Chapter Text
Sara was already up to her elbows in gore when the North went to war. Blood soaked the sleeves of her dress, and the stink of iron clung to her like a second skin. The Dreadfort seemed to shrink with each passing year, its drafty halls growing darker, its stones colder, as if the castle itself was slowly dying. Fewer voices echoed through the corridors now, fewer hands remained to carry out the crude, thankless labour that kept the place alive. But Sara didn’t mind at all. In the silence and the blood, she found a kind of peace.
Her father was proud of her when she bled, gutted, and skinned the catches meant for their supper. He never smiled, never said as much, his silence was a constant, as fixed as the mountains, but Sara knew nonetheless. She felt it in the stillness of his watching, the faint nod of approval hidden in the shadows of his face.
Besides, she liked the smell. Acrid and metallic, thick as rust in her nostrils, tangy on the tongue, it curled into her sinuses and clung to her hands even after scrubbing. Blood and rot, but rot that was peeled back, carved away to reveal the soft pink flesh beneath, gleaming under the blade of a butcher’s knife like something secret unearthed.
Soon the hare’s meat would be unrecognisable, transformed by heat and spice into something almost civilised, it would be burnished and sweet, served alongside butter-glossed turnips, thick-crusted bread still warm from the hearth, and carrots that snapped clean between the teeth. But Sara would know. She would bite into it and feel the tug of sinew on her molars, the slow melt of fat on her gums, and with each mouthful, she’d feel herself drawn closer to the beast. Not just the meat, but the moment. The flash of death in its eye, the weight of its body in her hands, small and limp and leaking warmth.
It had been Ramsay who brought it to her, cradled like an offering, its head lolling as though in sleep. It can’t have been hard to kill, she’d thought, eyeing the wound. A single puncture. A clean end. I’ve seen you kill bigger, she almost said aloud, and you weren’t as proud then.
Ramsay didn’t bleed, gut, or skin the catches. That was never his role. Her half-brother was everything she wasn’t. He was a thing of chaos where she was composed, a storm to her stillness. Where Sara was precise, lean, and cold as winter steel, Ramsay burned with an erratic, fevered heat. He screamed when he laughed, eyes wild, hands always twitching for violence. He was thick-bodied, his flesh like coiled muscle under pale, blotched skin, and his presence filled a room like smoke. His mother, Sara had often thought, must have been a very different woman from Lady Bethany, perhaps some wild creature who birthed madness and then vanished. But Ramsay never spoke of her.
Ramsay flayed. He never simply skinned. He liked the long work of it, the terrible intimacy of peeling a thing alive, lingering in the soundscape of gasps and broken pleas, dragging death out like a lover’s final sigh. A small hare, soft-furred and delicate-boned, was beneath his attention. It offered no performance, no thrill. So it was Sara who took up the knife and did the clean, quiet work of skinning their supper, as if to balance the horror with a kind of mercy.
Lord Bolton was a cold and harsh man, carved from the ice and iron of the North, and he’d raised Sara in his own unyielding image. The warmth, the tenderness, everything gentle and bright that had once come from her mother, had long since been extinguished by a fever that swept through their keep like a cruel wind. And yet, despite the sharpness of her father’s tongue and the shadow he cast over every room he entered, Sara loved him with a fierce and silent devotion. He was the axis around which her world turned, the man she longed to become, even in a world that would not let her. When his cold, calculating eyes met hers, her heart would race, not with fear, but with pride, with a desperate, breathless determination to prove herself worthy of his name.
When Roose Bolton stepped into the kitchen and cleared his throat, the sound echoed like a drumbeat in the stillness. Sara’s ears perked instantly, like those of an overexcited puppy catching the scent of something familiar and beloved. She snapped her head up from her work, eyes bright with eagerness and a quiet reverence usually reserved for the task at hand, only this time, that reverence was for him.
“Father,” Sara said quietly, her voice steady though her hands trembled slightly. She didn’t dare smile, it wouldn’t have been what he wanted. “Is there something so urgent you could not summon me to your study?”
