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He finds her (shoeless, a fur from their bed drawn tight around her shoulders) in a pool of moonlight. Her soles are clean; the snow sticks to the cobbles, the creases in his cloak. He moves soundless as a shadow. He touches her shoulder and says her name. Then, softer—
‘My love?’
To the first her face stayed open as the moon, but to this second softer sound a splinter needles its way beneath the smooth skin of her cheek. He puts his lips there (to the splinter, the slight beginning of a smile) and says it again. He says it in the low, lilting way a lord may ask a lady to dance. The way a knight may bend a rose forward in his gauntleted fist. Breathless now, she leans to take it: the flower that he proffers on his tongue, that he presses as a kiss to her cheek.
‘Jon,’ she says. ‘It is you.’
He smiles himself now, low and deep. He smiles and stows the sound of her away. (Between his ribs. Behind his breastbone. Inside the sinews of his ragged, beating heart.) ‘Aye,’ he says. ‘Only me.’
The maesters tell him he should not let her wander. They leave little flasks, a spoon beside to measure out milk of the poppy. They tell him to turn the key in the door, to bind her to her bed if he has to. They tell him the queen must sleep. Must sleep and dream: undisturbed, pale-lipped.
He tells them that is death.
Death became her, once. He found her shade in the lands that lay in the shadow of the Eyrie. Her hair dark-dyed, pearls rattling around her throat. The man holding her elbow whispered in her ear, held his eye as she bowed.
‘Your Grace,’ she said. ‘My father and I bid you welcome.’
He sent the man away: from her elbow, her side, his sight (and one day from this world, this life). He brought her up from her bow. He looked into her face. He said nothing. He looked.
In front of the fire he warms her feet inside his hands. She sits in her chair in their chamber and looks into the hearth as he kneels, as he moves her toes and hears his knuckles creak.
Behind them the bed stands rumpled, strewn with dogs. They shift and sigh in the heat that shapes its way around her body to filter like woodsmoke through the air. The maesters tell him the queen keeps too many. That some are wolves, and others whelps got from runaway hounds gone bad on a hunt. (One day he will send the maesters into the crypts. One day he will make them stand in the silent, stony world where his wife’s first love lies: wolf bones, blue-woven with roses. He will make them look, learn. One day.)
Her foot flexes against his palm. ‘Is there wine?’
‘Spiced,’ he says. ‘Do you want some?’
‘Aye.’
His knees ache on the hard flagstones, but he does not get up. Not yet. She rests easy in her high-backed chair and her foot stays where he is holding it: inside the span of his fingers, the sole pressed to his heart. She shifts it there a little as if she is still stepping shoeless through the snow. He feels the little mirrors of her movement, like a stone skimmed across a lake. They settle in his stomach, knit into his skin; ripples, kept and cast and lost.
He lifts her foot. He presses his lips to the delicate, worn-smooth arch of it. He shifts from his knees with a grunt.
She looks at him, her face soft in the firelight. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To get you wine, my love.’
‘There is wine?’
‘Spiced,’ he says. ‘Do you want some?’
She smiles at him. Her smile (ever, always) like the dawn. ‘Aye.’
Midway to the morrow she wakes. He puts his hand to her brow, and then his lips. Her skin is warm. She tastes of salt, spices. At her temple the scent she has carried since they were married: amber, rosewater. He breathes it. Inside his chest, the thunder of his heart finds a rhythm that carries itself to calm.
Her fingers feather his jaw. ‘The day is dark,’ she says. ‘Tell them to fetch more candles.’
‘It is night,’ he says softly. ‘It will be light soon, love. The sun will rise.’
Into the silvery knit of his beard, her fingers work and twist. ‘Night,’ she says. ‘But I do not sleep.’
‘Will we talk?’
‘We could.’ She shifts against him, her head warm and heavy. ‘We used to, didn’t we? When we could not sleep.’
