

“I’m here!” She says, beckoning them closer. Please, please, come to me, please, she’s thinking.

More dead people are paying attention, and letting go of their prey, armed with sticks and swords, to contemplate the girl with open arms before them.

She throws the last stone, as hard as she’s able. “Come to get me!”

And she runs. Nothing sets off a predator more than running from them; this, Dany learned with both dragons and humans.

And so she runs, and runs, as fast as she can and without looking back. If she looks back, her courage will leave her. She can hear the cacophony behind her: slow and quiet at first, and then, increasing in rhythm and pace as more and more dead men simply follow the new, easy prey. She realizes, with relief, that the noises of battle between the dead and the living are hushing down; this is good, this means they’re leaving the villagers alone, that all the dead are chasing her or simply following their peers, and the thought is terrifying enough to inspire her to run faster.

She raises her eyes to the sky, where Drogon is just waiting for her command. She cannot be sure this will work, but now she’s done it, there’s nothing left to do but try. She finally turns to face the army of the dead about to devour her.

They run faster than she does, though, and when she spins around, they’re already close enough to pounce, to jump on her.

“Dany, NO!” She can hear Jon screaming, just a second before she is swallowed by a horde of dead people.

And in the interval between her heartbeats, Dany raises both of her arms.

“Drogon!” She screams, fearlessly, closing her eyes. “Dracarys!”

And her world is engulfed by flames.

xi.

“I don’t know why you are so upset,” Dany murmurs, wrapping Jon’s cloak around herself more out of mortification than proper cold.

Jon is pacing around the main room of the house they are in. It’s a small house, with two chambers: one hall, one bedroom.

The people they saved, the smallfolk, had offered the entire village to them, maybe out of gratitude, maybe out of fear; Daenerys is never completely sure. Jon had told them, afterwards, to run.

Follow the Kingsroad to Winterfell, he had commanded. Do not look back, do not gather your things, just— just go. Do not stop, do not sleep, do not rest until you get to Winterfell.

As soon as his feet met the ground, he had wrapped his black cloak around her naked, but ultimately unburnt, unharmed body. In the back of her mind, she was reminded that Viserys told her once this is how their people got married — the groom wrapping a cloak over the bride’s shoulders — but the moment passed: he had frantically touched her face, her shoulders, her face again, her hair, as if he were looking for ashes, for blood.

Are you alright, he’d muttered, over and over, Dany, are you hurt? Are you alright?

And she’d held his palm against her face, calmed it down, soothed his frenzy.

Jon, she’d said, in a clear, calm voice, I am well. I’m unhurt.

She’d meant, almost said, I’m unburnt. But that was not what Jon wanted to know.

When they turned around, an entire village was on their knees before them.

No, that’s not right. An entire village was on their knees before her.

Right now, with the last of the smallfolk gone and only their dragons for watchers outside the house, she thinks Jon is supposed to be looking for clothes — hers burned under Drogon’s fire — but he has forgotten what he must do, and is just walking back and forth instead, running a hand through his hair.

He snorts under his breath when her timid voice breaks the silence; it is a furious sound.

“Why should I be upset?” He asks, clearly upset, so Dany keeps her mouth shut as he finally opens one of the trunks, fumbling for clothes.

“You just jumped in the middle of a bunch of dead men and poured fire over yourself,” he mutters. “No reason at all to be upset.”

Dany rolls her eyes.

“Fire cannot kill a dragon, Jon Snow,” she reminds him. “I don’t burn.”

He finds something, throws it in her direction, and Dany catches it in the air, midway. She holds it out in front of her: it’s a tunic. It’s too big for her, but she unwraps Jon’s cloak from her shoulders to wear it anyway. Jon catches a glance of her, and looks away, suddenly intensely focused on the contents of the trunk again, as if he’d been too shocked to realize her nakedness before and now, alone in a small house, he cannot avoid it.

“Dead men,” he mutters. “You made dead men chase you. They can eat you alive before you can think of the word Dracarys.”

Daenerys sighs. The tunic almost reaches her knees, her arms lost inside the sleeves.

“Jon,” she says, trying to sound like a reasonable person, deciding things reasonably. “We are alone here, you are one man with one sword, and those people — dozens of them — didn’t have dragonglass.” She crosses her arms under her bosom. “They are my people. I am sworn to protect them. What was I to do? To watch them die?”

“You are to never again in your life scare me like that,” he says, with finality and resolution, and throws another piece of clothing in her direction. “You are to remain on Drogon’s back at all times until it is safe to land. While it isn’t, you fight from the sky. This is your role.”

She almost misses the second garment; it’s a pair of trousers. Made of wool, but too big for her; she discards it away, resting it over the wooden table in the middle of the room. She’s not done with their argument.