Roose grunted, his eyes like cold stone beneath the dim torchlight, and the indifference etched on his pale face made Sara’s heart sink like a stone into deep water. “The Lannisters have arrested Lord Stark in King’s Landing. Treason, they claim. His son, Robb Stark, has called the banners to Winterfell.”
Sara’s breath caught. Her eyes widened as she set down the hare she had been cleaning, its blood still warm on her fingers. She laid the knife aside with care, then wiped her hands on her apron. “He means to go to war?”
“He won’t have a choice.” Roose’s voice was calm, too calm. As if war were merely a change in weather. “Regardless, the Stark boy has requested my presence and counsel. I trust you understand what that means?”
His expression gave nothing away, no worry, no anticipation, only the eerie stillness he always wore, like a second skin. He spoke of war as if it were an errand, as if lives weighed nothing.
“You’re leaving,” Sara said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Ramsay and I will hold the Dreadfort in your absence?”
“Ramsay will,” he corrected without hesitation. And before Sara could open her mouth to protest, to question, to beg, he added, “You will come to Winterfell.”
“To what end, my Lord?” Sara’s brow remained furrowed, her voice low but laced with uncertainty, as though the words themselves carried a weight too great for her to bear.
Roose Bolton turned his gaze on her, and the flickering candlelight seemed to drain from the room. His expression, already carved from stone, hardened to iron. The silence that followed was not merely quiet, it was suffocating, like the stillness before a blade is drawn. Her question had not just surprised him; it had irritated him, pierced through a calm meticulously crafted.
“If all unfolds as I have shaped it,” he said at last, his voice cold as the Dreadfort’s crypts, “Robb Stark will soon find himself in need of a Bolton. At his side, or his throat—it matters little. Do not question me again, girl.” His words snapped like a lash in the still air. “Pack your things. Say your goodbyes to your brother, if you must. We’ll leave at dawn, he requested our haste.”
With that, Lord Bolton turned away, his cloak whispering across the stone floor like the passing of a shadow. He did not look back. He did not need to. The silence he left in his wake was absolute, a silence that tasted of blood and cold iron.
Winterfell. The name lingered in Sara’s mind like a half-remembered nightmare, one cold, unshakable, and steeped in ancient stone. She and Domeric had been taken there once, many years ago, when the snows were thinner and the days seemed longer. It had been a ceremonial visit, draped in the illusion of civility. Lady Catelyn Stark had sent a polite summons to their mother, inviting her to behold the newborn Stark daughter a red-faced, shrieking thing swaddled in furs. Their mother had accepted, of course. One did not decline such an offer from Winterfell.
Sara remembered how Domeric had been ushered off to play with the Stark boys. Robb, proud and laughing, and the quiet, sullen bastard they kept just close enough to shame. She, on the other hand, had been sentenced to the company of the women, to sit beside Catelyn and her own mother and feign interest in bloodlines, nappies, and the weight of legacy. She had been six. She hadn’t given a single damn about babes in arms or noble niceties.
She had slipped away the moment their backs were turned, vanishing into the belly of the great keep, where the air was thick with steam and the scent of roasting meat. The kitchens had been paradise; pies bursting with honeyed apples, wheels of cheese, and a stew so rich it clung to the tongue like velvet. She had eaten until her stomach ached and her fingers were slick with fat.
Her father had found her there with her face smeared, mouth full, bold as brass, and the look on his face had curdled the warmth in her belly. He’d hauled her before Lord Stark like a thief before a magistrate, and forced her to apologise with all the stiffness of a child who does not yet understand shame. Lord Stark had chuckled, merciful in that moment, dismissing the incident with the wave of a weathered hand. But her father had not forgiven so easily. The shame of it had burned in him, and he’d made sure it burned in her too.
She would not eat this time. No stolen sweets, no tender meat. Winterfell was not a memory anymore. It was a shadow. A looming thing with teeth.