His heart, still-water inside his chest. (To hear her talk of a past he thinks half-remembered. That they both lived, as two halves of a whole. That he holds within his body, that she gropes for in the dark.)
‘Aye,’ he says. ‘We talked.’
She lifts her head. She looks at him. On the high plane of her cheekbone, that imperious look that needs no crown to carry its command. ‘Talk, then.’
He talks.
They were married in the godswood. Lanterns floated on the water; ribbons dressed the trees. A torch-lit path turned the snow to shades of flame.
He could not swallow the fear in his throat. It did not leap; it lay low like something half-alive, weighed to drag itself off to lick its wounds, or burst out from the hedgerow in a final fit of glory. He considered it, his lungs tight. He listened to his heartbeat striking its thin timbre against his skull.
She floated between the torches, dressed in shades of flame-lit snow. When she reached to put her hand in his the fear died inside his throat.
At the Gates of the Moon he looked into the sky: knitting clouds, the breath of a storm. He looked back into her face. He said, ‘I would speak to my gods.’
‘There is no weirwood here, my lord.’ She cut the air with her fingers. ‘This place is godless.’
Above, the clouds blew big as pearls. ‘Do you pray, my lady?’
‘I used to,’ she said. ‘But each of my prayers was picked apart. Thrown away like ashes in the wind.’
‘What did you pray for?’
Beneath her dark-dyed hair, her ears were pink. ‘For the dead to breathe again,’ she said. ‘For a prince to love me.’ Her teeth scuttered, bit: quick, clean. ‘For that same prince to die.’
‘The gods heard you, then.’ He felt the storm settle, slice as needles into the air. ‘Princes have died. Kings, too.’
Her eyes flashed. ‘That was poison, not prayer.’
‘I have heard tell of it,’ he said. ‘A hairnet. A wolf with leather wings.’
‘Wolves can’t fly.’
He said, ‘Little birds can.’
In their bed she lifts her head. She puts a hand to his chest and looks at him. Now as then, her eyes flash and flutter. A chord is struck, and it chimes inside her: soundless, sharp. Her name lingers on his tongue, but he will not say it. It is enough that she sees the shape of it, then as now—the soft, curling tips of its letters sliding like silk across his tongue. She stays silent, same as he.
(Now as then, he wonders: does she ache? Does she ache to hear it as I ache to speak it? Her name: her one, true name.)
They were married in the godswood. Flame kissed water, and he kissed her: a sister become a stranger, a wraith become his wife. He held her shoulders between his hands and felt her bones knit beneath the cloak.
‘Sansa,’ he said.
Once spoken he found it had ever been on his tongue. Carved into it half-forgotten, like a scar.
She learnt the lines of them on his body. She put a fingertip to each one and he told her its story. She said, ‘Arrow?’
He shook his head. ‘Dagger. A dozen of them.’
‘And here?’
‘Bite,’ he said—and caught the glimmer of her eye. ‘I think you knew that one already.’
She tilted her head, her hair falling like red silk across her shoulder. ‘Why would I know that one, husband?’
‘Because you left it,’ he said. ‘Because my blood is still on your teeth.’
He moved over her body. He caged her beneath his own. Between his arms, his legs, the hard hot plane of his stomach, she arched and twisted. From her lips, a high eagle shriek that he knew for a laugh. The shock of it, the surprise of joy that still lit her face when she felt it. He kissed the sound of it. He drank it.
‘And here?’
He nipped at her throat. That shriek again, pealing.
There were other sounds: high, bird-like. Something caught and caged, something clawing to get out. He would wake her from their grip, a hand to her sweat-damp brow. Her fingers finding anchor at his arm.
‘Sleep,’ he would say. ‘I will sit here. I will be here when you wake.’
The maesters tell him to send ravens to the children. They pass him scraps of scrolls, press a pen into his fingers. They tell him to call the children home, to bid them bring their babes for her to look at. They tell him the queen must sleep once she has touched the heads of her children again. Must sleep and dream: undisturbed, pale-lipped.
He tells them that is death.