“Stop treating me like I’m some fragile little girl waiting for you to save me,” she says, angrily. “We are equals. I am the mother of—”

“I don’t care about your twenty two titles!” Jon says. He is very furious, and finally drops the pretense of occupying his hands with something, anything, to simply glare at her. “Stop trying to be a savior!”

“Don’t be a hypocrite. As if your whole life doesn’t revolve around saving living people from dead men!” She throws her hands in the air. What a completely absurd thing to say — Jon Snow of all people! “And if I am not to save them, what am I doing here?”

Jon walks toward her and speaks through a clenched jaw.

“You help your fellow brothers-in-arms by not putting yourself in unnecessary danger,” he says, low and harsh. “By not being reckless. That’s what you do in a War.”

“I tire of you presuming to teach me about the ways of War, Jon Snow,” Daenerys says, and suddenly she is also furious. She hates when men are condescending, even the best of men. “And there is no such thing as safety anymore! Anywhere! The Wall fell!”

“Don’t blame me for decisions I had to—”

“I am not blaming you for bringing down the Wall. It was necessary! But what I did was necessary too,” she gets closer to him, too, enough to press a finger against his chest. “If we are to be partners in this, you have to trust that I know what I’m doing. Do what you must, and I’ll do the same.”

Jon covers her hand with his, as if he means to sway it away.

“It is distracting when you’re trying to die on me,” he says.

“I don’t need you to watch over me at all times. I never asked that of you.”

“Well, that makes two of us, because I never asked for this either and yet I can’t just stop myself from searching for you.”

For some reason Jon’s fingers lingered around her wrist, his thumb over her pulse point. They are suddenly very close, and from this distance, or lack of it, Dany can notice that the storm in his gray eyes is not really fury — not at her, anyway.

His hand around hers trembles and she realizes — it’s the same shaking that fumbled all over her skin, Dany, are you alright?

And in a moment of sudden clarity, it hits her: it must be hard for him, knowing the other side of death.

She doesn’t pull her hand away. He looks her in the eye. She sees his fear as it is: bare and bleeding and exposed like a fractured bone; and then some recognition falls into place between them, a lightning illuminating everything, all at once.

Jon tries to step back, let go of her hand; she doesn’t let him.

She holds his hand, instead.

And says:

“Jon,” quietly.

For a heartbeat, Jon hesitates, as if he’s afraid of the silence and afraid of speaking and afraid of what she might say; and then, in a single motion, he crashes his mouth on hers and kisses her, and Dany forgets what exactly she was arguing for.

Because Jon kisses her like they are in the eye of the storm, without a care for the world spiraling down into chaos; he kisses her with the fury necessary for survival, fingers tangling in her hair, an arm wrapping tight around her waist, bringing her to stand on her toes to match him, her body arching inside the cage of his embrace; he kisses her with guilt and fear and recklessness, slashing her mouth open as if his tongue were a sword; he kisses her like a dragon, all fire and blood, and Dany— ah.

Ah.

He breaks apart and his swollen mouth starts to shape in the form of an apology. He is frowning, he is shaking his head, his arms are loosening their grip around her and he is about to say I’m sorry.

Dany cradles his face between her hands before he can begin.

You don’t mean that, she thinks. You’re not sorry, and we both want this. Don’t lie to me.

She’s vaguely aware that she’s not supposed to — something about heirs, something about a throne, something about a kingdom, something about what was promised; but that was before the world ended.

“Don’t,” she murmurs, and kisses him back, and for the moment, she has this illusion that she has him.

Jon lifts her from the ground, wraps her legs around his waist and with fingers stiff from cold and past wars, reaches for the hem of the borrowed tunic Dany is wearing; and if the Others invaded that abandoned village right in that moment, if the world sunk into perpetual, irreversible winter, or was drowned in dragon fire, either way, it would have gone unnoticed.

xii.

Later she looks for it around the bed — for the tunic he took off of her minutes later he gave it for her to wear. She doesn’t find it.

Jon is asleep.

She thinks, absently, that they are stealing another family’s clothes, house, village, life. She supposes normal wives do this: they stare at their husbands sleeping. She wants to be this woman — she was too young to know better with Drogo, too apathetic to want it with Hizdahr zo Loraq, and too consumed by passion for Daario for the thought to ever cross her mind — but with Jon Snow, for him, she tries it out.

It doesn’t sit right in her belly, for some reason. One of them doesn't fit into the picture.

Jon is lying on his back, his chest and all the scars it harbors exposed in the chill winter air, rising and falling, slowly and deeply. She had kissed those scars, ran the tip of her tongue across them, felt him melt and sigh beneath her touch, but now it feels as if her memories are a fever dream; he is miles away.