So consumed was she by thoughts of the grand castle, its looming spires piercing the storm-fed clouds, its windows aglow like the eyes of some slumbering beast, that her grip faltered. The skinning knife jerked, slick with sinew and blood, and bit into the soft flesh of her thumb. A sudden lance of pain followed, sharp and immediate, but she barely flinched. Instead, she watched, almost entranced, as crimson welled up, hot and syrup-thick, blooming like a dark flower beneath her skin. It trickled slowly down, mingling with the blood of the half-flayed hare that sprawled on the wooden block like a discarded offering.
Without hesitation, she raised the bleeding digit to her lips and suckled gently, almost reverently, as if drawing sustenance from some sacred source. Her own blood was strangely sweet and warmer, fuller, lacking the iron tang and wild musk of the animal’s. She drank until the wound gave no more, until her pulse no longer surged beneath the skin, and the flavour thinned to the ghost of itself.
The moment passed like smoke in the wind. The warmth faded. The silence of the kitchen returned. Not just silence, but absence, thick and oppressive, crawling over the stone walls and pressing into her ribs. It filled her like cold water, sharp and still. She looked down at the hare, its glassy eyes now dull, its skin half-hanging like a torn veil, and resumed her work. Her hands moved with mechanical calm, stripping flesh from bone with clinical grace, her thoughts locked behind a frost-laced door. Whatever had stirred within her had vanished into the gloom. Only the work remained.
She finished with seamless ease, each motion practiced, precise, as if her hands moved by instinct rather than thought. The hare lay limply on the butcher’s block, its glassy eyes staring into nothing, a final accusation or perhaps simple resignation. Soon the cook would find it there and begin the ritual transformation—from still-warm flesh and the raw tang of death to roasted meat, to sustenance steaming on someone’s plate, as if the life once held in its bones had never mattered at all.
She washed her hands in the iron basin, the water clouding red before turning pale pink. The apron, stiff with gore, was peeled away and tossed aside, but no matter how many times she scrubbed, the blood clung to her. It lingered beneath her nails and along the creases of her knuckles like a memory that refused to fade. Blood had a way of doing that, reminding you that nothing was ever truly clean, that beneath every washed surface was a stain waiting to rise again. Perhaps that was why Domeric had hated it so much. Her brother had been born with an aversion to mess, to the visceral, to the truth of what people were beneath their skin. He had been clean, in all the ways she never was. Clean hands. Clean heart. And look where that had left him.
Sara slipped like smoke through the Dreadfort’s cold, stony halls, the echo of her footfalls swallowed by the ancient silence that seemed to hang in the air like mildew. The torches flickered dimly on the damp walls, casting long shadows that danced behind her like silent watchers. When she reached her chambers, the door was already ajar, someone had been inside.
Her father’s hand lingered even in his absence. A trunk lay open at the foot of her bed, its iron clasps yawning like a mouth waiting to be fed. A maid had been sent, surely on Roose’s silent command, and a handful of dresses had been arranged with clinical precision across the coverlet. They were not chosen at random. These were the gowns he meant her to wear in Stark’s company, gowns designed to catch the eye and unsettle the stomach. Roose never did anything without purpose.
All of Sara’s dresses were beautiful in the way a thorned rose is beautiful, dangerous, red, and soft only on the surface. Every one of them was dyed in shades of blood or bruised fruit: crimson, carmine, pomegranate, dusky rose. Silk clung to her narrow frame like wet skin, stitched and tailored to create the illusion of ripe curves, to give her the shape of a woman more full-bodied than she truly was. It was sorcery by seamstress hands that made a slip of a girl into something ripe for court, ripe for bargaining, ripe for sacrifice.