He calls the children home.
Her belly big and his hand forever on it. The curve came before her into a room, and he felt a savage kind of pride to see it. Something feral knit between his bones. The bloom of her belly: her and him.
At night he put his fingers to it. Learnt the marbled lay of lines; dips and swirls that settled somewhere low behind her hips. His fingers, his lips. She pushed his head between her thighs. She hummed his name into the dark.
Dawn comes and she is gone from the bed. He finds her in front of the fire, feeding cut ham to her dogs. She asks him for her cloak, and they turn the animals loose into the pale sunlight. They scamper across the snow. They leave their prints amidst the cobbles. They carve a path toward the godswood.
Between the trees the air is webbed with ice. A southron lord once told him that to breathe it was like taking a thousand knives into your lungs. He does not feel their blades, their sting. His lungs bloom, red-bright like roses. At the hinge of his elbow, her hand beds itself into his furs.
They walk in the wake of her dogs. Her runaway hounds and wolves. The black pool glimmers in the light. He thinks of their wedding, of the weddings of their sons. Torch-lit paths and the trees dressed in ribbons. Lanterns floating like flames caught in the fists of a god. He thinks of war and blood, of ashes. At night he dreams of it.
She stumbles on a tree-root. Her feet skitter like moth-wings for half a heartbeat; at his side, there is never a danger she might fall. Still, she lands against the solid column of his body: pulled jagged, breathless. Her fingers close tight at his elbow, her mouth open and square.
‘I am tired,’ she says. ‘I can’t walk anymore. I’m tired, Jon.’
That is death, he doesn’t say. That is death and you cannot die. I will not allow it. I will take death’s heart and grind it to dust between my teeth. You cannot. You—
He calls to the dogs. ‘To me,’ he says. ‘All of you, to me.’
The maesters tell him that the wandering wastes her bones, melts the muscle from them. They tell him to measure out milk of the poppy. They tell him to send the dogs out into the kennels. He does not look up from the fire.
‘You will go to the crypts,’ he says. ‘Take winter roses from the glass gardens. Give them to the stone wolf called Lady that lays there in the dark.’ He turns from the fire. ‘When you return you will know to leave my wife to her dogs, and the dogs to my wife.’
He dreamt of daggers the night she touched the scar. He saw himself as the Wall must have seen him: a dark figure on the snow, the blood around it spreading like a bruise. He woke, gasping. He felt a hand on his shoulder, a name across his cheek. Then, softer—
‘My love?’
He found her hand. He pressed her palm against his mouth. Her skin: soap and salt. He breathed her in and felt her settle like a stone inside his stomach. Fire-warmed, spreading heat through the ice of his blood. Burning the snow from it.
In the courtyard the children played with wooden swords. He stood at her side in his shirtsleeves, the linen damp at the small of his back from showing drills to his sons. (In another life they look the lord and lady of the castle. In this one, queen and king.) He put his hand to the curve of her stomach.
‘A girl,’ he said.
She let a cat-like smile spill across her face. ‘Aye.’
‘Then another boy.’
Her smile shattered to a laugh: the silver, pealing shriek of it. ‘Jon Snow,’ she said. ‘Jon Stark. You will be the death of me.’
He wakes, gasping. The bed beside him is smooth and cool. In his belly a fist, tightening. He flounders: a figure skewered onto the snow, light leaking from him like blood to the edges of a bruise.
He says her name into the dark air, and finds her face there like a pale flower.
She sees the fire in his cheek. From her chair she rises. She steps to him over sleeping dogs and sits beside him on the bed. Her fingers feather his jaw. She smiles at him, and his lip trembles in a wash of light so bright he feels he might turn to ashes inside the heart of it.
His fingers find anchor at her cheek, the apple of it. She lifts them to her lips. She kisses his knuckles, the ring that they both wear as a half-forgotten scar. He looks into her face. His wife looks back.
‘Sleep,’ she says. ‘I will sit here. I will be here when you wake.’