She turns her back on him. There’s a fireplace in the house, but the wood that once fed it has turned into coal. Her eyes have long adjusted to the almost absolute darkness, and she spots the tunic — he’d thrown it away next to the table, before they could reach the bed. Her back still hurts a little from how he pressed her against the stony wall, and the ache left is so good that Dany almost cries just from the memory.

He touched her as if he was trying not to think too hard about it, as if he was giving in, surrendering to some primal urge. Half wolf, half dragon.

Looking at it now, retrospectively, Dany is not sure his hunger was what she wanted. She thought she did. But then, once you sate it — once a beast has been fed, what is left? And what did she want from him, if not that?

She wears the tunic, after all. Looks for the black cloak he wrapped around her shoulders and that she had discarded; wears it, too. In the trunk, she looks for a trouser that is more fit to her body, but doesn’t find any. She grabs any piece of clothing that could smooth the ride atop Drogon, protecting her thighs — her thighs, still bearing the memory of Jon’s harsh beard; but not as harsh as dragon scales, she thinks.

She covers her hands in another woman’s gloves, wraps her neck in another woman’s scarf, her feet in another woman’s winter boots; she sits by the edge of the mattress and her gloved hand ghosts over Jon’s scars for a heartbeat before she touches them with the tip of her fingers.

He opens his eyes immediately, sits up on the bed, eyes not alert but body awake, ready as a sword.

“Are we—”

“No, no,” she gently pushes him down again. “I’m going out on a range. I just wanted to let you know,” she whispers, as if she could make him rest again if she were soothing enough, motherly enough.

Under her touch, he sinks into the mattress, closes his eyes, relaxes again.

“I’ll go with you,” he says, as a man who has no intention to do so.

“No, stay,” she murmurs. “I’ll be fine. May I wear your cloak?”

“Of course,” he mumbles, nodding, and Dany pulls the blanket up to his chin.

A wife, she thinks, would lean down, hand on her husband’s chest, and kiss him goodbye. But Dany is not a wife. She gets up and leaves.

xiii.

Viserion catches the moonlight, a giant signal pointing her where to land and come back to, but Dany can barely walk as she dismounts. The cloak she saddled Drogon’s back with had slipped off and flew away in the middle of a snowstorm while she and her dragon burnt stray dead men approaching the road, and her inner thighs are now burning raw.

She’s not expecting to see Jon awake — the flight felt long enough for him to wake up and fall asleep again — but she quietly opens the door to the house they were given, and he’s there, standing in front of a fire.

“Oh, finally,” he says in an exhale, and rushes toward her.

He’s wearing his own clothes. Black, from the Night’s Watch.

“Oh,” Dany says, pulling at the tip of the fingers of the glove until she can pull them completely off. “There’s a fire.”

She rests the gloves over the table, and Jon reaches out for the fastenings of his cloak to unwrap it from her shoulders; Dany watches his hands.

“I found a hatchet and visited the woods nearby,” he explains.

“Jon!” She exclaims with concern. “You shouldn’t go to the woods alone—”

He shakes his head with derision. “I took Ghost and Viserion with me,” he says. “And I’m not you, I need a real fire to keep warm.”

He lowers his eyes to hers, and catches her already looking at his face with the longing of a little girl — and if Dany were any the wiser, she’d have the dignity to look away. She doesn’t, though, and Jon smiles a little.

“I made something for you,” Jon says.

She raises her eyebrows. “Oh?”

He takes her hand and guides them to the bed, sitting on its edge and grabbing a garment laying by the pillows. He raises it between them.

It’s a trouser. With a leather belt, of sorts.

“I thought you would need one of those for— Dany,” he spots the red marks on her inner thighs.

“It’s nothing,” Dany says, trying to dismiss him.

He raises his eyes to her face, suddenly all Lord Commander again.

“Let me see,” he asks.

It shouldn’t be so embarrassing to open herself like this after she’s spread her legs for him without protest, but Dany blushes as she lets Jon cup the back of her knee to support her foot on the bed frame, examining her legs under the firelight. She holds onto his shoulder for better support.

He clicks his tongue. “Why didn’t you wear anything?”

She slips her foot back on the ground, her legs slightly apart to keep her thighs from touching each other, and crosses her arms in front of her chest.

“I found nothing that fit me,” she mutters. “I tried to use a cloak as a saddle but it slipped away in a snowstorm.”

“A snowstorm?” Jon frowns.

Dany closes her eyes, frustrated.

“Jon,” she says. “You’re doing it again. Stop. I am fine.”

He crosses his arms, too, not convinced. She feels compelled to defend herself. She hates feeling like this.

“I’ve been riding Drogon for much longer than you’ve swung a real sword,” Dany says, trying to sound confident.

“That’s impossible,” Jon states with certainty.