Her favorite was crimson. Ramsay had commissioned it during one of his brighter moods, which always came before the darkest storms. It was grotesque, and so beautiful she could barely breathe when she wore it. Silk spilled from the waist in deep red waves, a shade that reminded her of opened veins and the hot flood of spilled wine on stone. She always cinched it tightly, as tightly as her body could bear. The bodice was a brutal work of art: stiff with embroidery, its surface studded with blood-dark garnets and pale beads that shimmered like bone under candlelight. The neckline was cruelly high, pressing against her throat like a hand. From collar to navel, tiny white beads stitched with fine pink thread traced the outline of a flayed torso—ribs, breastbone, sinew—all glinting in mockery of anatomy, a polished and perverse tribute to the Bolton sigil.
Roose had laid it at the centre of her bed himself. She knew it. No maid would dare choose that one. He had picked it first, without hesitation. The thought sent a ripple of cold pride through her, a sharp, almost pleasurable shiver that raced down her spine like a knife drawn across skin. Her father had chosen her armor. He wanted her to be seen. To unsettle. To dazzle. To disturb.
And she would.
The other gowns were just as fine, each one chosen with meticulous care, and Sara found no fault in her father’s selections. He had always known how to dress a daughter he did not quite know what to do with. The silk gowns all layered in shades of ash-rose, frost-white, and muted wine were folded with a soldier’s precision and stacked into the iron-bound chest, their seams smelling faintly of lavender and something sharper beneath. Alongside them, a riding gown of tightly woven wool and stitched leather, severe in cut and colour, suited for long, jolting stretches between blood-soaked war camps. Cloaks were tucked beneath the gowns, some thick with fur, others lighter and slick with oilskin, to shield her from the chill winds and bleak rain of the North. Beneath all that were the small clothes, soft and sterile in white and the palest blush, barely touched with lace, like innocence preserved in a reliquary. Nightgowns and shifts followed, their fabrics ranging from the coarse and utilitarian to the kind of silk that seemed to weep through one’s fingers, as if longing to cling to warmth that had long since fled.
Her father had left out something more delicate and deliberately so. A small box, familiar in shape and scent, waited beside her bed. She recognised it at once from the years when her mother had still drawn breath. Lady Bethany, ever too soft for the Dreadfort, had kept it hidden away like a secret she had hoped might one day bloom. The box itself was carved with withering vines and faded flowers, once painted in pastel hues that had dimmed with time, their gentleness smothered by the years. Yet the contents told a darker story, one that belonged far more to Roose and his brood than to the woman who once bore them. Inside lay a necklace and a pair of earrings, nestled against crushed black velvet. The jewels shimmered darkly, the crystals glistening like thickened blood suspended in stone, red so deep it neared black, catching light in a way that felt wrong, almost sentient. The necklace, strung with ruthless elegance, was meant to rest low at her throat, the stones drawing the eye down to where it would settle between her breasts as a sigil of possession disguised as an ornament. The earrings, twin teardrops of rubies, seemed to pulse faintly in the candlelight, like wounds reopened.
It was a fine gift. A meaningful one. Not because it had once belonged to Bethany, but because it now belonged to Sara, and because her father had chosen to give it. To her. She was the Lady of the Dreadfort now, whether anyone had yet spoken it aloud or not. And even if Roose meant for Ramsay to hold the keep in their absence, it was her hands he’d trusted to wear the keep’s heartstone, cold, dark, and unyielding.
She would wear only one of the ruby earrings. Ramsay had a lone garnet glinting in his ear like a drop of spite, and Sara had worn its pair since they met. Her pride mattered less than what it meant, to wear Ramsay’s mark as surely as if he had carved it into her skin. Her earrings would not match, and she did not care. They were bound, she and her half-brother, in ways more permanent than blood and more cruel than marriage.
But Ramsay would remain behind, alone in the grey and rotting halls of the Dreadfort, while Sara rode northward to Winterfell, that ancient fortress of frost and stone, to serve wherever Robb Stark or her own cold-eyed father commanded. She would follow their will in silence, watching with the still patience of a shadow, her counsel whispering in rooms heavy with secrets and the stink of old blood. She would move like a ghost behind the lords and knights, eyes always open, ears always listening, her presence quiet but unyielding. And above all else—she would wait. Wait with the calm of someone who understands that power, like winter, always comes in time.