“Maybe,” she says, “but I knew what I was doing and I am fine.”

“Your skin is open raw and I doubt we’ll find ointment here.”

“It will be healed again in a few days,” she mutters.

He rolls his eyes.

“If you had waited…” he trails off, grabbing the trouser again and holding it in front of her, low enough for her to wear it. “Try it.”

Her hands land on his shoulders again as she steps into the clothing, and Jon slides it up, tucking the tunic she’s wearing in, and pulling at the leather belt until the waistband is firmly wrapped around her waist. The fabric is thick wool, comfortable as the childhood she’s never known, and perhaps more importantly, it does fit.

Jon studies her in it. He doesn’t look satisfied.

“I tried to make it a little like your Khalasar,” he scowls at himself. “So with that in mind, it’s not very good, but it’s better than nothing.”

Dany swallows hard and dry. She is thinking that, with both her feet firmly on the ground, there’s no more need to keep bracing herself on his shoulders and still she cannot move away, afraid he’ll disappear like mist if she’s not touching him.

She is thinking, Jon, what happened to us? What is happening?

She is thinking, please, marry me. Be my King, be my crown, be my kingdom and my—

Instead:

“I didn’t know you could sew,” and her voice is needlessly thick.

Jon chuckles, clicks his tongue.

“No maidservants in the Night’s Watch to darn your clothes,” he shrugs. “You make do. Sansa tried to teach me some tricks, but they were too complicated.”

“I’m sure she did,” Dany says; pauses. “Thank you, Jon.”

He lifts his eyes to look at her, his face serious and awe-struck, and for a fraction of a second, it doesn’t feel like she is the only one feeling this so intimately, so earnestly — for a moment, she is not afraid.

“There’s a hot spring just near the woods,” Jon says. “I think it was the reason why they didn’t want to leave… The people we found here. But if you’d like— maybe it could help,” he points, clumsily, at her legs. “With the—”

Dany nods. It takes more courage than to jump in the midst of dead men and rain fire over herself, but she slides her hands from his shoulders to his face, holding it tenderly and raising it up to her so she can bend down, pressing her lips gently against his.

Jon is tense at first, until he isn’t, until his hands land on the sides of her legs with ease.

Yes, Jon, this is easy, she wants to tell him. What are you so afraid of? Loving is so easy. I’ll show you.

She breaks apart. He takes a breath.

“Dany,” he begins. “We really can’t—”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she says.

“It matters,” Jon says. “We shouldn’t.”

There is an entire conversation that they are decidedly not having. They are not talking about the implications for her reign, about her barren womb, about the fact he is the last and only heir she has. They are not talking about the lady who brought him back from the dead and promised Jon he would sacrifice the love of his life to save the world from eternal winter.

All of this story, the story of their lives, the story of the people who came before them, is summarized in this: they cannot, they should not — and yet, they will.

She pulls, lightly, at his unruly hair, growing bored of the conversation.

“Take me to the hot springs,” Dany says, kissing his lips. “I could use a bath.”

And Jon nods.

“Alright,” he whispers. “Alright.”

xiv.

(Jon loves her well, it’s the issue. Jon loves her better than any man before him.

Jon walks around their borrowed house with his head low; Jon knocks on the wooden door to announce his arrival every time he comes back. Jon darns the rip on her clothes without her ever asking him to. Jon quietly massages her muscles, sore with dragon-riding, absent-minded. She lies to him, Jon, I’m cold, and he opens his arms.

Come here, he says, like a confession, Come to bed, Dany.

Jon is patient enough to tantalize her until she is on the verge of begging. Time is meaningless in the long night, but she feels as if he spends hours with his head between her legs, dragging her pleasure out of her until she’s given him everything that she has. Jon empties her out, leaves her boneless in the sheets of another family. He conjures a void that he fills himself afterwards with his seed in her dry womb.

She’s never felt so sated. She’s never felt so open. She’s never felt so drained. She doesn’t know what it is that he is taking, but she knows she is giving it to him freely, willingly. She wants him to have it all.

There’s no guile in him. There’s just shapeless remorse. Jon loves her well, too well: like he is apologizing for something beforehand, trying to compensate for it, to atone for it, to pay. And Dany tries very hard not to think about promises, about dreams, or about prophecies.)

xv.

He traces the lines of her lips and nose with his fingertips, learning them by heart and touch in the absence of light.

Outside, the snowstorm rages. It always does.

She stares at the low-ceiling of their stolen house. This entire life feels stolen from some other girl, a girl who could be a better wife than she would be a Queen, with a man who could be a better husband than he could be a Savior.

She turns to face him. She takes his hand and brings his palm to her lips.

“What do you dream of when you sleep, Jon?” She asks in a quiet, low voice.

She has this feeling about him, Tell me everything, I want to know everything.

He smiles kindly at her. Jon is kind, always and in every gesture. She gathers every infinitesimal part of his gentleness as proof to herself that this man would never kill her; loving, caring men aren’t murderers.

(She remembers the day he took her to the top of the Wall and confessed to her what he did to the people who betrayed him after he came back from the dead. A part of her, responsible for her survival, tells her she should fear him, as a prey naturally fears its predator; she should locate the danger right there in his bloodied hands.

But all she felt for him, then, was awe, and child-like passion.)

“I dream of spring,” he confesses. “And you?”

Not enough, Dany thinks. She kisses every one of his fingertips.

“Don’t you wonder about your— family?” She almost says cousins, and stops at the last second.

“Always,” he says. “But only when I’m awake. I wish Bran would come to us and tell me where Arya is.”

“Not Sansa?” She wonders.

“Sansa is safe in Winterfell,” he answers.

With Tyrion, Dany thinks, and looks away from Jon’s face, to the ceiling again. She didn’t part in the best of terms with her Hand — retrospectively, not the best idea, given he stayed behind with Sansa Stark of all people — but now none of it matters: she’s so sick with longing for him and Missandei and Grey Worm and Qhono and Jorah that it physically hurts her not to know if they are well.

Her people.

She focuses on drawing his chin, his cheek-bones, to distract her from her homesickness.

“When we brought down the Wall,” she murmurs, quietly, “and fled… Did you see Ser Jorah?”

She remembers everyone. She remembers Grey Worm quickly and efficiently sorting out his Unsullied, Qhono guiding his horsemen. But she lost Jorah amidst the northerners.

“I thought he was with you,” Jon says, somewhat bitterly. “He’s always following you like a shadow.”

Dany curls her lips. “He’s protective of me.”

“He’s in love with you,” Jon says.

Dany curiously raises her eyebrows. “Are you jealous, Jon Snow?”

“It’s just very obvious.”

His voice really betrays nothing.

Dany runs her finger over his eyebrows, and he closes the storm of his eyes.

“Jorah is not meant to be my King,” she tells him, simply.

Jon doesn’t open his eyes. In fact, he does not say a thing.

xvi.

(There are things Jon thinks, in the secret chambers of his heart.

It’s when they come back from yet another row of seeking, finding, burning stray dead men, occasionally together, usually one at a time; and at some point they must rest, or eat, or feed the dragons — without sunlight, it is only the limits of their exhaustion that guide their schedule, but it is a clock as good as any other.

They stop wandering around and fly back to that same village, a world made for two, a ghost town.

And he tries very hard not to let it take root, those thoughts: he goes to the nearby wood to gather wood for the fire, taking both Viserion and Ghost with him, just in case; he skins off whatever Viserion and Ghost hunt for them. Daenerys slices the meat and roasts it. After their meal, Dany tends to his wounds and he kneads the sore muscles of her thighs. Sometimes they go out to the hot spring to enjoy clean water, and Jon watches the soft curves of her body, her milky skin stealing the moonlight.

He stares as she combs her silver hair with her fingers to, then, braid it. He says, Come to bed, Dany.

When they take each other’s clothes off, it’s often for the mere warmth of human skin. They’re too tired for anything else.

Whenever he can, Jon watches Dany fall asleep.

As a husband would watch his wife, he muses, but he wouldn’t know. And if he were a better man, he wouldn’t be doing this; he knows it in his blood and bones. Turns out he isn’t a very good man. He warned Bran. He tried to warn so many people.

In the secret chamber of Jon’s heart, the thought takes shape, unbidden: this thing they’ve built in the dark, among dragons and dead men, is a home.)

xvii.

When Bran comes to them, the moon has already turned.

As almost every time it happened before, a infamous raven landed and perched at their window. Its third eye, all knowing, seems to watch and wait, condescending and judgmental, for them to make room for its full presence.

It is Daenerys who first notices it, Daenerys who points the raven to Jon, because it was Daenerys who had been waiting to speak with Bran the most; but she would never force Jon to do anything. She puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Are you ready?” She asks, with gentleness.

Jon nods. He is always ready.

It is unnerving, every time, to watch the face and the eyes of her partner — now her lover — turn white, turn into snowy nothings, into milky emptiness, an empty vessel for a bird-god.

Jon is gone, and Daenerys misses him instantaneously. Bran does something to his face that unsettles and fazes her.

Bran stretches Jon’s arms, trying to get a grip on this body that does not belong to him, and lifts his head to look at Daenerys, sitting on the edge of the bed. She is standing with her back against the wall, her arms crossed beneath her bosom. She can be judgmental, too.

They stare at each other in silence for a while.

“You took my dragon,” she says, at last.

“I beg your pardon?” Bran asks.

“You entered Drogon’s mind,” Dany accuses him. “At the Fall. Without my consent.”

“We didn’t have a choice,” Bran frowns. “If I hadn’t, you would have burned the entire forest in the dark without a clue of what you were doing. You needed my direction.”

“If you need to ask for Jon’s consent, or Arya’s, or Jaime’s—”

“They’re humans,” Bran answers. Jon’s face is cold, set in stone; there is no emotion visible in his white eyes. “Your dragons are not humans.”

“Well, I would appreciate it if you didn’t do it again.”

Bran narrows Jon’s eyes.

“Of course,” he nods, just once, his voice dripping a very characteristic Stark wit. “It was terribly rude of me to use your weapons without your express authorization.”

“Not my weapons,” Dany shakes her head. “My children.”

“Of course. Your children.” Bran shrugs, exhales a prolonged breath. “I did not come here to fight, Your Grace.”

Daenerys pauses, hesitating.

“We were waiting for you,” she admits. “We didn’t know what to do, so we’re just—”

“You’re doing well,” Bran assures her, gently. “It’s part of the reason why I didn’t come sooner. Other people needed me more.”

He studies her, only with a tunic that didn’t reach her knees, hair unbraided and messy, and does not dare to comment on it.

Dany raises her chin an inch higher. If Bran Stark is waiting for her to explain any of it — merely seeking warmth in the cold, all things considered — then he’ll wait a very long time.

In any case, Bran continues.

“Because of your dragons, the dead are hiding in the forests, where they cannot be seen,” Bran explains. “This has cleared the road for our people to move to the Twins somewhat safely.”

Dany sighs with relief, a knot in her belly finally releasing its grasp on her. The past week had been only anticipation and waiting and no news, good or bad; the respite of being positively surprised is a flood of warmth within her.

She should know it could not last.

“But,” Bran says, and the knot tightens back again.

Dany doesn’t realize her muscles are straining, all around her spine and in her jaw, and her hands are closing in fists — a habit from Tyrion. Gods. Where is Tyrion?

But if she asks about him, she will not stop asking about a thousand things and people, so she presses her lips closed together, waiting for the god’s turn to say his oracles.

“They have taken all the strongholds north of Winterfell,” Bran explains, calmly. “Last Hearth, Karhold, Deepwood Motte.”

Dany tries to remember the map of the North.

“All castles surrounded by forests,” she murmurs.

“Yes,” Bran confirms.

“Why don’t we just burn the forests?” She asks.

Bran wrinkles Jon’s brow.

“We can’t burn all the forests in the North.”

“Why not? We know the dead are hidden there. It would solve most of our problems. We would only need to cross the Others to get to the Night King without the dead shielding him.”

Bran pinches the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes. “We can’t destroy the world we’re trying to save, Daenerys Targaryen. Please, tell me you understand this.”

“I’m not trying to destroy the world, I’m trying to save our people. Our people matter more than your trees.”

“The trees are necessary for the North,” Bran replies, exasperated. “We’ll need them to rebuild everything we are in fact destroying, we’ll need them to keep us warm, and we’ll also need the animals that live in those forests to eat, since we can’t grow crops as effectively as the other kingdoms.” Bran grabs the edge of the mattress in which he’s sitting. “I’m planning for us to actually survive this. It would be a waste to win this War only to die of cold and hunger in a regular winter.”

“You have allies to help you through regular winters,” Dany reminds him. “Just as you have allies to help you through the Long Night.”

“Oh, yes,” Bran smiles sharply. “And wouldn’t it be convenient to depend completely on the Iron Throne for our survival after we’re done with the Night King?”

Dany’s nostrils flare with rage. “That’s not what I was thinking of.”

“Of course you weren’t, Your Grace,” Bran mutters. He keeps his stare, white and hard and unrelenting. “If you keep ranging and burning strays, the dead will leave the roads alone and we’ll move safely until we can reach the Twins. No burning forests.”

His voice is final, commanding. He keeps his head held high.

“Is this an order, my lord?” Dany asks.

“Prince. And yes, it is an order.”

“Or what?” Dany wonders. “Or you’ll hold my children as your hostages to stop me?”

“Interesting choice of words, hostages.”

“I don’t know any other way of describing what you do to the creatures you possess. If my children are weapons, then what are you?”

“A weapon as well,” Bran answers in Jon’s calm, steady voice. “And that is why we’re trying to prevent the Night King from having me, and why you need to trust me. I can see things you cannot. Call it whatever you want, hostage, weapon, I do not care, I’ll do what I must. No burning forests.” He sighs. “I have a second request.”

“Request,” Dany echoes, amused. “Not an order?”

Bran ignores her.

“I am not in Winterfell anymore,” he says. “And the Night King is following my track, as planned. But Winterfell is in the middle of the way of his army, and every living human who is not moving South is there. It’s still a potentially large army to him, should his White Walkers decide to get a hold on it, even if the Night King himself is not there to raise the dead from the crypts.”

Dany frowns. “But— you were to get out to prevent—”

“I know,” he sighs. “But there’s no good reason why the White Walkers wouldn’t try to attack it, or the Night King himself if I sail safely from White Harbor. It’s an unprotected castle. The people there aren’t soldiers or fighters. They would not be able to resist an attack. Why wouldn’t he add numbers to his own army, if given the chance?”

“What’s your plan?” Dany asks.

“I think you and Jon should take shelter there,” Bran suggests. “The dead are afraid of dragons. We are fighting back and fighting well; the Others are measuring risks carefully. If there are dragons protecting Winterfell, then I believe they’ll skip it and move ahead.”

Dany feels that old noose around her neck, catching her breath with fear. She closes her eyes.

“You believe?” she repeats.

“Well, mine is the best informed guess available. If there’s one thing the army of the Dead consistently does, it is to avoid dragons at all costs, whenever possible.”

“But you just said we need to range,” Dany says. “We need to keep watching over our men as they move to the Twins.”

“You still need to take turns. One of you stays in Winterfell, the other flies and terrifies the dead into hiding in the forests, burning the occasional strays. That way the road is free, Winterfell is protected, everyone is safe.” He frowns his lips, and pleadingly looks at her. “Will you tell Jon?”

Dany nods, grudgingly.

“You know I will.” She tries to discern the god behind the white eyes. “What about you? Who is keeping you safe?”

“I don’t want you to worry about me,” he says, and it sounds a little sad.

“You’re an important part of this, Bran.”

“I know. I have people with me. People willing to—” Dany sees, in the dim-light, Jon’s throat bobbing as Bran swallows down, dry. He bows his head. “Anyway. One last thing. The Night King wants me for a weapon. There is no reason why he wouldn’t want your weapons, too. He’s afraid of your power. He will aim to take it, just as he takes all precious things from us.”

A fear colder than the night air drops into Dany’s belly, a pang of it. “My children?”

“The Night King can Other any living thing, just as he can bring any dead creature back,” Bran shrugs in the cloak of Jon’s body. “You both need to take care.” He gets up, and, a little clumsily, walks on unsteady feet until he’s close to Dany. “Go to Winterfell. Go now.”

Dany wraps her arms about Jon’s waist, as if that could stop Bran from leaving. “Bran,” she says, urgently. “Are— my people, are they—”

Jon’s mouth smiles a sad smile. “Which one of them?”

“Tyrion?” Dany’s voice is as small as a child’s. “Jorah, Missandei, Grey Worm, Qhono— Jon will ask about Arya and Sansa and—”

He presses his lips. “Tyrion is alive. Missandei is safe at Winterfell, you’ll see her soon. Grey Worm is alive, too.” He pauses. “I have not seen Jorah or Qhono in a while, but that does necessarily means—”

Dany shakes her head to stop him from even suggesting it. “And your sisters?”

He hesitates.

“They’re alive, for now,” Bran says. “Arya has a wolf and a Hound to protect her, and Sansa is— well. She’s a fighter. But if he asks, tell Jon they’re alive.”

And then Bran leaves — like air leaving the lungs; in the blink of an eye, he’s left.

Jon stumbles a little and Dany is there so he won’t fall. He rests his forehead on her shoulder for a long moment. He breathes in and out until he’s steady.

“You were fighting,” he mutters, unpleased. He feels it in his bones, in his body, but he never knows precisely what happened. “What were you fighting about?”

“Nothing of consequence,” Dany answers. “Bran and I disagree on battle strategy, is all.”

Jon grimaces. “I don’t like this.”

“Don’t worry,” she rolls her eyes. “We’ll do as he says, as usual.” She cups his cheek. “We need to go to Winterfell. I’ll tell you all there.”

xviii.

Winterfell is more crowded than it was when they left it, and the whole of it practically falls to their knees when dragons fly above it, amidst the snowstorm.

There are cries across the battlements. Open the gates! Open the gates for the King and the Queen!

They’re a King and a Queen — no more of the North or of the Iron Throne, but simply of Winter. And as they enter Winterfell’s courtyard, their people herd together around them, reaching out to touch their skin with bony, slender hands as if they carried the fire in their bodies and not in their dragons.

It is Samwell Tarly who welcomes them. Sansa Stark, the Lady of the House, has left.

xix.

There’s an entire wing of the castle dedicated to soldiers who were hurt. Jon goes to them first. Missandei pulls Dany aside, to the women and children sleeping in the hallways.

Later, with warm soup between their hands, Samwell explains the situation to them.

“Why did you let her leave?” Jon asks Samwell, the castellan. As far as confrontations go, it isn’t unkind, but he speaks like a king. It’s rare that he uses that voice.

“I tried,” Samwell answers. Gilly stands by his side, her child at her hip. “But she was adamant that she couldn’t allow Bran to travel alone, and besides, she needed to handle something directly with Lord Manderly in White Harbor.” He sighs. “It was all very fast.”

Jon is still distressed, unconvinced.

“Jon, there was nothing she could have done here but wait,” Samwell reasons.

“There was safety here,” he replies, sharply. “And there were her people. She abandoned her people in the middle of a War.”

“But without her, Bran would have gone only with Meera and Theon. And Theon was…”

“Theon was what?”

“Theon was already fragile of health,” Samwell says, carefully. “Podrick was sworn to Lady Sansa, and of course Lord Tyrion followed her, and so did Ser Bronn. If she had stayed, it wouldn’t have been safe for Bran. Did you want her to choose between her family and her people?”

Jon runs a hand through his beard, his hair. He doesn’t answer. Dany quietly listens, drinking her soup directly from the bowl. Missandei rests a hand on her shoulder for comfort.

Of course Lord Tyrion followed her, she is thinking. Of course he did.

xx.

Later, she goes to Jon.

They’ve been given Sansa’s old solar. Her private chamber is occupied.

There are two desks, and Dany can very clearly spot which was Sansa’s and which was Tyrion’s — one messy and chaotic, the other neat and properly organized. Their absence is so loud; Dany tries to picture them working together here, in the dark, in the waiting, for months.

What bloomed there? Of course Lord Tyrion followed her. She wonders if Jon is thinking the same when she walks to him. He is looking out of the window, to the courtyard. Dany palms his back, gently rubbing it.

“Did Bran tell you this?” He asks. “Did he say anything about her, about—?”

“No,” Dany shakes his head. “He only told me not to worry about him, and that they were all alive. Jon, he would have told me if anything bad had happened. She must be fine. She’s a strong woman.”

Jon scoffs a dry chuckle under his breath.

“No, he wouldn’t,” Jon murmurs.

He turns around, walking past her.

“Where are you going?” Dany asks.

“On a range,” Jon says, and leaves without looking back. “Your turn to rest.”

She stays alone in a haunted solar, with two ghosts for company.

xxi.

The difference between the two of them is that Jon knows better than to give his thoughts a voice, knows better than to utter it. He has lived under the seal of secrecy. Keeping his heart to himself is not at all a struggle; it’s just in his nature.

But Dany is a force of nature who cannot be contained by quietness, and so she dares to, on one of the occasions their desire wins the battle against their shared tiredness. In the aftermath Jon always feels lazy; like his bones had turned into wax. His limbs are loose and he could float, be carried away, lifted up; he could, in fact, fly. He chuckles under his breath to himself.

Dany, who has her head tucked under his arm, lifts her face toward him. “What is it?”

She’s smiling; he can hear it more than he can see it.

“Nothing. Just a bad jape,” he dismisses. His fingers dance on the ball of her naked shoulder.

Dany squeezes her arms tighter around him. They’re lying on the carpet, next to the hearth; the glow of the flames is welcome, but the warmth comes from Winterfell’s heated walls and of Dany, always Dany, her body its own fire.

“Tell me,” she insists, and her breath flutters over his neck.

Jon shakes his head. He’s still smiling.

“Do you feel light afterwards?” He asks. “As if you could… fly? Without a dragon, I mean.”

Dany does laugh a little.

“No,” she answers, simply. “I feel very rooted here.”

“I am surprised I’m still on the ground at all,” Jon comments.

“I’m not letting you go anywhere, Jon Snow,” Dany jokes. There’s a pause. “I think we should just stay here, in Winterfell, forever.”

Jon stiffens, like a bowstring pulled taut.

There’s a ghost of a girl in the corner of his eye, hair as red as the flames. He withdraws his arms, unwraps them from Dany. Like loosening an arrow:

“And what would we do here? Let the living die in the darkness?”

Dany raises her head, frowning her eyebrows together.

“What?” She asks, confused. “No, Jon… I was joking,” she murmurs. “A bad joke, as you said.” Dany lowers her eyes, timidly. “I’m sorry.”

Until he started to love this girl, this woman who carried a storm in her name, he’s never seen her looking so bashful, so apologetic or anxious. It doesn’t suit her. What am I doing to her?

Jon sits up, the sheets still tangled in his legs. Dany kneels behind him. She seems so small.

“Don’t apologize,” he pleads. “But we don’t— we shouldn’t—” he gestures dumbly between them. “This is not the future, Dany.”

Dany holds his gaze. “I know it isn’t.”